The year enshittification became undeniable

BetaKit is ending the year with a look back at the biggest tech stories of 2025. With more to come throughout December, you can read the full series here.

There’s a lovely Isaac Asimov short story that starts in the year 2061 with the last question humans will ever ask. In the story, humanity has managed to solve for infinite energy, yet realized that energy, along with everything else, will inevitably decay. So they ask: can we reverse it? The computer, a 1950s vision of an LLM chatbot, doesn’t have the answer.

This year, the decay was undeniable. So many tech systems that we interact with in our daily lives seem to have degraded beyond usability, or, as fellow Canadian Cory Doctorow puts it, enshittified. Doctorow first coined the term enshittification to describe platform decay in 2023; it was named word of the year by an Australian dictionary in 2024. By the time Doctorow released a book of the same name this fall, enshittification had fully wormed its way into the public consciousness. The word prompts a question: can the process be reversed?

#CDNTECH 2025

BetaKit looks back at the defining Canadian tech stories of 2025.

First, let’s address the obvious: BetaKit is a technology publication. We tell stories grounded in the default optimism of our nation’s tech entrepreneurs. There are many tech companies—especially in Canada—doing incredible, innovative, unshittified things. So many, in fact, that we dedicated our Most Ambitious issue this summer to telling the stories of tech companies, people, and products taking big swings.

But our role as media is to balance that optimism with professional skepticism (always) and criticism (when warranted). And there was seemingly no end to the list of tech that earned a critical side-eye from users for how it swallowed up our time, attention, and money this year.

The year in shit

In 2025, Samsung’s $3,500 smart fridge started showing you ads in your own kitchen; it led to at least one hospitalization after allegedly triggering a psychotic episode. Carmakers like Volkswagen software locked basic features that used to be free, like accessing your engine’s full power, behind subscriptions. Smart home assistants prioritized AI over accuracy. Not even the bathroom was spared from home appliance enshittification: Kohler introduced a subscription toilet camera that doesn’t encrypt its photos but may use them to train its AI.

Google was legally found to have intentionally made its search product worse. Businesses from grocery stores to airlines implemented dynamic pricing, adopting consumer-unfriendly practices from ridesharing companies like Uber and Lyft.

More than half of social media traffic was found to be driven by bots, often posting politically or financially motivated disinformation. Some of it was just AI-generated slop. In fact, OpenAI, Meta, and Google launched entire apps to facilitate the generation of that slop, which users quickly used to make videos of Ukrainian soldiers surrendering, racist depictions of Martin Luther King Jr., and deepfake porn of colleagues and classmates.

This summer, I lingered on that viral, AI-generated video of rabbits jumping on a trampoline—first because it made me laugh, but later because I started to notice its uncanny qualities. Lingering on a video hints to the algorithm that the user wants more; over the next few days, my feed was filled with increasingly impossible videos of AI animals (a bear, a whale) on that same trampoline.

I didn’t look away at what the algorithm fed me, and now it’s all there is to see.

The internet’s 0% approval rating

This month, Time Magazine named the “Architects of AI” as their persons of the year. In one of the cover images, the CEOs of Meta, Tesla, Nvidia, OpenAI, and Anthropic straddle a steel beam—mimicking the nameless steelworkers of the famous 1932 Rockefeller construction photo. The image seemed to suggest that these faces represent the builders of our future, our great cities, our destiny.

Many, especially in Canada, have increasingly begun to question whether the tech those leaders are building is beneficial for us. That question is a relatively new one. In 2000, US public relations firm Edelman reported that technology was the sector that inspired the most public trust. But from 2017 to today, Gallup polls indicate that approval of what it calls “the internet industry” has dropped from about 40 percent to essentially zero. As the FT writes, even the narratives promised by those tech leaders have shifted from optimism to doomerism, despite the fact that “many of today’s dystopian plutocrats are the same people who promised utopia in the earlier phases of the internet.”

One utopian phase of the internet I personally remember fondly was StumbleUpon. The website, founded by University of Calgary grads, let users click through a kaleidoscope of pages. A Tokyo jazz bar’s live recordings. Click. A Mexican mom’s cooking blog. StumbleUpon was shut down seven years ago; one of the site’s cofounders, Garrett Camp, moved to LA and went on to co-found Uber. In 2025, he’s now working on Uber for private jets.

“If enshittification isn’t the result of a new kind of evil person, or the great forces of history bearing down on the moment to turn everything to shit, but rather the result of specific policy choices, then we can reverse those policies, make better ones.”
Cory Doctorow

We don’t really stumble around the internet like that anymore, because we can’t. Our digital lives are now gated in a way that makes it harder or more expensive for us to reach the information we’re looking for, adding to the discontent that has polluted public sentiment toward tech at large. The internet no longer feels like a single, heterogeneous place. Instead, we spend our time bouncing between decaying platforms. Critics have outlined the numerous costs to our time, our environment, our society, while the benefits seem more murky.

That’s not to say those earlier internet eras were golden ages we need to return to. Early internet forums were still hubs for hate speech. Access to information was gated by technical knowledge, or constrained by infrastructure. Consumer-facing tech, for better and for worse, has gotten a lot easier to use and more accessible since then.

But improvements like accessibility require the collective choice to uphold them. It requires funders, both public and private, to prioritize open creativity and collaboration; it requires builders to prioritize users over owners. This year, we were confronted with the many ways we have failed to let that type of innovative environment flourish.

Doctorow said in a speech this spring, paraphrasing Canadian tech activist and writer Ursula Franklin, that technology’s outcomes are not preordained: “They are the result of deliberate choices. It’s a very science fictional way of thinking about technology. Good science fiction isn’t merely about what the technology does, but who it does it for, and who it does it to.”

And, he added, that’s good news. “Because, if enshittification isn’t the result of a new kind of evil person, or the great forces of history bearing down on the moment to turn everything to shit, but rather the result of specific policy choices, then we can reverse those policies, make better ones and emerge from the enshittocene.”

This piece is one of a series of retrospectives published by BetaKit this month, looking at the Canadian tech stories that defined this year. Our journalists wrote about how Canada now finds itself at a series of crossroads:

Whether we can kickstart domestic industry and innovation or continue to depend entirely on foreign tech firms.
Whether our increased spending on defence will make our country safer and more prosperous or simply make us more militarized.
Whether the frenzy surrounding AI will materialize into real economic value or crash out, taking markets along with it.

I’ll add another, returning to the question of whether the process of enshittification can be reversed.

In that Asimov short story, the computer can’t provide an answer to humanity’s question. In 2026, it won’t have an answer for us, either. We’ll need to figure it out ourselves.

Next year, we’ll continue to follow the Canadian tech founders, funders, and critics trying to find those answers. We hope you’ll follow their stories along with us.

Feature image courtesy Madison McLauchlan for BetaKit.