Enshittification Relies on Broken Economic Math

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Enshittification Relies on Broken Economic Math<br>Pay no attention to the externalities behind the curtain.

Hamilton Nolan<br>Jul 28, 2026

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Economically rational development. (Photo: Getty)<br>A quintessential quality of modern American life is the inescapable feeling that once-good things are subtly but surely being degraded. Things that once seemed to be abundant and free transform into consumer experiences. Existing consumer experiences slowly become worse. Prices rise; customer service becomes harder to access; functionality grows hostile; companies seem to grow more predatory. “Enshittification” is a quasi-formal description of the unfolding of this process. But most people, I think, experience it as a sort of ambient deterioration in the smoothness of life—a series of tiny obstacles to daily living being erected where formerly there were none.<br>Because we all live inside of this process, and because its transformations are mostly gradual, it can be difficult for people to put their finger on exactly what is happening. Often, Americans must go somewhere else and be staggered by the accumulated differences in order to see how far we have drifted away from our ideals. In that vein, consider this from Cullen Roche, an investor and writer, who went to the Tour de France:<br>I went to the Tour de France last week and it feels like a perfect microcosm of how Capitalism and Socialism differ (and why America is diverging economically and stagnating socially).<br>As an American I couldn’t believe how poorly they monetized the event. You have millions of people watching and 99% of them watch for free.<br>The result - the median rider in the event is earning $250K a year, but the public has an event that is loved and accessible by all. The broader result is you don’t get the private (and public) investment that coincides with such events in the USA because it’s not being monetized well. That is, the teams earn less, the riders earn less and municipalities hosting earn less. So the aggregate result is everyone is poorer, on average, in the long-run because they don’t capture the economic value of the event well.<br>BUT, the Europeans love their bikes. Boy do they love their bikes. And you see the happiness and social value of making this a public good instead of a private profit maximizing endeavor. So there’s social value in NOT monetizing the event that **arguably** makes it a better overall social value than the Capitalist model.<br>In short, the American model creates a wealthier, more capitalized industry, while the European model sacrifices financial maximization to generate a widely distributed, unpriced public good. Which is better? Most certainly a mix. The hard part is getting the balance right.

Roche is a thoughtful writer on finance. His observation is interesting for the way in which Economics Mind struggles to embrace a conclusion that, to most people, seems obvious. While he has been struck in a very human way by the absence of ubiquitous advertising shit, his analysis of it helps to show how American capitalism has led us astray.

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Due to the less aggressive monetization of every square inch of everything by the Europeans, Roche concludes that “the aggregate result is everyone is poorer, on average, in the long-run because they don’t capture the economic value of the event well.” Is everyone poorer? Certainly the Tour de France riders and their team owners and the Tour de France itself take in less money than they would in America where all aspects of the event would be turned into sponsorship opportunities. But how does that notional amount of money compare to the value of “the happiness and social value of making this a public good instead of a private profit maximizing endeavor” that Roche recognizes as the benefit of the European method?<br>There is no easily quantifiable answer to that question. And that is the problem. The way that America’s version of capitalism proves its utility is by adding up all of the profits created by the privatization of public goods without subtracting the value that has been destroyed by the same activity. We have created the largest enshittifying machine in world history by employing a financial logic that leaves out half of the equation.<br>Take a scenic countryside and fill it with billboards. You can calculate precisely the amount of profit that has thereby been created for advertising companies, and the associated rise in profits for the companies that attract more customers with the billboards. But what is the cost of the destruction of the scenic countryside view? Don’t ask! It would, of course, be something of a philosophical project to place an exact dollar value on the lost beauty. The bigger problem is that, in our economic system, we do not even try. Across our economy, externalities are simply...