The Enshittocene: How the Drive for Monopoly Super Profits Made Everything Worse

Notes from a small roastery watching the whole thing happen in slow motion

Clear Lake Coffee Roasters · Clear Lake, Iowa · July 2026

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There is a word for the age we are living through. It was coined in 2022 by the Canadian writer and technologist Cory Doctorow, and it is, fittingly, a profane one. Enshittification. Doctorow used it first to describe digital platforms — the way they attract users with quality, lock them in, and then systematically degrade the experience to extract maximum value before anyone can escape. But the word has since escaped its original container and is now doing something more useful: describing an entire economic epoch.

We are living, Doctorow has argued, in the enshittocene. And he is right. The evidence is everywhere you look — from your veterinarian's waiting room to your Redfin search results to the fluorescent aisles of your local big-box store, where ultra-processed food products in jingoistic packaging stare back at you from shelves that no longer carry what you used to buy.

This is not an accident. It is a system. And the system has a logic.

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The Logic: Super Profits in Search of Somewhere to Go

We have written before about Thomas Piketty's central insight — that the return on capital persistently outpaces economic growth, concentrating wealth in fewer and fewer hands with each passing cycle. But there is a second-order consequence to that dynamic that deserves its own examination: what concentrated capital does when the real economy can no longer absorb it at the returns it demands.

The answer, increasingly, is that it rolls up everything it can reach.

Consider the veterinarian. Twenty years ago, your local vet clinic was almost certainly independently owned — a small business, usually run by the person whose name was on the door, who knew your dog and charged you what the market would bear in a competitive local landscape. That world is dissolving. Between 2017 and 2023, private equity firms spent an estimated $50 billion acquiring veterinary practices across the United States. Corporate and private equity-backed chains now control somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of all general veterinary clinics in the country, and approximately 75 percent of specialty and emergency clinics. The growth from less than 10 percent corporate ownership a decade ago to 50 percent today is not the result of private equity offering better care. It is the result of a strategy called multiple arbitrage — buying individual practices cheaply, bundling them into a platform, and selling the platform at a dramatically higher valuation. The investment thesis has nothing to do with animals. The price hikes — documented at up to 100 percent for routine services at corporate-owned clinics — are the extraction mechanism. Your pet is the asset. You are the revenue stream.

The same logic is operating in housing. When institutional investors and private equity funds own housing stock at scale — single-family homes, apartment complexes, manufactured housing communities — they are not in the business of providing shelter. They are in the business of extracting yield from a captive population that cannot easily exit. Rents rise. Maintenance falls. The resident who cannot afford to move absorbs the cost. The fund reports a strong quarter.

And at Target — to take a specific, visible, absurd example — you can now purchase ultra-processed food products in packaging themed to America's 250th anniversary: red, white, and blue containers holding ingredients lists that read like a chemistry final, sold to a public that has been, through decades of wage suppression and time poverty, largely stripped of the conditions required to cook from scratch. The packaging is patriotic. The contents are a byproduct of a food manufacturing system optimized for margin, shelf stability, and addiction science, not nutrition. The store that sells it is itself a consolidation story — a survivor of the retail apocalypse that killed its smaller competitors and now operates as a near-monopoly in thousands of American communities.

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The Watching Machine: Surveillance Capitalism and Dynamic Pricing

While this consolidation proceeds in the physical world, a parallel system of extraction has been built in the digital one.

Shoshana Zuboff, the Harvard Business School professor who wrote the defining account of the phenomenon, calls it surveillance capitalism: the economic logic that treats human experience as raw material to be harvested, processed, and sold as behavioral prediction products. Every search you conduct, every page you linger on, every item you add and remove from a cart — this is data. And data, in the surveillance economy, is the input to a machine whose output is your behavior, predicted and modified in the interest of whoever is paying for the prediction.

Nowhere is this more viscerally apparent than in dynamic pricing. Search for a flight on a Tuesday afternoon, and then search again on Thursday morning, and you may find a different price — not because the cost of flying has changed, but because the algorithm has read signals in your behavior and adjusted the price to what it calculates you will pay. Search for a rental on Zillow or Redfin from a device associated with a high-income zip code, and you may see different results than someone searching from a lower-income area — because the platform is not showing you housing inventory, it is showing you a curated experience designed to maximize the probability of a transaction that generates a commission. Hotels, rental cars, insurance quotes, concert tickets — dynamic pricing has colonized every market where digital intermediaries can insert themselves between buyer and seller. The price you see is not the price. It is a price — one of many, generated in real time by an algorithm that knows more about your willingness to pay than you do.

This is not competition. Competition produces prices that trend toward cost. Dynamic pricing produces prices that trend toward the maximum extractable surplus from each individual buyer. It is, in the most precise economic sense, perfect price discrimination — the theoretical endpoint of monopoly power, made operationally real by surveillance data and machine learning. The intermediary captures value that previously went to either the producer or the consumer. The platforms — Expedia, Redfin, Google Flights, the opaque pricing engines behind virtually every major consumer marketplace — are toll booths on every road in the economy.

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The Numbers on the Nameplate

The inequality that this system produces is not abstract. It has been carefully measured.

In 1965, the average CEO of a major American company earned 21 times what a typical worker in that company earned. By 1989 that ratio had reached 60 to 1. By 2000, at the height of the dot-com bubble, it reached 380 to 1 before temporarily retreating. In 2024, according to the Economic Policy Institute, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio stood at 281 to 1 across major corporations — meaning the average large company CEO earned in roughly four days what the median employee earned in a year.

But that aggregate number obscures the more grotesque reality at the bottom of the wage distribution. The Institute for Policy Studies analyzed the 100 S&P 500 corporations with the lowest median worker pay — a group that includes household names like Walmart, Amazon, Starbucks, and DoorDash — and found that at these companies, the average CEO-to-worker pay ratio reached 632 to 1 in 2024, up from 560 to 1 in 2019. At Starbucks, the ratio hit an almost incomprehensible 6,666 to 1: CEO Brian Niccol received $95.8 million in total compensation while the median Starbucks employee earned $14,674 for the year.

Let that land for a moment. The person who decides the company's strategy earned, in one year, more than a median Starbucks barista would earn in 6,666 years of continuous employment at their current wage.

This is not a market outcome in any meaningful sense. It is the result of a decades-long campaign to dismantle the institutional constraints that once kept executive pay tethered to some relationship with company performance or employee welfare: weakened labor law, the rise of stock-based compensation, captured compensation committees, and the ideology — dominant in boardrooms since the 1980s — that the corporation's only obligation is to shareholder value. CEOs are paid in stock. When the stock rises, they become enormously wealthy regardless of whether anything of actual value was produced. From 2019 to 2024, the Low-Wage 100 companies spent $644 billion on stock buybacks — money returned directly to shareholders that could have funded wages, training, maintenance, or the kind of long-term capital investment that actually creates productivity growth.

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The 1099 Economy: Surplus Value on Four Wheels

The cruelest innovation of the current system is the gig economy — the rebranding of precarious piecework as entrepreneurship, the conversion of employment relationships into contractor arrangements that transfer all risk to the worker while retaining all control for the platform.

The logic is elegant, in the way that extractive systems tend to be. If you classify your workers as employees, you owe them minimum wage, overtime, unemployment insurance, workers' compensation, and the right to organize. If you classify them as independent contractors, you owe them nothing except the rate you have unilaterally decided to pay them this week, which you can change without notice. The worker provides their own vehicle, maintains it at their own expense, pays both halves of their payroll tax, and has no recourse when the algorithm reduces their earnings or deactivates their account. The platform takes its cut — typically 25 to 30 percent of each transaction — while bearing none of the costs of a traditional employer.

This is, in the most classical sense, the extraction of surplus value from social labor time. The driver who delivers food or ferries passengers is performing work that creates value. The gap between what the customer pays and what the driver receives is captured by the platform — not because the platform created that value, but because it controls the matching mechanism that connects workers to customers, and has used its monopoly position to make itself indispensable to both.

The private vehicle is the hidden subsidy. When a Lyft driver uses their own car, they are absorbing depreciation, fuel, insurance, and maintenance costs that would, in any honest accounting, be borne by the employer. The car is wearing out in the service of the platform's shareholders. When the transmission fails — and it will fail sooner because of the driving intensity the gig work requires — the driver absorbs that cost entirely. The platform's quarterly earnings report does not include a line item for driver vehicle depreciation. It should. It is a cost of the business, externalized onto the people least equipped to bear it.

The vacancy this system fills is real. Four decades of deindustrialization, wage suppression, and the deliberate defunding of the public sector have produced an economy that is genuinely poor at creating sustainable, living-wage employment. The union jobs that once provided middle-class stability in manufacturing and logistics have been offshored, automated, or carved into pieces. The service sector jobs that replaced them pay less, offer fewer hours, and provide no path to the kind of economic security that would allow a worker to absorb a transmission failure without a financial crisis. Into that vacuum the gig economy inserted itself, not as a solution to job scarcity but as a mechanism for exploiting it — offering just enough income to survive on while ensuring the structural conditions that produce the desperation required for the model to function.

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The Whole Picture

Stand back and the image resolves. Private equity rolling up your veterinarian, your housing, your emergency room, your parking lot. Surveillance algorithms repricing your flight search in real time based on behavioral data you didn't consent to provide. Platforms inserting themselves into every transaction and taking their cut. CEOs earning in a week what their median workers earn in a decade. Gig platforms converting the American car — the symbol of working-class independence and mobility — into unpaid capital stock for their shareholders.

This is not a collection of separate problems. It is one problem, operating at multiple scales simultaneously: the systematic conversion of every human relationship, every necessity, every commons, every moment of attention into a revenue extraction opportunity for concentrated capital.

Cory Doctorow calls it enshittification. The Marxist tradition calls it the extraction of surplus value. Shoshana Zuboff calls it surveillance capitalism. The language differs, but the phenomenon is the same, and it is accelerating. The four forces that historically constrained corporate power — competition, regulation, labor, and civil society — have all been weakened, deliberately and systematically, over the course of forty years. What remains is the extraction mechanism, running largely unchecked.

We make coffee. We buy it from cooperatives. We pay our single employee a living wage and our share of payroll taxes and our equipment lease and our Shopify fees — which are, we note, dynamic and growing. We compete in a marketplace that increasingly favors scale over quality and extraction over production. We do it because we believe in the alternative: an economy organized around what people make and provide for each other, rather than around the returns generated by those who own the mechanism of exchange.

That economy is not naive. It is, in fact, the only economy that has ever worked for most people. It requires, as it always has, the political will to constrain the forces that are currently eating it.

The enshittocene is not inevitable. It is a policy choice. And policy choices can be changed.

 

 Six reasons for making Clear Lake Coffee Roasters - CLCR - your go-to coffee roaster:


☕️ We are a local family-run business located in the heart of Clear Lake, Iowa.

☕️ We go to great lengths to find only the finest and ethically sourced coffee around, from the top 2% of coffee beans in the world.

☕️ We only source 100% certified Arabica coffee beans, carefully hand-selecting each coffee based on specific quality and taste attributes.

☕️ Our roasting process has been refined over the years and each roast profile is individually designed to complement the nuances of the coffee we source, from Cup of Excellence (COE) award-winning producers.

☕️ By roasting in smaller batches, we can ensure our coffee is ALWAYS fresh, in fact, we roast your coffee only after you place an order - the same day your order ships out.

☕️ At CLCR, we are dedicated to a single mission: the unyielding pursuit of coffee perfection in every cup.

We would give you more reasons, but rather than reading it's better if you visit our website, purchase a bag or two, and experience a unique caffeinated or half-caff journey for yourself 😊!
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Clear Lake Coffee Roasters LLC · 15068 Hill St · Clear Lake, IA 50428 hello@clearlakecoffeeroasters.com

Sources: Cory Doctorow, Enshittification (Verso Books, 2026); Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019); Economic Policy Institute, CEO Pay data 2024; Institute for Policy Studies, Executive Excess 2025; American Veterinary Medical Association; Asheville Watchdog veterinary consolidation reporting; CT Acquisitions Veterinary Private Equity Report 2026; AFL-CIO PayWatch 2025.