{"slug": "the-coming-de-enshittification-boom-2025", "title": "The coming de-enshittification boom (2025)", "summary": "Venture capital in 2025 is all-in on AI, but generative AI's only proven use cases are slop and scams, according to a blog post by an author citing David Gerard and others. The post argues that Big Tech companies like Meta are battling an 'epidemic of scams' and that AI tools enable fraud, fake research, and low-quality content, while the tech oligopoly remains out of touch with the antisocial behaviors AI enables.", "body_md": "25 May 2025\n\n[the coming de-enshittification boom](/de-enshittification/)\n\nI was going to call this how to prosper in the\ncoming de-enshittification boom\n\nbut I’m still trying to figure that\nout.\n\nDavid Gerard has a pretty good summary of today’s Internet business\nsituation, in [In\n2025, venture capital can’t pretend everything is fine any more](https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/05/03/in-2025-venture-capital-cant-pretend-everything-is-fine-any-more/).\nThis year, the investors are all-in on AI. Crypto’s still dead,\nquantum isn’t taking off—AI’s the last game in the casino.\n\nAnd the\nBig AI companies are having trouble making anything useful [even\nfor stuff like customer support where corporate decision-makers are\nalready willing to tolerate low quality](https://fortune.com/2025/05/09/klarna-ai-humans-return-on-investment/). So far, generative AI does\nhave two winning use cases: slop and scams. Widely available generative\nAI tools are able to generate content that’s similar enough to real\ncontent to be plausible, but different enough that it can beat the\nalgorithms used for detecting infringement and fraud. The AI/crime mess\nis most obvious at the Big Tech companies.\n\n[Meta Battles an ‘Epidemic of Scams’ as Criminals Flood Instagram and Facebook](https://www.wsj.com/tech/meta-fraud-facebook-instagram-813363c8)by Jeff Horwitz and Angel Au-Yeung at The Wall Street Journal[Google Ads Shitshow Report 2024](https://blog.zgp.org/google-ads-shitshow-report-2024/)(You can almost stop reading this report at the release date. A report on the crime level of Google ads that got released on the same day as huge antitrust news isn’t going to be good.)\n\nAnd it’s not just those companies. Sometimes it looks like we’re in a\ndoom spiral of [fake\nresearch](https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/05/17/how-to-make-a-splash-in-ai-economics-fake-your-data/), [bogus\narticles](https://balloon-juice.com/2025/05/17/chasing-the-electric-pangolin-open-thread/) and [legal briefs](https://substack.com/@garymarcus/p-164360492), [auto-generated\naccessibility problems](https://adrianroselli.com/2025/05/do-not-publish-your-designs-on-the-web-with-figma-sites.html), [AI\nslop in educational apps](https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/05/04/duolingo-replaces-its-contractors-with-ai-courses-with-slop/) [and\neven classrooms](https://thoughtshrapnel.com/2025/05/14/the-classroom-ai-doom-loop.html), and, worst of all, as Asma Derja covers in [The\nWeakest Link in AI](https://asmaderja.substack.com/p/the-weakest-link-in-ai), an enforcement of Big Tech points of view.\nBefore AI can\n\nunderstand\n\nthe world, someone has to tell it\nwhat the world means….Labelers in Kenya, the Philippines, and Venezuela\nare handed instruction sets written in California, reviewed in Dublin,\nand told to mark what counts as toxic, hateful, threatening, or real.\nThey don’t decide. They execute.[Rands](https://randsinrepose.com/archives/minimum-viable-curiousity/)\nwrites, I am deeply suspicious of AI, especially after watching\ndecades of social networks monetize our attention while teaching us to\nignore facts and truth, minimizing our desire to understand….AI does an\nincredible job of confidently sounding like it knows what it’s talking\nabout, so it’s easy to imagine what it will do in the hands of those who\nwant to manipulate you.\n\nSoatok writes, in [Tech\nCompanies Apparently Do Not Understand Why We Dislike AI](https://soatok.blog/2025/05/04/tech-companies-apparently-do-not-understand-why-we-dislike-ai/). What\nconcerns me about AI has very little to do with the technology in and of\nitself. I’m concerned about the kind of antisocial behaviors that AI\nwill enable.\n\nThe tech oligopoly is even more out of touch now than\nIBM or Microsoft ever got during their peak days. Big Tech companies\nhave enough power to get away with being mean and dishonest and\nhalf-assing things. Most people don’t. The result is that the\ntechnologies that Big Tech builds, with the assumption that a certain\nlevel of meanness, dishonesty, and half-assing are acceptable, are less\nand less relevant to more and more people.\n\nMaybe we’re not in a doom spiral after all? What if we’re back to\nsomething more like the dismal Microsoft monopoly from which came the\nInternet and free software boom of the 1990s? The green shoots of\nde-enshittification are popping up in lots of places once you start to\nlook for them. Here’s a de-enshittification sighting in a [toot from\nHugo-award-winning author Charles Stross](https://wandering.shop/@cstross/114541747269406389) explaining his switch from\nMicrosoft Office 356 to [LibreOffice](https://www.libreoffice.org/):\n\nCoPilot in Office would open me up to accusations of breach of contract—my book contracts warrant that they’re all my own work: CoPilot brings that into question.\n\nGenerative AI slop has real consequences for [authors](https://www.404media.co/authors-are-accidentally-leaving-ai-prompts-in-their-novels/)\nbecause of reputation risks and contract terms. A Big Tech company’s AI\nservice can output copyright-infringing slop for a user—what are they\ngoing to do about it? An individual author can’t turn in\ncopyright-infringing slop to a big publishing company.\n\nMore sightings…\n\n[12 years of Ghost](https://john.onolan.org/12/) by John\nO’Nolan. As ever, we’re competing with prominent, VC-funded platforms\nwith tens of millions of dollars and hundreds of employees, playing\nzero-sum games to try and control the entire media industry. Now,\nthough, it feels like there’s more appetite than ever for something\ndifferent.\n\n[What\nmakes a tech gadget calm? This certification firm has an 81-point\nchecklist](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/05/what-makes-a-tech-gadget-calm-this-certification-firm-has-an-81-point-checklist/) by Scharon Harding. Currently, six products are Calm\nTech-certified\n\n[How to\nImprove Your Site’s Typography](https://scottk.mba/how-to-improve-your-sites-typography/) by Scott Knight. (More people are\nmaking personal web sites again.)\n\n[Just a QR\nCode](http://blog.fnaard.com/2025/05/just-qr-code.html) by Gabriel M. Schuyler You type something, it makes a QR\ncode. You can also set the size, error correction, and colors. And\nthat’s it. Just a QR code.\n\nSlop, surveillance, and extreme right politics are all part of the\nsame big movement, so political concerns are a big motivator to avoid\nthe first two. [The\nnetworker: Microsoft shutting down email accounts of Trump’s foes should\nbe worrying to us all](https://observer.co.uk/news/columnists/article/the-networker-microsoft-shutting-down-email-accounts-of-trumps-foes-should-be-worrying-to-us-all) by John Naughton on The Observer.\nKhan, who is a British subject, has already lost access to his bank\naccounts, which is what happens when you’re sanctioned. More\ninterestingly, though, Microsoft has also blocked his email account….The\nreality is that it’s a global company based in the US.\n\nMore: [Trump’s\ntrade war risks splintering the Internet, experts warn](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/05/trumps-trade-war-risks-splintering-the-internet-experts-warn/) by Ashley\nBelanger. [the #Eurostack, so hot right\nnow](https://blog.zgp.org/mlp-2025-02-08/)\n\n[Enterprise\nPolicies for Firefox Customization: A Beginner’s Guide](https://www.quippd.com/writing/2025/05/18/enterprise-policies-for-firefox-customization-a-beginners-guide.html) by Asif\nYoussuff. I wanted to post something to enable people who are\ncurrently using dodgy user.js files and forks without security teams to\nuse the mainline version of Firefox, just tweaked in known safe\nways.\n\n(See [Data\nand Firefox Suggest](https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2025/05/07/data-and-firefox-suggest/) for info from Mozilla on one of their ad\nfeatures. Firefox is still good, but they do end up in [weird\nrisky advertising rat holes](https://blog.zgp.org/the-advertising-cartel-coming-to-your-web-browser/) sometimes, so it helps to have an\nindependent tool to fix the settings. Bonus link: [When\nYour Webcam Doesn’t Work: Solving Firefox and PipeWire Issues](https://jgrulich.cz/2024/12/13/when-your-webcam-doesnt-work-solving-firefox-and-pipewire-issues/) by Jan\nGrulich)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-coming-de-enshittification-boom-2025", "canonical_source": "https://blog.zgp.org/de-enshittification/", "published_at": "2026-08-01 04:40:10+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-01 04:52:14.153663+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["generative-ai", "ai-ethics", "ai-policy"], "entities": ["David Gerard", "Meta", "Wall Street Journal", "Jeff Horwitz", "Angel Au-Yeung", "Asma Derja", "Rands", "Soatok"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-coming-de-enshittification-boom-2025", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-coming-de-enshittification-boom-2025.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-coming-de-enshittification-boom-2025.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-coming-de-enshittification-boom-2025.jsonld"}}