There is a strange moment when you realise something has tipped over. You log in, you scroll, you click… and you feel a dull wear and tear, as if every gesture took a little more energy than yesterday. The services you loved become heavy, chatty, saturated with prompts. You catch yourself sighing at a news feed that looks less and less like a conversation and more and more like a supermarket concourse on amphetamines.
This shift is no anecdote. It is a precise, patient, almost geometric mechanism. First the platforms seduce us, then they squeeze us, and finally they wring us dry. And we stay put, convinced this is normal. Because “everyone is on it”. Because leaving would cost too much: too much data, too many connections, too many habits.
What if this slow deterioration were not fate, but a system?
What if our tools, designed to make life simpler, had become machines that erode our attention, our knowledge and sometimes even our institutions?
We may have entered an age in which technology no longer merely malfunctions: it methodically decays, and takes us with it. The challenge is no longer to be outraged, but to understand. Because a mechanism, once decoded, stops being a trap.
Find the full transcript of this episode, along with all the sources and plenty more, at: The age of enshittification