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Why wouldn’t people feel insane? Why wouldn’t the internet, where we’re mostly forced to live, drive most people crazy? How are we not discussing the fact that so much of the internet is riddled with poison? How are we not treating the current state of the tech industry like an industrial chemical accident? Is it because there are too many people at fault? Is it because fixing it would require us to truly interrogate the fabric of a capitalist death cult?

To exist in modern society requires you to use these devices, or otherwise sacrifice large parts of how you’d interact with other people. You need a laptop or a smartphone for work, for school, for anything really. You need messaging apps otherwise you don’t exist.  As a result, there is a societal monopoly of sorts — or perhaps it’s more of a cartel, in the sense that, for the most part, every tech company has accepted these extremely aggressive, anti-user positions, all in pursuit of growth.

We all live in the ruins created by the Rot Economy, where the only thing that matters is growth. Growth of revenue, growth of the business, growth of metrics related to the business, growth of engagement, of clicks, of time on app, of purchases of micro-transactions, of impressions of ads, of things done that make executives feel happy.

The computer pauses slightly every time I type a letter. Every animation shudders. Even moving windows around feels painful. It is clunky, slow, it feels cheap, and the operating system — previously something I’d considered to be “the thing that operates the computer system” — is actively rotten, strewn with ads, sponsored content, suggested apps, and intrusive design choices that make the system slower and actively upset the user.

Aside: I swear to god, if your answer here is “get a MacBook Air, they’re only $600,” I beg you — I plead with you — to speak with people outside of your income bracket at a time when an entire election was decided in part because everything’s more expensive.

The picture I am trying to paint is one of terror and abuse. The average person’s experience of using a computer starts with aggressive interference delivered in a shoddy, sludge-like frame, and as the wider internet opens up to said user, already battered by a horrible user experience, they’re immediately thrown into heavily-algorithmic feeds each built to con them, feeding whatever holds their attention and chucking ads in as best they can. As they browse the web, websites like NBCnews.com feature stories from companies like “WorldTrending.com” with advertisements for bizarre toys written in the style of a blog, so intentional in their deceit that the page in question has a huge disclaimer at the bottom saying it’s an ad.  As their clunky, shuddering laptop hitches between every scroll, they go to ESPN.com, and the laptop slows to a crawl. Everything slows to a crawl. “God damnit, why is everything so fucking slow? I’ll just stay on Facebook or Instagram or YouTube. At least that place doesn’t crash half the time or trick me.”

The biggest trick that these platforms played wasn’t any one algorithm, but the convenience of a “clean” digital experience — or, at least as clean as they feel it needs to be. In an internet so horribly poisoned by growth capitalism, these platforms show a degree of peace and consistency, even if they’re engineered to manipulate you, even if the experience gets worse seemingly every year, because at least it isn’t as bad as the rest of the internet. We use Gmail because, well, at least it’s not Outlook. We use YouTube to view videos from other websites because other websites are far more prone to crash, have quality issues, or simply don’t work on mobile. We use Google Search, despite the fact that it barely works anymore, to find things because actually browsing the web fucking sucks.

ESPN’s app is a fucking mess — autoplaying videos, discordantly-placed scores, menus that appear to have been designed by M.C. Escher — and nothing changes because Disney needs you to use the app and find what you need, versus provide information in anything approaching a sensible way. It needs your effort. The paid subscription model for dating apps is so aggressive that there’s a lawsuit filed against Match Group — which owns Tinder and Hinge, and thus a great deal of the market — for “gamifying the platforms to transform users into gamblers locked in a search for psychological rewards,” likely as a means of recouping revenue after user numbers have begun to fall. And if you’re curious why these companies aren’t just making their products less horrible to use, I’m afraid that would reduce revenue, which is what they do care about.

Now, what’s important to accept here is that absolutely none of this is done with any real consideration of the wider effects on the customer, as long as the customer continues doing the things that the company needs them to. We, as people, have been trained to accept a kind of digital transience — an inherent knowledge that things will change at random, that the changes may suck, and that we will just have to accept them because that’s how the computer works, and these companies work hard to suppress competition as a means of making sure they can do what they want. In other words, internet users are perpetually thrown into a tornado of different corporate incentives, and the less economically stable or technologically savvy you are, the more likely you are to be at the mercy of them. Every experience is different, wants something, wants you to do something, and the less people know about why the more likely they are to — with good intentions — follow the paths laid out in front of them with little regard for what might be happening, in the same way people happily watch the same TV shows or listen to the same radio stations.

Everything I’ve discussed around the chaos and pain of the web is a result of corporations and private equity firms buying media properties and immediately trying to make them grow, each in wildly different ways, all clamouring to be the next New York Times or Variety or other legacy media brand, despite those brands already existing, and the ideas for competing with them usually being built on unsustainably-large staffs and expensive consultants. Almost every single store you visit on the internet has a massive data layer on the background that feeds them data about what’s popular, or where they’re spending the most time on the site, and will in turn change things about their design to subtly encourage you to buy more stuff, all so that more money comes out, no matter the cost. Even if this data isn’t personalized, it’s still powerful, and turns so many experiences into subtle manipulations.

The Rot Economy isn’t simply growth-at-all-costs thinking — it’s a kind-of secular religion, something to believe in, that everything and anything can be more, should be more, must be more, that we are defined only by our pursuit of more growth, and that something that isn’t growing isn’t alive, and is in turn inferior.

Almost every corner of our lives has been turned into some sort of number, and increasing that number is important to us — bank account balances, sure, but also engagement numbers, followers, number of emails sent and received, open rates on newsletters, how many times something we’ve seen has been viewed, all numbers set by other people that we live our lives by while barely understanding what they mean. Human beings thrive on ways to define themselves, but metrics often rob us of our individuality.  Products that boil us down to metrics are likely to fail to account for the true depth of anything they're capturing.

Societal and cultural pressure is nothing new, but the ways we experience it are now elaborate and chaotic. Our relationships — professional, personal, and romantic — are processed through the funhouse mirror of the platforms, changing in ways both subtle and overt based on the signals we receive from the people we care about, each one twisted and processed through the lens of product managers and growth hackers. Changes to these platforms — even subtle ones — actively change the lives of billions of people, and it feels like we talk about it like being online is some hobbyist pursuit rather than something that many people do more than seeing real people in the real world.

I believe billions of people are in active combat with their devices every day, swiping away notifications, dodging around intrusive apps, agreeing to privacy policies that they don’t understand, desperately trying to find where an option they used to use has been moved to because a product manager has decided that it needed to be somewhere else. I realize it’s tough to conceptualize because it’s so ubiquitous, but how much do you fight with your computer or smartphone every day? How many times does something break? How many times have you downloaded an app and found it didn’t really do the thing you wanted it to? How many times have you wanted to do something simple and found that it’s actually really annoying?

I don't think you realise how powerful it is being armed with knowledge — the clarity of what's being done to and why, and the names of the people responsible. This is an invisible war — and a series of invisible war crimes — perpetuated against billions of people in a trillion different ways every minute of every day, and it's everywhere, a constant in our lives, which makes enumerating and conceptualising it difficult.

Holding these people to a higher standard at scale is what brings about change. Be the wrench in the machine. Be the person that explains to a friend why Facebook sucks now, and who chose to make it suck. Be the person to explain who Prabhakar Raghavan is and what his role was in making Google Search worse. Be the person who tells people that Sam Altman burns $5 billion a year on unsustainable software that destroys the environment and is built upon the large-scale larceny of creative works because he's desperate for power.

Anthropologist Donna Haraway was one the first to argue this in her 1991 book Simians, Cyborgs, and Women . In it, she critiques our moden approach to seeing the world in clear dualities: human/animal, machine/organic, male/female, and natural/cultural. She instead advocates for a more holistic, hybridised, and interconnected view of the world – one she calls “ natureculture ” – that recognizes that nothing is ever purely one or the other. People, creatures, objects, and ideas are always hybrids of these categories. Cultural, social, and technological forces transform what we might otherwise label as “natural,” while natural systems shape and influence our cultural, social, and technological realms. These false divisions have been socially and historically constructed, and do not exist a priori in the world. “Nature” is a concept we invented to draw a line between ourselves and the earth – a tool for asserting human uniqueness and separation that became an obsession during the scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries ( Latour 1991 ).