POLITICAL ENSHITTIFICATION

You can feel the descent long before the lift stops working. “The ads used to say hot girls in my area, now they say desperate girls.” he said.“The internet is different now,” she said, “they use targeted advertising.” I used to like Amazon, it was dependable – broken something? Fixed, needed something? There. Like a butler with prime logistics and no desire for conversation. But gradually, quietly, it changed, for I’d search for the exact thing, using the exact product name, and still end up wading through neck-deep in an orgy of ‘Sponsored’ tiles. The item I need will still be there, just now its somewhere on page three behind a Bluetooth-enabled salad spinner and a bikini for a dog. Even when you’re not consuming content, Jeep recently added full-screen ads to their car dashboard touchscreens. Samsung’s Family Hub smart refrigerators now display ads during idle time, and now Samsung TVs are sold at a loss because they plan to monetize you later through ads and tracking, even across HDMI inputs. Soon your house will no longer be a home, but a commercial break with a roof. You won’t be able to get into your own fridge until the Jet2Holidays advert has finished, or you’ll have to wait for the skip-ad button to appear so you can start your car. Cory Doctorow calls this enshittification, which is the slow, inevitable rot that sets in when a company starts out by being great at a financial loss – offering generous features, low prices, and a smooth experience to win over users. Once it dominates the market and competitors fade, it begins shifting its priorities, squeezing users with fees and degrading quality to serve advertisers or business partners. Eventually, it turns inward, clawing back every ounce of value for itself, cutting corners, raising prices, and offering terrible service, all while knowing users have nowhere else to go. It’s a deliberate reallocation of value away from users and toward shareholders, and it’s not just the screens we scroll or the products we buy. I think, for my 2026 Bingo Card, that this applies to democracy also. Capitalism, socialism, communism, or some other hybrid economic system gift-wrapped with pretty colours and slogans. It doesn’t really matter – it is always concentrated power, diminished agency, and a system more interested in preserving itself than the people it claims to serve – like clamshell packaging. “Everything is fine,” he said.“That’s what people say before things aren’t,” she said.“Well, everything will be fine,” he said.“That’s worse!” Capitalism looks sexy, it’s the top shelf stuff on the magazine stand, freshly pressed, sharp cut, glossy cover for easy cleaning. But then we see America, where capitalism has reached stage IV of its cancer and has begun to devour its own democratic foundations. Socialism, the halfway house to the economic nirvana that is communism, where workers take the reins and guide the carriage to classless bliss. In practice, has rarely followed the script, with every attempt being less about omelettes, and more about breaking eggs. For when a state assumes total control of the economy and the lives of its citizens, even if initially justified by revolutionary ideals or equity, falls toward authoritarianism. Often, the justification is survival – the revolution must be defended from internal enemies, class traitors, and foreign powers. In the end, the state’s grip tightens, and the utopian ideal blurts into dystopian rule, like the popping of a spot. But don’t think the other side wears a halo. Capitalism, that glistening machine of freedom, innovation, and bespoke coffee, hides its rot behind a subscription where you can’t even buy eggs, let alone break them. You are free, kinda, like a fish in a tank, and they seem content, I think. I admit, I often forget that capitalism isn’t about the fat getting fatter, but is actually about competition, and I agree we do need competition, but it’s what capitalism becomes when there isn’t competition that concerns me. The theory, to my understanding, is that even if you’re greedy, you’ll be forced to behave, because someone else will undercut you, outbuild you, outthink you, but lobbying has now changed what winning means. Now when a company becomes dominant, its smartest investment is not a new product, but a new rule, such as a compliance requirement that behaves like startup-extinction. Suddenly capitalism isn’t competing on the playing field of innovation – it’s competing on the playing field of lobbying. Competition dies the way friendships die, – not with a dramatic betrayal, but with unanswered messages and a forgotten birthday card. Once that happens, you don’t have capitalism, – not in the romantic sense people imagine, – you have a gated economy, a marketplace with a bouncer, a system where the winners decide who the winners are. Robert Michels coined the Iron Law of Oligarchy after noticing that every organisation, no matter how democratic at birth, tends to drift toward elite control. Leaders consolidate authority, bureaucracies entrench themselves, and the system begins serving itself before it serves the people. I don’t think oligarchy is just a political failure, I think it’s an efficiency pattern. Large systems need management, management becomes class, class becomes interest, interest becomes self-preservation, and self-preservation becomes ideology. But combine that with Technology? Breathing in through closed teeth like a plumber calculating a quote. Technology has an annoying habit of changing the rules so violently that yesterday’s empire wakes up as a museum exhibit for tomorrow’s empire, and this is why I think the modern oligarchy is weaker than the traditional one. A feudal lord could be stupid and still survive because land doesn’t require innovation. You can be a medieval parasite for centuries if your peasants can’t leave and your neighbours don’t have gunpowder yet. But a tech oligarchy lives on a treadmill, – its legitimacy is progress for a profit built on novelty, removing innovation also removes relevance. And on the global stage, stagnation is fatal, and for politics, it is a recipe that history has cooked before, and it never tastes good. And a system where the winners stop competing, the law becomes a product, innovation becomes a threat, and the future is something you subscribe to.- Welcome to Political Enshittification.– the process by which a political system keeps the appearance of choice while stripping away meaningful public influence, replacing service to the people, with serving lobbyists. A world where democracy still exists, technically, in the same way a TV still works when the screen is 70% ads and the remote takes credit cards instead of AA batteries. But the choices you make are display only, as the people become the product, the lobbyists become the customers, and the govenment becomes the shareholder. The problem that America faces with its ‘tech-run’ Political Enshittification – is when protecting itself by suppressing competition and innovation, it is not securing its future, but quietly destroying it.