Why the Internet Feels So Broken—and How We Can Fix It

Enshittification is the Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year

Congratulations, Cory Doctorow, for giving us the perfect word to describe the slow, grinding collapse of everything we once loved about the internet.

I once believed the enshittification of the internet was purely the fault of big tech companies—the Googles, Metas, and OpenAIs of the world, squeezing our attention for profit while pretending to care. And they have got plenty to answer for.

But it’s not just them. Enshittification is what happens when no one moderates what we value. Left unchecked, it piles up like a fatberg of intellectual junk, choking the flow of ideas and connection until everything stagnates and rots.

Still, even that doesn’t fully explain why everything feels so off. Why does it feel like we’ve been swept away by some invisible current, carried so far from where we started that we can no longer see the shore?

Enshittification isn’t just an internet problem. It’s a symptom of how far we’ve drifted from one another.

It’s everywhere on people’s faces—the collective “WTF happened?” expression. It’s not just the internet; it’s everything. The world we once knew doesn’t seem to have space for us anymore.

So many people I know talk about feeling unmoored, like the shared values that anchored us were cut loose and sank before we could catch them.

The long tail scattered us

Twenty years ago, we lived in the same world. We all watched the same TV shows, read the same newspapers, laughed at the same cultural references. It was sometimes stifling, but there was a shared language, a collective context that gave us something in common.

Then the internet gave us everything. We were no longer limited by what was in our local library or what the TV guide offered. The long tail of the internet let us bathe in our individual obsessions.

And slowly we built up our confidence and started exploring the endless possibilities of who we could be.

And, for a while, it felt like freedom.

But something shifted. At first, our digital lives were shaped by the people we actually knew—real friends, family, classmates. We poked each other on Facebook, shared daft jokes, and felt like we’d cracked the code of what the internet could be.

And then they invented the feed.

The feed corroded it all. It moved our friends to the margins and inundated us with ads, outrage, and algorithm-driven detritus. The platforms we once used to connect changed to places designed to hold our attention and exploit our insecurities.

Why we’re all tired and lost

The spaces that once felt personal and meaningful now feel alien, hostile. Where we used to go online to connect, now we go to perform, to posture, to numb ourselves.

And slowly its evolved to reflect the worst of us—our fears, our biases, our darkest impulses.

We’ve grown lonelier, not just because our feeds are rubbish but because we’ve lost the common ground that made connection easy. The internet promised individuality but left us fractured and isolated, each of us scrolling through our own hyper-personalised cages.

And we all know it. We know it isn’t working. But we’re stuck, scrolling through the same enshittified sludge, unsure how to find our way back.

The way out

The internet, as it exists today, thrives on our misery, but we don’t have to keep feeding it.

We can start small. We can put down our phones. Talk to a stranger. Strike up a conversation with our neighbour. Rebuild the connections we’ve lost, one awkward, human moment at a time.

And we should again, like kids on a playground, find the courage to say to someone; “I’d like to be your friend.”

It’s only by being open that we’ll reclaim what enshittification took from us: the simple joy of being together.