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Many of you read the original post, shared it, and then asked where to see the material for yourselves. So here is the follow-up I promised: the best videos I could find on the same subject, each one showing a different corner of the same machine. Watch quality get stripped out of a product, a service, or an institution while the price climbs and the shell stays glossy.
Consider this a second bite of the apple. Every link below opens a video worth your time. Click the image, watch, and see the pattern for yourself.
Start here. Cory Doctorow coined the word enshittification, and in this interview he lays out the three-step cycle in plain language: win the users, squeeze them for the business customers, then bleed everyone once they are locked in.
The next video, “Selling Divorce to the West,” is one of the most brutal portraits here, and I recommend it highly.
To understand this critical subject better, see the following: The sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox has spent his career measuring what happened to the American family after the divorce revolution. He walks through the numbers on marriage, divorce, and what children lose when a home breaks apart.
New construction has turned into garbage. A builder tours a new development and points out the shortcuts hidden behind the fresh paint: the cheap framing, the sloppy flashing, the fixtures chosen to fail. It is the fifteen-year house on a thirty-year mortgage, shown board by board.
Why did buildings stop trying to be beautiful? This video traces the shift from ornament and craft to the concrete box, and asks who decided that ugliness counts as progress. If you don’t mind reading, Unbekoming has an excellent post titled “The Uglification Agenda: How Oligarchs Weaponized Architecture.”
Your grandmother’s washing machine outlived her. This one explains why today’s appliances quit in about five years, from the cheaper parts to the sealed electronics that no one can repair.
Red Lobster and TGI Fridays did not die of bad food. This report follows the private-equity playbook that loaded them with debt, sold off the real estate they once owned, and left the corpse for the creditors.
Your new car records where you go, how hard you brake, and whether you buckle up, then sells the file to data brokers and insurers. This video shows how the dashboard became a surveillance device you paid for.
I don’t know why anyone would buy one of these new cars. I have rented them, and they are terrible; some of the damn things vibrate the seat when I try to change lanes without signaling. This insanity of shutting the engine off at stoplights must create maintenance issues in the long run.
But I guess we will eventually run out of good quality used cars to buy. My car is seven years old, has 140,000 miles, and is running well. I recently had the body work done to fix some dents.
About seventy percent of what sits on the grocery shelf is ultra-processed. This documentary shows how those products are engineered to override the signal that tells you when you have had enough.
A matched couple stops paying. A lonely subscriber keeps paying. This video explains why a dating app's business model depends on you staying single.
The gig platforms drew workers in with good money, then cut the pay once the drivers had nowhere else to go. This one shows the bait, the switch, and where the work heads next.
The same pattern shows up in every video on this list. Take something people depend on, hollow out the quality, and keep charging as though nothing changed. Naming it is the first step. Routing around it is the second: grow your own where you can, buy from people with a reputation to protect, and back anyone willing to break up the monopolies and prosecute the fraud.
Psychopaths are involved in this story.
Since this post explains so much, please share it with your friends. If you know a video that belongs here, put it in the comments. I will add the best of them and give this list a longer life.
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