Enshittification

Originally posted on Facebook May 31 2026

Let's talk about something other than AI

Enshittification

Do you pay for a service that's become worse over time, while increasing its cost? Netflix, YouTube Premium, Spotify, Uber, Meta Ads?

Or do you use an ad-supported service that's become worse over time, while increasing the amount and proportion of ads you're being served? Facebook, Instagram, Google Search, YouTube Free, Spotify Free?

This is something called "enshittification", and it is a deliberate monetisation strategy these companies use, to extract the maximum profit that they can.

Dependency

Their goal as a company is to provide you a service (at a loss) that you like so much that you start to consider it a necessity.

Then, over time, they slowly increase what they charge you to use that service (watching ads is part of what you pay, if you don't pay your actual money - don't forget that old phrase "if the service is free, you are the product").

Along with this they slowly reduce the quality of the service, in a way that reduces their overheads.

Boiling The User Frog

They do this slowly so that you will normalise to the new service and cost levels over time and not ever really consciously consider the value proposition. Their goal is to get you to a point that you never would have considered at the beginning: paying way too much for way too shitty a service. This is perfect for them. This means they are extracting more value from you than you are getting from them, and this means they are an effective business.

Churn Is Fine If It Makes More Profit

Every time such a company makes a price hike, there is an exodus is paying customers ("churn") BUT as long as they can hang onto enough folks who pay the new, higher rates for the service, they end up with more profit. They model this before a price hike to make sure they win. When Netflix brought in the 'ad-supported' tier they modeled how much they would make from ads, then offset this against the subscription cost, so even if you dropped down to a "cheaper" tier they would still end up making more money from you.

Subscription Hopping Is THEIR Plan

The streamers now incorporate the idea of "subscription hopping" into their pricing. They are PLANNING on you saying "Oh I will just pay for Netflix 3 or 4 months out of the year". That's part of the business model. That's why it costs so much now. If you stay subscribed? Great! What a cash cow for them you are. If you only subscribe 4 months of the year at this higher rate? Great! They make as much from you in 4 months as they used to make in a year, and only have to provide 1/3 the service!

Rate of Enshittification Recently

If you've noticed everything getting way worse, way faster over the last year or so - that is because the recession (mostly caused by the AI "boom" sorry that's the only mention I'll make of it) has made debt much more expensive to carry, so the folks in charge say "okay now is the time to get cash-positive tighten the screws!"

How Do We Oppose Enshittification?

Now, I think its pretty clear that we (end-users / consumers) want things to be better, for cheaper (not worse, for more money). How do we encourage that?

We need to increase the rate of "churn" when they enshittify their service. When they make something worse and more expensive we need to make the hard choice to cancel a service, or move to a different ecosystem permanently.

This is annoying and tedious to do (of course! this is what they are counting on!) BUT if it happens in large enough numbers then the company says "hey we are now profiting LESS than when we were providing a better service for less money!?! This price hike and service disruption was a bad idea! Let's make it better for cheaper!".

It is the goal of a business to make money. If you tell them you will accept bad service for more money they will make that deal every time. If you tell them you won't pay them to enshittify your experience? They'll make a better experience.

I used to pay for streamers but I've gone back to torrents. I want to support creators but I'm not willing to play the rigged game the way these companies want me to. I've left Google Search because they deliberately made it less accurate to serve more ads AND now have bundled their AI bullshit into it (sorry last time in this post). I cancelled my YouTube Premium because of the price hikes and worsening of their service (and I use an ad blocker on there now which I didn't do before a few months ago). I left Spotify in large part due to their pushing of AI content, but the increase in price while funneling money into autonomous murder machines while paying artists less per stream than every other platform, and amplification of right-wing voices certainly also made an impact. Apple Music has a worse UI, but it was nice to get access to a bunch of artists who took their stuff off Spotify for some or all of the above reasons.

The unfortunate reality is some of these predatory ecosystems are really entrenched so you can't leave everything all the time but some positive action is better than none.

A Very Funny Sketch That Covers This

The Norwegian Consumer Council did a really great comedy sketch about this that is worth watching (it is something governments can regulate even though they mostly don't).

This is the title I'm not linking it because FB hides off-site links (remember when they didn't do this?? Its more profitable to keep you on here being served ads)

"A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator"

You can search that on Duck Duck Go (which allows you to turn AI off)

The Anti-LLM & Anti-AI-Art Posts

The (Two) Big Anti AI Rant(s)

I’ve been posting some long-ish writing pieces on my Facebook wall recently but Meta is evil and the algorithmic internet is stupid so I’ve decided to resurrect the blog here on my actual website. Remember when the internet was more than just 5 walled gardens owned by technofascist billionaires? If you’re very young you may have missed that incarnation of it but it was better (I’m gonna write a piece on that soon).

These aren’t really comedic but I’ve had some positive feedback from readers so this felt like a decent place to post them. Substack supports right wing evil fucks so I decided not to put these up there for the moment (no shade if you write on there there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism ofc).

If you follow me on socials you may have already seen one or both of these posted rants, in which case there is nothing really new in the below text – I’ve done some minor edits for formatting and clarity but the essential text of both is the same.
 
I also sent this out in the email blast so, you know, you may have seen it there as well.
 
Using Generative AI is Bad But It Doesn’t Mean You Are A Bad Person

I’ve tried to say as much below but if you currently use AI for stuff I would ask you to consider stopping, and I also want to make clear that just because you use AI doesn’t mean I’m calling you a bad person, but I would ask you to please consider the impact you are making on the world, as AI is making this civilisation we share a worse place to live.

Okay here we go:
 
TERMINOLOGY
First thing’s first: “AI” as the term has been used these last few years is really, really inaccurate.
 
Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are not any kind of ‘intelligence’, as they are not designed to have any understanding of the words they are guessing should complete their text chains.

“AI” sounds a lot better than “word-guessing machine” and most of the “AI Revolution” is driven by the marketing arm of the mega corps and billionaires who stand to profit by it (though the whole industry is burning money at an insane rate – for no real benefit to anyone, even if you currently THINK you are gaining benefit). The economics most clearly track to the subprime mortgage crisis, and crypto boom. When we say ‘profit’ here its essentially profit as determined by grifting the public, the stock market, investors, governments and megacorps.

When it comes to image generators, this again is the result of an averaging-machine. There is no sentience (nor path to sentience) involved in the process.

For clarity, I will refer to them both as “AI”, or “Generative AI”, even though the term is a misnomer.

The following is from two posts I made to social media – one on February 9, and one on May 7. Both have been slightly edited for clarity.
 
THE ANTI-AI-ART POST
Originally posted Feb 9 2026, minor edits yesterday

This was posted in response to the trend of posting “AI Art” interpretations of oneself.

Let's do a trend where we all pay artists to draw something instead.
 
LLMs and GenAI-driven image generators waste massive amounts of electricity, drive the recession, waste fresh water near communities, drive up the price of ram and graphic processors, steal from artists, and degrade the internet & the utility of websites.
 
They do this so that mega corps and multi billionaires can chase the next hypergrowth market and cut employment opportunities for everyone. They do not and can not by definition create a better output than a human can create. They are averaging and probability guessing machines.
 
What they CAN do is be owned by mega corps and multi billionaires (although, ridiculously, the actual costs of running them will never, ever, make financial sense to the value of their outputs - they are the new crypto and are currently running at a loss of many billions of dollars)
 
Anytime I see someone post AI-created slop I unfollow them, and I encourage you to do the same
 
The big problem of the internet is not A Lack Of Content. There is more ‘content’ and entertainment already in existence for you to be entertained for multiple natural lives.
 
The problem is saturation of low-effort and low-value slop that makes discovery of content difficult. There’s loads of good stuff out there that you are not seeing because the ocean of the internet is polluted with slop.
 
Put some fucking effort in. Express yourself, rather than offloading your creativity and cognitive load to an ocean-boiling machine.
 
I'm consistently broke but I paid an artist $350 to draw the animals (and me onstage) for my comedy showcase in Perth, and I'd do it again. I paid the same artist to draw the rabbits for Bun Runner / The Smoking Bun years ago.
 
If you use ChatGPT and generative AI-driven image generators you are actively destroying the internet
 
I'm not saying you're a bad person, but you are doing a bad thing. If you are an artist using these things I honestly find it almost impossible to understand your values.
 
If you use ChatGPT to answer questions and "do therapy" you are actively destroying your own ability to think creatively and critically
 
The way LLMs are constructed is not to "read the internet and give you the answer". They are constructed to guess the next most likely word for you, the reader, to accept as 'probably correct'. That means it will flatter you, and lie to you, as long as you are likely to believe it. It understands nothing, and limits your ability to understand. It is a sycophancy machine and we all like to be sucked up to.
 
Even if you use the services for free, you are helping to prop up a destructive and parasitic system.
 
Every free use of Generative AI goes into their stats to waste 10s of billions of dollars more in investment capital. The global recession is in large part driven by this HUGE drain of humanity's resources into the word/image guessing/stealing machines.
 
If you pay them money you are collaborating in the enshittification of the internet in a very active way
 
LLMs are not accurate. They are not better than learning a skill or researching a question yourself. They function in a way that they make the sources they pull from stop being viable in the mid to long term. They scrape websites without supporting websites. They steal from artists without compensating them.
 
Let’s not forget the old adage “if you pay nothing for a service, you are the product”
 
Google made their search worse deliberately to sell more ads. This is a matter of public record.
 
They, and Microsoft, are jamming generative AI into all their products because they overleveraged their companies into this wasteful, destructive bet on hypergrowth, the AI shit isn't better, and they realised okay we need to literally prevent people from having the choice to not use it (because it is worse), so they now they tell you it is unavoidable. They say “it is inevitable” because they want you to stop resisting. They are off-brand Thanos wannabes and they suck.
 
Divest from AI. Use other services.
 
Don't support and be complicit in wasteful, destructive slop.
 
When you see people using AI art know that they are saying: “we don't value art, and we don't value you.”
 
 
THE ANTI-LLM POST
Originally posted May 7 2026, minor edits today
 
I’m still mad about AI here's some more thoughts so I can get them out of my brain.
 
Generative AI Is An Opiate
 
And like all opiates it makes you feel good, while causing harm to you, and society, while enriching a bunch of criminals.
 
The reason we have laws regulating opiate consumption in society is because we human beings LOVE to feel good and we will pursue that over our own wellbeing – and if the good feeling is good enough we will do that until it kills us.
 
The Cost of AI Is Not Decreasing (It Is Increasing)
 
I see this one a lot. "Oh man it will be so cheap to run!" "Costs are coming down all the time!" "We just need to scale it up more!". Generative AI’s underlying architecture is not built in a way that the costs come down over time. It’s built for the opposite.
 
AI is getting more expensive to run over time, not less
 
Each consecutive LLM model is exponentially more expensive to train (& run) than previous models, for an incrementally improved functionality. The image generators (such as Sora, which OpenAI has now shuttered, in a move which meant they had to also cancel a 1 Billion Dollar Deal With Disney) are even more crazily expensive to run than the LLMs.
 
Every AI company has been setting money on fire and the current recession is in large part to the rush of venture capitalists to hurl their money on the blaze.
 
Generative AI "Productivity Benefits" Are A Lie
 
There are little (to none, to negative) "productivity" benefits to using AI. The "productivity" being sold is a lie the billionaires and megacorps are telling you because they need people to keep using it even though its not making work easier, because they need more capital investments into it, or their whole house of graphics cards will fall apart.
 
What I'm saying here is that at times using AI makes work take LONGER - this is not even accounting for the current subsidised running costs.
 
Other times it mostly makes it take the same time, or possibly very slightly less. And usually for a worse end-product than if you’d written the thing yourself from the beginning.
 
All reputable studies have shown the actual use-cases for AI are extremely limited and in most cases make the effort to work ratio worse. "Work" in this context being something usable to a professional standard out the other side.
 
Claude Code Is Bad Actually
 
You really do not want to use something that has been ‘Vibe Coded’

"Oh but Claude Code makes programmers redundant!". Even when Claude Code does successfully make something that "works", the code is insecure and buggy and verbose (meaning, there's way too much of it). Good code is simple, annotated well, and lean. Claude code is very wordy and way longer than it needs to be, convoluted, and has no useful annotation. This means it takes ages to run, has a bunch of bugs in it, a bunch of security holes, and is really difficult to debug and improve by an actual programmer, because its just a bunch of regurgitated code from github (fine to use) but copy/pasted with no understanding of how it works.
 
Vibe coding is just another Generative AI trap that can very quickly (for a lot of money that someone is paying, even if you are not) get you to something 70% usable, but then you are on your own to get it to 100%, and unless you already know how to do the thing then good luck coz that’s the hardest 30% of the work.
 
Why You Think Its Good (If You Think Its Good)
 
This is based on the Dunning-Kruger effect, which you've probably heard of. Know that everyone suffers from this, including smart people (sometimes they are MORE vulnerable to it because they "know they are smart").
 
My fiancee got a concussion a year ago and arguing with her about what medical precautions we should take due to her head injury was incredibly frustrating, because she remembered she's smarter than me - but she was using a damaged brain that was making her actively dumber in that moment.
 
Famed annoying smarty-pants Richard Dawkins demonstrated this a couple weeks ago, where he talked to a chatbot for 10 minutes then went "ITS ALIVE!" because he lacked expertise enough to understand that a word-guessing machine, talking to a person built by evolution to find humanity in everything, would seem like humanity. This is a natural extension of Pareidolia (or the ability to find faces in anything). It’s hardwired by our evolution.
 
The whole myth of vitamin C being "good for a cold" or to fight the flu comes from a super smart guy that thought because he was smart in chemistry he would also be smart in biology.
 
Linus Pauling got a Nobel Prize in chemistry and it made him so confident in himself he manufactured a completely wrong idea about vitamin C and infection (in the 1970s) that persists in the culture over 50 years later.
 
Vitamin C does not help to fight colds and flu btw
 
This is as accurate as 'vaccines causing autism', for similar reasons (extrapolation from a non-representative small sample, though in the case of Andrew Wakefield's work he probably falsified data in addition to using bad science).
 
Autism is genetic. Part of the reason for the increase in cases is diagnostic expansion & understanding, and part of that is once autistic people created the internet, more of us were able to find each other and have kids together (shoutout to Tim Berners-Lee and a bunch more autismiacs for making The Cool Internet before these mega billionaire fuckheads decided to railroad us all into 5 or so walled gardens that exist almost entirely to be a vector for advertising).
 
Nobody likes to hear they are bad at something, but in most cases where you think AI is helping you it is because you lack enough expertise to assess the AI's output correctly. Due to unavoidable hallucinations (integral to the technology) you can never trust AI output without having sufficient expertise to vet the output yourself. What this means is you can only reliably use AI to generate something you already know how to generate. In any other use case you are likely to let hallucinations through.
 
"AI" does not have any understanding of what it is saying. It is a word guessing machine. It cannot assess its own output. Only you can do that. That's why it is so nice to you. People like when someone is nice to them so they are more likely to accept the output as "valid" when it tells you that you are good / smart / correct / handsome / pretty / loved / lovable. It is a "Yes Man", and like all Yes Men it is therefore both basically worthless AND addictive.
 
The Real Cost Of AI Is Astronomical
 
AI is not worth it to run, even based on the subsidised costs they are currently charging you.
 
This is not even accounting for the environmental and power costs to train and run it. Currently that cost is being subsidised by billionaires and megacorps, but the crunch is starting and they are increasing the end-user costs. This is only the first step for cost increases - the actual training & running costs are fucking WILD and if they ever start trying to charge anything NEAR those you would never, ever, ever consider that a worthwhile expenditure of your own money.
 
They would very much like your dependence now, however, so you might feel there was no way to do certain tasks without AI
 
Dependency & Preventing Your Own Mastery
 
There is clear data that using LLMs and AI degrades your own cognitive abilities and reduces your ability to develop mastery. Work can be its own reward, because YOU GET TO GET BETTER AT STUFF. You cannot learn from AI. All you can learn is more and more dependence.
 
And ultimately all AI can do is make something that is the average of a bunch of other things. They have really successfully branded GenAI a totally wrong term. It is not “artificial intelligence” because it does not, can not, and can never, understand anything. That’s not what its built for.
 
You can though. You can understand stuff. Don’t cheat yourself out of that.
 
YOU can make something BETTER / DIFFERENT / INTERESTING because you have the ability to not only develop mastery but also to synthesise different ideas and inspirations together. Unfortunately developing mastery also means making stuff that sucks for awhile and that feels bad.
 
Opium feels good. But its bad FOR you.
 
Delete ChatGPT.

#RelevantRealityProgramming

We can all agree that the current crop of reality television is the lowest of the lowest common denominator. Rather than simply scrapping the lot, here are some commonsense repurposings for existing shows:

Celebrity Big Brother.
The life of everyday citizens is monitored for anti-government sentiment by D list celebrities via reverse televisual technology

Deal Or No Deal
What terrible political outcomes will Tony Abbott barter to country senators for their support in destroying the country? Tune in this week to find out!

The X Factor
Mockumentary following the hilarious antics of people living in the fallout of Fukushima

America’s Got Talent
Hard-hitting documentary series detailing just how much global instability has resulted from U.S. imperialism over the 20th and 21st centuries

Survivor
Series follows average minimum-wage worker in the United States

Cops
Watch unarmed black teens and adults get shot! New storylines every week!

The Biggest Loser
23 minutes of a silver reflective surface

Australia’s Next Top Model
How will climate change affect the liveable regions of this continent? We seriously don’t know, but here’s our best guess for where you’ll need to be in 2050!

The Amazing Race
4 part series documenting the history and possible future of eugenics

The Farmer Wants A Wife/Border Security
In this groundbreaking series crossover we give refugees the option of imprisonment on Manus Island, or marrying men in country towns – the results may surprise you!

Shark Tank
You will laugh and cry as you watch a succession of Western Australian political figures who called for the ‘shark cull’ enter a one-on-one battle to the death with an endangered species and easy political target.

My Restaurant Rules
Can an eatery lead a socialist revolution? Watch and find out!

It's Not Sesame Street. It's HBO.

Now that HBO and Sesame Street have reached an exclusive deal, its exciting to see what the hard-hitting, gritty network has in store to revitalise the long-running children's show. Here are some of the early announcements. 

Cookie Monster has breakout performance, starring as both high-end cookie supplier and conflicted addict in spinoff series, 'Baking Bad'.

Big Bird confronts the fact that Snuffleupagus was Tyler Durden the whole time.

Finally get to watch Bert and Ernie do what they've been doing since 1969, in full HD and uncensored.

Elmo now the star of Law & Order-style procedural police drama, 'Ticke Me Elmo: Special Victims Unit'.

Two-headed monster tipped to play both roles in season 3 of 'True Detective'.

Final episode ends as Big Bird walks into restaurant, sits down for dinner with Elmo, then sudden cut to black with 50/50 chance of being alive/dead.

Oscar the Grouch found dead from inevitable heroin overdose. Count von Count suspected of planting 'one hotshot' in corner dispute.

HBO announces season 6 of ‘The Wire’. Storyline revolves around corrupt puppeteers and actual wires.

Every episode not brought to you by the letters 'H', 'B' and 'O' are brought to you by the letters 'F', 'U', 'C' and 'K'.

Top 10 (+1) Worst Things About Quitting Smoking

11. When I smell bad I have nothing to blame.

10. Feeling out of breath all the time obviously the result of being fat.

9. Will have to suffer significantly longer from being alive.

8. No longer able to wreak world’s slowest revenge through second hand smoke.

7. Persistent cough now far more troubling.

6. Overwhelming need to continue obsessive sucking behaviour has led to surprising lifestyle change.

5. Have to find new ways to demonstrate true feelings to abused stepson and battered wife.

4. Saying nothing in group conversations no longer seems cool and aloof (just uninspired and uninteresting).

3. Becoming painfully obvious that ready supply of cigarettes was the basis of almost all my ‘friendships’.

2. Really puts a lot of pressure for stress relief on heroin addiction.

1. Does nothing to alleviate pre-existing cancers.

Wagga Wagga Sucks

I used to be in the army. Basic training was terrible. Discipline, physical exertion and teamwork never agreed with me at the best of times, and being confined to a barracks with 30 other guys for 6 weeks didn’t help. Listening to one's bunkmate furtively masturbate every night isn't the uplifting emotional journey you might think. And the perfectly well adjusted don't seem to be drawn to the gun-toting, high-testosteroning, professional murderiser life as a rule. 

I wasn’t a very good soldier. I made a lot of mistakes. But so did lots of other guys. I think you would be hard pressed to have found many of those 30-odd young men who enjoyed their time.

You would constantly think about how there was one day of leave at the four and a half week mark. Every evening you would talk with other recruits about your big plans for 'leave day', to try and temporarily escape the misery, if only through your imagination.

Leave was in the small town nearby: Wagga Wagga. It had everything you’d expect from a town near an army base called ‘Wagga Wagga’. A few bars. A bowling alley. And a brothel. That was pretty much it. The big day finally arrived, and due to our ignorance we were super excited.

We didn't realise that the nicest thing you could say about Wagga Wagga was that it was a shithole. In our minds, this was Nirvana (the transcendent place of paradise and no-suffering, not the Kurt Cobain vehicle that eventually drove him to eat a bullet). This was to be Shangri-La! This was the place in which our hopes and dreams would be fulfilled! It was only once we arrived in town, got off the bus, and our corporal drove away, and we were standing there looking at one another that the stark depression of the place sank in. Sad buildings. A sad street. And sad people. Apart from alcohol, there were two things we could do for fun:

1.     Visit the brothel and have sex with a prostitute for $20.

2.     Visit the bowling alley and play a game for $15.

Either way, there was no avoiding the fact that hundreds (if not thousands) of soldiers had inserted themselves before you, and had probably left behind a disease.

I bowled.

And I still worry about that finger.

I have a website now

That is all.