How the erosion of competition, regulation, and worker power ushered in the “enshittocene”, an era defined by the slow decay of online platforms like Facebook
The term describes the slow decay of online platforms such as Facebook. But what if we've entered the ‘enshittocene’?
Context & Ripple Effects
The argument extends a long-running critique that Big Tech’s power was built through weak oversight, pressure on labor, and constraints on rivals, rather than disruption alone, as outlined in an earlier account of Big Tech's route to power.
It also gives a wider institutional frame to the enshittification cycle across major platforms, shifting attention from individual product changes to the conditions that let platforms rebalance their services against users and business customers.
First-order effects
- The “enshittocene” label consolidates declining user and business-customer experience into an institutional critique of Facebook and comparable platforms, rather than treating each change as an isolated design decision.
- It raises the salience of competition policy, platform regulation, and worker leverage as connected levers for stakeholders assessing platform behavior.
Second-order effects
- Platform operators face stronger pressure to justify changes that shift value from users or business customers toward the platform, especially where market power limits practical alternatives.
- The framing strengthens the case for responses that combine antitrust, labor, and consumer-policy tools rather than relying on voluntary platform self-correction—a contrast with the earlier call for a more self-policing web ethos.
Third-order effects
- If this diagnosis becomes more widely accepted, platform governance may be judged less by individual moderation or interface decisions and more by whether markets, labor, and enforcement create credible constraints on extraction.
- The larger shift is from viewing platform decline as a product-quality problem to treating it as a structural consequence of concentrated digital markets and weak countervailing power.
The trend: Platform accountability is moving toward a political-economy lens in which competition, regulation, and labor power determine whether digital services remain aligned with their users and commercial partners.