Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

I have been hearing it ever since I came back to North America from Asia: “It’s just getting worse!” I keep hearing the same question from friends and readers: why does everything feel worse at the same time? Social media, work, politics, customer service, even institutions that used to feel stable now feel hollow or hostile.

I don’t think this is a coincidence.

When people talk about “enshittification,” they’re usually talking about apps. Platforms start out helpful and friendly. Then slowly, they become cluttered, annoying, and extractive. Ads multiply. Algorithms get aggressive. Users feel trapped.

But here’s the thing I can’t shake: this isn’t just happening online. It’s happening everywhere.

We should understand that enshittification (i.e. the tendency for systems to start out awesome, and degrade over time) is not a technological bug that needs to be worked out, it is core to the kind of world we live in. In other words, The same logic that ruins platforms is shaping society itself.

Modern systems are designed to optimize—to grow, scale, and extract value as efficiently as possible. They don’t ask whether something is meaningful, fair, or humane. They ask whether it performs.

At first, these systems work well. They serve people. But once we depend on them—once leaving becomes risky or complicated—the priorities shift. The system starts serving itself.

This is why so many institutions feel like they no longer care about the people inside them. It’s not that no one is trying. It’s that the rules reward extraction, not care.

We’re still participating. We’re still clicking, working, voting, and consuming. But we’re doing so with less and less influence over how things actually run. That’s participation without agency.

What holds this kind of society together isn’t shared values or trust. It’s the feeling that there’s nowhere else to go.

I don’t think the solution is simply deleting apps or replacing leaders. The problem is deeper than that. We’ve built systems that run on efficiency but forget why they exist in the first place.

Naming that problem matters. It reminds me that this feeling—that something fundamental is off—is not personal failure. It’s structural. And once we see that, we can at least begin asking better questions about what kind of society we actually want to live in.