Superglas
Makes unbreakable glass, a durable alternative to products engineered to break and be replaced.
Enshitification
Products Used to Get Better With Age. Now They're Built to Decay.
Platforms and products that once delighted users are re-engineered, on a schedule, to extract more value from them: worse for users, then worse for the businesses that depend on them, then worse for everyone except shareholders. The pattern is common enough that dictionaries added a word for it. Twice.
Key numbers
E-waste from short-lived products
Global e-waste generated in 2022
62M tonnes
Formally collected and recycled
22.3%
Right to repair, so far
US states with an enacted law (mid-2026)
7
Americans covered by one
~26%
The evidence
The Three-Stage Death Spiral
Writer Cory Doctorow coined "enshittification" in 2022 to describe how two-sided platforms decay in a predictable sequence: first they are good to their users to build a captive audience, then they abuse those users to enrich business customers, then they abuse the business customers too, clawing back all remaining value for shareholders. Once a platform has locked users in, quality becomes the first thing it can afford to cut.
Word of the Year, Twice
The American Dialect Society named "enshittification" its 2023 Word of the Year. Australia's Macquarie Dictionary named it Word of the Year again in 2024. A term needs to describe something a lot of people are living through before two separate dictionaries recognize it in consecutive years.
E-Waste Rising Five Times Faster Than Recycling
The world generated 62 million tonnes of e-waste in 2022, up 82 percent since 2010, and is on track for 82 million tonnes by 2030. Only 22.3 percent of that waste was formally collected and recycled in 2022, and the UN projects that share will fall to 20 percent by 2030 even as the pile keeps growing (UN Global E-waste Monitor, 2024).
Built to Fail, Not to Last
Non-removable batteries, glued-shut enclosures, software updates that quietly slow older hardware, and firmware that disables third-party parts and repairs all convert a durable good into a subscription with extra steps. None of it is an accident: it is a deliberate design choice made by people capable of designing the opposite.
Meanwhile, Planes Fly for Thirty Years
A commercial airliner is expected to remain airworthy for 25 to 30 years, and when one component fails, the FAA issues an Airworthiness Directive that grounds and fixes every plane in the fleet, not just the one that broke. That isn't corporate virtue. It's the result of a legal and regulatory regime built entirely around the fact that a failure means a plane full of dead passengers and a company facing lawsuits, grounded fleets, and a wrecked reputation. Consumer tech has no equivalent forcing function, so it has no equivalent incentive to last.
The Repair Pushback Is Working, Slowly
Seven US states have enacted right-to-repair laws as of mid-2026, covering roughly a quarter of the population, with more bills pending. These laws force manufacturers to sell parts, tools, and manuals to independent repairers. It's real progress, but it only mandates that repair be possible. It does nothing to reward a company for making a product that never needs repairing in the first place.
What we can do
Aviation and rail don't build for decades because their operators are more virtuous than a phone manufacturer. They build for decades because the cost of failure is attached directly and unavoidably to the people who make the design choices: a defect grounds a fleet, triggers a public investigation, and creates liability that scales with the failure. Consumer products and platforms decay because that link is missing, degrading a product or a feed is nearly free for the company and the cost lands entirely on users, who mostly can't leave anyway. The fix is to install the same kind of link, adapted for products that fail slowly instead of catastrophically:
Phase 1, mandatory durability disclosure. Require every consumer product and platform to publish a plain-language "airworthiness record": expected functional lifespan, battery cycle life, the date software support ends, and a repairability score, extending the model already piloted by France's repair index and the EU's Digital Product Passport to phones, appliances, and app terms of service alike.
Phase 2, liability that scales with revenue, not just injury. Treat engineered obsolescence, an update that bricks a device, a lock-in followed by a price hike, a paid feature quietly removed, as a compensable defect under product liability law, with statutory damages tied to the revenue the company drew from the affected product line, so cutting corners costs more than it saves.
Phase 3, an NTSB for products. Fund an independent body that investigates large-scale degradation the way the NTSB investigates crashes: publishing root-cause reports when a firmware update disables third-party parts or a platform change harms millions of users, and mandating a fix across every affected unit or account, not a settlement with whoever happened to sue.
Sources: Cory Doctorow, "Tiktok's enshittification" (craphound.com, 2023); American Dialect Society; Macquarie Dictionary; UN Global E-waste Monitor 2024 (UNITAR/ITU); The Repair Association (repair.org); U.S. PIRG
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