Never Forgive Them

Source: Where’s Your Ed At Date: 2024-12-16 URL: https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/

Summary

Ed argues tech companies have systematically sabotaged their own products through “growth-at-all-costs” thinking — the “Rot Economy” — transforming users from customers to extraction targets. Spotify forces video onto a music platform, Windows serves ads in the OS itself, Facebook algorithmically scrambles content to force longer session times. The claim: this is deliberate design sabotage by executives, not accidental degradation, and users aren’t deficient for finding it frustrating. Solution: public accountability, naming responsible executives repeatedly until reputation matches the damage.

Implications

The “Never Forgive Them” framing is Ed at his most prosecutorial — naming-and-shaming as antitrust substitute. This connects directly to the enshittification thread and the AI financial sustainability thread: if the rot economy is the diagnosis, AI features layered onto already-degraded products (AI search results, AI-summarized feeds, AI customer service) accelerate the extraction without fixing the underlying misalignment. The piece also signals Ed’s shift toward accountability journalism as a strategy, which explains his later deeper reporting on AI costs and OpenAI’s financial position.