Never Forget What They’ve Done

Source: Where’s Your Ed At Date: 2025-06-09 URL: https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forget-what-theyve-done/

Summary

Ed argues that Zuckerberg, Pichai, Altman, and Nadella have deliberately degraded digital products to maximize extraction: Instagram’s forced algorithmic feeds, Google Search’s collapse under AI-generated content, Apple’s invasive intelligence features, pervasive tracking that degrades device performance. His claim is that these executives made active choices to worsen technology in service of advertising revenue, algorithmic manipulation, and data extraction — and that the record of those choices should not be forgotten or forgiven when the industry’s next pivot arrives.

Implications

• Enshittification. This is Ed’s clearest enumeration of the specific degradation decisions made by specific named executives — not a structural critique but an accountability document. The “never forget” framing insists on attribution: these were choices, made by people, who should be named.
• Big tech rent extraction. The pattern across all four executives is identical: products made worse to serve advertising and data extraction at the expense of the users who built the platforms’ value. The specific mechanisms differ; the underlying logic is the same extraction dynamic.