Showing posts with label enshittication. Show all posts
Showing posts with label enshittication. Show all posts

No posts for a wee while

Mike's Notes

I was on holiday for the last few weeks and am back now. There will be no blog posts, newsletters or meetings until Pipi Core is back up and running.

Update 27/05/2026

Lots of surprises. Making rapid progress. The peace and quiet are bliss.

Update 31/05/2026

The problem and solution are how things are named. Pipi auto-generates thousands of code names using multiple pattern languages, and all the naming conventions require many minor fixes for several unexpected reasons after migrating from a developer laptop to a production server environment. Everything else is absolutely fine.

Other naming problems are also being solved now, including:

  • The rapid development of Boxlang by Ortus has brought forward another challenge. Pipi 10 will be migrated to run on top of Boxlang in 2027 to support multiple languages, including C++, CFML, COBOL, Go, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Rust, etc.
  • Future integration with cloud-based LLMs.
  • Future integrations with Office365, Google Workspace, Zoho, LibreOffice, etc.

The common solution is to create standardised naming systems that are simple, stable, robust, schema-based, versioned, self-documenting, and extensible to meet unanticipated future needs.

This is done by replacing code-based naming rules with database-driven ones that can be easily edited in the future via an admin UI.

90% of these names are internal, hidden in the closed core, and how they work and what they are will not be discussed here. The rest will be publicly and fully documented as part of the open-source workspaces for developers to work with.

Update 02/06/2026

I'm changing the disclosure boundary between the Pipi closed-core and open-source workspaces. Previously, "disclose everything unless there is a security reason not to". This is now changed to "disclose on the basis of need to know".

Closed-core accounts for 90% and open-source workspaces for 10% of lines of code, databases, etc.

This will reduce the documentation burden, given Pipi's vast scale. So, the open-source workspaces will be fully shared and documented on GitHub, etc, without restriction. This includes;

  • Standards schema
  • Ontologies
  • Parameters
  • Laws of physics
  • HTML + CSS
  • Algorithms
  • Module DDD models
  • Workflow diagrams
  • Documentation
  • API schema
  • UI code
  • etc

This also means some existing technical documentation about the closed-core will become hidden and only available internally.

Update 07/06/2026

Pipi Core is the IDE used to edit Pipi Core (AKA: which came first, the chicken or the egg?). Temporary UIs have been created and are being used across multiple engines to edit the names in use. This is much faster than directly editing data, which had to be done initially. The next step will be turning auto-generation back on. Once that's done, temporary UIs will be used to build permanent UIs. More automation will then be enabled via the UIs, and so on, as Pipi Core builds itself with a human in the loop.

Update 08/06/2026

The list of code cases available to use now for auto-generated naming, I/O translation, etc with examples, includes;

  • camelCase: userProfilePicture
  • kebab-case: user-profile-picture
  • PascalCase: UserProfilePicture
  • snake_case: user_profile_picture
  • SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE: USER_PROFILE_PICTURE
  • Train-Case: User-Profile-Picture
  • flatcase: userprofilepicture
  • UPPER-CASE-KEBAB-CASE: USER-PROFILE-PICTURE
  • Sentence case: User profile picture
  • Title Case: User Profile Picture
  • middot·case: user·profile·picture
  • dot.case: user.profile.picture
  • UPPER CASE: USER PROFILE PICTURE
  • lowercase: user profile picture

Update 12/06/20026

Checking that these changes to variable names and internal messaging do not clash with the GΓΆdel Machine.

Update 17/06/2026

The DevOps Engine (dvp) has unexpectedly proven to be critical to solving this puzzle. Mostly fixed last night. Watching the rather excellent live Google talk, Beyond the GPU: Maximising goodput with self-healing AI infrastructure, this morning has given me valuable insights into how to fix the remaining issues by reviewing Google HPC YAML files. 😎😎 Sometimes insights come from the strangest places.

Update 01/07/2026

The main work now is rapidly configuring Pipi for production and full autonomous automation. Using Google Search AI Mode (Gemini) and then Grammarly Pro makes the work easier and 100x faster.

  • I have decided to have Pipi re-render the many Ajabbi draft public websites with the new and missing developer information. (20K pages)
  • The website's .robot.txt file will then be unlocked to enable search engines.
  • The HTML will be updated to make it easier for AI to read.
  • This blog will be imported into Pipi, cleaned up, re-exported from Pipi, and published to Blogger via the API.
  • The new posts created in Pipi will return to A Sandy Beach to discuss something already built rather than being built.

Update 02/07/2026

The DevOps and IaC engines are getting rapid data model overhauls. The IaC engine is a great test for the variable names. I'm building a capability into Pipi to autonomously and automatically run OpenTofu and Ansible, initially targeting the Pipi Data Centre, then GCP and AWS for deployments. It's going very well and making rapid progress.

Update 05/07/2026

Pipi will initially run the open-source enterprise applications on Google Cloud Run and Google Cloud Storage (GCS). The code is complete and will be very low-cost to run, giving Ajabbi, a bootstrapping-purpose startup, a very long runway.

Update 18/07/2026

The job has now shifted to configuring, networking and deploying many physical servers. Installing software, including Pipi, labelling cables and rack gear, throwing out junk, tidying, etc., leaving nothing to chance. Shipping delays are holding up part deliveries.

Update 23/07/2026

On the basis of open collaboration and credits for experimentation, I was going to offer Google exclusive use of Pipi for a period (as a thank you) before Pipi open-source is donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation for all to use.

Make money to provide a service.

I'm getting exasperated with XWF. They are the external sales contractors to Google, and since 2021, they regularly contact me.

  • Selling GCP products (No need; I'm already convinced).
  • Acting as gatekeepers to any contact with Google Engineers to discuss novel integration options, which is the actual issue. How to combine Gemini (an LLM) and Pipi (non-LLM) to make something much better.
  • They are all very nice, but a complete waste of my time. No more XWF meetings, folks.

So, I have decided to target integration with OpenRouter (and its alternatives) instead of Gemini and open up the Pipi developer platform (it is big and coming 😎) to enable developers from Alibaba, Alice AI, Anthropic, AWS, Azure, ByteDance, DeepSeek, Google, IBM, Meta, Mistral, Moonshot AI, Naver, OpenAI, Oracle, Palantir, Sarvam AI, xAI, etc, and anyone else, to enable integrations that are optimal, 100% secure and vetted, with everything publicly verifiable.

Pipi closed-core will never be for sale; this year it's getting a non-profit foundation behind it, a bit like Patagonia. I'm open to all genuine offers of assistance, collaboration and experimentation with no strings attached. Contact me.

Don't send sales engineers

Send a senior, highly experienced engineer/architect/chief scientist who loves a big fat problem and has time for an open chat without a pitch or an agenda, and just see where it goes.

If you want to meet in person, expect to work collaboratively at a whiteboard or blackboard like a real mathematician. Plus coffee, of course. 😎 To see how this works, watch the seminars at the London Institute of Mathematical Sciences, or the recorded physics seminars at Perimeter.

Pipi is rooted in biology and the laws of physics, so you need a very solid background in advanced sciences (microbiology, biochemistry, mathematics, philosophy, particle physics, thermodynamics, complex adaptive systems, etc).

Please, no venture capitalists or private equity. You're wasting your time. Go find something else to plunder. Pipi is a gift to humanity.

Update 28/07/2026

Most of the equipment has arrived, and the small data centre setup is coming together. More deliveries later this week. It's already running a lot better and is much more productive.

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Last Updated

28/07/2026

No posts for a wee while

By: Mike Peters
On a Sandy Beach: 15/05/2026

Mike is the inventor and architect of Pipi and the founder of Ajabbi.

I was on a no-coding holiday for the last few weeks to clear my mind, and it has been great. I am back on the job today.

Suspended

Until the closed-source Pipi Core is back up and running 100% on autopilot, 10x faster, the following are suspended.

  • New posts "On a Sandy Beach
  • All newsletters, including the weekly Friday Report and the monthly Ajabbi Research Newsletter.
  • The fortnightly online Open R&D meeting.

Rapid refocus

  • A new developer area with five coding screens, designed to be more productive for hypervisual learners.
  • A better library has been set up for my A4 drawings in ring binders, the many reference books I use, and more bookshelves are on the way.
  • The server rack has been moved to a better location.
  • The light levels have been adjusted.
  • A big office tidy is almost done. An office-work-only desk has yet to be set up with a cat bed included.
  • A separate area with no screens for the happy cat, coffee, music, reading and drawing.

Less is more

Minimise screen time to be more productive at work. The new setup is also much less tiring.

Get the job done

The good thing is that, with a holiday and lots of drawing, I now have mental clarity about what needs fixing and how to fix it. Mainly, quite delicate changes here and there, organised into a list of steps. Now, I need to concentrate on one thing only: go as fast as possible, without meetings, post-deadlines, phone calls, or other distractions.

How

1. Use an AI workforce

Be the architect, and AI fills in the dots to make it happen.

Use Google Search AI mode (Gemini) to generate 99% of the code in one-page chunks (including references) to copy and paste, then manually change the variable names and SQL. Careful, test everything, resulting in 100x faster progress. Know how everything works and rapidly raise personal skill level.

2. Then build a cathedral

Make a wooden scale model of a cathedral for the builders. Google Search AI mode (Gemini) makes each brick, and Pipi Core assembles the bricks into floors, arches, walls, and vaults...

Speed is king

With the 100x coding productivity gains from Google Search AI mode (Gemini), plus the 10x10x10x speedup of Pipi Core currently underway over the next few months, what previously took a year will be done in hours and better.

Phase transitions

Once these initial migration issues from laptop to server are resolved, further transitions can be anticipated as the number of engines rapidly increases beyond 20. Increasing the number of engines slowly changes the whole system's behaviour from deterministic to probabilistic and adaptive.

Here is a partial list of transitions expected as the number of engines increases from 0 to 200. The actual numbers are a bit of a guess.

  • 20 engines enable Pipi 9 Core in a simple, deterministic structure.
  • 40 engines enable a workspace with a UI for administering Pipi Core.
  • 60 engines enable self-generation of user documentation.
  • 80 engines enable REPL and IAC (infrastructure-as-code).
  • 100 engines enable Workspaces for different user accounts.
  • Different Pipi 9 editions are made with the same engines, which recombine differently in response to the external environment.
  • And so on until...
  • 200 engines self-organise into a multi-layered complex fluid structure with probabilistic behaviour and emergent properties, as engines also act as agents.
  • 200+ engines enable Pipi 10 to interact with externally cloud-hosted LLMs, combining the very different strengths of both.
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Tim Cook is Leaving. Good.

Mike's Notes

The key takeaway of this copied article.

"make products you’d be proud to use yourself."

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05/05/2026

Tim Cook is Leaving. Good.

By: Tony Mattke 
Router Jockey: 27/04/2026

I’m Anthony Mattke, aka Tony. I’m a network engineer, infrastructure architect, and general-purpose technology geek located amidst the endless cornfields of north central Indiana. I’m a husband and father, and I hope to have superpowers one day. Seriously.

Your AirPods just connected to the wrong device. Again.

iMessage is taking twenty minutes to sync a message between your laptop and your phone sitting six inches apart. HomeKit forgot the kitchen lightbulb exists, and will remember it again in three hours like nothing happened. System Settings, which used to be one of the cleanest preferences UIs ever shipped, now feels like a bad Electron app pretending to be macOS.

These aren’t dramatic failures. They’re worse than dramatic failures. They’re daily proof that somewhere along the way, Apple stopped caring about the texture of using its own products.

This is Apple in 2026. And this is the Apple that Tim Cook built.

Cook announced his departure last week, and most of the coverage you’ll see is going to be a victory lap. A lot of it is earned. Apple is a three-trillion-dollar company. Services revenue is at record highs. Apple Silicon is one of the great hardware bets of the last decade. He took a company already at the top of its industry and made it bigger than the GDP of most countries.

So why am I glad he’s leaving? Because somewhere in all that growth, Apple stopped making products it was proud of.

What Steve Actually Said

There’s a passage in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs that gets quoted less than the famous ones. Jobs talked about how great companies die, and his theory was that the rot has nothing to do with competition or markets or innovation cycles. The rot starts when the salespeople end up running the company.

He named names. He pointed at IBM under John Akers. He pointed at Microsoft under Ballmer. He even pointed at the Sculley era of his own Apple as the cautionary tale. The phrase Jobs kept circling back to was that the people running these companies eventually “have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.” They can’t tell the difference. They can run a supply chain better than anyone alive, but they couldn’t tell you whether the radius on a button looks right.

That’s not a small criticism. That’s the founder of Apple, on the record, naming the disease and warning the company against catching it.

Then, in 2011, Apple promoted its head of operations to CEO.

I’m not saying Cook was a bad pick at the time. He was the right person to keep the trains running while everyone caught their breath after losing Steve. But fifteen years later it’s worth asking the question Steve himself would have asked. What kind of products are we shipping now?

The Tenet Cook Forgot

Of all the things Steve Jobs believed about Apple, one of them stands out as the most quietly violated under Cook: make products you’d be proud to use yourself.

Not just sell. Not just ship. Use. Sit down at the Mac on a Tuesday night, put your AirPods in, fire off a Message, set up a HomeKit automation, and feel proud of every single one of those things working the way you wanted them to.

Today’s Apple doesn’t pass that test. And the failures aren’t dramatic ones. They’re the small, persistent, daily-friction kind that the founder used to personally drive teams to fix.

You know the list. The 2022 System Settings redesign managed to take a perfectly usable preferences app and ship it as something worse, then leave it that way for three OS releases and counting. Notifications have been re-architected three times in five years and still work inconsistently across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. Mail rules have been broken since the Obama administration. The Photos library will quietly drop items, sync ghosts, and offer no diagnostics when something goes wrong. HomeKit loses devices the way a child loses socks. Spotlight returns stale results and pauses for seconds at a time on hardware that should make it instant.

Each one of these, on its own, is just a bug. Together, they’re a culture.

They survive because they don’t move metrics. They don’t reduce revenue. They don’t show up in the quarterly. But they’re exactly the kind of paper-cuts that would have annoyed Steve at 9pm on a Tuesday, and they would have been fixed by Wednesday morning.

That’s the difference. Steve used the products. Cook signs the budget.

Before Someone Says This Is Just Nostalgia

Yes, I know. Apple under Steve wasn’t perfect. MobileMe happened. Antennagate happened. The hockey-puck mouse happened. Plenty of bad calls happened. Nobody is arguing for some flawless golden age that didn’t actually exist.

The argument is about standards, not perfection. Old Apple shipped mistakes too, and it visibly hated them. The bad release, the launch-day disaster, the public mea culpa, the engineering re-org. The whole company would visibly recoil and try to do better.

Today’s Apple ships friction and treats it like background radiation. That’s not the same thing.

The Counter Argument (-ish)

Yes, Apple Silicon is incredible. Yes, the Watch saved lives. Yes, the iPhone got better cameras and better screens and better batteries. The hardware story under Cook is strong, and pretending otherwise would be silly.

But here’s the thing about hardware. You can grow it through operational discipline. You can squeeze a process node, you can negotiate a better deal with TSMC, you can lean on a thousand suppliers until they bend. That’s exactly the kind of work Cook is good at, and it’s exactly the kind of work that doesn’t require a product person at the top.

Software is different. Software lives or dies on judgment calls a thousand times a day. Should this preference go in this menu or that one? Should this notification fire silently or with a sound? Should this Bluetooth handoff be aggressive or conservative? Those decisions can’t be operationally optimized. They have to be made by someone who actually uses the thing and has an opinion. Cook is famously not that person.

And the rot follows that exact line. Apple’s hardware reviews are still glowing. Apple’s software reviews… are not. The number of “I’m switching to Linux” or “I’m switching back to Windows” essays from longtime Apple loyalists has gone from a trickle to something that should worry someone on Apple Park’s executive row.

The grumbling isn’t about features. It’s about the texture of using the products. Which is the thing Steve cared about most, and Cook seemingly cares about least.

The Era of *aaS

There’s a related thread here. Cook’s Apple has gradually rebuilt itself as a services company that happens to make hardware. iCloud subscriptions. Apple Music. Apple TV+. Apple Arcade. Apple Fitness+. Apple News+. Apple One. AppleCare+ tiers within tiers. The recurring monthly nudges that show up in apps that used to be one-and-done.

There’s a real argument that this was a defensive move, and it worked. The Services line is now bigger than the GDP of small nations. But there’s also a reason long-time Apple users are uneasy. The company that ran the iPod silhouette ad is now the company that nudges you to try Apple Fitness+ when you open the Watch app for an unrelated reason. The texture changed. The thing that made Apple feel different is, slowly, less different.

And here’s where it loops back to the bug list. When recurring revenue becomes the thing the company optimizes for, the tolerance for friction goes up. A slightly annoying subscription upsell is acceptable as long as the funnel still works. A weird Settings menu is acceptable as long as nobody actually leaves. That’s how product standards quietly erode. Not through one dramatic bad decision, but through a thousand tolerated ones.

Was that the right business call? Maybe. Was it the right product call? Different question. And it’s the question Steve would have asked.

Enter John Ternus

The honest read on Cook’s tenure: he was the right operations CEO for the post-Steve transition, and he stayed long enough to also become the wrong product CEO for the post-iPhone era. That’s not a damning legacy. It’s just a long career with two halves that needed different people.

So who’s getting handed the keys? John Ternus.

If you needed to pick someone inside Apple to course-correct away from the operations-CEO failure mode, Ternus is the right person on paper. He’s been SVP of Hardware Engineering for years. He came up working on the Mac, ran iPad development, and was a key player in the Apple Silicon transition. He’s the one Apple keeps putting on the keynote stage to talk about new hardware. By any honest read, he’s an engineer and a product person, not a salesperson, not an operator. That’s the pick Steve would have nodded at.

BUT…

The piece I just spent a thousand words complaining about isn’t a hardware problem. Apple’s hardware under Cook has been excellent. The thing that rotted is the software experience. The bug list. And Ternus, for all his strengths, has spent his career running hardware, not software. Whether his product instincts translate into fixing the software stack is the open question of his tenure.

The hopeful read is that an engineer-CEO will demand engineering rigor across the whole company, including from the software org that’s been getting away with shipping half-baked work for a decade. The cynical read is that hardware engineers and software engineers are different cultures, and you can lead one without knowing how to fix the other.

I’m cautiously in the hopeful camp. The fact that Apple chose a builder over another finance type or another operations type says they noticed the thing this article is about. That’s not nothing.

But the proof is going to be in the next macOS release. Does System Settings get rebuilt? Does AirPods routing finally stabilize? Does Mail get a rewrite? Do notifications get a coherent strategy across all four operating systems? If yes, this was the right pick. If we get another year of shiny new features with five new bugs and zero fixes for the old ones, then Apple just rearranged the deck chairs.

Because that’s what made Apple. The rest is supply chain.

So yes. Tim Cook is leaving. Good. And John Ternus is taking the keys at exactly the moment Apple needs to remember what it was supposed to be.

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My Fitbit Buzzed and I Understood Enshittification

Mike's Notes

Kent, as always, nailed the problem right on the head.

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16/02/2026

My Fitbit Buzzed and I Understood Enshittification

By: Kent Beck
Software Design: Tidy First?: 15/01/2026

Programmer, artist, coach coach, singer/guitarist, peripatetic. Learning to be me. Full-time content producer.

My Fitbit started buzzing at me a year ago. “It looks like you’re exercising.”

Yeah. No shit. I’m walking. I know I’m exercising. I’m the one doing it.

I didn’t ask for this notification. I don’t want this notification. Nobody wants to be told what they’re already doing. And yet, here we are.

I was annoyed for about thirty seconds. Then I started thinking about what it must be like to be a product developer inside Fitbit. That’s the advantage of walking as exercise. Time to think.

The View From Inside

You’re a product owner. You have a feature to ship: “Automatic Exercise Detection.” It’s a reasonable feature. The watch notices when you start moving in exercise-like ways and begins tracking.

But here’s your problem: how do you know the feature is working? How do you prove it’s valuable? How do you keep your job?

You need metrics. You need numbers that go up.

So you add a notification. “It looks like you’re exercising.” Now you can measure engagement. Users are responding to your feature. They’re seeing it. They’re interacting with it. Your numbers go up. Your feature is a success. You get to stay employed.

Then users get annoyed. Some of them complain. So you add a setting to turn it off. But you default it to “on” because that keeps your numbers up. Most users won’t find the setting. Most users will just... tolerate it.

I can’t blame this product owner. They’re playing the only game available to them. The company set up incentives that reward exactly this behavior. What else were they supposed to do?

This Is The Mechanism

I’ve been thinking about this pattern ever since Cory Doctorow coined “enshittification” to describe how platforms decay. But I don’t think we’ve been precise enough about the mechanism.

It’s not that companies decide to make their products worse. Nobody wakes up thinking, “Let’s annoy our users today.” The mechanism is subtler and more tragic:

  1. Individual contributors need to demonstrate value
  2. Demonstrating value requires metrics
  3. Metrics create incentives
  4. Incentives shape behavior
  5. Behavior optimizes for the metric, not the user

Each step is locally rational. Each person is doing their job. And the cumulative result is a product that gets progressively more hostile to the people using it.

Here’s another example. In most messaging apps, there’s a button to call someone. This button is conveniently located right where you might accidentally tap it. You’re scrolling through a conversation, your thumb grazes the wrong spot, and suddenly you’re calling your ex at 2 AM.

Why is that button there? Why is it so easy to hit accidentally?

Because someone’s job depends on “calls initiated” going up. If the button were harder to find, fewer people would use it. Fewer people using it means lower numbers. Lower numbers means maybe you don’t get to keep working on this feature. Maybe you don’t get to keep working here at all.

So the button stays prominent. And users keep accidentally calling people they didn’t mean to call.

The Metrics Arms Race

Some folks suggest the solution is more metrics. Add a “calls immediately hung up” counter. Subtract it from “calls initiated.” Now you’re measuring meaningful calls!

You’ll never win this race.

To keep their jobs, people will be extremely clever about gaming whatever measurement system you create. Add a metric, they’ll optimize around it. Add two metrics, they’ll find the corner cases. Add ten metrics, and now you’ve created a system so complex that nobody understands what “good” looks like anymore.

I’ve watched teams spend more energy figuring out how to make their metrics look good than figuring out how to make their product actually good. The metrics become the product. The users become an externality.

The Alternative Nobody Wants To Hear

At some point, you have to have principles.

Not metrics. Principles.

“Don’t interrupt the user unless they explicitly asked you to.”

“Don’t put buttons where they’ll be accidentally pressed.”

“Don’t optimize for engagement when engagement means annoyance.”

These aren’t measurable. You can’t put them in a dashboard. You can’t A/B test them (well, you can, but you’ll lose to the variant that violates them, because that variant’s numbers will be better).

Principles require someone to say: “We just don’t do this, and I don’t have to give you a reason.” And then they have to defend that line when the metrics-driven arguments come. “But the numbers show—” No. We don’t do this.

This is uncomfortable. It feels arbitrary. It feels like you’re leaving value on the table. Maybe you are.

But the alternative is a product that slowly, inexorably, turns against its users. One “engagement optimization” at a time. One “growth hack” at a time. One annoying notification at a time.

Software Design Is An Exercise In Human Relationships

I keep coming back to this phrase because it keeps being true in new ways.

Product development is also an exercise in human relationships. And when we reduce those relationships to metrics, we lose something essential. We lose the ability to say, “This would be rude.” We lose the ability to treat users like people instead of engagement vectors.

The Fitbit doesn’t know I’m annoyed. It only knows I looked at the notification. In the database, that’s engagement. In my lived experience, it’s one more small friction. One more tiny way the device that’s supposed to help me is instead demanding my attention for its own purposes.

I turned off the notification. I found the setting, buried three menus deep, and I turned it off. I’m a technical person who knows these settings exist. Most people won’t. Most people will just get buzzed, over and over, because someone at Fitbit needed their numbers to go up.

I don’t know how to fix this at the industry level. But I know this: the seemingly rational, completely legible, metrics-based product development process is how we got here. The numbers all went up. And the products all got worse.

Maybe it’s time to trust the numbers a little less and trust our sense of what’s right a little more. Even when—especially when—we can’t prove it in a dashboard.

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The Rot Economy

Mike's Notes

Ed Zitron's blog post in 2023 on Silicon Valley behaviour provides a fascinating insight. I copied it from his blog.

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11/05/2025

The Rot Economy

By: Ed Zitron
Where's your Ed At?: Feb 9, 2023

At the center of everything I’ve written for the last few months (if not the last few years), sits a cancerous problem with the fabric of how capital is deployed in modern business. Public and private investors, along with the markets themselves, have become entirely decoupled from the concept of what “good” business truly is, focusing on one metric — one truly noxious metric — over all else: growth.

“Growth” in this case is not necessarily about being “bigger” or “better,” it is simply “more.” It means that the company is generating more revenue, higher valuations, gaining more market share, and then finding more ways to generate these things. Businesses are expected to be - and rewarded for being - eternal burning engines of capital that create more and more shareholder value while, hopefully, providing a service to a customer in the process. In the public markets, that means that companies like Google, Meta, and Microsoft were rewarded for having unfocused, capital-intensive businesses that required mass layoffs when times got tough, because the market loved the idea that they’d found a way to save money. They weren’t punished for their poor planning, their stagnating products, their mismanagement of human capital, or their general lack of any real innovation because the numbers kept going up.

When I wrote in October that Mark Zuckerberg was going to kill his company, the street responded in kind, savaging Meta’s stock for burning cash building a metaverse that was never going to exist. Yet once Zuckerberg fired 11,000 people and claimed that 2023 would be the “year of efficiency,” the market responded with double-digit increases in the price of Meta’s shares, despite the fact that Facebook’s active user growth declined and they lost $13.7 billion on the same metaverse department that caused the stock to drop the last time.

The markets seemed to ignore the $410 million fine that Meta received for GDPR violations, along with the fact that European users will now have to deliberately opt-in to sharing their data - which is bad, considering only about 25% of iOS users choose to opt-in to app tracking, and their business model is intrinsically linked to the repurposing of customer data into ad targeting telemetry.

Let’s be abundantly clear: Meta’s core advertising models depend heavily on things that likely become impossible to do legally (or even technically, given Apple’s App Tracking Transparency, Alphabet’s retirement of the third-party tracking cookie, and the Chromium Project’s planned blocking of non-cookie fingerprinting technologies) in the next decade. Their other products simply do not make that much money. Their CEO’s big idea to make more money has lost them billions of dollars, and likely won’t make them any for quite some time. Yet Meta remains beloved, because the numbers are going up.

Killing Innovation

Google has a similar yet slightly different story, where their core product - search - has gone from a place where you find information to an increasingly-manipulated labyrinth of SEO-optimized garbage shipped straight from the content factories. As Charlie Warzel put it last year: “Google Search, what many consider an indispensable tool of modern life, is dead or dying.”  Users have to effectively find cheat codes - adding things like “[whatever you’re searching]+Reddit” to get reliable answers. Despite its decades-long efforts to improve the quality of organic results, Google remains easily-gamed by anyone who knows how to craft an algorithm-friendly headline.

Without finding a way to negotiate with Google Search, you’re offered a fragmented buffet of content provided by Google’s algorithm, either based on how much they’ve been paid to prioritize said content or by how companies have engineered content to rank higher on search. Google no longer provides the “best” result or answer to your query - it provides the answer that it believes is most beneficial or profitable to Google. Google Search provides a “free” service, but the cost is a source of information corrupted by a profit-seeking entity looking to manipulate you into giving money to the profit-seeking entities that pay them.

The net result is a product that completely sucks. “Googling” something is now an exercise in pain, regularly leading you to generic Search Engine Optimized content that doesn’t actually answer your question. Google’s push to hyper-optimization has also led it to serve results based on what it *thinks* people mean, rather than what they actually said. It’s frustrating, upsetting and annoying. A problem that likely hits hundreds of millions of people a day, yet Google doesn’t have to change a thing, because the street likes that they have found more innovative ways to get blood from a stone. These moves are unquestionably hurting Google, to the point that Microsoft’s Bing (paired with OpenAI’s ChatGPT), has gained major headlines for providing the service that everybody wished Google would.

That’s because Google has, like every major tech company, focused entirely on what will make revenues increase, even if the cost of doing so is destroying its entire legacy. Google has announced their own “Bard AI” to compete with Bing’s ChatGPT integration, and I’ll be honest - I feel a little crazy that nobody is saying the truth, which is that Google broke the product that made them famous and is now productizing fixing their own problem as innovation.

That’s because the markets do not prioritize innovation, or sustainable growth, or stable, profitable enterprises. As a result, companies regularly do not function with the intent of making “good” businesses - they want businesses that semiotically align with what investors - private and public - believe to be “good.”

Despite its ubiquity, companies like Uber should not exist. Uber has not made a profit from its businesses. They had a net loss of 1.21 billion last quarter, yet the street fell over itself to praise the company because “gross bookings grew 19% year-over-year” for their unprofitable businesses that largely hinge upon the government failing to impose sensible labor laws, a con that will eventually come to an end, and indeed, has ended in some territories like the UK, where Uber drivers are now recognized as employees, and are therefore entitled to pensions, paid vacation time, and a minimum wage. London, I note, is one of Uber’s most important markets.

Yet as of writing, Uber’s stock is up 5%.

The media itself somewhat fuels this economy of growth-mongering. CNBC reports earnings like many other media entities, but their reports on, say, Uber fail to acknowledge the fact that Uber has spent nearly 15 years burning money. It has never turned a profit. Even with its push into freight and food delivery, it  may never turn a profit, no matter how much it contorts its financials to pretend otherwise. Yet acknowledging the truth is that much worse because Uber will not be killed, because people keep buying the stock, because it is a “valuable company” in the eyes of markets that have fucking cataracts.

This is why we see such vast oscillations of hiring and firing - because these companies are never, ever punished for failing to operate their businesses in a sustainable way, or even with a view for the future, particularly when it comes to macroeconomic trends that literally everyone else saw coming.

Their business models were predicated on an endless supply of cheap money, even though the Fed steadily ratcheted interest rates in the years leading up to the Covid pandemic, only slashing them to mitigate the pain of Covid and (to a lesser extent) the US-China trade war.. The specter of inflation reared its ugly head as early as 2020, first driven by the lockdown-induced chaos on supply chains, and then exacerbated further by the war in Ukraine, the collateral damage of China’s Zero Covid policy, and a chronic labor shortage in most industrialized countries.

The markets do not react when they are mass-hiring people to capture consumer demand. They do not react to the fact that Microsoft, for example, seems to be laying off people almost every year. In 2020, CEO Satya Nadella called for a “referendum on capitalism,” telling businesses to start to grade themselves on the “wider economic benefits they bring to society, rather than profits.” To be clear, this was four months after Microsoft laid off 1000 people, one year before they hired 23,000 people, and a few months after which they laid off 10,000 people to “deliver results on an ongoing basis, while investing in [their] long-term opportunity.”

Everything Ventured, Nothing Gained

Before these companies reach the public markets, they are fueled by an even more violently reckless form of funding - venture capital. Venture capitalists are regularly incentivized to create businesses that look valuable but aren’t necessarily of value. When I wrote about the Liches of Silicon Valley last year, I remarked upon how many valley companies experience volatile, erosive cycles of growth with the goal of being acquired or going public, burning as much venture capital as it takes to find an outcome:

They repeat a very specific cycle - company is the next big thing, company is now worth over a billion dollars, company is experiencing “unheard of growth” (with no question as to whether they are sustainable or profitable), company is now challenging ‘the big dogs’ of industry, a little M&A, an absolutely insane valuation, and then a sudden realization that actually, perhaps this wasn’t a good business at all? I am hammering on TechCrunch links here because I am being lazy - they are far from the only outlet to assume that a company like Brex would not simply run itself into the ground through virtue of existing - but the path is always the same - growth, growth, growth, legitimization, growth, growth, acquisition, and then an eventual reckoning with real life.

Venture pumps millions or billions of dollars into ideas that might sell a product or a service, but ultimately resemble things that can be sold to other companies or put on the public market for a profit higher than what was paid on a per-share basis. I once suggested that Silicon Valley conflated “making great ideas work” with “making ideas I like work,” but on consideration, many of these companies aren’t even things venture capitalists like - they are things that resemble things that they can sell. Do I genuinely believe that everyone who invested into the Web3 grift was a strident believer in the brave new decentralized economy? Hell no. They just went where the winds blew — or where they seemed to be blowing.

Andreessen Horowitz was the lead participant in arguably the biggest con in venture capital, pumping billions into Web3 companies that didn’t have any real product, but stapled together enough buzzwords and websites to resemble actual entities. A16Z found a way to vastly accelerate the idea-to-business-to-profit cycle of venture. Despite claiming it was “Time To Build” in 2020, Andreessen Horowitz realized that there wasn’t ever really much of a need to build at all - you could create things that semiotically aligned with what “valuable” looked like and profit off of that. While the public markets may (at least, before the rise of the SPAC) have required some sort of business - even if said business wasn’t graded on being a “good” one - the cryptocurrency markets allowed the vaguest of ideas to get even vaguer valuations.

This same insipid thought process applies to the rest of their portfolio too. Adam Neumann, a guy who is most famous for running WeWork into the ground, got a second at-bat with his new startup “Flow,” a company that Neumann is still not able to fully describe, but that may involve you renting to own an apartment that Flow owns somewhere at some point. Just like Silicon Valley can’t help itself from reinventing the bus, Neuman is seemingly attempting to reinvent the rental market — a diseased, exploitative industry in its own right — in his own image. He’s replacing one cancer with another, only even more aggressive and metastatic.

Neumann was, is, and will always be full of shit. Appropriately, in a video A16Z released yesterday, Neumann used the following analogy to describe Flow:

The founder turned to a toilet metaphor to explain one aspect of his idea of ownership. “If you’re in an apartment building, and you’re a renter, and your toilet gets clogged, you call the super,” he said. In contrast, “if you’re in your own apartment, and you bought it and you own it and your toilet gets clogged, you take the plunger.” For Neumann, fixing up your own apartment means shifting from “being transactional to actually being part of a community” and “feeling like you own something.”

In a functioning society, Adam Neumann would not be given a single dollar. This quote proves that he has never unclogged a toilet, because in the event that you could unclog your toilet in an apartment you rented, you’d probably do it. If the clog was so severe it required the super, you would probably still call a plumber if you owned the place, because your nasty business has created a problem you cannot solve.

What I am suggesting is that Adam Neumann doesn’t know anything about home ownership, or unclogging toilets, or toilets, or the regular experience of being a human. Yet he is given unfathomable amounts of capital to address problems related to these things, because he has the resemblance of the kind of messianic white guy that is able to take a product and sell it, even if he is quite literally the guy who failed to do this before.

Neumann turned a (nominally) $47bn company into a $2.9bn company. In a sane and just world, he wouldn’t see a dollar of funding for the rest of his life.

There are tons of other examples of colossally stupid assholes and stupid ideas getting money. As I wrote about on Monday, the largest investment rounds of the last few years have gone to companies that got obscene valuations based on nothing other than a vague sense of them “looking like a winner.” There is no reason a weight loss app should need $540 million to operate - that is not a sustainable enterprise considering the entire weight loss industry is worth about $3.8 billion. Clubhouse was never worth the billions of dollars pumped into it, considering the entire radio industry only makes about $12 billion a year combined. While capital is required to get a company off the ground, the only way to justify these massive surges of capital is that venture capitalists are putting companies on life support in the hopes that they can flog them for a profit.

And this corrosive capital system gets continually rewarded. Companies like Uber are taken public, making massive windfalls for venture capitalists without ever having to run a profitable business. Venture capitalists crammed $41 billion into crypto in the space of 18 months, despite there being no real use cases for crypto. Metaverse companies raised $120 billion in 2022 for a concept that has yet to really exist, and perhaps never will. Yet these concepts get vast amounts of money because venture capitalists are incentivized to pump cash into “good companies to invest in” over “good companies.”

As my friend Kasey put it in a recent conversation, growth is a fire. If you build a nice, sustainable fire, it’ll keep you warm, cook food and sustain life. And if the only thing you care about is how big your fire is, then it’ll set fire to everything around it, and the more you throw into it, the more it’ll burn. Eventually, you’ll have nothing left, but if you desperately desire that fire, you will constantly have to find new things to burn at any cost.

And we, societally, have turned our markets and businesses - private and public - over to arsonists. We have created conditions where we celebrate people for making “big” companies but not “good” companies.

Venture capital and the public markets don’t actually reward or respect “good” businesses or “good” CEOs - they reward people that can steer the kind of growth that raises the value of an asset. Elon Musk’s success with Tesla didn’t come from the inarguable point that he ended the monopoly of the internal combustion engine - it came from his canny manipulation of the symbolic value of a stock through lies and half-truths, meaning that there was always a perpetual reason that Tesla was a “growth” company and a “good stock to buy.” Sundar Pichai isn’t paid $280 million a year because he’s a “good CEO.”  After all, Google has all but destroyed its search product. He’s paid because he finds ways to increase the overall growth of the company (even while their cloud division still loses money), and thus the stock goes up.

The consequences are that these companies will continue to invest in things that grow the overall revenue of the company over all else. They will mass-hire and mass-fire, because there are no consequences when the markets don’t really care as long as the company itself stays valuable. Venture capitalists certainly don’t mind - after all, it’s “less burn” to “get you through” tough climates that were arguably created by the poor hiring decisions of a company that was never incentivized to hire sustainably or operate profitably.

Until we see a seismic shift in how major investors treat the companies they invest in, this cycle will continue. I guarantee that we will see each and every one of the companies doing mass layoffs do mass-hirings in the next few years, and then do another mass layoff not long after, because they are simply treating human capital as assets to be manipulated to increase the value of a stock. They are not structured to evaluate whether the business is “sustainable,” because their only interest is seeing their current profits grow by multiples that please Wall Street.

“Good companies” should not have to repeatedly lay people off. They should not be mass-hiring for fear that the demand they are capturing is temporary, and those new employees will soon find themselves at the receiving end of a pink slip.

The lens through which we evaluate businesses is cracked, and until we fix it, we will continue to experience these punishing cycles of binging and purging on human capital.

This is the problem at the center of almost everything I’ve written. Why are bosses mad they can’t bring people back to the office? Because their alignment of business success isn’t really tied to profit or “success,” but rather the sense that they are “big” and “successful,” which requires a bustling workplace and “ideas.”

Why did billions of dollars get pumped into crypto’s countless non-companies? Because “success” as defined by capital has been reframed to mean “number go up.” As a notion, it is divorced from any long-term thinking, fiscal probity, or even what you and I would call “morality.”

Why did these companies never seem to get blamed for hiring and then quickly firing tens of thousands of people? Because at the heart of the business media and the markets, workers were necessary casualties of the eternal struggle for growth. Layoffs are inevitably reported as a large number (“10,000 employees at Microsoft”), which makes it all too easy to remove the human element. When confronted with numbers of this scale, it’s easy to ignore the individual human agony that comes with losing a job. The uncertainty and shame that follows a firing.

The truth is that nothing lasts forever. Companies can (and should) die — or, at the very least, understand that there is an inevitable limit to growth, and eventually they must reconcile with being a stable, albeit plateaued, business.

A product may be profitable for a while, but there is a line at which profitability comes at the cost of functionality, and your company may simply not be able to grow more. A business that cannot generate profit is not a good business, and a business that can never generate a profit deserves to die.

And the net result of all of this is that it kills innovation. If capital is not invested in providing a good service via a profitable business, it will never sustain things that are societally useful. Companies are not incentivized to provide better services or improve lives outside of ways in which they can drain more blood from consumers. And the street doesn’t care either - just look at Facebook and Instagram, two products that have grown endlessly profitable and utterly useless in the process.

If capital wishes to call labor entitled, capital must acknowledge that it is the most entitled creature in society, craving eternal growth at the cost of the true value of any given service or entity.

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Enshittification, tarpits and other things your mother never told you about

Mike's Notes

Here are some valuable resources about stuff you may have to deal with one day.

  • Enshittification
  • Tarpits
I am so disgusted with the degeneration of previously useful websites provided by the world's largest software companies that I took these measures to ensure that Pipi would never end up like that.
  • No Investors
  • No social media
  • No sales, only word-of-mouth
  • No ads
  • No moats
  • Open-source as much as possible
  • Ownership by a foundation
  • Only SaaS applications that are socially useful
  • Built for experienced developer teams
  • Open Handbook
AI companies are ignoring robots.txt files when they go out and scrape websites. That sucks.

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Last Updated

17/05/2025

Enshittification, tarpits and other things your mother never told you about

By: Mike Peters
On a Sandy Beach: 13/02/2025

Mike is the inventor and architect of Pipi and the founder of Ajabbi.

    Enshittification

    "Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is the term used to describe the pattern in which online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders." - Wikipedia.

    Examples

    • Google Search
    • Facebook
    • Amazon

    Tarpit

    "A tarpit is a service on a computer system (usually a server) that purposely delays incoming connections. The technique was developed as a defense against a computer worm, and the idea is that network abuses such as spamming or broad scanning are less effective, and therefore less attractive, if they take too long. The concept is analogous with a tar pit, in which animals can get bogged down and slowly sink under the surface, like in a swamp." - Wikipedia

    Examples

    • Nepenthes
    • Iocane

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