Note: This series has now been added to “Enshittification” – a term by Cory Doctorow about how technology is getting worse.
The Fabric of the Technology Universe Is Ripping
The fabric of the technology universe is ripping. All software and systems are buggy now. Microsoft products are awful. Google is awful—search results give up after five results. Paywalls, broken registration systems, terrible phone center technology. And don’t even get me started on AI. Or the total lack of funding for low-resource African languages. It’s an endless list.
But this is happening for one simple reason: quarterly reports for publicly traded companies.
Shareholder profits have to go up four times a year, or everyone panics and sells their stock. So tech companies are thinking short-term. They make more profit by cutting expenses—so they cut and cut and cut. They drive down wages. They lay off tech support. They cancel big software improvement projects. They have few customers in the global south. They push more ads. They charge more for less.
And here’s the crazy thing: over the last 90 days, I’ve talked to stranger after stranger who’s having tech problems—and when I tell them “the fabric of the technology universe is ripping”, no one disagrees.
At Walgreens, they rolled out new photo book software that completely doesn’t work—and there’s no one to call. Facebook is crap, they give out half broken internet to a handful of people. At a hotel, they couldn’t get the TV working after four tech support calls, all in Spanish.
I even tried using Google Translate to understand the tech support conversation. But after 35 minutes, the TV still didn’t work. Eventually, they moved me to a different room—one with a working TV. I told them I was a writer and needed to watch CNN for work. WordPress is still awful – posting this post is awful and Divi is worse than it was 10 years ago.
Everybody has a story like this.
You probably do too.
The fabric of the technology universe is ripping.