What We’re Fighting For

Source: Where’s Your Ed At Date: 2025-02-11 URL: https://www.wheresyoured.at/what-were-fighting-for/

Summary

Ed’s manifesto piece arguing that tech giants deliberately degraded their products to maximize growth while becoming obscenely wealthy — the “Rot Economy.” Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple made record profits from “products that are bordering on non-functional.” Software now “extracts from, tricks, misleads and controls you” through dark patterns and manufactured engagement. Tech media fails to cover these harms, chasing AI narratives while “Facebook sucks, Instagram sucks, our apps suck, everything feels like it’s built to subtly fuck with us.” The solution: name executives, reduce engagement with exploitative apps, build collective consciousness.

Implications

This is Ed’s most programmatic piece — a call to action framed as a movement. The “Rot Economy” label, first developed in earlier pieces, is here deployed as the unifying frame for all his coverage threads. The media criticism (chasing AI while ignoring platform rot) is directly relevant: AI coverage that ignores the rot dynamics in the platforms AI is being deployed on misses the actual story. Ed’s three-part solution (naming, reducing engagement, collective consciousness) is the anti-capture methodology for anyone evaluating AI vendor claims.