The Feed That Forgot Us
Enshittification, Elders, and the Social Media We Deserve
There is a word I keep coming back to. It is not a polite word, but it is an accurate one, and sometimes accuracy matters more than politeness. The word is enshitification, coined by Canadian writer and tech critic Cory Doctorow in 2022, and now — having been named Word of the Year by both the American Dialect Society and Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary — enshrined in the lexicon of our digital moment. Doctorow has since expanded his argument into a full book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (Verso, 2025), and if you have been walking around with a vague, grinding sense that the internet stopped working for you somewhere around 2016, this is the book that names what happened.
I want to take Doctorow’s argument seriously, and then I want to take it somewhere he doesn’t go very far himself: to the specific experience of older adults, who were not the original target market for these platforms, were never well-served by their design, and are now among the most exposed victims of their decay.
I. The Mechanism: How Platforms Eat Themselves
Doctorow’s thesis is elegant and brutal. Online platforms, he argues, follow a predictable three-stage lifecycle. First, they are genuinely good to their users — offering real value, at a loss if necessary, to build an audience. Early Facebook let you see your friends. Early Google gave you search results. Early Amazon found you the cheapest price. These were real gifts, and we accepted them gratefully.
Then, once users are locked in and dependent, the platforms shift to serving their business customers — advertisers, merchants, data brokers — at the users’ expense. The feed fills with ads. The search results fill with paid placements. The inbox fills with sponsored content. The friends you came to find recede behind the promoted posts of brands that paid to be there.
Finally, once both users and business customers are trapped, the platform turns on everyone, extracting maximum value for shareholders, providing the bare minimum to keep the whole thing from collapsing entirely. At this stage, Doctorow writes, the platform becomes a two-sided market hostage situation: you can’t leave because everyone you know is still there, and everyone you know is still there because you’re still there. The lock-in is the product.
Columbia Law professor Tim Wu, who coined the phrase “net neutrality” and served as tech policy advisor in the Biden White House, makes a complementary argument in his 2025 book The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity (Knopf, a New Yorker Best Book of 2025). Wu’s frame is slightly wider: he is less interested in the mechanism of platform decay than in the structural conditions that made it inevitable. His argument is that platforms don’t merely attract investment — they attract extractive investment, the kind that demands returns on a timeline incompatible with genuine service to users. The platform that began as a public square becomes, in Wu’s telling, a toll road. And in the current political environment — with the regulatory agencies that might have constrained them now defunded or captured — there is no one left to set the rates.
Both authors are saying, in different registers, the same essential thing: this is not an accident. The degradation of your social media feed, the disappearance of actual customer service, the interminable doom-scroll through AI slop and outrage bait to find a single post from a friend — these are features, not bugs. They are the logical outcome of a business model that was always going to prioritize extraction over connection.
II. What the Research Tells Us About Older Adults Specifically
I have been thinking about these arguments through the lens of a recent conversation I had with Kelly Quinn, Clinical Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Illinois Chicago, for the Elderware podcast. Quinn has spent her career studying how older adults actually use social media — not from the standard assumption of digital decline, but from a serious research interest in what these tools do and don’t do for people whose relationship to networked life is genuinely different from that of a twenty-two-year-old.
Her research reaches back to sociologist Mark Granovetter’s influential 1973 paper on the strength of weak ties — the finding that our more peripheral connections, the person you wave to at the coffee shop, the colleague from three jobs ago, the neighbor you know by face but not name — are often more valuable than our close networks for accessing new information, opportunities, and a sense of broad social belonging. Quinn argues that social media platforms are, in theory, well-suited to supporting these weak and latent ties: they make the peripheral network visible, searchable, reachable. For older adults, whose primary networks have often contracted through retirement, relocation, and the deaths of friends, this theoretical value is real and meaningful.
“One of the ways that social media benefit older people,” Quinn told me, “is by making those latent ties, those weak networks more visible to us. You might join a group on Facebook that is the alumni of your high school or your grade school, and find people you had come across at much earlier points in life — in ways we could never do 30 or 40 years ago.”
And yet. Quinn is equally direct about what the platforms have gotten wrong for older users. Low-contrast design. Tiny icons. Feeds algorithmically optimized for engagement over connection. The Facebook blue-and-gray palette that is, as she put it, “a very visually challenging environment” for anyone with even slight age-related vision changes. The implicit assumption, baked into every design decision, that the user is young, fast, and easily re-engaged by novelty. “They didn’t think it was important to address the skills of an aging person,” Quinn said flatly. And this from a company whose fastest-growing demographic, for years running, has been older adults.
The research on what this actually costs older users is sobering. A December 2025 AARP study found that 4 in 10 Americans over 45 now report being lonely — up from 35% in 2018, a significant rise in a short period. An October 2025 study from Oregon State University of more than 1,500 adults found that those in the top quartile of social media usage frequency were more than twice as likely to experience loneliness as those in the bottom quartile. The platforms marketed to us as antidotes to isolation are, for many of us, making it worse.
A particularly pointed finding, from a 2025 analysis published in JAMA-affiliated journals, showed that for Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation, daily social media use was associated with significantly higher loneliness scores — a relationship that did not hold for Millennials or Gen X. Older users are not just underserved by these platforms. They may be actively harmed by the way they use them, in part because the network effects that make social media genuinely valuable for younger users — everyone already there, friends easily found, connection frictionless — never fully materialized for older cohorts whose peers arrived late, partially, or not at all.
III. A Consumer Report on the Enshittified Present
Let me be concrete, because the argument sometimes stays too abstract. I want to name specific ways in which the enshittification thesis plays out for older consumers of digital services, beyond the social media feed.
Customer service portals. The disappearance of the human being at the other end of the line is not a side effect of digitization. It is, as Doctorow would say, a policy choice. Every chatbot standing between you and a real person at your health insurance company, your bank, your internet provider, your airline represents a calculated decision to externalize the cost of customer care onto the customer. For older adults navigating complex systems — Medicare, prescription benefits, insurance claims — this is not merely inconvenient. It is a structural barrier. The “self-service” portal that replaced the customer service representative was never designed for someone with presbyopia, arthritic fingers, or a reasonable expectation of a clear answer in plain English.
Subscription creep and dark patterns. Wu’s concept of the extractive platform maps cleanly onto the subscription economy: free trial requires a credit card, cancellation requires a phone call during business hours, the price increases automatically, the “cancel” button is four menus deep. These are not oversights. They are dark patterns — interface designs deliberately engineered to extract money from users who are confused, rushed, or simply trusting. Older adults, who grew up in a consumer culture governed by different norms of commercial fairness, are disproportionately targeted by these techniques. The FTC has documented this. The platforms continue anyway.
The smart device trap. Doctorow spends time in his book on the enshittification of physical devices — the garage door opener that now runs ads because the manufacturer realized that once you’ve installed it, designing around the app is a legal violation. This is the Internet of Things as hostage situation. For older adults who adopted smart home technology for genuine accessibility reasons — voice-activated lights, fall detection, medication reminders — the dependency on platform ecosystems that can be degraded, discontinued, or monetized at will is not a trivial concern. When Amazon sunsets Alexa features, when Google discontinues a smart home product line, the people most affected are often those who most needed the functionality in the first place.
Algorithmic scam targeting. Quinn raised this directly: the era of platform decay is also the era of unprecedented financial predation against older adults. The same data-driven targeting apparatus that sells ads can sell access to potential fraud victims. The FTC estimated that older Americans lost more than $1.9 billion to fraud in 2023, a figure that almost certainly undercounts the actual toll. The platforms that enabled this targeting have, in the enshittification framework, no particular incentive to stop it. Fraud is an engagement event.
IV. The Politics of Letting This Continue
Both Doctorow and Wu are clear that the solution is structural and political, not behavioral. Telling older adults to use social media more mindfully, to call their bank during off-peak hours, to read the terms of service — this is, as Quinn said in our conversation, placing the burden where it doesn’t belong. The power imbalance between an individual user and a platform with a trillion-dollar market cap is not addressable through individual literacy.
Doctorow’s preferred remedies center on interoperability and switching costs: require platforms to let users take their social graph with them when they leave, break the lock-in that makes enshittification safe, restore the competitive pressure that once forced platforms to treat users well. Wu’s proposals overlap: antitrust enforcement, data portability, regulatory frameworks that treat dominant platforms as the public infrastructure they have, in practice, become.
Quinn pointed me, as many do, toward Australia, which has moved more decisively than the U.S. on platform regulation — age verification for children, mandatory news payment negotiations, incoming obligations around algorithmic transparency. Europe’s Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act represent the most serious legislative effort yet to impose genuine accountability on platform power. In the United States, under an administration that sent its tech oligarchs to occupy the front row at the inauguration, the odds of meaningful federal action are, to put it charitably, long.
Which means the burden, for now, falls on state-level action, on civil society pressure, on the kind of organized consumer politics that produced the original truth-in-lending laws and the FTC’s earliest consumer protection mandates. There is, in other words, historical precedent for wresting back consumer rights from industries that believed themselves ungovernable. We have done this before. It took time, and organizing, and a generation of people angry enough to show up.
V. What This Has to Do with Story
I come at all of this, finally, as a story worker. My argument is not that older adults should abandon social media in disgust — Quinn’s research suggests that the weak ties social media can maintain are genuinely valuable, and that the cognitive engagement of learning new digital tools has measurable benefits. My argument is that we should be clear-eyed about what we are dealing with.
These are not neutral tools. They were built to extract value from us, and they have been systematically degraded in service of that extraction. The feed that once showed you your friends now shows you what you can be sold. The platform that once surfaced the people you lost touch with now surfaces the outrage that keeps you scrolling. The connection you were promised is buried somewhere under the commerce, and finding it requires more work every year.
Kelly Quinn made a point near the end of our conversation that stayed with me. She talked about how social media profiles, for all their enshittification, have become unexpected repositories of ordinary life — the granddaughter’s wedding dress candidates, the beach photos, the birthday posts. The platforms that are failing us as connection tools are, accidentally, succeeding as archives of the everyday. “The mundaneness of social media,” she said — the ordinary daily postings, the reactions and the shout-outs — “is one of its appeals.” And she’s right that this matters, that the record of ordinary life is part of what we mean by legacy.
But I would rather we make those records intentionally, in spaces we control, in forms that belong to us. Which is, ultimately, what the work I do at StoryCenter is about: not as a replacement for social connection, but as an act of reclamation. The story you make is yours. It does not run ads against it. It does not downrank it when you fail to pay for promotion. It does not disappear when the platform pivots to the next business model.
The feed that forgot us can’t take that.
Further Reading
Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (Verso, 2025)
Tim Wu, The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity (Knopf, 2025)
AARP, Disconnected: The Escalating Challenge of Loneliness Among Adults 45-Plus (December 2025)
Oregon State University, “Loneliness in U.S. Adults Linked with Amount, Frequency of Social Media Use,” (October 2025)
Kelly Quinn, University of Illinois Chicago — research on older adults and social media
Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties” (American Journal of Sociology, 1973)