Enshittification, AI fatigue and finding an escape
Tags:
AI
Date: 2025-12-21
It hasn't always been this way. We're so surrounded by shitty products that we've gotten used to them. Products that were designed to last a lifetime now last a couple of years, they're impossible to repair, they frustrate us, they don't help us in life. The music we listen to is no longer made by musicians, since technology has allowed everyone to become an "artist". The result is that production quality has declined.
We're surrounded by ugliness. We no longer have any interest in beautifying our cities, we don't care anymore about building pleasant-looking buildings, attention to detail no longer exists. There's been a flattening of colours and shapes. Some blame minimalism, but minimalism is something else to me: it's doing few things and doing them well, not cutting corners. Every logo now is two-dimensional, black and white. They're all the same. Everything seems to have lost its soul.
Cars used to be masterpieces, they were built with care and attention to detail. Kids would hang posters of cars in their rooms and dream about them for years and years. Now a car is an appliance designed to last no more than five years, like all other appliances. Think about it: the only ones who can aspire to have a beautiful car are the rich, for the rest of us they're all ugly tools, useful only for getting us from A to B.
Playing a video game was an experience, it was beautiful, you immersed yourself in a parallel world, while now you open a video game and it looks like a marketplace. Buy this, spend here, shop there. By the way, playing a video game used to be easy. You bought the game, put it into the console and played. It's no longer like this: we've managed to ruin this experience too. You buy a game (part of it, because you have to buy the rest of the content through DLCs, skins, etc.) and you can't play it immediately because you have to download it. And if you've already downloaded it, you can be sure there's an update to do. The update, by the way, doesn't update anything, instead it fixes bugs that should have been fixed before the game's release.
Even the web was a more colourful place (I talk about this here). At the very least, content was created by people. Gen-AI has put the final nail in the coffin of Web 1.0, which was the only web that had a reason to exist, since everything that came after contributed to the decline of the content we consume. Now content is created by the usual three or four models, resulting in lazy, empty, sterile output. The experience of using LLMs itself is increasingly frustrating, and I'm convinced I'm not the only one to have had this feeling. There's evidence supporting the thesis that models aren't actually getting better, but are simply getting better at answering benchmark questions (Cheng, Y., Chang, Y., & Wu, Y. (2025). A survey on data contamination for large language models). Yet that's enough to inflate the bubble.
Everyone already knows about the AI bubble, it's in front of everyone's eyes, there's no need to add more. The issue is simple: as things stand, Gen-AI is not profitable, and won't be until it completely changes paradigm. And at this point, the hope is to hear about it less and less, because computer science is not just AI, and what drew many of us to this world was the possibility of creating new things, not the desire to delegate to a machine. Let the AI bubble burst, and take the real estate bubble with it while we're at it.
All of this has led to a rediscovery of certain things we would now consider "vintage." Vinyl records, radio, iPod Classics, retro-gaming consoles, diaries, handwriting, restoring old cars (often not old enough to be considered "classics").
But it's not just objects from a few years ago that have come back. More and more people are becoming aware of the grayness to which many of us have been doomed and are looking for an escape route, which consists of returning to a simpler life. There's a movement of people who have gone back to living like our grandparents lived, far from the frenzy of the so-called "rat race." Of course, moving away from conveniences and trying to be as self-sufficient as possible involves many sacrifices, but the impression is that the reward is a more enjoyable life, where there are no anxieties and fears related to imaginary threats constructed to keep us productive. Information overload, the stress of the attention economy, the anxiety caused by the unsustainable pace of our lives have brought back an alternative model, one that involves rejecting what stands between us and peace.
Creating instead of consuming, living in beauty rather than garbage, choosing which technologies are worth letting into our lives. A man can dream.