Age of decay: the enshittification of everything

Am I the only one noticing that everything is turning to crap?

Crap ads. Crap science. Crap food. Crap music. Crap movies. Crap people.

Crap software that you “subscribe” to because ownership is a relic of the past. Crap customer service loops designed to make you give up before you can cancel. Crap AI-generated “content” clogging up every search result. Crap infrastructure. Crap manners.

Crap “news” that reads like a script from a central narrative department. Crap schools that trade critical thinking for ideological conformity and the soft bigotry of low expectations. Crap medicine that pushes a lifetime of pills for symptoms while ignoring the roots of health. Crap products built to break the day the warranty expires. Crap feeds designed to keep you scrolling through a digital wasteland of vanity and outrage.

I just read a post by Diane M. Kimura about how “standards are the quiet architecture of a functioning society.” She’s right — and that architecture is currently being demolished in real-time. Whether you call it The Great Flattening, The Great Stupefication, or my personal favorite — The Great Enshittification, the result is the same: the bar isn’t just low; it’s being buried.

Here is Diane’s post in its entirety:

Standards are the quiet architecture of a functioning society. Most people rarely notice them when they work. They become visible only when they disappear.

Standards show up in the small things. Returning the shopping cart. Honoring a contract. Letting someone merge in traffic. Speaking to a colleague or a stranger with basic respect.

These behaviors may seem trivial, yet they form the invisible infrastructure of trust that allows communities and markets to function. As this recent essay put it, roads work because drivers expect compliance, markets work because contracts are honored, and communities work because people believe that how we behave still matters.

When standards decay, the consequences are subtle at first. Expectations fall. People stop assuming good faith. Institutions become less trusted. Civility gives way to suspicion and confrontation. Over time, that erosion compounds.

Data on social trust tells the story clearly. In the early 1970s, nearly half of Americans said most people could be trusted. Today that number sits around one third.

That decline in trust does not occur in isolation. It spills directly into the tone of our public life. Surveys show that a majority of Americans believe civility in public discourse has deteriorated over the past several years.

When respect disappears from the conversation, debate stops being a search for truth and becomes a contest of volume and outrage.

The deeper issue is not politics. It is culture. Standards are essentially social agreements about how we treat each other and what we expect from ourselves. When those agreements weaken, everything else begins to wobble. RAND researchers have called this phenomenon “truth decay,” a shift in which opinion overwhelms fact and civil discourse deteriorates as a result.

History has taught us that societies rarely collapse all at once. They simply stop insisting on excellence. Expectations drift downward. Institutions tolerate mediocrity. Public behavior becomes coarser. The bar quietly lowers in schools, in media, in leadership, and in everyday conduct.

Rebuilding standards does not start with laws or regulations. It starts with individuals deciding that certain things still matter. Accuracy matters. Integrity matters. Respect matters. Accountability matters.

In the end, standards are contagious. So is their absence. Every society eventually becomes what it tolerates.

The view from my security post

In my job as a security officer, I see the “Quiet Architecture” crumbling every hour. I see it in the way people treat each other like obstacles rather than humans. I see it on the roads, where traffic laws have become “suggestions” and basic regard for the person in the next lane has evaporated.

But the most fractured part of the foundation? Our inability to even talk to one another.

I work in a 55+ country club community where the majority of the service labor — the delivery drivers, the landscapers, the home health nurses — are immigrants who have not learned to speak English. We’ve been told “diversity is our strength,” but strength requires a bridge. If we don’t share a common language, we don’t share a common culture. If we can’t understand each other’s words, we can’t understand each other’s rules or values.

A society that cannot communicate is a society that cannot function. We are left with nothing but fracture, frustration, and a total loss of the “greater good.”

Bad things happen from there.

The contagion of “good enough”

Diane noted that “every society eventually becomes what it tolerates.” Right now, we are tolerating a total collapse of the standard. We aren’t just letting things slide; we’re watching the floor fall out.

We are tolerating:

• The Death of Accountability: It’s in the corporate “labyrinths” designed to trap your money, but it’s also in the neighbor who plays bass-heavy music at 3 a.m. because they do not acknowledge your existence. It’s in the “speeders” in my own community who drive with such reckless disregard that a roll-over crash has become a weekly ritual.
• The Erosion of Competence and Pride: I see it in my own industry — security officers who think it’s acceptable to do drugs or sleep on the clock. I see it in the candidates who show up to job interviews wearing t-shirts and ripped jeans, looking like they’re headed to a garden shed rather than a professional environment. If you can’t be bothered to put on a collared shirt to ask for a paycheck, you’ve already told me everything I need to know about your “standards.”
• The Rise of the “Hair-Trigger” Culture: We are increasingly surrounded by people who are mentally frayed and morally unchecked — people who would just as soon tear your throat out as look at you for a perceived slight. This isn’t just a breakdown of basic civility; it’s the social fabric fraying into feral chaos.
• The Loss of Friction: We’ve made it so easy to be mediocre that excellence feels like an elite “extra” we can no longer afford. When you stop insisting on excellence, you don’t just get “average.” You get decay.

It creates a world where the “invisible infrastructure of trust” is replaced by suspicion, disorder, and the systemic rot of everything that once held us together.

The most terrifying part of the Great Enshittification isn’t that it’s happening; it’s that we’ve made it profitable. We’ve turned the decay of our own civilization into a convenience. We are subsidizing our own obsolescence, one crap “upgrade” and one ignored rule at a time.

Buckle up, Cranky readers. It’s a long way down from here.

Rob Rhode is a former marketing copywriter and founder of The Cranky Creative, a blog so triggering to the LinkedIn elite that he’s been called “divisive” (and worse). He’ll never be invited to an industry cocktail party, but his blog has been read by millions and his insights have appeared in major books and newspapers. He’s happy to piss off the right people.

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