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Have you noticed that software just keeps getting worse? Your phone updates and something breaks. Your favorite app redesigns and suddenly it’s harder to use. Your operating system adds features nobody asked for and slows everything down. Every single year, the tools we rely on get a little more hostile, a little more extractive. You’re not imagining it. Software really is getting worse. And there’s a reason.

Andrew Kelley, the creator of the Zig programming language, gave a talk called “Don’t Take the Black Pill” at Software Summit 2026. And what he laid out explains everything you’ve been feeling about the tools you use every day. The core problem is this: the people who build software and the people who manage software companies are increasingly at odds. Engineers want to make things that work well, that respect users, that solve real problems. Management wants to hit quarterly numbers, maximize shareholder returns, and extract as much value as possible from every user interaction. Over the past two decades, management has been winning — not by building better products, but by systematically degrading the ones we already have.

This is what’s been called enshittification, and the mechanics are brutally simple. A platform starts by being genuinely useful to users. Then it shifts to being useful to businesses who pay to reach those users. Then it becomes useful to the platform itself, which extracts maximum rent from everyone involved. Users get a worse product. Businesses face higher costs. The platform’s shareholders get richer. It’s a textbook extraction economy — value flows upward while everything below it deteriorates.

But Kelley exposed something deeper that most people miss. The engineers inside these companies often know exactly what’s wrong. They can see the rot. They have the skills to fix it. But they’re blocked — by management, by incentive structures, by the shareholder-first model that treats long-term quality as an obstacle to short-term profit. So they practice what Kelley calls benevolent non-compliance. They quietly build the things they know users need, outside official channels, sometimes against explicit direction. It’s not sabotage. It’s the opposite. It’s people who care about their craft finding ways to deliver value when the system is designed to prevent it.

The platforms have also gotten much smarter about locking users in. DRM — digital rights management — is marketed as anti-piracy protection. But in practice it’s coercionware. It prevents you from modifying software you’ve paid for. It prevents you from owning the tools you depend on. It turns every piece of software into a subscription, a leash. Your phone, your car, your thermostat — all designed so that you never truly control them. And the data they collect feeds an attention economy optimized not for your wellbeing, but for engagement. Doomscrolling isn’t a personal failing. It’s engineered behavior, deployed by some of the most talented engineers alive, aimed directly at you for profit.

Russia figured this out before most people did. They saw the vulnerabilities in social media — not technical ones, but structural ones. The same extraction economy that degrades software also degrades information. When a platform optimizes for engagement over truth, it becomes a vector for manipulation. That’s not a bug. That’s the business model working exactly as designed.

So what do we actually do about this? The pessimistic take — the black pill — is that all of this is inevitable. That monopoly power and rent-seeking will keep winning and there’s nothing we can do. But Kelley’s point is that we don’t need permission to build alternatives. We don’t need massive funding or corporate backing. We need a computer, curiosity, and time. That’s it. Linux already runs the internet. Wikipedia already replaced encyclopedias. The tools to build a better digital world already exist. What’s been missing is collective will — the shared understanding that when we demand better software and build it ourselves, we’re not just fixing a technical problem. We’re reclaiming something fundamental about our relationship with technology.

If this hit home, subscribe and share this with someone who’s felt the frustration of software getting worse. Drop a comment about the worst example of enshittification you’ve encountered — I read every single one. Please like, comment, follow, share. It really helps out. Until next time, comrades.