By Kit Moke
The COVID-19 pandemic was a key split in the public consciousness. By August 2022, the virus had killed 11,062 people across Australia in just two short years—permanently fracturing thousands of families, businesses, and communities. Upon reaching this point, notions of ‘greater social cohesion’ had completely evaporated. The familiar faces of political polarisation, tribalism, and populism had reared their heads with a vengeance, and the country’s short-lived shared narrative came crashing down.
It became clear that repeated snap lockdowns had finally taken their toll. Instigating forces such as conservative media, online grifters, and growing economic pressure had finally reached a breaking point; the floodgates protecting institutional trust had eroded entirely. Community gave way to conspiracism, belief in the common good was channelled into populist rhetoric, and a brief consensus of shared values, collaboration, and unifying purpose was erased. With nothing else to replace it, Western societies began to fall back on a tried-and-true template—a template arguably responsible for the malaise of modern living. It seems complex at first, but at its core, the issue is remarkably simple.
The cult of capital is killing us.
To understand what broke in 2020, we need to ask an important question: who benefits from all this? Pockets of genuine prejudice, anti-intellectualism, and extremist thought had existed prior to the pandemic; however, the complete implosion of the social contract hadn’t occurred in most people’s lifetimes. It’s difficult to pinpoint where this downward spiral began author and journalist Corey Doctorow was able to quantify it, with a term he dubbed ‘enshittification.’
“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market”, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.”
– Doctorow, 2023, WIRED
Doctorow’s focus centred on a unique and particularly corrosive part of the contemporary market: the digital economy. The crux of his argument hinged on the idea that digital ecosystems follow a cycle of decay: the initial growth stage, speculation and investment, followed by a reduction of quality, gradual decline, and an eventual collapse. In this model, companies like Uber, Netflix, and Amazon rely on an initial wave of investor cash, which they use to undercut the market. Once competition is neutered by these artificially low prices, these businesses are free to cost-cut, lower wages, engage in corporate buy outs, and raise prices by obscene margins—because there’s no longer any alternatives for consumers.
However, he argues that this exploitation isn’t a matter of choice. Years of generating no profit, or in some cases, operating at a loss, coalesces into one glaring issue—these services make no money. While a company’s stock can be valued far higher than the comparative profit it generates, investor confidence is not infinite. As deficits grow and stakeholders become restless, these ‘one-in-a-million, revolutionary’ services are forced to engage in increasingly anti-consumer behaviour. This starts the death spiral.
Some companies survive this process of circling the drain, but most do not. When all is said and done, billions are lost in collateral, workers are made redundant, industries are permanently shattered, and nothing of substance is produced. This is the lifecycle of a company in the gig economy. Enshittification is a remarkably apt term for describing this form of wealth extraction, with nearly all involved parties losing out. Corey Doctorow’s prognosis for the future would become increasingly bleak. In a 2024 op-ed featured in Financial Times, he warns “enshittification is coming for everything.”
His prediction was depressingly accurate.
The rise of conspiracy and social unrest during the Covid era didn’t come from nowhere; resent for the status quo had simmered for the better part of a decade, and tensions were beginning to boil over. With the cost-of-living building since the late 90s, much of the population found themselves being slowly asphyxiated by the modern living; foreboding milestones like the war on terror, ballooning inflation, job scarcity, housing affordability, or the 2008 global financial crisis revealed glaring cracks in the West’s global hegemony. A reflexive reaction to these growing pressures was a resurgence of extremist political trends such as nationalism around the late 2010s. Although Britain’s vote to leave the EU and Donald Trump’s 2016 election indicated massive shifts in public sentiment, they were just some of the first dominos to fall in a much larger chain.
Narratives don’t just emerge from thin air. Take an issue at face value, and the public response often clashes or outright rejects capital interests. Practices like union busting, unwarranted foreign intervention, wealth consolidation, or monopolisation are universally unpopular. So, you move the goalpost. Significant responsibility for this decline in institutional faith lies with the media we consume; our actions and responses are inseparable from the way we receive, interpret, and process information. What if that information was contaminated? What if vested interests needed public sentiment to shift a certain way?
Your answer can be found with mainstream media.
To describe it reductively, the role of media often has little to do with empirical presentation of news and instead becomes the sanitation of unpopular issues. Why sell the prospect of invading a country for oil when you can piggyback off the coattails of tragedy—such as how September 11th was used to justify the invasion of Iraq. What’s the point of defending wealth consolidation when you can just blame migrants for the cost of living instead? Is the public becoming frustrated with the increasing price of childcare, housing, and groceries? Draw attention away from the death of community and small business and blame welfare instead. These are the tried-and-true methods of mass manipulation employed by mass media.
Traditional media often claims to harbour opposing views, but this usually amounts to little more than controlled opposition. Institutions like the ABC may present themselves as movers of progress and engage in things like platforming Indigenous voices, releasing stories critical of government initiatives, or highlighting environmental misconduct on the part of big business when possible. But when the ABC’s role is considered within the framework of state funding, many of their actions feel more cynical. The juggling act of criticising power, while still relying on said power for funding, produces a stilted kind of cognitive dissonance.
We cannot assume a passive role in all of this. Initiatives like independent media or community building projects are a start, but these solutions face the same persistent risks of internal rot and destabilisation. To put it frankly, we must begin divesting from the cult of global capital before it’s too late. Neo-liberal hegemony has been responsible for the execution of local industry, the vilification of state-run assistance, and the warping of the global order into a large-scale pyramid scheme. But perhaps worst of all, this ideology has introduced a persistent sense of individualism that is simply not sustainable. ‘Every man for himself’ is not a valid approach for the future. The longer we convince ourselves that it is, the worse the eventual collapse will be. The truth is right there in front of us; our only alternative is to roll over and die.
