The Junkification Of Everything

Chapter 1: The Slippery Slope BeginsThere was a time—not that long ago—when CEOs thought like builders. They took pride in constructing companies that lasted. A good year meant more workers, better products, and growing trust with customers. You could retire from a company you believed in, and even buy products made by your own employer with pride. But that kind of capitalism—stubbornly grounded, reputation-driven, human-scaled—quietly died sometime in the early 1980s. And the man who replaced it didn’t wear a hard hat. He carried a spreadsheet, a golden parachute, and a bonus plan tied directly to the company’s stock price.
That was the moment the slope began to tilt. The moment when the CEO stopped being a steward and became a speculator. Not in theory—on paper. Because from that point forward, **stock options** weren’t just a perk—they were the game. And like all games, they came with cheat codes. Legal ones. Rubber-stamped by Congress, signed off by regulators, and applauded on Wall Street.
The logic went like this: if you give executives a personal stake in the stock price, they’ll work harder to make the company succeed. It was sold as “alignment.” What it actually created was **incentive distortion**. Because share price doesn’t measure quality. It doesn’t reward good service, safe products, or fair wages. It rewards **whatever makes the number go up the fastest**—no matter what it wrecks along the way.
That’s how we got where we are. That’s why your appliances break, your airline seats shrink, your support calls are outsourced, your doctor doesn’t have time for eye contact. It’s not a mystery. It’s not a bug. It’s the **intended result of a decades-long shift** that rewarded executives not for building—but for squeezing. And once it started, no one had the incentive to stop it.
The turning point was 1982. That’s when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission passed **Rule 10b-18**, quietly legalizing something that had long been considered market manipulation: **corporate stock buybacks**. Before that rule, a company that bought back its own shares to boost the stock price could be sued. After that rule, it became standard operating procedure. Wall Street celebrated. CEOs rejoiced. And just like that, **companies could use their profits to inflate share prices rather than reinvest in workers, R&D, or quality.**
But it didn’t stop there. In 1993, the Clinton administration passed what was supposed to be a reform: **IRS Code Section 162(m)**, a rule capping executive pay tax deductions at $1 million unless the pay was “performance-based.” Sounds good, right? In reality, it **poured gasoline on the fire.** Because companies simply **switched to paying executives in stock options**—which counted as performance-based under the new law. It was a loophole you could fly a Gulfstream through. And they did.
From that point on, executive pay and stock prices became welded together. And suddenly, everything else—product quality, employee retention, customer satisfaction—became expendable. Why? Because **none of those things moved the stock fast enough.** What did? Cutting labor. Merging with competitors. Moving production offshore. Slashing benefits. And most of all: **buying back shares**—fewer shares in circulation means higher earnings per share, even if the company didn’t sell one more product.
Let’s put it in plain terms. Imagine you’re running a lemonade stand. Instead of making better lemonade, you realize you can raise your stock price by pouring fewer cups, firing the kid on the corner, and using half the lemons. Then you take the profit and use it to buy back your own stock—giving the illusion that each share is now more valuable. That’s not entrepreneurship. That’s grift with branding.
And yet, that’s what modern corporate leadership became. By the mid-2000s, the average S&P 500 company was spending more on **stock buybacks than on employee wages or capital investment.** Executives weren’t just managing businesses anymore—they were playing short-term stock games with long-term consequences. And they were rewarded handsomely. CEO pay exploded while median worker wages stagnated. The workers made the products. The executives made the spreadsheet dance.
This shift didn’t just junkify the economy. It **junkified values**. Business schools began teaching shareholder primacy as gospel. Politicians of both parties accepted it as “efficient.” The media sold it as growth. But it wasn’t growth. It was **a slow siphoning of trust, quality, and value from the commons into the private vaults of those at the top.** And it was all legal.
Once that logic took over, everything else became rational. Why pay for good support when you can outsource it to a chatbot? Why design something durable when replacing it means another sale? Why keep a workforce when contractors are cheaper and disposable? Why innovate when consolidation can kill your competition?
None of this was inevitable. It was a **choice made by people in suits who saw a new way to play the game—and win big**. And once they started winning, they rewrote the rules so no one else could stop them.
The slope got steeper. The grip got slicker. The fall became faster. And most people didn’t even notice—until the box showed up half empty. Until the hospital had no beds. Until the phone tree had no humans. Until the school had no teachers. Until the fridge broke after 18 months.
It all started here. When the CEO stopped being a builder and became a gambler. When corporations stopped trying to make things and started trying to make stock prices. When the whole economy stopped trying to serve people—and started trying to squeeze them.
The Mechanics of DecayOnce the incentive structure changed, everything else followed like falling dominoes. It didn’t matter whether you ran a hospital, an airline, a cereal company, or a software platform. If your competitor was juicing their stock through layoffs, outsourcing, and buybacks, you couldn’t afford not to. Suddenly, **good management meant cutting corners**—because **cutting corners raised the share price**. And the share price was now the scoreboard.
This wasn’t just greed. It was engineered. Public companies have a legal obligation to maximize returns for shareholders. That mandate used to be balanced by a sense of duty—loyalty to workers, commitment to quality, pride in craftsmanship. But in the post-1980s financialized economy, those became **quaint distractions.** What mattered now was the number at the end of the quarter. Anything that didn’t move that number? Optional. Anything that reduced it? Eliminated.
Imagine running a company where your personal income depends not on how good your product is, but on how well you manipulate financial optics. You start seeing your customers not as people to serve, but as **data points to exploit.** Your employees aren’t human beings anymore—they’re liabilities to be trimmed. Your vendors are margin risks. And your products? They’re vessels for profit extraction, nothing more.
Look at appliances. Once upon a time, Maytag ads bragged that their repairman was lonely—because the machines were built to last. That’s not profitable under stock-based incentives. Today, manufacturers deliberately use cheap plastic gears, sealed units, and proprietary parts—not to improve performance, but to **ensure you have to replace or repair early.** The junkification is by design. Long-lasting products are the enemy of quarterly growth.
Or take airlines. Ever wonder why flying feels worse every year? It’s not your imagination. Seats are smaller, overhead bins are chaotic, and customer service is now an app that crashes. That’s not mismanagement—it’s the result of a spreadsheet where every square inch of aircraft is monetized. More seats means more revenue. Longer hold times mean fewer staff. Delayed flights? They’re often cheaper to manage than empty ones. And the executives flying private don’t have to care. Their job is to make the stock go up, not the passengers feel human.
Healthcare? A masterclass in junkification. When private equity firms buy hospitals, they aren’t trying to improve care. They’re trying to **maximize “billable events.”** That means minimizing staff, pushing upcoding schemes, denying claims, and forcing doctors to churn patients. And when it works—when profits rise—they buy back more shares and the CEO’s net worth explodes. You, meanwhile, can’t get an appointment, your nurse is exhausted, and your bill is indecipherable. But the market’s thrilled. Because that, too, is profitable decay.
Education? The same logic. Turn a public good into a monetized platform. Inflate tuition. Slash tenured faculty. Replace curriculum with click-through modules and call it “innovation.” Launch branded “executive certificate programs” at $20,000 a pop. Junk degrees, junk content, junk futures. But if the university’s endowment grows and the rankings improve, who cares what happens to the students drowning in debt?
What ties all this together isn’t bad luck—it’s a **shared financial playbook**. Cut costs. Raise prices. Extract loyalty. Monetize the experience. Reward the C-suite. Boost the stock. Call it growth.
This is what happens when **Wall Street logic invades Main Street life.** You can see it in your grocery store: cereal boxes filled with more air, meat with more water weight, vegetables pre-cut and three times the price. That’s not convenience—it’s margin padding. You can see it in digital products: subscriptions for things that used to be one-time purchases, ads inside productivity tools, “premium support” that’s just the old support with a price tag.
Even your sense of time is being monetized. Long loading screens give advertisers more exposure. Phone trees are designed to frustrate you into giving up. Loyalty programs track your data, not reward your loyalty. Every delay, every click, every inconvenience is a revenue stream somewhere—just not for you.
And here’s the kicker: **junkification works**. At least in the short run. Executives hit their bonuses. Investors get their returns. Analysts cheer the “cost efficiencies.” But the long run? That’s somebody else’s problem. After all, the CEO will be gone in five years—with their golden parachute intact and their stock options cashed out. The rot they leave behind? That’s for the workers, the customers, the next administration to deal with.
This is why it spreads. Not because it’s the best way to run a business—but because it’s the best way to **game the incentives we’ve allowed to take over our economy.** It’s not capitalism in the Adam Smith sense. It’s not innovation. It’s **financial looting in slow motion**, dressed up as strategy.
So when you ask, “Why is everything worse than it used to be?”—this is why. It’s not your imagination. It’s not nostalgia. It’s not bad luck. It’s a system where **every corner cut, every service degraded, every product cheapened is a feature, not a bug.** And the moment we made stock options the compass, the ship started sailing toward this iceberg.
We didn’t arrive here by accident. We were steered. The decay was mechanized, incentivized, legalized—and most of all, normalized.
Real-World ConsequencesYou don’t need a Ph.D. in economics to feel what’s happening—you just need a microwave that died after 13 months, a medical bill you can’t decipher, or a customer service call that ended with a robot hanging up on you. These aren't isolated annoyances. They’re signals of systemic breakdown. The economic rot is no longer abstract. **It lives in your daily life.**
Let’s start in your kitchen. That blender you bought from a name-brand company? It looked sleek on the box, but the motor burned out in six months. When you tried to get it serviced, the manufacturer offered you a coupon for a new one instead. Try finding replacement parts. You can’t—because none exist. It was never designed to be repaired. It was designed to fail, so you’d buy it again. Welcome to **planned obsolescence**, version 21st century.
Now go to your closet. That shirt you bought on sale? The stitching came apart after three washes. The fabric pilled. The color faded. You look at the tag: “Designed in New York. Made in Bangladesh.” It was shipped halfway around the world to save 37 cents in labor costs. The store you bought it from doesn’t even carry it anymore. “Fast fashion” they call it. But it’s not fast—it’s disposable. We’re swimming in cheap clothes we don’t wear, just like we’re drowning in broken gadgets we can’t fix. **We’ve industrialized the production of garbage.**
Need help with a bill? Try calling your phone company. First, you get the automated voice. Then the button maze. Then the hold music. After 22 minutes, you get a human—sort of. They’re reading a script. They can’t help. You get transferred. Then disconnected. You call back, re-explain everything, and start again. The whole ordeal takes an hour. You never get a solution. But hey, the company saved money by cutting support staff. **Your wasted time is their profit.**
Even the grocery store feels different now. Shrinkflation is everywhere: the box looks the same, but there’s less inside. Chips have more air, cereal more sugar, meat more water weight. You pay more for less—and get less satisfaction too. In some cases, the product itself is worse: cheaper ingredients, artificial fillers, substitutions. A box of "whole grain" granola is now mostly rice puffs and corn syrup. You didn’t notice until you tasted it—and by then, the transaction was over. They already won. You already lost.
You see it at the doctor’s office. If you can get an appointment. You wait three weeks, then 45 minutes in the waiting room. The doctor spends seven minutes with you, typing into a computer. They’re rushed, distracted, apologetic. You ask a question; they glance at the clock. It’s not their fault. They’re under pressure from the billing software and the hospital system. They’re not allowed to care—they're allowed to **code**. Each visit is a billing event, not a healing experience.
Even funerals have been junkified. Basic cremation used to cost $700. Now it's $3,000, with line-item charges for transportation, storage, paperwork, and “memory care packages.” Your grief is a sales opportunity. Your sorrow becomes someone else’s quarterly win. It sounds grotesque—because it is. But that’s how far the decay has spread: to birth, to death, and every transaction in between.
And the workplace? Ask anyone over 40. They’ll tell you it used to feel different. Not perfect—but different. There was loyalty. You could make a living. You had a manager who knew your name, maybe even your kids’ names. Now it’s surveillance apps, impossible quotas, unpaid overtime, and “fun” emails about Pizza Fridays. Employees are “human resources”—a term that says it all. You’re a consumable input, not a stakeholder. And if you burn out? HR will send flowers—and a LinkedIn recommendation.
Schools feel the same rot. Teachers buy their own supplies. Class sizes swell. Buildings decay. The curriculum is filled with standardized tests that prep kids for nothing but bureaucracy. Meanwhile, some district administrator just got a bonus for under-budgeting paper towels. The children know something’s wrong. So do the teachers. But the system? It’s optimized—for test scores, not learning. For public perception, not intellectual growth.
It’s not just individual frustration—it’s **collective erosion.** The fabric of society weakens when everything becomes a transaction. When trust is replaced by disclaimers. When value is replaced by volume. When satisfaction is replaced by reviews. When participation is replaced by loyalty points. You start to ask: *Is anything real anymore?* And that’s not a psychological crisis. That’s a perfectly rational reaction to a system that has **made junk the new normal**.
In a healthy economy, products improve, service expands, wages rise, and communities benefit. In a junkified economy, we get worse everything—for more money—and we’re told it’s “innovation.” The consequence isn’t just inconvenience. It’s **burnout. Despair. Cynicism.** People disengage not because they don’t care—but because **caring costs too much energy** in a system designed to wear you down.
And for the record: this isn’t about nostalgia. This isn’t “back in my day” hand-wringing. This is about the tangible, measurable, infuriating reality that **most Americans are paying more for less and being blamed for noticing.** It’s about a system that works perfectly—for those sitting at the top watching the slope steepen beneath everyone else.
That slope—the one that began with stock options and buybacks—now runs right through your kitchen, your job, your health, and your future. And unless we name it, map it, and fight it, it will only grow steeper.
Who Benefited—And Who PaidLet’s not kid ourselves—junkification wasn’t some tragic accident or misguided policy experiment. It was a **strategic, profit-driven pivot** by those at the top. It worked exactly as intended. The decay wasn’t collateral damage; it was a business model. So if you're wondering who made out like bandits while everything else got worse, the answer is simple: **they did**. And we paid for it.
The CEOs who championed the shift to stock-based pay weren’t punished for degrading the customer experience—they were **rewarded with generational wealth.** When the products got worse and the support vanished, their stock prices soared. When the factories closed and the workforce shrank, they cashed out. If the company tanked afterward? Didn’t matter. They’d already retired, written a leadership book, and moved on to the board of another firm to repeat the process.
Consider the airline industry. From 2014 to 2020, U.S. airlines spent over **$45 billion on stock buybacks**. That’s money that could’ve gone toward higher wages for flight attendants, more spacious seating, or better service recovery. Instead, it went into artificially boosting stock prices—**directly inflating executive compensation**. Then, when COVID hit and demand collapsed, the airlines turned to the government for a bailout. Your tax dollars bailed them out from the consequences of their own junkification. They privatized the upside and socialized the downside. And they’re not alone.
Pharmaceutical companies? Same game. Take insulin manufacturers. The formula hasn’t changed in decades. The price? It’s skyrocketed. Why? Not because of research or inflation. Because they could. Because **pricing committees decided maximizing shareholder value outweighed patient survival.** The executives walked away with bonuses while diabetics rationed doses. The cruelty is the point—and it’s legal.
Tech platforms? A goldmine of junkification. Meta (formerly Facebook), Google, Amazon—they built brilliant products, hooked billions of users, and then, once the monopoly was secured, they **turned the screws.** Timelines became ad delivery systems. Recommendations favored engagement over truth. Search results filled with junk SEO sites and sponsored placements. Amazon’s first page is now a maze of pay-to-play listings, knockoffs, and ads that look like results. And every change—every degradation of user experience—was another line item on a quarterly earnings report. More ad clicks. More Prime subscriptions. More data harvested. And behind it all? **Executive stock options swelling like overfed ticks.**
Meanwhile, what happened to the worker? Flat wages. Gig contracts. No benefits. “You're lucky to have a job.” Pension? Gone. Job security? LOL. Labor force participation down. Union busting up. Frontline workers were branded “essential” during the pandemic, but compensated like they were disposable. Because to the C-suite, they are.
And it wasn’t just workers who got hollowed out—it was entire **communities**. When retail chains went private-equity, they closed “unprofitable” locations—usually in low-income neighborhoods—creating pharmacy deserts, food deserts, and job deserts. All while the financiers behind the cuts pulled management fees and dividend recaps—cash extracted without creating anything.
Who else paid? You. The consumer. The patient. The student. The citizen. Every time you were overcharged, underserved, misled, or stuck on hold—you paid. Every time your data was harvested, your insurance claim denied, your wage suppressed, your product broke—you paid. Not just in money, but in time, in trust, in dignity.
The cumulative effect of this system isn’t just economic inequality—it’s **spiritual exhaustion.** People stop expecting things to work. They stop complaining. They accept the rot because “that’s just how it is now.” That’s not resignation—it’s survival. But it plays directly into the hands of those who built the system. Because once you stop believing change is possible, **you stop resisting.**
That’s the real cost. Not just broken microwaves or endless phone menus. It’s the breakdown of expectations. The erosion of faith in fairness. The quiet death of hope that anything can still be built to last.
And the beneficiaries? They’re not evil geniuses. They’re not even original. They just saw a system that allowed extraction without consequence, and they took full advantage. They’re the architects of enshittification—but they never touch the mess. They sit above it, detached, remote, and richer than ever.
So let’s be clear: the junkification of everything wasn’t an accident or an inevitability. It was a transfer of value—**from the many to the few.** It was the gutting of quality, of trust, of care—for the benefit of people who don’t care if your life gets harder, your fridge breaks, or your kid’s teacher quits.
They’ve got stock to buy, bonuses to claim, and markets to please. And unless we rewrite the rules, they’ll keep squeezing the system until there’s nothing left to extract.
Chapter 2: When Products Turned to Garbage It used to be a joke: “They don’t make ’em like they used to.” But now, it’s not a punchline—it’s a warning. Because somewhere along the way, that offhand complaint turned into a design philosophy. Planned obsolescence isn’t just an annoying quirk of modern manufacturing. It’s the **economic foundation** of our age. And it didn’t happen by accident. It was engineered.
Let me tell you about the blender.
Not a fancy one. Just a basic, no-frills countertop blender bought from a national chain store. Middle-of-the-road brand, decent reviews, on sale for $39.95. I bought it expecting nothing extravagant, but something that could handle frozen fruit and last a few years. It lasted six months. The motor whined, sputtered, and finally smoked one morning like it had tried to puree a brick. I checked the warranty—90 days. I checked customer service—nonexistent. I checked the landfill—where it was headed.
Now multiply that story by every household, every small appliance, every box store across the country. That's not consumer behavior. That’s **a business model.** And it works because we’ve all been trained to accept it. Your phone slows down? Must be the battery. Your vacuum stops sucking? Buy a new one. Your headphones crackle after a year? Probably your fault. Somewhere along the way, we stopped expecting things to last—and companies took that as a green light to stop making them to last.
This wasn’t always the case. In the postwar boom, American products were **built like tanks**. Cars had metal bumpers. Radios ran for decades. You could still find a 1950s GE refrigerator humming in someone’s garage. In fact, the biggest problem for manufacturers back then was that people **weren’t replacing things fast enough**. Capitalism thrives on churn, and durable goods were bad for business.
So they fixed that. Slowly. Quietly. Strategically.
First came subtle design tweaks—cheaper parts, more plastic, glue instead of screws. Then came the warranties that shrank while product lifespans shrank even faster. Then came the customer service robots and the return policies designed to wear you down. And finally, they removed the repair path entirely. No spare parts. No schematics. No accountability.
The result? A throwaway economy built on **planned failure.** Not only is it a nightmare for your wallet, it’s a disaster for the planet. Landfills are packed with gadgets that could have worked for a decade. Instead, they lasted just long enough to make another sale.
And here’s the kicker: this isn’t just about blenders or iPhones. The logic of junk has infected everything. Your clothes? Designed to fall apart. Your apps? Designed to frustrate unless you pay to upgrade. Even your relationships with services—banks, airlines, health insurance—are built on systems that wear you down until you give up. **The whole economy is built to fail—on you.**
But the blender is the symbol. Not because it’s rare, but because it’s common. Because you can’t even buy a reliable kitchen appliance anymore without studying YouTube reviews like you’re planning a mission to Mars. The burden of quality has shifted—from the producer to the consumer. It’s now your job to navigate the maze, dodge the duds, and pray you don’t get scammed.
That’s not a free market. That’s a rigged game. A lottery where the jackpot is “a product that works.”
And let’s not forget the class dimension. If you have money, you can buy your way out of this garbage cycle—premium versions, boutique brands, service contracts. But for most people, the only option is cheap and replaceable. We’ve turned poverty into a subscription plan for inferior goods.
The real tragedy? We’ve normalized it. We joke about it. We shrug. “What did you expect?” But that resignation is exactly what powers the machine. As long as we keep accepting junk as normal, they’ll keep selling it. Not because they have to—but because it’s profitable.
That blender didn’t break because of bad luck. It broke because it was **supposed to.** And that, right there, is when the social contract broke with it.
The Death of DurabilityDurability used to be a badge of honor. If you built something that lasted, your name meant something. You didn’t need influencers or flashy packaging—your product was the ad. Word of mouth was your marketing strategy. Fixability was your customer service. And loyalty came not from branding tricks, but from trust earned over time.
But somewhere in the back rooms of corporate America, that philosophy became a liability. A product that lasted was a product that wouldn’t be replaced. That’s a dead end when your growth model demands exponential returns. The math of Wall Street doesn’t reward quality—it punishes it. The more durable a product is, the fewer units you sell next quarter. So quality had to die, and quickly.
The rot began with light bulbs. In the 1920s, the Phoebus cartel—a group of major lightbulb manufacturers including GE, Philips, and Osram—agreed to limit bulb lifespan to 1,000 hours. Before that, bulbs routinely lasted twice as long. This was no accident. It was **planned obsolescence in its earliest form**, and it worked. Profits soared. The lesson stuck.
That same logic now infects every corner of the economy. From the moment a product enters the design phase, the question isn’t “how long should this last?” It’s “how fast can we make them buy another?”
Look at smartphones. Ten years ago, a good phone could last five years with ease. Now, software updates deliberately slow down performance. Batteries degrade faster. Screens are glued together so tightly you need a heat gun and dental picks to open them. This isn’t innovation—it’s sabotage with a user manual.
In the clothing industry, fast fashion turned the seasons into weeks. New collections hit stores monthly, designed to fall apart after a few washes. The seams fray. The fabric pills. The buttons pop off. And because prices are low, we accept it. We buy more, throw away more, and keep the treadmill spinning.
Even appliances—once considered lifetime investments—have become temporary guests. Washers, dryers, dishwashers that once lasted 15–20 years now fail in under five. Try getting them repaired. Manufacturers won’t even provide parts, and if they do, the service costs as much as a new machine. This is not incompetence. It’s business strategy dressed in the language of efficiency.
And it's not just hardware. Software companies now operate on the same churn model. Subscription plans replaced ownership. Features are stripped from base models and sold back as “premium.” Updates introduce bugs to force upgrades. Reliability becomes a paywall. Users become test subjects. You don’t buy software anymore—you rent it until they decide to break it.
Durability, once a measure of pride, is now a design flaw.
We’ve even lost the ability to fix things ourselves. Screws have been replaced with proprietary bits. Components are soldered, glued, or encrypted. Right-to-repair laws are opposed by the very companies that make the products we rely on. The goal is simple: **trap the customer in an endless loop of dependency and replacement.**
All of this is justified with buzzwords—“innovation,” “lean supply chains,” “just-in-time manufacturing.” But strip away the marketing gloss and what you have is a deliberate assault on longevity. And the consequences ripple out far beyond individual frustration.
Environmental costs skyrocket. E-waste piles up in Ghana and India, poisoning communities that never used the products to begin with. Carbon emissions rise as products are manufactured, shipped, and discarded at record speed. Precious metals, plastics, and energy are wasted—not because we lack the technology to build better, but because we’ve chosen not to.
And still, consumers are blamed. “You bought the cheap one.” “You should have read the reviews.” “You get what you pay for.” But in an economy where **planned obsolescence is the only option at scale**, these aren’t choices. They’re traps. Try finding a durable toaster in a store that isn’t high-end or imported. Try getting a printer that works after six months without a subscription. This isn’t about quality vs. price—it’s about system-wide decay disguised as consumer freedom.
What’s most disturbing is how normalized it’s become. We now expect things to break. We budget for replacements. We joke about it—“They don’t make ’em like they used to”—as if this were just nostalgia. But nostalgia implies something accidental or romantic. This was neither. It was calculated. Durability wasn’t lost. It was murdered.
And the body’s still warm.
The Cost to You and the PlanetEvery time a product fails before its time, someone pays. Usually, it's you. But not just in dollars. The cost of a junkified economy shows up in frustration, wasted time, stress, clutter, environmental damage, and a creeping sense that everything—including your choices—is rigged.
Let’s start with the obvious: your wallet. In theory, a cheaper product saves you money. But when you replace it three times in the span of what used to be one purchase, it’s no longer a deal. It’s a shell game. Your budget bleeds slowly—$29.99 here, $89.99 there—until you look around and realize your money didn’t buy value. It bought landfill filler.
And that landfill? It's not an abstract place. It's real, and it's overflowing. Americans throw out over **12 million tons of furniture** every year—much of it cheap, unrepairable pressboard junk. Add to that 150 million smartphones, 400 million ink cartridges, and countless plastic gadgets that never had a chance. Globally, **we generate over 50 million metric tons of e-waste annually**, much of it dumped in poor countries under the polite fiction of “recycling.”
Those countries, by the way, are paying the ultimate price. In Ghana, toxic e-waste dumps leak lead, mercury, and flame retardants into water systems. Children scavenge circuit boards for scrap metal while breathing poisoned air. In Indonesia, mountains of Western plastic clog rivers and soil, often burned in open pits. All of this because we can’t buy a toaster that lasts.
But it’s not just about trash. There’s a hidden cost to your mental health, too. Every broken item is a micro-betrayal. You trusted that product. You counted on it. Now it’s junk, and you’re left navigating tech support scripts, warranty loopholes, or a customer service chatbot that might as well be mocking you. This slow grind of disappointment is exhausting. It erodes faith in the idea that things can work as they should.
There’s a name for it: learned helplessness. When failures pile up, you stop trying. You stop returning items. You stop calling the helpline. You stop expecting anything to work—and instead, you just replace. Over time, this seeps into how we view the world. Why fix the system when it’s easier to swipe for a new one?
And that mindset isn’t just personal—it’s political. A society trained to accept garbage products becomes a society that tolerates garbage systems. Public services don’t work? Shrug. Elections feel broken? Shrug. Healthcare costs bankrupt you? Shrug. The dysfunction of consumer life becomes a metaphor for larger civic decay. If everything is falling apart, what’s the point of caring?
Meanwhile, inequality is baked into the very structure of junkification. Wealthy people can buy quality. They can afford products designed to last, services that actually answer the phone, warranties with real teeth. They don’t shop at the dollar store or rely on rental apps to furnish their homes. The poor, on the other hand, are trapped in a cycle of cheap and broken. They pay more over time for less. It’s the high cost of being poor, one busted coffee maker at a time.
And let’s not forget the emotional labor required just to function in this system. Every purchase becomes a gamble. Every repair a research project. Every interaction with customer service a test of endurance. You’re not just a consumer—you’re an unpaid quality control agent, warranty enforcer, and amateur lawyer. The burden has shifted, and we carry it without protest because it’s been normalized.
Worse yet, we’re told it’s our fault. “You didn’t read the fine print.” “You should have bought the extended warranty.” “You didn’t follow the proper cleaning procedure.” The blame machine is relentless. It takes your frustration and spins it back at you. And in the absence of alternatives, it works. You buy again. You hope again. And you’re disappointed again.
This is not just inconvenient. It’s unsustainable. The environmental crisis demands less consumption, not more. Yet the entire economy is structured around constant churn. Companies don’t want durable goods. They want recurring revenue. And they’re willing to design failure into everything to get it. You don’t own your stuff—you rent its functionality until the day it quits.
But here’s the quiet rebellion: we remember. We remember the appliances our parents kept for decades. The toasters that toasted. The TVs that lasted longer than your mortgage. That memory is more than nostalgia—it’s a benchmark. A reminder that quality was once normal, and could be again. The garbage economy isn’t the only way. It’s just the most profitable.
And the true cost? We’re paying it right now—in dollars, in despair, in rising temperatures and falling trust. All for what? To prop up quarterly earnings and executive bonuses.
That’s the bargain we were never asked to agree to. And it’s time we stopped paying for it.
Who’s Getting Rich Off the RotIf everything feels like it’s falling apart, it’s not because no one is in charge—it’s because someone is. And they’re making a killing. The decay of quality isn’t a bug in the system. It is the system. And behind that system are corporations engineered not to serve customers, but to serve shareholders. The worse it works for you, the better it works for them.
Let’s go back to the early 1980s. That’s when the rules of the game changed. Before then, most CEOs were paid a salary. Some had a bonus tied to performance, but their loyalty was to the company, not the stock price. Then came **Reaganomics**, deregulation, and the worship of the free market. By the end of the decade, CEO compensation shifted—heavily—to **stock options**. Suddenly, a CEO’s personal wealth was directly tied to the company’s short-term share price. Not its health. Not its products. Just the stock.
And that changed everything.
Now imagine you’re that CEO. You can invest in long-term durability—designing better products, building loyalty, training staff. Or you can cut corners, outsource production, fire workers, and buy back stock to goose your numbers for the next quarter. Which do you choose when millions of your own dollars are on the line every three months?
The answer is obvious. And the results are everywhere.
Quality drops. Wages stagnate. Customer service is gutted. And Wall Street claps. Because to investors, none of those things matter. They don’t use your product. They don’t shop at your store. They want dividends, stock gains, and predictable earnings reports—regardless of what’s happening to the customer on the ground. The financial tail now wags the operational dog.
This isn’t just theory. It’s visible in the data. In the 1960s, **corporate profits** made up around 5% of U.S. GDP. Today, it’s closer to 12%. Meanwhile, wages as a share of GDP have fallen. The pie grew, but workers got a smaller slice. Where did the money go? Stock buybacks, dividends, executive bonuses, and mergers designed to kill competition.
It’s why a major airline can charge hundreds for basic economy, pack you in like cattle, lose your bags, strand you overnight—and still report record profits. Because you don’t matter. The stock price does. And Wall Street doesn’t fly coach.
The same applies to tech. Every new “feature” that limits usability or pushes you toward a subscription isn’t a glitch—it’s a funnel. A new toll booth on a road that used to be free. Companies now build barriers into their products so they can charge to remove them. What was once a one-time purchase is now a recurring tax on your patience.
And let’s not forget **venture capital**. In many cases, startups are funded not to build sustainable businesses, but to grow fast, dominate a market, and flip it to a bigger fish. Durability? Customer trust? Irrelevant. The only thing that matters is valuation. That’s how we got Uber. That’s how we got WeWork. It’s not about building something good—it’s about creating the illusion of growth long enough to cash out.
Even when companies fail, the people responsible walk away rich. Executives collect golden parachutes. Hedge funds sell short. Private equity strips assets, lays off workers, and blames the market. Accountability is a relic. The only consistent losers are the customers, the workers, and the environment.
This rot is systemic. It’s not just a few bad actors. It’s an entire architecture of incentives built on short-term greed. And as long as the markets reward decay, decay is what we’ll get. Every new product that breaks too soon, every app that pushes an upsell, every call center that never picks up—it’s all part of the same economic machinery. It’s not malfunctioning. It’s performing exactly as designed.
And the people pulling the levers? They’re getting richer than ever. CEO pay has grown over 1,000% since the 1970s. The average S&P 500 CEO now makes **over 300 times** what their median worker earns. The billionaire class exploded during the pandemic—even as millions lost jobs or fell behind on rent. Why? Because decay feeds growth. The faster things fall apart, the faster new profits can be extracted from the rubble.
That’s the real kicker. This isn’t capitalism working too slowly. It’s capitalism in overdrive. The market has found a way to monetize dysfunction. To turn frustration into revenue. To make you pay for being disappointed, and then pay again to try again.
And until the rules change, nothing else will. Because in this house of mirrors, the only reflection that matters is the stock ticker. And the rest of us? We’re just the recurring revenue stream.
Where Does It End?Every system built on rot eventually collapses. You can only patch the ceiling so many times before the whole roof caves in. And in this economy, we’re already dodging the falling beams. The question isn’t whether this model is sustainable—it clearly isn’t. The question is: how much longer can it limp along before something breaks for good?
We’re not just facing a consumer crisis. We’re staring down a civilization-wide credibility problem. People don’t believe in brands anymore. They don’t trust tech. They don’t expect the government to protect them. They’ve stopped counting on the things they buy, and worse, they’ve stopped counting on each other. When even your refrigerator spies on you, and your coffee maker needs a firmware update, the basic idea of reliability feels like a quaint myth.
This isn’t just exhausting—it’s corrosive. A culture built around planned disappointment trains its people to expect betrayal. And once that mindset sets in, it seeps everywhere. Into relationships. Into institutions. Into democracy itself.
So, where does it end? Not with a bang. With a shrug. Apathy becomes the dominant mood. Cynicism replaces engagement. And that’s precisely what the current system counts on. A burnt-out, demoralized population is easy to manipulate. If nothing works, and no one cares, then no one resists. That’s the final stage of enshittification: normalization.
But we don’t have to accept that ending. Because buried beneath the rubble of junkified commerce and financial rot is something much older, much more durable: human memory. We remember what things used to be. Not perfect, but better. More accountable. More fixable. More real. And we’re starting to talk about it again. That matters.
Movements like the Right to Repair are gaining traction. Independent repair shops are popping up again. Farmers are fighting John Deere for access to the software in their tractors. Apple was forced to backpedal—slightly—on locking out third-party repairs. It’s not enough, but it’s a start.
Some companies have begun to market durability again—not as a cost-cutting measure, but as a competitive edge. Patagonia repairs your jacket. Fairphone lets you replace your own battery. A few appliance brands now proudly boast “built to last 20 years.” This is no accident. It’s a signal. A hint that consumers are waking up, that quality can be cool again, and that businesses might respond if we demand more than fast, cheap, and broken.
Policy can help too—if we push for it. Regulations that ban planned obsolescence. Incentives for repairable design. Public investment in repair infrastructure. Trade policies that don’t reward dumping toxic waste overseas. These aren’t radical ideas. They’re just overdue.
And at the individual level? We can slow the churn. Buy less, fix more, share tools, swap gear, leave reviews that shame the junk peddlers. Every choice won’t shift the system overnight—but they all send a signal. And if enough people signal together, the market eventually listens. It’s designed to. That's its one redeeming feature.
But make no mistake: we won’t repair our way out of this alone. The rot runs deeper than gadgets. It lives in the boardrooms, the stock markets, the think tanks, and the campaign donations. It's the story we've been sold—that growth is the only goal, that convenience is worth any cost, and that we're just consumers, not citizens.
That story has reached its end. And if we don’t write a new one—something based on stewardship, dignity, and durability—then we’re just rearranging the junk in the landfill.
So where does it end? Maybe here. With a chapter, a conversation, a decision not to replace the broken thing with more of the same. With a pause. A question. A refusal.
That’s how all real change starts: not by fixing the machine, but by deciding you’ve had enough of being ground up in it.
Chapter 3: The Enshittification of Work It used to be that a job meant something. You showed up, did your work, and in return, you got a paycheck that covered your bills, some benefits, maybe even a pension. There was dignity in it. Stability. A path. But over the last few decades, that path has crumbled beneath us. What’s replaced it isn’t just worse—it’s insulting.
Work today has become a trap door. You fall in, and by the time you look up, you realize the ladder’s gone. You're a contractor now. An “independent partner.” A self-employed risk-bearing unit of economic potential. Which is a polite way of saying: you’re on your own.
The traditional job, with all its flaws, was at least a social contract. Employers had responsibilities. Workers had rights. But once corporate America figured out it could offshore risk and call it freedom, that contract got shredded. Enter the gig economy—Silicon Valley’s repackaging of 19th-century piecework, now with an app and no benefits.
Let’s be clear: the “gig” wasn’t an invention. It was a regression. What Uber and DoorDash and Amazon Flex did was legalize the reclassification of labor. Instead of hiring employees, they hired algorithms. The humans just follow the prompts. No healthcare. No overtime. No unemployment insurance. You’re not a worker—you’re an input.
Even traditional jobs aren’t safe. Once the gig mindset infected the rest of the economy, it spread like mold. Retail workers get hours slashed with no warning. Teachers are hired on year-to-year contracts. Nurses are floated across departments with no say. Even white-collar jobs offer less security than a used toaster.
And it’s not just the paycheck. It’s the meaning. Work used to provide identity—a sense of purpose or pride. Now it offers metrics. Dashboards. Rankings. “Productivity optimization.” Workers are rated, ranked, scored, and surveilled like livestock. One misstep, one angry customer, one bad algorithmic flag—and you’re out. No recourse. No explanation.
This isn’t a workplace. It’s a slot machine. And the house always wins.
The irony is that it’s happening in an era of record corporate profits. Productivity is high. Output is up. But instead of sharing the gains, employers squeeze harder. Labor gets less. Executive pay soars. And workers are told to be grateful for whatever scraps they get—especially if it comes with free pizza in the breakroom.
What we’re living through is more than wage stagnation. It’s spiritual erosion. A system that treats human effort as disposable can’t sustain human dignity. When every job is precarious, every boss is a spreadsheet, and every paycheck is a maybe, people don’t just lose income—they lose hope.
And yet, for all the rot, there’s a simmering resistance. The pandemic pulled back the curtain. Workers saw how little corporations cared. They saw who got rich while they got sick. And many of them said, “no more.” Strikes are back. Union drives are up. People are quitting en masse. They’re waking up to the scam—and starting to fight back.
In the chapters to come, we’ll dig into that resistance. But first, we have to understand how we got here. How work became hustle. How hustle became exploitation. And how exploitation got marketed as empowerment. The enshittification of work didn’t happen overnight. It was engineered—one benefit cut, one contract clause, one gig at a time.
The Metrics That Broke UsIn the old economy, your manager knew your name. Maybe they even knew your kid’s name. They saw your effort, understood your quirks, and judged your performance based on something vaguely human. Now? Your manager is an app. Your score is a number. And your value is reduced to how well you feed the machine’s metrics.
Welcome to the age of algorithmic labor—a world where **KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)** rule, and where work is no longer measured by quality, commitment, or creativity, but by speed, compliance, and clicks. The shift from human judgment to data-driven oversight promised fairness and objectivity. What it delivered was dehumanization and burnout.
Start with Amazon. Warehouse workers are tracked by the second. Every package scanned, every step taken, every pause in motion—is recorded and ranked. If your “time off task” (TOFT) exceeds the invisible threshold, you might get flagged. Enough flags, and you’re out. It doesn’t matter if you needed the bathroom, if the barcode scanner glitched, or if the conveyor jammed. The system doesn’t care. It only sees lag.
It’s not just warehouses. At call centers, software listens to your tone of voice, your pitch, even your “dead air.” If you don’t move fast enough from call to call, or if your script deviates, you risk discipline. Delivery drivers are scored on routes they can’t control. Ride-share drivers are punished for traffic or customer whims. Office workers face dashboards tracking keystrokes, idle time, and mouse movement—as if creativity flows from constant fidgeting.
The result? Paranoia. People working not just to complete a task, but to appease a machine. You’re not just solving problems anymore—you’re managing your metrics. Gaming the system. Chasing the graph. Work becomes theater, and stress becomes strategy. You log in early, fake activity, skip breaks, and obsess over your rating, because that rating is now your job security.
And yet, the data is worshipped. Employers frame it as objective. “We’re just following the numbers,” they say, as if those numbers weren’t shaped by design. But the algorithms aren’t neutral. They’re written by people, for profits. And when they misfire—when they promote the wrong person, or penalize the innocent—there’s no one to appeal to. The code is gospel.
This obsession with metrics didn’t come from nowhere. It’s rooted in a broader ideology: that **if you can measure it, you can manage it**. It sounds smart. It sounds scientific. But it leaves out the soul of labor—the nuance, the context, the human judgment that makes a workplace more than a machine. In the end, what’s easiest to measure becomes what matters most, even if it matters least.
We’ve all felt it. The teacher who teaches to the test. The nurse clicking boxes instead of comforting patients. The writer chasing SEO keywords over substance. The coder pumping out features no one needs. Metrics become the mission. The actual mission gets lost.
This system doesn’t just exhaust us. It insults us. It assumes we’re lazy, dumb, or dishonest by default—and need constant digital prodding to behave. It treats trust as a risk, and surveillance as a solution. And in the process, it erodes the very thing it claims to optimize: performance.
Studies have shown that excessive monitoring actually reduces productivity over time. It increases anxiety, lowers morale, and pushes people to cut ethical corners just to survive the metric gauntlet. But companies rarely learn. Because the metrics still show movement. And movement, in a spreadsheet, looks like progress—even if it's panic.
And let’s be honest: the people designing these systems rarely live under them. Executives don’t have their keystrokes tracked. Managers don’t get rated by faceless customers. It’s the rank and file—the warehouse worker, the call center agent, the delivery driver—who shoulder the weight of algorithmic scrutiny. Those least empowered are watched the most.
It’s not that data is useless. It’s that we’ve mistaken it for wisdom. We’ve let numbers replace relationships, and dashboards replace decisions. And as a result, we’ve created workplaces where workers feel more like suspects than citizens. Where the question isn’t “Am I doing a good job?” but “Am I surviving the algorithm today?”
This is not just inefficient. It’s unsustainable. No one can sprint forever. No one thrives in a panic loop. And no society can afford to let its most valuable resource—human effort—be chewed up by systems that confuse motion for meaning.
In the next section, we’ll look at what this has done to **worker loyalty, identity, and pride**. Because metrics don’t just manage performance. They mold culture. And the culture they’re building isn’t one of empowerment. It’s one of fear.
The Culture of Fear and the Death of LoyaltyOnce upon a time, staying with a company meant something. You worked your way up. You were rewarded with raises, promotions, maybe even a gold watch at retirement. But somewhere between the spreadsheets and the stock buybacks, something snapped. Loyalty stopped being an asset—and started being a liability.
Today’s workers know better than to commit. Why should they? The company sure isn’t committing to them. Layoffs happen without warning, often the day after record profits are announced. Entire departments vanish after a merger. Promises evaporate as soon as a new CEO arrives with a “bold restructuring plan.”
It's not just the actions—it’s the atmosphere. Fear is now the dominant workplace currency. Fear of being replaced. Fear of being surveilled. Fear of making a mistake that gets flagged by the algorithm or criticized in a public Slack channel. You don't build culture with that kind of fear. You build a high-turnover hellscape where no one cares enough to improve anything because they might not be around next quarter.
That fear rewires how people think. Workers stop taking initiative. Why take a risk if failure means being dumped on a Zoom call with two minutes’ notice? Why innovate if the reward is a bigger workload and no raise? People keep their heads down, keep their mouths shut, and keep a backup resume updated at all times. That’s not engagement—it’s survival mode.
And this isn’t just anecdotal. Surveys show that trust in employers has cratered. Gallup has been tracking employee engagement for decades—and the numbers tell a grim story. Most workers are either “not engaged” or “actively disengaged.” Translation? They’re phoning it in—or quietly dreaming of escape.
What’s truly tragic is how quickly all of this became normalized. We've come to expect that companies will fire loyal employees to juice a quarterly report. We expect that managers will be powerless to stop it. We expect that layoffs are just “market discipline” and not the human wreckage of financial engineering.
And with that expectation comes resignation. Workers don’t just stop caring about the job. They stop caring about the institution itself. They don’t advocate for their employer. They don’t represent the brand with pride. They don’t go the extra mile. Why would they? Loyalty has become a sucker’s game.
The irony is that companies used to spend fortunes on “corporate culture.” Remember all those mission statements, all-hands meetings, and trust falls? They don’t even bother anymore. You can’t cultivate culture when the soil is poisoned by precarity. A ping-pong table doesn’t fix burnout. Free snacks don’t erase the trauma of layoffs.
Even the concept of “team” has been distorted. In modern corporate speak, “team” is a euphemism for overwork and unpaid expectations. It's what management says when they want you to pull a weekend shift for free. It's what they use to mask hierarchy—because it sounds nicer than “you work for us, and we own your time.”
This erosion of workplace solidarity bleeds into everything. It weakens labor organizing. It isolates workers. It discourages mentorship. When everyone’s replaceable, no one invests in anyone else. Older workers stop teaching. Younger workers stop asking. The human fabric of the workplace unravels.
And the cost isn’t just emotional—it’s economic. Disengaged workers are less productive, less creative, and more likely to leave. High turnover costs billions. Lost institutional knowledge slows growth. Poor morale leads to more accidents, more mistakes, more customer churn. The enshittification of work doesn’t just harm workers—it sabotages the very businesses doing the enshittifying.
Yet still, the rot continues. Because at the top, the metrics look fine. If the stock is up, then the layoffs must have worked. If the quarterly numbers look good, then the culture must be healthy. No one bothers to ask what’s been hollowed out to make the numbers shine. But those who work on the inside know. They feel it. Every day.
In the next section, we’ll turn to the final indignity: the weaponization of “passion” and “purpose.” When the paycheck shrinks and the pressure grows, companies often respond by selling meaning instead of money. And that, as we’ll see, is its own special kind of exploitation.
Passion as PropagandaWhen employers stopped offering job security, decent wages, and retirement benefits, they needed something else to keep workers in line. Enter the new corporate hustle: “passion.” Suddenly, you weren’t just doing a job—you were “living your purpose.” You weren’t an employee anymore—you were part of a “mission-driven family.”
Except you weren’t. You were still underpaid, overworked, and expendable. But now, if you complained, you weren’t just seen as disgruntled. You were ungrateful. You didn’t just lack motivation—you lacked heart. Passion became a leash disguised as a love letter.
This is one of the most sinister tricks of late-stage capitalism: turning emotion into a weapon. The company doesn’t need to raise your wage if it can raise your sense of guilt. Didn’t meet your metrics? Work harder. You should care more. Think about the mission. Think about the team. If you really loved the work, you’d stay late. Come in on the weekend. Answer emails at midnight.
It’s not enough to do your job well—you have to show you care. You have to smile while you're being squeezed. Because now the job isn’t just labor—it’s a performance. And if you’re not beaming with enthusiasm during a 10-hour shift, you must not be a “culture fit.”
This toxic optimism has infected everything from startups to nonprofits to the trades. Even in warehouses, management plasters the walls with posters: “One Team, One Dream!” and “Work Hard, Have Fun, Make History!”—as if slogging through a 100-degree facility for $16 an hour is some kind of legacy project.
In many industries, especially creative ones, passion is used to justify low pay. Artists, writers, coders, designers—they're told they’re “lucky” to be doing what they love. Which is just another way of saying: “We’re not going to pay you fairly, but please keep producing.” This logic is everywhere—from unpaid internships to YouTube creators to musicians playing for “exposure.”
And the kicker? When burnout hits—when workers collapse under impossible expectations—it's framed as a personal failing. You didn't manage your time well. You didn't balance your work and life. You just weren't passionate enough. The system offloads all responsibility onto the individual while claiming to support their dreams.
This manufactured passion serves one purpose: to extract more labor for less money. And it works, for a while. People want to believe in their work. They want to feel useful, creative, purposeful. But when those values are manipulated, something starts to break. Workers lose trust. They stop believing the slogans. They stop believing in themselves.
We’ve seen the fallout: teachers asked to buy their own supplies with a smile. Nurses working double shifts and being called “heroes” instead of being given raises. Tech workers pulling 70-hour weeks for stock options that never vest. All of it under the illusion that they’re part of something bigger. But it’s not purpose—it’s exploitation wrapped in flattery.
Even the language of “family” has been hijacked. Companies say “we’re a family here” right before layoffs. They say “we take care of our own” right before cutting health benefits. But unlike a real family, a corporation will ghost you the second your productivity dips. Try calling HR for emotional support after a firing. See how far that love goes.
Real passion is powerful. But it can’t be coerced, and it can’t be faked. When it’s used honestly—when workers are supported, empowered, and respected—it creates magic. But when it's used as cover for abuse, it becomes toxic. The more a company brags about its culture, the more you should worry what it’s hiding.
And workers are starting to catch on. The glossy mission statements don’t hit the same when your rent is late and your boss won’t respond. People are talking, organizing, quitting. They’re reclaiming their time, their energy, and their sense of self-worth. Because no paycheck—or lack thereof—is worth sacrificing your soul to an app that calls itself a dream.
In the next and final section of this chapter, we’ll look at the seeds of resistance—how workers are pushing back, organizing across industries, and reclaiming not just better wages but better work itself. Because the enshittification of work is not destiny. It’s a choice. And choices can be undone.
Seeds of Resistance: The Fight to Reclaim WorkEvery system that exploits eventually faces a backlash. The modern workplace—with its burnout culture, metric surveillance, and passion theater—is no different. And while the enshittification of work has been widespread, so too is the resistance. You can hear it in union chants, see it in walkouts, feel it in mass resignations. People are done.
The 2020s didn’t just bring a pandemic—they brought a reckoning. Millions of workers, forced into reflection by lockdowns and life-threatening jobs, began asking: “What am I doing this for?” The Great Resignation wasn’t just a trend—it was a referendum. People quit not because they were lazy, but because they’d finally had enough of being treated like disposable cogs in a profit machine.
And it’s not just quitting. It’s organizing. Workers at places once thought impervious to unions—Amazon warehouses, Starbucks cafes, Apple retail stores—have risen up. These are not the old union strongholds of the 20th century. They are the front lines of a new labor movement born in algorithmic workplaces and optimized misery. The slogans may be different, but the message is the same: respect us, or we’ll shut you down.
What’s remarkable is how grassroots much of this resistance is. It’s not led by celebrity politicians or legacy labor bosses—it’s driven by baristas, warehouse packers, teachers, nurses, and Uber drivers. And they’re using the very tools that once monitored them—social media, text chains, data leaks—to build solidarity. The algorithm turned them into numbers. They’re turning that data into fuel for rebellion.
We're seeing other forms of resistance too. Workers are “quiet quitting”—doing their job, but not sacrificing their sanity. They’re side-hustling, freelancing, or forming co-ops. They're rejecting corporate culture altogether and starting their own small businesses, even if it means earning less. Because freedom, flexibility, and dignity matter more than fake perks and empty slogans.
This isn’t just about wages. It’s about meaning. Workers want jobs that don’t suck the life out of them. They want schedules that honor their families. They want work that doesn’t make them feel like they're failing at life just by showing up. And for once, employers are having to listen—because there's a labor shortage, not of people, but of people willing to put up with this nonsense.
Of course, the backlash is real. Corporations are fighting hard to crush unions, rewrite labor laws, and automate resistance away. They’ll dangle perks, threaten layoffs, and flood PR channels with “we care” messaging. But beneath the surface, they’re scared. Because once workers realize their collective power, the whole house of cards wobbles.
Even in white-collar professions, the shift is visible. Software engineers are demanding remote work, fair hours, and better treatment. Journalists are unionizing. Tech workers are whistleblowing. Employees are banding together to call out racism, sexism, and abuse, even when it means risking their jobs. The old assumption—that workers should be grateful just to have a job—is collapsing.
And governments are slowly catching on. Some countries have begun regulating gig work, banning exploitative algorithms, and expanding worker protections. It’s not nearly enough, but it signals a change in the weather. The era of blind faith in “the market will sort it out” is cracking under the weight of its own cruelty.
Still, no one’s coming to save us. Not the bosses, not the brands, not the bureaucrats. If work is to be reclaimed, it will be reclaimed from the bottom up. From the lunch break conversations, the whispered complaints, the walkouts that start with two people and grow to twenty. Every movement starts small—until it doesn’t.
The enshittification of work didn’t happen overnight. It took decades of erosion, of dehumanization packaged as efficiency. Undoing it won’t be quick. But it’s already begun. Because somewhere, right now, someone is standing up to a boss who thinks they own people’s time and dignity. Somewhere, a worker is saying “no.” And that word, when said together, becomes power.
In the next chapter, we’ll shift our gaze from the workplace to the marketplace—where enshittification has infected not just how we work, but what we buy. Cheap goods, fast fashion, plastic everything—the race to the bottom didn’t stop at the factory floor. It followed us to the checkout aisle.
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