Why Every App You Love Eventually Gets Worse

Why do the platforms we once loved eventually become frustrating, cluttered, and difficult to leave? In the first episode of Fix Your Focus, Dr. Sabir Haque explores Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification” — the process by which digital platforms begin by serving users, then shift toward advertisers and business customers, and finally extract value from everyone once dependence has been built.The episode looks at Instagram, Facebook, Amazon, X, platform capitalism, surveillance capitalism, network effects, switching costs, and the deeper reason we stay on platforms we no longer enjoy. It also asks whether generative AI is currently in its own early “honeymoon phase,” and what might happen when our workflows, memories, and creative habits become locked into AI systems.This is an episode about platform decay, digital dependency, and the need for exit rights, interoperability, portability, and open systems.