Everything Is Getting Worse on Purpose
Enshittification is a feature, not a bug
You’ve probably noticed it, even if you don’t have a name for it. The washing machine that doesn’t last as long as the one your parents had. The software you now rent instead of own. The Starbucks that seems perpetually understaffed. The streaming service where you’ve “purchased” dozens of movies you’ll lose the moment you cancel your subscription.
There’s a word for this. It’s called enshittification — the gradual, deliberate decrease in the quality of any product or service over time. The term was coined by the author and journalist Cory Doctorow, who originally used it to describe a specific pattern in tech platforms: the way a platform attracts users with good service, then degrades that service to extract more value for advertisers, then degrades it further to extract more value for shareholders, until there’s almost nothing left for the people who originally showed up. I want to use it more broadly here, because the pattern Doctorow identified in platforms turns out to describe nearly everything. And I want to draw a through line that I don’t think gets enough attention: the legal and political conditions that made enshittification not just possible, but almost inevitable.
How We Got Here: The Legal Foundation
To understand enshittification, you have to go back over a century, to a 1919 Michigan Supreme Court case called Dodge v. Ford Motor Company.
The Dodge brothers — yes, those Dodges, the ones who would go on to found the rival car company — were minority shareholders in Ford. Henry Ford had decided he wanted to stop paying large special dividends and instead reinvest profits into the company, expand production, and raise worker wages. The Dodge brothers sued. And they won. The Michigan Supreme Court ruled that Ford had to pay the dividends, writing that “a business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders.” Not for its workers. Not for its customers. Not even for the long-term health of the enterprise itself. For shareholders. First, last, and primarily.
That principle — shareholder primacy — became the foundational legal logic of American corporate governance. (Dodge v. Ford Motor Company, 204 Mich. 459, Michigan Supreme Court, 1919.)
The intellectual machinery came later. In 1970, the economist Milton Friedman published a famous essay in the New York Times Magazine titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Make Money.” His argument was blunt: corporate executives who voluntarily spend shareholder money on social goods — cleaner factories, better wages, community investment — are, in effect, imposing an unauthorized tax. The only legitimate obligation of a business is to increase profits within the rules of the game. Friedman’s essay gave academic cover to a doctrine that had been humming along in the courts for half a century, and it became enormously influential in business schools throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Then came the political dimension. To understand how shareholder primacy moved from legal doctrine to cultural operating system, you have to read a document called the Powell Memo.
In August 1971, a corporate attorney named Lewis Powell wrote a confidential memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.” His argument was that American corporations were under coordinated assault — from the political left, from academia, from consumer advocates like Ralph Nader, from the press — and that business had been far too passive in its own defense. His prescription was systematic and well-funded: corporations needed to staff and fund think tanks, shape what was being taught in universities, cultivate relationships with media, and lobby government with far greater aggression and coordination than they had before. He was, in effect, writing the blueprint for the modern corporate political infrastructure — institutions like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute trace significant parts of their origin and funding to exactly this moment.
Two months after writing the memo, Lewis Powell was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Nixon. He was confirmed in December 1971. And in 1978, he wrote the majority opinion in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti — the decision that gave corporations First Amendment rights to spend money on political referendums. The man who wrote the corporate mobilization playbook handed corporations one of their most powerful legal weapons from the bench.
Over a period of roughly a century, American courts steadily expanded the legal rights of corporations until they resembled, in many respects, the constitutional rights of individual citizens. The arc is worth tracing briefly: in 1886, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (118 U.S. 394) was cited — through a contested court reporter’s headnote, not the actual ruling — as establishing that corporations are “persons” entitled to equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court’s First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti (435 U.S. 765) gave corporations First Amendment rights to spend money on political referendums. And in 2010, Citizens United v. FEC (558 U.S. 310) completed the circuit, ruling that corporations could spend unlimited sums on political speech. Along the way, the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. (573 U.S. 682, 2014) held that closely held, for-profit corporations could claim religious exemptions under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) — a statutory rather than constitutional ruling, which means Congress retains the power to amend RFRA and close that door.
The practical consequence is that corporations gained the political and legal standing of persons without the moral accountability of persons. They can speak. They can lobby. They can donate. But they cannot go to jail.
Put all of this together — the shareholder primacy doctrine of Dodge v. Ford, the intellectual legitimization of Friedman’s essay, the decades of expanding corporate rights — and you’ve built a legal and cultural environment in which corporations believe, sometimes rightly and sometimes wrongly, that their only real obligation is to maximize returns for shareholders, even at the cost of the general public, their own employees, and ultimately their own products.
That belief is the engine of enshittification.
The Evidence Is Overwhelming
If you want proof that shareholder primacy has taken hold as an operational doctrine — not just a legal theory, but a genuine guide to corporate behavior — the evidence is not hard to find.
Start with stock buybacks. In 2018, companies in the S&P 500 collectively spent more than $800 billion buying back their own stock, directly inflating share prices. That same year, they spent less than $600 billion on research and development. The math tells you everything: returning money to shareholders was a higher priority than investing in the future of the business.
Look at executive compensation. In 1965, the average CEO of a large American company earned roughly 20 times what the median worker at that company earned. By the early 2020s, that ratio had climbed above 300 to 1 in many industries. The primary driver of executive pay is stock price performance. CEOs are, structurally, optimized to make one number go up — not to build great products, retain talented employees, or serve customers well. If those things happen to make the stock go up, fine. If they don’t, they’re expenses to be cut.
Even the corporate establishment has quietly acknowledged the problem. In 1997, the Business Roundtable — the lobbying organization that represents CEOs of America’s largest corporations — published a statement declaring that corporations exist principally to serve their shareholders. In 2019, to some fanfare, they reversed themselves, issuing a new statement signed by nearly 200 CEOs pledging that corporations should serve all stakeholders: employees, customers, suppliers, communities, and shareholders. It was treated as a landmark moment.
And then, largely, those same companies continued doing what they had always done. Harvard Law School professors Lucian Bebchuk and Roberto Tallarita examined what actually happened after the signing in a paper titled “The Illusory Promise of Stakeholder Governance” (Cornell Law Review, 2021) and found that virtually none of the signatory companies had updated their corporate governance bylaws — the actual documents that boards use to make decisions — to reflect the new stakeholder commitments. The pledge had never been operationalized. It was, in their words, an “illusory promise.” The statement was, in the end, a press release. The incentive structure hadn’t changed, because nobody in the boardroom had been asked to change it.
The Cheapening of Everything
The most obvious form of enshittification is straightforward: make the product with cheaper inputs and hope the customer doesn’t notice.
The American washing machine is an instructive example. Compare the durability and construction of an appliance made in 2022 to one made thirty or forty years ago. There’s simply no comparison. Corporations have spent decades finding ways to use cheaper materials, less expensive manufacturing techniques, and lower-grade components — while keeping the product looking, on the surface, roughly the same. The goal isn’t to deceive customers, exactly. The goal is to preserve the perception of value while steadily eroding the actual value. The machine still washes your clothes. It just won’t do so for as long.
Stretch this logic across nearly every consumer product category and the pattern holds. Furniture. Appliances. Tools. Clothing. The things we buy today are, in most cases, designed to need replacement sooner than their predecessors. This is sometimes called planned obsolescence, but that framing lets corporations off the hook too easily. It’s not just planning for obsolescence — it’s engineering it.
The Rise of Monthly Recurring Revenue
There is a second, arguably more corrosive form of enshittification: the shift from products you own to services you license.
Corporations have become infatuated with what the business world calls MRR — monthly recurring revenue. The logic is seductive from an investor’s perspective. If you sell someone a product once, and it’s a genuinely excellent product that lasts a lifetime, you’ve made one sale. The customer is satisfied. They may even recommend you to others. But you’ll never make another dollar from them directly. Under the old model, building the best possible product was, at minimum, defensible as a business strategy.
Under the MRR model, that math inverts. A product so good it never needs replacing is a liability. What you want instead is something the customer pays for every month, every year, indefinitely.
The tech industry offers the clearest illustration of this shift. I spent part of my career at Lotus Development Corp, which made — among other things — a word processor and a spreadsheet called Lotus 1-2-3. These were dominant products. Then Microsoft entered the market, bundled competing products with the operating systems businesses were already buying, and priced Lotus out of existence. That move effectively eliminated a major competitor and consolidated enormous power in Microsoft’s hands.
But here’s the part that deserves more attention. Once Microsoft had that market dominance, it shifted its entire business model. You used to walk into a store and buy a box: Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, a one-time purchase. That model is essentially gone. Today, you license those products. You pay every month, or every year, forever. The software is never truly yours.
And that shift created a problem that Microsoft solved in a particularly telling way: how do you justify charging customers every year for a product they already know how to use? The answer is features. Constant, relentless, often unnecessary features. I watched this from inside the industry and found myself wondering: who is this for? Menus grew more complex. Interfaces became cluttered. At one point, Microsoft had to roll back years of accumulated complexity by redesigning its menus from scratch — an implicit admission that the product had grown unwieldy. But the underlying dynamic never changed, because it couldn’t. The business model demands it.
One consequence of this feature race that I don’t think gets discussed enough: in their rush to add new capabilities to justify ongoing subscriptions, Microsoft embedded a scripting language — VBA, Visual Basic for Applications — directly into Word and Excel. The intention was to give power users more flexibility. The result was a massive, long-lived security vulnerability. Every Excel file, every Word document, became a potential vector for malicious code. A feature nobody asked for, built to satisfy investor expectations, ended up making millions of computers less safe for years.
You Don’t Own Your Movies, Either
The same dynamic has reshaped entertainment. With the rise of streaming, the notion of “buying” a movie has become something of a legal fiction. When Amazon Prime offers you the option to purchase a film, what you’re purchasing is a license to view that film on Amazon’s platform, subject to Amazon’s terms of service. If you ever cancel Prime, those “purchases” go with it. The fine print in Amazon’s terms of service makes this explicit — those licenses are non-transferable. You cannot take them to another platform. You cannot bequeath them. You cannot resell them.
You are, in effect, paying for the privilege of being locked in. Monthly recurring revenue, applied to culture.
Understaffing as a Business Strategy
Move from products to services, and enshittification takes a somewhat different form — but the logic is identical.
Walk into a Starbucks today, or sit in a hospital emergency room, or call a customer service line for almost any large corporation, and you are experiencing the results of a decision made in a conference room somewhere: how few people can we employ without meaningfully hurting sales? Not “how many people do we need to serve our customers well?” Not “what staffing level would prevent our employees from burning out?” The question is almost always about the floor, not the ceiling.
Labor is typically the largest single operating expense a service business carries. Private equity firms in particular have become skilled at identifying businesses where staffing can be reduced — the logic being that customers, out of inertia or lack of alternatives, will tolerate a degraded experience rather than leave. And often, they’re right. At least in the short term.
The results are visible everywhere, if you’re paying attention. The Starbucks line that takes twenty-five minutes when it used to take five, because there are two people working a shift that used to have four. The customer service hold time that runs forty-five minutes, then an hour, because the company has decided that the cost of hiring enough agents to answer the phone promptly is higher than the cost of your frustration. These aren’t accidents or isolated failures. They are the output of a deliberate calculation, made in a spreadsheet, that your time has no value on their balance sheet. You will wait because you have no real choice — and because the people making that calculation know you’ll probably stay anyway.
What makes this particular form of enshittification especially corrosive is that it also falls hardest on the people doing the work. The barista who has to apologize to an irritated customer for a wait that isn’t her fault. The support agent handling a queue no reasonable person could manage. The ER nurse running between too many patients at once. The degradation of the product and the degradation of the job are the same event, experienced from two different sides of the counter.
You Don’t Own Your Tractor, Either
The software licensing logic doesn’t stay neatly inside the tech industry. It has migrated into the physical world, with consequences that are, in some cases, a matter of life and livelihood.
John Deere is the dominant manufacturer of agricultural equipment in the United States. It also sells some of the most software-dependent machinery ever put in a farmer’s hands — modern tractors packed with sensors, GPS systems, and onboard computers that would have seemed like science fiction a generation ago. When that equipment breaks down, the software that runs it is locked. Farmers cannot access the diagnostic tools required to identify the problem, let alone fix it. That access is reserved for authorized John Deere dealers.
The practical consequence is that a farmer whose tractor fails in the middle of harvest — a window that may last only a few days before crops are lost — cannot simply fix the machine they own and go back to work. They have to wait for a dealer technician, who may be days away. The tractor sitting in the field is theirs. They paid for it. In every practical sense, however, they do not own it. They own the hardware. The software that makes the hardware run belongs to John Deere, and John Deere has decided that software is not transferable with the sale.
The argument John Deere makes will sound familiar: you aren’t purchasing the software, you’re licensing it. The same logic that turned your Microsoft Office subscription into a monthly fee and your Amazon movie “purchase” into a revocable license has now been applied to a $500,000 piece of farm equipment. A farmer in Iowa and a software developer in Seattle are, legally speaking, in the same position: they paid for the use of something they will never truly own.
John Deere, facing mounting pressure from farmers and legislators, signed a voluntary memorandum of understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation in 2023, promising expanded access to repair tools. Voluntary. Unenforceable. Sound familiar?
What To Do About It
The through line in everything described above is not bad luck or market failure. It is the predictable output of a system that was deliberately constructed — through case law, through intellectual frameworks, through coordinated political organizing — to place shareholder returns above every other consideration. That system didn’t build itself, which means it can be dismantled. Here is where to start.
Right to repair. The most direct intervention. Legislation requiring manufacturers to provide customers, and independent repair shops, with the tools, parts, and documentation needed to fix what they own. The European Union has moved aggressively in this direction; the United States has lagged, though more than two dozen states have introduced right-to-repair bills in recent years, and Colorado passed agricultural right-to-repair legislation in 2023. The fight is winnable, but it requires sustained pressure on state and federal legislators who will face well-funded opposition from manufacturers whose dealer service networks are a significant profit center.
Antitrust enforcement. Many of the worst enshittification dynamics are downstream of monopoly or near-monopoly power. Microsoft’s ability to price Lotus out of existence and then lock customers into subscriptions depended on its dominance of the operating system market. Amazon’s ability to sell you a movie license you can’t transfer depends on its dominance of streaming infrastructure. John Deere controls roughly half the U.S. market for large agricultural equipment. When companies don’t have real competition, they don’t need to treat you well. Antitrust enforcement — actually breaking up dominant players, or blocking mergers that would create them — is not a radical idea. It is, historically, how democratic societies have kept market power from concentrating to the point of abuse.
Open source and cooperative models. Not every solution is legislative. The open-source software movement has, for decades, produced tools — Linux, Firefox, LibreOffice, countless others — that are genuinely owned by their users and deliberately designed not to be enshittified, because no shareholder is waiting to extract value from them. Agricultural cooperatives give farmers collective bargaining power against equipment manufacturers and input suppliers. Credit unions exist as direct structural alternatives to shareholder-owned banks. These models don’t scale to replace every corporate product, but they demonstrate that the shareholder-primacy model is not the only way to organize the production of things people need.
A constitutional amendment. This one is a long shot, and I say that without apology — long shots are sometimes the only honest answer to a deeply structural problem. The accumulated power of corporate personhood doctrine was not handed down from nature. It was constructed, case by case, over more than a century, by courts interpreting a Constitution that says nothing about corporations at all. What courts have built, a constitutional amendment could clarify: that corporations are not natural persons, that they hold no inherent constitutional rights, and that whatever legal standing they enjoy exists only because democratic governments choose to grant it — and can choose to limit it. Corporations are legal fictions. They are instruments created by society to organize economic activity. They were never meant to have a bill of rights.
There are already organized efforts pushing in this direction. The Move to Amend coalition has been working toward a “We the People Amendment” that would do exactly this: establish in the Constitution that constitutional rights belong to human beings, not to corporations, and that money is not speech. Whether or not such an amendment ever passes, the argument behind it is correct. A corporation cannot suffer. It cannot be imprisoned. It cannot die. The idea that it should enjoy the same First Amendment protections as a person — that its capacity to spend unlimited money on politics is constitutionally equivalent to your right to speak your mind — is a legal fiction built on top of another legal fiction, and it has had consequences that the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment could not have imagined and would not have endorsed.
The economists and lawyers who built the legal infrastructure of shareholder primacy spent decades doing it deliberately and patiently. Dodge v. Ford was 1919. The Friedman essay was 1970. The Powell Memo was 1971. Citizens United was 2010. This was not an accident. It was a project. Reversing it will require the same persistence — which starts with being clear about what actually happened, and why your washing machine doesn’t last as long as your parents’ did.