Cory Doctorow gave us the word we needed for a feeling everyone already had: enshittification. The arc is grimly familiar. A platform is wonderful to its users at first, to pull them in. Then, once they are locked in, it degrades their experience to lure business customers. Then it squeezes the business customers too, to claw value back for itself. Then, bloated and hollow, having betrayed everyone it once served, it dies. We have watched it happen to search, to social, to marketplaces, to every platform we once loved. The question worth asking is not why it keeps happening. It is why we keep expecting the next platform to be different.
The trap is the mechanism
The usual hope is a better-behaved platform — one run by nicer people, or chastened by regulation, or committed to good values in its charter. But look at what actually drives the decay and the hope evaporates. Enshittification is not a moral failing that better executives would avoid. It is what rationally happens once a platform can hold you hostage. The engine of the whole cycle is lock-in: the moment leaving becomes costly — because your data, your history, your contacts, your reputation all live inside and cannot come with you — the platform's incentive flips. It no longer has to earn you. It only has to keep the pain of leaving higher than the pain of staying. Everything rotten downstream flows from that one fact.
A platform decays because it can. The decay is not a betrayal of the model — it is the model, running to completion. The only real exit is to not be captured in the first place. — why a nicer platform won't save us
This is why a kinder platform is not the exit. A kind platform that can still trap you is a platform that has merely chosen, for now, not to pull the lever — and the lever is still there, waiting for a new CEO, an acquisition, an activist investor, a bad quarter. You are relying on restraint, and restraint is the first thing to go when the growth curve bends. The decay is not a bug in the platform model. The decay is the platform model, running to completion. You cannot behave your way out of a structure whose incentives all point at your capture.
Owning the instance is a structural exit
So the exit has to be structural, not behavioral. It has to remove the lock-in itself rather than ask the lock-holder to be gentle. And the way you remove lock-in is you own your own instance — the software runs on hardware you control, your data lives in your custody, and nothing essential to your life is held on a machine that someone else can degrade, fence off, or switch off. When the thing is yours, the whole enshittification engine loses its grip, because its grip was always the threat of taking away what you cannot take with you. There is nothing to take away. You already have it.
Notice what this does to the balance of power. On a platform, the provider can decay the service precisely because you cannot credibly leave. When you own the instance, leaving is always free, which means the provider has to keep earning you every single day — the one discipline that platforms shed the moment they no longer need it. The exit is not that you storm off in protest. The exit is that the door was never locked, so the incentive to abuse you never forms. Ownership is not loyalty. It is the permanent, standing option to walk, and that option is what keeps a provider honest.
Not a better landlord — your own house
The clearest way to put it is that the platform era offered us better and better landlords, and the argument was always about which landlord to trust. Own your instance and you stop renting. The guarantees you care about — that the service won't rot, that your data won't be held hostage, that the terms won't turn against you overnight — stop being promises a landlord makes and start being properties of a house you hold the deed to. A landlord can raise the rent, change the locks, sell the building. You cannot be evicted from a place you own.
That is the whole case, and it is why this feels urgent right now, as AI agents move into the most consequential corners of our lives. The thing that knows your finances, your health, your family, your work is the thing you can least afford to rent from a platform that will, on a long enough timeline, decay — because that is what platforms do. Build it or choose it so that it is yours: your machine, your data, your deed. Then there is no trap to spring, no lever to pull, no exit to need, because you were never captured. The exit from enshittification is not a better platform. It is not being on one.
This is unfinished — making owned instances as easy to live with as rented platforms is the hard part, and honesty requires admitting we are not all the way there. But the logic of the exit is sound, and worth saying plainly while the next generation of platforms is still being poured: don't look for a landlord you can trust. Hold the deed.