Name: Why everything on the internet is getting worse | The Gray Area
Uploaded: 2025-11-19T17:34:13.000Z
Duration: 43 min 29 s
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For the show this week, I'm talking to Corey Doctoro.

He's an author, a journalist, a science fiction writer, and

he's got a new book out called why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and what To Do About It.

It's a fun book, but it's also a serious book and a smart book and a probing book.

It explains why so many of the technologies and platforms we use continue to get worse and worse in similar ways and for similar reasons.

Let's just start with the basics here, Corey.

I, for my entire adult life, or at least the majority of it, have worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that works on digital rights.

And these are very abstract, technical questions.

They eventually become very concrete and immediate.

But that's usually when something terrible has happened to you.

So the challenge is to get people to care about it beforehand.

And so enchitification is not a new idea.

It's really an encapsulation of decades of things that I've been trying to get people to care about.

But it turns out that when you start swearing, it's kind of a magic combination and people start paying attention to it.

The formal definition of insertification is both a kind of descriptive and theoretical idea.

So descriptively, it describes how platforms go bad, that first they're good to their end users, they find a way to lock those end users in, and

then they make things worse for those end users, because the lock in means that the end users are unlikely to depart.

They use that new surplus to make things good for business customers.

They lock those business customers in, making them dependent on those end users.

They make things worse for the business customers, too, and then they turn into a pile of shit.

This, I think, is a process that many of us can recognize in platforms as diverse as, like, Uber or Google.

But what is, I think, more interesting and important is the theoretical work on why this is happening now.

How come all these platforms are doing this now?

So when would you say the great enshitning officially began?

If you had to bark the era, where would you start?

Not that it's that neat, but where would you start?

I think the defining characteristic of inshidification is not that things got worse, but

that we kept using them after they got worse.

And so that makes it hard to find a demarcation point.

There's definitely like moments where we can say, oh, this is definitely post inshitification, like 2019.

We see in the court records from the Google antitrust case last year that these two executives at Google had a fight.

There was the head of Google search, a guy called Prabhakar Raghavan, and

the head of Google search technology, a guy called Ben Gomes, who'd been with Google since it was like one server under a desktop and had built out all their server infra.

Raghavan had this idea to make search growth come back after the company had achieved a 90% market share, after which it's very hard to grow by making search worse.

So you'd have to search more than once to get your answer.

And clearly most of us are still using Google today.

But I wouldn't say that that's like the moment it happened.

So why do we keep using shit after it gets worse?

Why don't we just quit and move to something that isn't shit?

So I think there's a kind of galaxy brain version of this where it's like stage one.

It's because consumers are dumb and you like shopped wrong.

And if only you shopped better and been willing to pay for things rather than getting them ad supported, everything would be fine.

Because if you're not paying for the product, you're the product.

It's not just that the platforms were greedy or that VCs were greedy because VCs been greedy and platforms have been greedy forever.

I think the thing to understand the thing that changed is that the constraints on firms changed.

The things that punished them when they did poorly, One of them was competition.

It's very hard to take your business elsewhere when there's nowhere else to take your business.

As Tom Eastman says, I'm old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four.

The cartelization of the Internet was downstream of a bunch of very explicit policy choices to support monopolies.

We have the Chicago school in the 70s and 80s saying monopolies are efficient.

It's perverse to punish companies for having products so good that we all use them.

Antitrust enforcement is a fool's errand.

And you see that proceeding over the decades since with the result of Increasing concentration everywhere.

I think my favorite example of this is Facebook buying Insta, where they're buying this company with 12 employees, they're giving them a billion dollars.

The CFO of Facebook sends an email to Mark Zuckerberg and says, this seems like an awful lot of money for a relatively small firm.

Mark Zuckerberg, who had previously in writing said it is better to buy than to compete, sent his CFO a memo saying, we're buying them because people like Instagram better than Facebook.

They leave Facebook, they go to Instagram.

If we buy Instagram, they will still be Facebook users even if they're not using the platform.

You know, if you're an antitrust enforcer, this is like an admission in writing, right?

And yet the Obama administration waved that merger through.

In fact, they presided over so many of these anti competitive mergers, just like the Bush administration, just like the Trump administration, and

The monopoly competition point, because we, we're going to get there.

Before we do, I just want to make sure we sort of break down the physics of insertification.

People understand what's happening and why.

One of the points you make, right, is that when we're talking about this, we're talking about a pattern, a process, whatever you want to call it, that infects a specific kind of digital business, right?

Why are they such fertile, fertile soil for shit?

Well, we need platforms on the Internet, right?

A platform is just a thing that mediates between two different groups of users.

And unless you want to do it all yourself, unless you not only want to write a newsletter, but

also process the payments and write the mail server and maintain the mail server and so on, you need an intermediary in there.

It's nothing wrong with not being required to gnaw your own Internet stack out of a whole log with your own teeth.

It's great to have middlemen who handle stuff for you.

The problem is that they manage to usurp the role between end users and business customers.

The way that they do that is that they have the distinct advantage of digital technology, which is that you can alter the business logic on a per user, per interaction basis.

It makes it very hard for either group of users to make things better.

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Why everything on the internet is getting worse | The Gray Area

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