When Infinite Growth Kills Good Tech
But what causes products that once offered genuine utility to eventually turn into hostile, extractive machines?
The answer lies in a single corporate obsession: relentless, quarter-over-quarter infinite growth.
Social platforms didn’t start out broken. They began as remarkable tools designed to keep us connected with real friends, family, and local communities. But in modern platform economics, simply being profitable and useful is never enough. To satisfy the mandate for endless financial expansion, user experience was sacrificed for hyper-monetization. Genuine human connection was systematically replaced by outrage algorithms, pay-to-play visibility, and infinite scrolls engineered to capture attention at any cost.
This cycle, often described by strategists as “enshittification”, repeats across the digital landscape. We abandoned open, native standards like SMS for proprietary messaging apps, and overlooked open, decentralized networks like Mastodon in favor of corporate walled gardens. In the process, we surrendered utility for convenience, even as tech companies knowingly design loops that degrade human attention and well-being.
The real danger is that this isn’t an even playing field. Today, some of the brightest minds in engineering are tasked with designing interfaces that optimize for engagement above all else, a practice now facing serious legal and regulatory scrutiny worldwide. As the first generation living through this experiment, we are learning firsthand how hard it is for simple, utilitarian software to compete against platforms built for constant stimulation.
Until broader regulatory guardrails are established, choosing to return to the basics remains our most effective choice: reclaiming technology as a tool that serves our lives rather than consumes them.