bombs in bottles
Maybe I'm just paying more attention now, but it feels like the pace of tech enshittification is speeding up recently.
For example: Google started (admitting to) device fingerprinting in February 2025. Meta announced it's getting rid of its fact-checkers in favor of "community notes," despite the fact that they don't exactly work in the first place: Twitter apparently does axe those on some posts. Amazon recently announced it will start recording your Alexa conversations to its cloud, even if you told your device not to do that, so that it can train its AI - something Twitter already changed its terms of service to do.
Google uses device fingerprinting now
Meta to ditch fact-checking in favor of "community notes"
Twitter's "community notes" are conspicuously absent from posts that have definitely drawn flags
Amazon: no more storing Alexa voice recordings locally
Twitter uses your tweets to train Grok
The family members and colleagues I've mentioned this to blame it on the return of one Donald Trump. I don't think it's that. After all, the US hasn't passed a data privacy law since the 1980s. These companies could have turbo-enshittified at any time without legal consequence.
Rather, I think it has more to do with the fact that big tech companies justify their existence (to venture capital and shareholders, the only parties whose opinions matter to them) with fast short-term growth, and they're running out of ways to do it.
Way back in 2015, Idle Words predicted an "ad bubble" for online advertising:
https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
I think this might be one of the pressures Big Tech is currently facing. After all, ad blockers get more popular by the year. When Apple let iPhone users opt out of third-party tracking in 2022, 96 percent of users opted in to opting out:
https://applescoop.org/story/96-of-users-opt-out-of-app-tracking-report-finds
It's not just the ad bubble that's nearing its end, though. All the big Oligarch Tech companies grew in their earlier years mostly by buying other companies. Except they're now running out of other companies to buy. "Tech startups" really aren't what they once were. Trust me; I wrote for them for a living for over a decade, and finding new clients is harder than ever - because finding new startups is harder than ever.
Even the startups that do exist aren't what they used to be. Nobody has "the next big thing." No, not even generative AI - and it's starting to look like at least one oligarch tech company knows it:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/power-cut/
That's not even considering the people who are deleting their Meta and Twitter accounts - which is perhaps the only part of this that is clearly administration-related:
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-boycott-facebook-instagram-users-delete-accounts-policy-changes-rcna187480
https://www.pcmag.com/news/x-lost-record-number-of-users-after-election-day
In short, I think they're getting worse faster because they're running out of worlds to conquer. Which leaves them with no choice but to wring more money out of what they already have.
The current crop of tech billionaires did not earn their billions of dollars, of course. Nor are they sitting on that many portraits of dead presidents on their private island bunkers. A lot of them are "worth" that much only because their ownership stake in their companies is "worth" that much, and that number is arrived at based in part on expectations of further explosive growth.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/06/privacy-last/#exceptionally-american
Unlike your local family diner or landscaping business, Big Tech has to keep growing. Or the bubble bursts. So if there's no "next big thing," no new country full of rich people and devoid of tech privacy laws to exploit, no new market to disrupt, no new place to plaster ads...there's no path to the growth that is the only thing of "value" these companies actually offer.
I don't think they're making things worse because there's a new administration. I think they're making things worse because they know their value is based on their growth, and they're running out of ways to grow.
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