Do you remember the internet? Many years ago it seemed that a liberatory third dimension had opened up online that was destined to change all of our lives for the better. From the explosion of the commercial internet in the 1990s and the broadband revolution of the 2000s, for the first time, people from all walks of life had suddenly gained the ability to interact with one another, express themselves and even do business on what appeared to be our first true global public square.
Like many people growing up during this period, I found the internet a place bursting with discussion forums, chatrooms and webpages that seemed to offer limitless avenues for learning and self-expression. Online, it no longer mattered what one’s station in life was, or how much money one had in the bank. A plethora of blogs and websites emerged where anyone could set up shop at minimal cost (if any) and with equal opportunity and ability to make an argument, demonstrate a product or even report on a story.
The same thing that was taking place in culture was also happening in commerce. The novelty of being able to advertise, sell and buy goods online was likewise revolutionary for small businesses. The problem of reaching the public had been eliminated by a new digital marketplace that put all businesses on an equal footing. Suddenly it looked like anyone who had a good product and the motivation could compete with entrenched global conglomerates.
To begin with, the World Wide Web reflected the counter-cultural world-view of early Silicon Valley, and for a while it appeared as if it were living up to that promise. The potential of individuals and small organisations empowered by the network seemed so great that some scholars began predicting the end of industrial organisation itself. Instead, they foresaw the emergence of a new “commons-based peer production” that would spread wealth in an unprecedented fashion while allowing all of us to reshape the culture in which we lived. Thanks to our friends from anti-authoritarian Silicon Valley we were on the verge of being freed from oppressive institutions that had become a dead weight in our collective culture and prosperity.
Scrolling through one’s social media feed today, filled with “slop” and algorithmic manipulation, it’s hard to imagine that we had ever been so naive. We continue to log in daily, but it’s clear that the internet as we knew it no longer exists. The breakdown happened so gradually that it has taken some years to even realise it occurred.
For most of us the internet simply no longer works – as a place to find information, converse intelligently with others, or even start a small business on competitive terms. On a personal level, I recently gave up and resubscribed to a physical newspaper.
Today the online world is less likely to be lauded for taking humanity to new plateaus of enlightenment than it is to be blamed for fomenting rage-driven chaos, triggering a depression epidemic in young people and potentially extinguishing the Enlightenment itself. Instead of seeing it as an outlet for learning, which is something that teachers in my generation had encouraged, worried parents now attempt to limit their children’s exposure to online content for as long as possible. Some now deem social media use a vice on a par with smoking.
One thing that is important to know is that the internet did not die of natural causes – it was a calculated act. The destruction of our once vibrant public square is the subject of two recent books, The Age of Extraction, by the former Biden administration official Tim Wu, and the colourfully titled Enshittifcation, by the journalist Cory Doctorow.
Each book approaches the subject of what happened to the internet differently, but both settle on a single culprit: oligarchy. The tech billionaires who now control much of American society shed their counter-cultural ethos long ago. Rather than becoming marginalised, existing big businesses infected the internet and turned its egalitarian tools of communication and commerce against the rest of us. Instead of being regulated like a utility that would have kept the internet free and fair, the major online platforms consolidated into an oligarchy. This, in turn, transformed users from a clientele to be served into a resource to be extracted from ruthlessly.
Doctorow’s book lays out a pattern of abuse that will likely be familiar to any user of one of the major social media platforms. In the beginning, the platforms are good to their users, offering them a place to transact and express themselves with relative freedom. Once enough users have been locked in to the platform – along with their friends, family and clients – the focus of the operation’s owners shifts to satisfying their own business customers. Because of its large user base, the cost to switch platforms is too high to move easily for the customer, while advertisers and publishers are willing to pay to get their ads in front of them. Once business clients are locked in, the platform’s process of “enshittification” really begins. A few familiar examples help illustrate the phenomenon.
After successfully embedding itself as the default search engine on hundreds of millions of devices around the world, Google altered its search algorithm in ways that gave people less effective results. This decision was based on the market logic that forcing users to click through more pages to get what they want would generate greater ad revenue.
According to Doctorow, Facebook and X similarly encouraged tens of millions of ordinary people – but especially activists, journalists and artists – to treat their platforms as primary forums for sharing their work and networking with their peers. The sites were then redesigned or re-engineered, he writes, in an attempt to get people to publish on the platforms directly. Not only that, updates were implemented that made it harder to use them as legitimate sources of news of information. Such decisions were made in the name of driving engagement and revenue and in spite of it increasing social conflict.
The same dynamic has played out in the commercial sphere. Small businesses who found themselves roped in to using Amazon as the best and easiest way to reach customers soon found themselves captives of the platform, which began squeezing them with ever higher fees. Instead of levelling the playing field with a greater number of larger players, many independent firms began declaring bankruptcy. Many of them also found that instead of operating as a neutral commercial square, Amazon had taken their sales data and used it to launch their own brands of replacement products.
Historically, companies that behaved in a similar manner simply would have found themselves turfed out by superior competitors. This is part of the self-corrective nature of capitalism that is supposed to prevent it from devolving into tyranny. But the Big Tech firms avoided this predictable threat by engaging in anti-competitive behaviour, which should have been made illegal by responsible regulators. These methods include using their size to kneecap emerging rivals and buy out possible competitors that might infringe upon their oligopoly.
That type of behaviour by large firms has gradually transformed the internet from something that belongs to all of us into something owned by a select few. It is also the subject of The Age of Extraction, which is essentially a manual to the oligarchic takeover of the internet as well as the broader economy that now depends upon it. In his book, Wu encourages us to see tech platforms as modern versions of the town square – a space where citizens can gather, meet and do business. He also posits that this space should be managed by shared democratic institutions that can prevent its abuse by a few wealthy firms and individuals.
The internet is our global town square. But instead of an egalitarian marketplace where people can pay for shared upkeep and take home the fruits of their labours, we find ourselves ensconced in a dystopian shopping mall. It is a place that neither visitors nor businesses can ever leave, where rents constantly increase, and in which every movement is surveilled by a small group of unaccountable owners whose sole priority is maximising their advertising rent.
Instead of helping to promote a capitalist free-market, the tech firms have recreated something more like feudalism. A handful of connected people have taken home tremendous profits, while most of us are still scrambling to make do with what we can in an environment now managed for the benefit of the super-rich.
What makes matters worse is that the political leanings of our new Big Tech bosses have been increasingly tilting in a disturbingly social-Darwinist direction, with life extension and private cities for them and a future of high-tech exploitation for the rest. The coup de grace, as many tech elites seem to imagine it, will be the replacement of the labouring masses by artificial intelligence and robotics, with a lucky few human beings kept around to continue watching their advertisements.
This bleak future is not inevitable, nor is the good old internet that many of us remember beyond retrieval. Fixing the problem does not rely on any sort of magic trick, or even new technological innovations. As both Doctorow and Wu explain, the real problem with the internet and the future it is leading us towards is simply oligarchy. Tech firms are acting in the way that railway barons and other abusive business elites acted in generations past, before the public and government regulators finally tired of their antics. The degradation of the internet into an abusive hellscape has been facilitated by the powerful economic elites extracting fees and advertising revenues from its users.
First and foremost, Big Tech’s anti-competitive model needs some of the same Darwinian tests placed upon it. Instead of allowing more buy-outs, consolidations and mergers to create an ever stronger oligopoly, governments should intervene, as they have done in the past, in order to ensure that competition actually does exist and that abusive firms are promptly challenged by new ones. Breaking up the oligarchy will allow the next upstart social media platform to be a legitimate rival to a dominant companies, such as Meta. It would also prevent Mark Zuckerberg from neutralising opponents with buy-outs, like he did when his company bought Instagram.
“Any firm gets away with less when facing competitors,” Wu writes. They will also find it harder to stop succession and generational change – that is, the new technologies that may come to succeed theirs -– “which they have an inherent interest in slowing down or co-opting”.
Likewise, incumbents should be subjected to the same stringent anti-monopoly laws that put limits on other companies and that helped to lay the basis for a once-thriving middle class. In addition to ameliorating economic inequality, this sort of anti-monopoly regulation would help drive innovation, improve product quality and dissuade companies from going down the path of “enshittification” that has made life in the online world a source of increasing misery and frustration for so many of us.
Reading Doctorow and Wu on how we got here is depressing. But their proposed solutions for fixing the internet provide hope, not least because of how simple they are. During the Biden administration, the US government briefly woke from its long slumber over anti-monopoly regulation, when the then Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan turned up the heat on Big Tech. That pressure was a significant part of why the industry back Donald Trump’s political campaign, as he has promised them the same free rein that other large businesses in America have come to expect from Republican politicians in past decades.
But hope is not lost. We can save the internet, and we have the tools to do so. If the online world is a public square, we as its patrons and denizens still have the chance to reassert ownership of it over the abusive elites who have commandeered it for their own good – those who have transformed the once-beloved digital sphere into something barely functional and frankly unpleasant. Fixing the internet means breaking the oligarchy first – and the same political tools that helped us accomplish that in times past are still available to us, waiting to be deployed once more.
The Age of Extraction
Tim Wu
Bodley Head, 224pp, £25
Enshittification
Cory Doctorow
Verso, 352pp, £22
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[Further reading: David Olusoga’s empire state of mind]
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This article appears in the 13 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, What Keir won't hear