From the Great Acceleration to the Great Enshitification and Beyond: Part Two

Part Two: Missed Opportunities, the Great Enshitification, the Consequences for the Young, and the Age of Flux

 

The Missed Moment

The end of the Cold War in 1989 was supposed to open a new chapter. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Americans were told that history itself had ended—that liberal democracy and free markets had triumphed once and for all. For a brief moment, it seemed as if the United States might redirect the vast resources once devoted to military competition into a “peace dividend”: rebuilding infrastructure, expanding education, addressing poverty, and perhaps even taking early action on the environment.

That moment never came.

Instead, the 1990s became a decade of missed opportunities. The neoliberal consensus, now bipartisan, turned away from social investment and doubled down on globalization, deregulation, and the technological boom. Bill Clinton, elected on the promise of a new kind of Democrat, embraced free trade, loosened financial rules, and celebrated the market as the engine of progress. For ordinary Americans, the message was clear: government would no longer guarantee security or prosperity—it was up to the individual to adapt, hustle, and compete.

Meanwhile, the scientific evidence on climate change was already mounting. By 1988, NASA’s James Hansen had testified before Congress that global warming was underway. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established the same year. The link between fossil fuel combustion and rising greenhouse gases was no longer speculative; it was measurable, observable, and widely understood among scientists. Yet the political will to act never materialized. The United States signed but never ratified the Kyoto Protocol. Fossil fuel interests, well-funded and politically connected, sowed doubt and confusion, successfully delaying action at the very moment when intervention could have altered the trajectory.

Culturally, too, the 1990s revealed a shift. The decade was suffused with optimism about the digital future—Silicon Valley promised a frictionless world of connection and innovation. But beneath the hype, the social fabric was fraying. The dot-com bubble inflated a speculative economy, while traditional industries continued to wither. Communities built on manufacturing hollowed out, replaced by service jobs that paid less and offered fewer protections. For many young people entering adulthood, the promise of upward mobility felt increasingly fragile.

The missed moment was not only about economics or climate—it was about governance itself. The flaws in America’s political system became harder to ignore. The Electoral College allowed a president to lose the popular vote and still win the White House. Senate representation gave disproportionate power to smaller, rural states. And campaign finance—already awash in corporate influence—tightened its grip. Ordinary citizens, seeing their voices diluted, began to disengage, deepening a cycle of political alienation.

Then there was the violence. School shootings, once unthinkable, became part of the national landscape. Columbine in 1999 shocked the country, but instead of catalyzing meaningful reform, it became the grim template for a recurring nightmare. Sandy Hook would follow in 2012, and countless other tragedies in between. Each time, the response was paralysis—thoughts and prayers instead of legislation. The inability to address such a glaring public safety crisis revealed a government increasingly incapable of acting on behalf of its citizens, even in the face of horror.

Looking back, the 1990s and early 2000s were a hinge point. The United States had the wealth, the technology, and the global standing to redirect its trajectory—to build a more sustainable economy, strengthen its social fabric, and restore faith in democratic governance. Instead, the opportunity slipped away. Growth was celebrated, but inequality widened. Climate warnings were heard but ignored. Governance flaws were visible, but unaddressed.

This was the missed moment: the chance to pivot from acceleration to sustainability, from neoliberalism to renewal. Instead, America doubled down on a system already beginning to show signs of strain. The consequences of that inaction would not be felt immediately, but when they arrived, they would fall hardest on the generations who had no say in squandering the opportunity.

 

The Great Enshitification

The internet was once hailed as humanity’s new frontier, a digital commons where knowledge would flow freely and barriers of geography, class, and gatekeeping would fall away. In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was a real sense of possibility: search engines that promised to catalog the world’s information, forums that connected strangers across continents, platforms that allowed anyone with a modem to publish, share, and participate. For a generation, this was intoxicating—the promise of democracy reborn in the ether of cyberspace.

But what began as liberation has hardened into enclosure. The open, decentralized internet has steadily given way to walled gardens controlled by a handful of corporations whose business model depends not on empowerment, but on capture. This transformation, which writer Cory Doctorow has memorably dubbed “enshitification,” follows a familiar trajectory: platforms start out good to lure users, then become exploitative to serve advertisers, and finally degrade outright as monopolies extract value from everyone—users, workers, creators—until little remains but a hollowed-out husk.

Social media embodies this descent most clearly. What began as a way to connect with friends or share updates became, by the 2010s, a system optimized to keep eyes glued to screens. Algorithms were tuned not for truth, not for depth, but for engagement—which often meant outrage, misinformation, or spectacle. Advertising dollars rewarded the most inflammatory content, while meaningful discourse was buried. For creators, the platforms promised visibility but delivered precarity: one tweak of the algorithm, and entire livelihoods vanished.

E-commerce followed a similar path. Amazon, once lauded for its convenience and selection, consolidated power through predatory pricing, relentless surveillance of sellers, and exploitative labor practices. Independent businesses were absorbed, crushed, or made dependent on a platform that could change the rules at will. Consumers enjoyed convenience, but at the cost of diminished choice, lower quality, and a system where the profits accrued not to communities but to a centralized behemoth.

Even the search engines that once seemed like the great liberators have been corroded. Where once search results offered pathways into the web’s vast archives, they now increasingly prioritize paid placements, SEO-gamed content mills, and the platforms’ own properties. The open web survives, but as a shadow of itself, buried under a layer of corporate sludge. The promise of discovery has given way to a kind of digital claustrophobia.

The deeper cost of enshitification, however, is not technical—it is civic and psychological. The internet that might have expanded our collective imagination has instead narrowed it, filtering experience through metrics of virality and monetization. It has eroded trust, blurred the line between fact and fiction, and rewarded polarization over consensus. Worse, it has left us dependent on systems we do not control. As ordinary users, we have little recourse when platforms implode or pivot. Our digital lives—our communications, archives, creative work—are hostage to the whims of executives and the imperatives of quarterly earnings reports.

This was not inevitable. Different choices in regulation, ownership, and design could have fostered a more democratic digital sphere. But as with earlier moments in America’s trajectory, profit was prioritized over stewardship. The internet was not nurtured as a public good; it was strip-mined as a private asset. And so the cycle repeated: early abundance followed by consolidation, enclosure, and extraction.

By the 2020s, the pattern had become impossible to ignore. What once felt like progress now felt like decay—an acceleration into diminishing returns. The promise of the digital frontier had curdled into a system where everything worked worse, cost more, and left its users more isolated, surveilled, and exhausted.

The great enshitification is not only a story about technology. It is a parable of late capitalism itself: how systems built on the logic of endless growth inevitably turn parasitic, consuming the very resources that gave them life. The missed moment of the 1990s meant that by the time these dynamics were clear, the infrastructure of daily life—from communication to commerce to entertainment—was already entangled in systems designed for extraction.

In that sense, enshitification is less an aberration than a symptom: a mirror reflecting the deeper exhaustion of the American project.

 

The Consequences for the Young

If the Great Acceleration promised a future of rising tides, and the Neoliberal Turn recalibrated that promise toward individual risk, the Great Enshitification has made clear that the deck is stacked against most young people today. The rewards of society’s labor and innovation, once broadly shared, are now increasingly concentrated at the top. For the generations coming of age in the 2000s and 2010s, the American Dream is no longer a horizon toward which they can steer—it is a mirage whose shape constantly shifts.

Economic precarity defines much of their experience. Student debt has become a millstone: the promise of higher education as a pathway to prosperity is now undermined by loans that often exceed the starting salaries of graduates. Housing, once attainable in a postwar boom fueled by unions and a growing middle class, is now prohibitively expensive in cities where jobs cluster. Renting consumes ever-larger portions of income, while homeownership feels out of reach except for those who inherit wealth. Jobs themselves are unstable, increasingly automated, and often offer no benefits, leaving young people juggling gig work, temporary positions, and the perpetual fear of displacement by technology.

Health and well-being have also deteriorated. Obesity, diabetes, anxiety, depression, and other chronic conditions reflect both lifestyle and systemic factors: ultra-processed food, sedentary work, and an environment saturated with stressors. Mental health crises have become normalized, yet support remains inadequate. For many, the intersection of financial insecurity and societal neglect cultivates a constant low-level anxiety, a sense that the future is something to survive rather than shape.

Culturally, the erosion of trust extends to institutions that once promised guidance and protection. Politics feels distant, skewed by money, structural inequalities, and procedural quirks—from the Electoral College to Senate malapportionment—that amplify the voice of the few over the many. Young people witness elections decided by the narrowest margins or by systemic quirks that ignore the popular vote. Decisions about the environment, healthcare, and social welfare are dominated by lobbying and campaign finance, leaving ordinary citizens to absorb the consequences. The sense of agency, once foundational to civic engagement, is undermined.

Social life, too, bears the scars of historical choices. The dispersal of families in the postwar suburban migration, combined with the dissolution of stable community networks, has produced isolation. Loneliness is pervasive, compounded by digital engagement that connects superficially while amplifying comparison, envy, and disconnection. School shootings and mass violence reinforce the sense of vulnerability and powerlessness, while the failure of policy interventions signals that safety is contingent on wealth or luck rather than collective protection.

All of this shapes a worldview that is fundamentally different from that of the postwar generation. Whereas the youth of the 1960s and 1970s believed in their capacity to change the world, today’s young adults and teenagers are more likely to aim for survival, stability, and incremental gains. Their horizon is constrained by debt, climate anxiety, and the fallout of policy choices they did not make. Dreaming big is difficult when the scaffolding of opportunity has been removed.

And yet, even amid these challenges, the human capacity for adaptation persists. Networks of activism, mutual aid, and technological savvy show that young people are not entirely passive recipients of systemic failure. They are learning to navigate, hack, and sometimes resist the structures that constrain them. But the weight of history—of missed opportunities, neoliberal policy, and societal erosion—presses down relentlessly, shaping a generation whose expectations are measured not in the grandeur of achievement, but in the mitigation of harm.

In short, the consequences of the previous decades—the Postwar Dream deferred, the acceleration unchecked, the neoliberal turn embraced, the missed moment unheeded, and the enshitification realized—land disproportionately on those least responsible for creating the system. The young inherit not a dream, but a landscape defined by constraint, compromise, and crisis management.

 

The Age of Flux

We live now in an era that defies simple description: an Age of Flux in which the foundations of society, economy, and environment are all in motion, often at once. The forces unleashed by the Great Acceleration, the Neoliberal Turn, and the ensuing enshitification have produced a world in which stability is no longer the default, and certainty is a fragile illusion.

Economically, globalization and technological transformation continue to reshape labor markets at dizzying speed. Automation, artificial intelligence, and platform economies are replacing and restructuring jobs, often faster than workers can retrain. Financial systems are increasingly abstract, global, and interdependent, with shocks propagating rapidly across continents. Economic inequality, having widened for decades, is now a structural feature of society rather than a temporary aberration.

Socially and culturally, the consequences are profound. Trust in institutions—government, media, education, and corporations—remains eroded. Digital platforms mediate much of life, shaping perception and discourse while simultaneously enabling both connection and manipulation. Climate change, resource scarcity, and biodiversity loss present challenges that are both global and existential, forcing humans to confront limits that were invisible to the postwar generation. The youth of today inherit a world in which the future is uncertain, fluid, and often threatening.

Yet within flux lies possibility. The very systems that destabilize can also catalyze adaptation and innovation. Movements for social justice, environmental stewardship, and participatory governance demonstrate that citizens can reclaim agency, even in constrained conditions. Digital tools, while imperfect and often exploitative, also enable unprecedented communication, collaboration, and mobilization. The challenge—and opportunity—of the Age of Flux is to navigate complexity while retaining sight of shared purpose.

This age calls for creative resilience: the capacity to imagine, experiment, and act in ways that do not rely on the old scaffolding of stable growth, linear progress, or inherited privilege. It asks us to recognize interdependence rather than individual ascendancy, to cultivate systems that prioritize stewardship over extraction, and to balance human aspiration with ecological and societal limits.

In many ways, the Age of Flux is a reckoning with history. It is the culmination of the Postwar Dream’s promise, the Great Acceleration’s momentum, the neoliberal recalibration of the social contract, the missed opportunities of the 1990s, and the enshitification of digital and economic systems. It is the world shaped by choices—collective, political, and technological—that were made over the last seventy-five years.

But it is also a world of agency. While the past cannot be rewritten, understanding the threads that brought us here allows for deliberate intervention, for designing societies, economies, and technologies that serve broad human and planetary well-being. The Age of Flux is, paradoxically, both a warning and an invitation: a warning that the status quo is fragile, and an invitation to imagine, innovate, and act in ways that renew possibility rather than diminish it.