“Enshittification” is a term coined by tech critic Cory Doctorow in 2023. It describes the process whereby many tech offerings start as fun and life-enhancing, then become useful and then unavoidable, often indispensable. But over time, the offerings degrade in quality as the extractive ambitions of billionaires trump the interests of the ordinary people they were supposedly designed to serve, leading to miserable outcomes.
If we are not careful, this process will take root in finance too, and just like one area of consumer-facing tech, it all involves Elon Musk.
The mercurial Musk is, of course, the man who seemingly bought Twitter pretty much by accident and changed its name to X. Since then, the once fun and life-enhancing social media network has become an enshittified open sewer on the internet, infested with trolls, bigots, tinfoil-hatted conspiracists and AI slopaganda.