TL;DR: Writer Hamilton Nolan argues in a recent essay that the platform decay known as “enshittification” isn’t just a byproduct of corporate greed, but the predictable result of Wall Street demanding infinite growth from companies that have already maxed out their markets. When growth stalls, platforms squeeze existing users, sellers, and workers harder to fake continued returns, eroding the very value that made them successful in the first place.
In a widely shared essay published on his Substack newsletter How Things Work, labor journalist Hamilton Nolan takes aim at one of the tech industry’s most viral buzzwords of the past several years: enshittification. Coined by writer and activist Cory Doctorow in 2022, the term describes how online platforms tend to get worse over time, first luring users with a good product, then degrading that product to benefit business customers, and finally degrading it further still to claw back profit for shareholders. Nolan’s argument, published August 2, 2026, is that this isn’t just a story about corporate villainy. It’s a story about broken math.
The Core Argument: Growth That Can’t Continue, Continuing Anyway
Nolan’s central point is that publicly traded tech companies are valued not on what they currently earn, but on the expectation that earnings will keep growing indefinitely. That expectation, he argues, is mathematically impossible once a platform has already captured most of its addressable market. A company like Amazon, Google, or Meta cannot keep adding tens of millions of new users forever in markets that are already saturated.
When user growth flattens, Nolan writes, executives and boards don’t simply accept slower returns. Instead, they turn to extraction: more ads crammed into feeds, more fees layered onto transactions, more paid placement pushing organic results and creators further down the page, and thinner margins passed on to the workers and small businesses that depend on the platform. The result looks identical to Doctorow’s enshittification cycle, but Nolan frames it as an inevitable consequence of a financial system that treats infinite growth as a baseline requirement rather than a temporary phase.
Real-World Examples of the Squeeze
The pattern Nolan describes has become increasingly visible across the tech and consumer landscape this year. Automaker BMW recently drew sharp criticism for testing full-screen dashboard advertisements in vehicles customers already paid tens of thousands of dollars to own, an example of a company looking for new revenue streams from a captive audience rather than growing its core business. Delivery apps have faced similar scrutiny, with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani signaling a renewed push against fees charged by DoorDash and Uber Eats, fees that critics say squeeze restaurants and drivers to sustain investor-pleasing margins.
Nolan points to search engines as another case study. Google’s results pages, he notes, have become increasingly cluttered with ads and sponsored content, pushing organic links further down the screen even as the underlying search product has arguably not improved to match. Streaming services have layered on password-sharing crackdowns and ad tiers after years of ad-free subscriptions. Ride-share apps have adjusted pricing algorithms in ways that extract more from riders and drivers alike. In each case, Nolan argues, the company isn’t necessarily reacting to a genuine business need. It’s reacting to a stock market that punishes flat growth, regardless of whether the underlying business is healthy or profitable.
Why the Math Doesn’t Add Up
Nolan’s essay contends that shareholder-driven demands for perpetual growth are fundamentally at odds with the reality of finite markets, and that this tension, not simply corporate malice, is what produces the slow degradation users experience across nearly every major digital platform.
This framing matters because it shifts the proposed remedy. If enshittification were purely a matter of bad executives making greedy choices, the fix might be replacing leadership or shaming companies into better behavior. But if the root cause is structural, tied to how public markets value growth stocks, then Nolan argues the fix has to be systemic: stronger antitrust enforcement, regulation that limits how aggressively platforms can extract value from captive users, and possibly a broader reckoning with shareholder primacy as the default goal of corporate governance.
A Familiar Debate With New Urgency
The essay lands amid a broader wave of scrutiny toward how tech and consumer platforms treat their users. Regulators have moved on multiple fronts this year, including a Minnesota court fight over AI-generated content and a New York lawsuit against prediction-market platform Kalshi. Investors, meanwhile, continue to debate which companies still have legitimate room to grow; Morningstar analysts recently argued that Nvidia’s stock remains undervalued given the company’s continued expansion in AI chips, a rare case, by Nolan’s logic, where growth expectations may still be grounded in real market headroom rather than extraction from existing users.
Nolan’s essay does not offer a tidy policy fix, but it reframes a term that has become internet shorthand for “companies getting worse” into a more specific economic critique. The products people use every day, he argues, aren’t degrading because executives woke up one day and decided to make them worse. They’re degrading because the financial incentives built into how those companies are valued leave few other options once real growth runs out.
