A Cauldron of Despair

Apple can't even claim to protect you from third-party surveillance. Sure, they block Facebook from spying on you, but they have barred ICE Block, an app that tells you if there are ICE chuds hunting in your neighborhood, looking to kidnap you and send you to a concentration camp. Apple declared ICE mercenaries to be a "protected class":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/rogue-capitalism/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply

And thanks to Apple's control-freakery – which prevents you from overriding Apple's decisions about your own devices – once Apple decides to spy on you or sell you out to fascist goons, there's nothing you can do about it:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

Then there's Google, the company that ran a free-range livestock operation in which you could roam wherever you liked, because they could always find you when it was time for the slaughter. For years now, Google has been moving inexorably to the kind of control-freak nonsense that you used to only find in one of Apple's crystal prisons.

For example, every year or two, Google floats a proposal to use secure hardware in your device to rat you out if you've got an ad-blocker, privacy blocker, or other aftermarket add-on that lets you choose how you experience the digital world:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

It's an idea they just can't quit, despite the fact that it's fucking abominable and everyone hates it:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/12/compelled-speech/#quishing

Google used to pride itself in its ability to send you to the open web, viewing search as a conduit to other peoples' resources. Now, with AI search summaries, Google is harvesting the open web and then eating the seed corn, keeping searchers inside of Google's walled garden:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/29/arsonist-firefighters/#im-feeling-lucky

Google also took the idea of a free/open browser and ran with it, rehabilitating some discarded Apple code and turning it into Chrome, the internet's most dominant browser – by far. Now, Google is nerfing that browser's plug-in architecture in a way that blocks all kids of user-tunable options, including and especially ad-blocking:

https://protonprivacy.substack.com/p/google-is-finally-killing-ublock

And Google has also announced that they're going to turn Android into an iPhone, making it both technically challenging and radioactively illegal for you to install software of your choosing on your own property:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/google-will-block-sideloading-of-unverified-android-apps-starting-next-year/

Google is adopting every one of Apple's worst practices, and Apple is adopting all of Google's worst practices, and so they're both turning into Facebook: technocarcinization!

What's driving this technocarcinization? Well, the obvious answer is that the more Facebooklike a company becomes, the more ways there are for it to rip you off. Surveillance can be monetized by selling your data, by ad targeting, and by surveillance-based pricing and wage-suppression:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/21/cod-marxism/#wannamaker-slain

Control lets platforms block competing products, extract massive junk fees to the businesses they connect you to, and control repair and end-of-life, forcing you to replace hardware by blocking parts and independent service:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/10/markets-are-regulations/#carney-found-a-spine

It turns out that "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product" is only half-right. The other half is, "even if you pay for the product, you're the product." Pay, don't pay: companies will productize anyone they can. And thanks to our enshittogenic policy environment – where the worst ideas of the worst people make the most money – you can always be productized:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/10/say-their-names/#object-permanence

This is independent of the kind of person running the company. Facebook is run by Mark Zuckerberg, a cringe halfwit whose only successful idea was to offer Harvard bros a way of nonconsensually rating the fuckability of female undergrads. Everything he's done since was an acquisition (Whatsapp, Insta) or a flop (metaverse, Libra), or both (Oculus). Zuck owns the majority of the voting stock in the company, which means he has total control over its actions. He can ignore or fire his board members at will. He is the move fast/break things guy, whose every foolish whim can become policy that impacts billions of people.

By contrast, Google and Apple are no longer run by their flamboyant founders, who were every bit as prone to folly as Zuck. They were constrained by their shareholders, which meant that the blast-radius of Steve Jobs's worst ideas (like treating his otherwise curable cancer with green juice) were confined to his own person.

Today, Apple and Google are run by bloodless business sociopaths who go to enormous lengths to project an air of sober adulthood. And yet, these people – who would never be caught dead bow-hunting their own livestock or climbing into an MMA cage – have steered their companies into Facebook's quadrant on our enshittification 2×2.

I think this shows just how much the enshittification of tech is a matter of the policy environment, not the personalities of the people involved. Sure, the worst people imaginable run these companies, but the reason they're able to yield to their most venal impulses and succeed is because the world has been re-arranged to make sociopathy and greed into fitness factors. We get technocarcinization because the most fit organism for a landscape without consequences is a zuckerbergian techno-crab:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

What can we do about it? Well, we're going to have to remake the landscape to punish (rather than reward) enshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

And in the meantime, there is one inhabitant of the 2×2 that hasn't drifted up and to the right: free and open source software. It's still snugly nestled in the low-surveillance/low-control box, and if you live in that box, your life will be much, much better for it.

There's no better time to make the switch: with RAM and storage prices through the ceiling and OSes growing ever-more bloated with AI and spyware (but I repeat myself), this is the moment to rehabilitate that old computer with Linux:

https://www.fosslinux.com/158206/linux-on-older-hardware-revival-guide.htm