You’ve heard of enshittification: the phenomenon where digital platforms inevitably worsen as they prioritize squeezing users, sellers, and workers for profit. But that’s just a symptom.
It’s part of a global ailment we’ll Decay Capitalism: a shareholder-driven race to the bottom where siphoning value matters more than creating it. A system where quality, ethics, and meaning are systematically sacrificed for speed, scale and above all, greed.
It took the world by storm. And Europe isn’t unaffected. But it resists. Through regulations, through consumers’ rights, through stringent health and safety standards, and through a foundational, democratic respect for its citizens.
The #BuyEuropean trend might just be what strengthens its immune system.
Setting the Scene: The Decay of the Digital Era
We’re living in the golden age of value siphoning. This business model, pioneered by the likes of Meta, Amazon or TikTok, was first diagnosed by Cory Doctorow under the now-famous term “enshittification”. It aptly describes how tech companies, upon reaching dominance, begin to deliberately degrade their platforms. The user experience is sacrificed for shareholder returns, transforming what was once a useful, even beloved, service into a cynical and frustrating pile of, well, shit.
This pivot isn’t accidental; it’s intentional. A company begins with a bold idea. It’s funded, improved, scaled. Customers flock to its slick experience (be it for quality entertainment, fast deliveries, or easy communication) until the platform becomes virtually unchallengeable. Then comes the shift: monetisation and profitability take precedence. Once free or affordable services are cannibalised. Degradation takes over. Value decays. Users find themselves trapped, dependent on a product they no longer enjoy but feel they can’t easily abandon.
However, while “enshittification” captures this process in utmost honesty, it fails to name the much larger engine that enables it, rewards it, and today chips away at European sovereignty.
Hence, allow me to introduce to Decay Capitalism. A system where economic value is meticulously created only to be relentlessly siphoned later, almost always at the public’s expense, and invariably with appalling consequences.
The Decay Lifecycle: an Adventure Where You’re the Loser
Decay Capitalism describes the deliberate degradation of corporate services and ethics once market growth is secured. Its playbook is familiar and now painfully well-documented. Years of observing this model have made its steps predictable, as well as its target: you, dear reader.
- Genesis: The startup is born. It is mission-driven, experimental, and user-obsessed, and it desperately wants you to know it. Amazon declared itself “the most customer-centric company on Earth[1].” Google’s early mantra was “Don’t be evil[2].” At this stage, they project an image far removed from a tentacular corporation: they are well-meaning nerds, annoyed by a common problem, offering a sleek, innovate solution. A solution so convenient, so groundbreaking, that you don’t just adopt it: you become a loyal advocate. And why not? They’re the good guys.
- Adoption: Free or radically underpriced services attract users en masse. The product seems almost too good to be true, fuelling explosive word-of-mouth growth. Adoption skyrockets, end-users become locked-in, and growth turns exponential. No marketing department needed. Think Facebook reconnecting you with long-lost friends, or YouTube offering infinite entertainment at zero cost. Everything feels intuitive, convenient, human-centred and just so damn good that it integrated seamlessly into your daily routine.
- Expansion: Backed by venture capital and optimistic shareholders, the platform scales aggressively, frequently operating at a loss. The rationale is that dominance today guarantees profits tomorrow. Amazon launches 1-day deliveries. Spotify floods users with personalized playlists. Uber offers rides if not cheaper, at least more convenient and comfortable than public transport. Business customers now realize they also must adopt the platform. Your local artisan sells on Amazon instead of the town market. Your next-door band upload their tracks to Spotify. Local drivers convert their cars into Uber vehicles. Competition, on their side, starts sweating.
- Peak Value: The platform reaches its zenith; user trust is high. The startup, now a juggernaut, is unavoidable, edging towards monopoly. Business customers are locked-in as well. Best of all for them: competitors start closing doors, unable to match the tech-driven, heavily-funded rival. However, profitability may still lag. Investors now demand returns. The party is over. Decay Capitalism is knocking at the door. But you don’t know it yet.
- Decay Shift: Enshittification begins. Public relations departments may spin narratives, but customer satisfaction is relegated to the back seat as value siphoning takes the driver’s wheel. Ads flood your feed. Algorithms prioritise sponsored content over the creators or friends you once followed. A fundamental sabotage occurs; had the platform launched in this state, it would likely have failed. But now, it’s too late. You are embedded, dependent, and a prime target for further siphoning, often unable or unwilling to leave. Netflix will not only feature ads cutting your entertainment and deploy further efforts to stop account sharing, it will make you pay the price, increasing them accordingly to… sweeten the deal?
- User Exploitation: Customers effectively become the product. The adage holds: “If it’s free, you’re the product”. Facebook and Instagram transform into an ad-delivery system lightly seasoned with the news or entertainment that initially attracted users; and force creators to pay for reach. Twitter/X gates basic visibility behind an €8 per month paywall, the price to pay for an otherwise collapsing engagement. TikTok captures attention, along with your data, for third-party use. Privacy is compromised, engagement is manipulated through algorithms, and creators are commodified.
- Value Erosion: Quality relentlessly drops, prices steadily rise, and viable alternatives remain scarce, often too weak or too late to offer meaningful competition. Subscriptions and micro-transactions become the default. A license that once offered you lifetime access for perhaps €150 now demands €12/month indefinitely. Smaller digital platforms, and even sectors like automotive (e.g., Tesla features[3]), smelling the profits and in need to convince shareholders, adopt the siphoning model. Meanwhile, viable alternatives remain rare, struggling for funding or visibility. Their branding just can’t compete.
- Systemic Decay: The once-great services are no longer ethical. Google quietly dropped its “don’t be evil” mantra from the preface of its code of conduct for a vague “commitment to the highest standards”[4]. Amazon still proclaims customer-centrism, but the words ring hollow, amidst an experience cluttered with ads pushing low-quality products from brands with names as evocative as “QDSOLQ”. The unassuming nerd from the humble beginnings completed its own enshitiffication process, metamorphosing into an obnoxious tech bro who either call for more masculine energy and less diversity in the office[5] or doing nazi salutes at presidential inaugurations[6].
But you remain, not out of loyalty, but due to habit, inertia, addiction or the sheer lack of convenient alternatives. Soldiering on, you promise yourself you’ll be done soon with the god-forsaken app, while the economic and social consequences ripple far beyond your screen.
Decay Capitalism’s Global Fallout: Consequences for Europe (and beyond)
A system demanding shareholder appeasement over user satisfaction inevitably leads to shareholder-driven degradation, as quarterly expectations hijack long-term decision-making. However, the damage extends far beyond frustrated users and squeezed business customers:
Nations lose digital sovereignty, becoming reliant on predatory platforms and cloud services governed by foreign interests and monetisation. Citizens and business gradually lose control over their data, capacity for innovation and ability to shape the digital environment as the corporate giants define what is possible and what is not[7].
Social media devolves into rage engines. Algorithms optimise for engagement at any cost, even if it means disinformation, division, or surveillance. Outrageous or harmful content often gets rewarded with visibility because drama drives clicks, while fringe theories are given theories and amplified to a disturbing degree.
Workers are exploited to feed the Profit-Obsessed All-Consuming Machine:
- Amazon warehouse workers face gruelling conditions, pushed to perform like robots, dealing with anxiety, depression and burning out [8].
- Spotify’s algorithms churn out AI-generated musical slop, draining revenue from original artists, under the benediction of its CEO[9].
- Twitter/X proudly fires 80% of its workforce, driving massive job insecurity as other corporations adopted the practice[10].
- Gig workers in food delivery race through traffic for precarious, often barely liveable, wages[11].
It’s a race to the loosest legislation possible, as the corporate giants, fully driven by insatiable greed, view any obstacle to value siphoning, such as consumer protection or fair labour laws, as unacceptable. When Zuckerberg calls for the dismantling of the Digital Services Act[12] (an European directive whose sole responsibilities are to protect European consumers from illegal and harmful content, and prevent the spread of disinformation), he means it. When Amazon lays off 4,500 workers in Quebec to bust their burgeoning union, they show you where their values lie[13].
There are countless examples. It’s horrifying, yet it has become disturbingly routine, as public’s numbness prevails.
But why wouldn’t it? People have been trained for this since generations.
The Roots of Decay
Why #BuyEuropean Can Resist Decay Capitalism? Because it's More than a Boycott Call
Many of our core digital tools are controlled by foreign tech conglomerates whose incentives rarely align with the European public good. For Europe, the stakes aren’t just commercial: they are cultural, political, and strategic. A growing number of European citizens understands this.
And what makes #BuyEuropean different from previous boycott calls is threefold:
- Rooted in Identity and Sovereignty: #BuyEuropean taps into a sense of continental identity, a desire to be self-reliant, and a pushback against external pressures, hostile narratives, and unfair practices. It explicitly targets not just individual companies, as we have seen before with Nestlé or Starbucks, but the systems and governments that enable their behaviour. In this sense, it’s a multilayered political stance. It seeks renewed sovereignty, moving beyond protesting specific human and/or consumer rights violations. It’s a step change from symbolic protest to structural rejection.
- Addressing Convenience: The problem with most boycotts is that convenience trumps outrage. The above-mentioned broader consumerist paradigm means that literal slaves in Xinjiang can build solar panels for the global market, and hardly anyone will bat an eye. The #BuyEuropean movement however, is coupled with the creation of directories and applications specifically designed to make European alternatives more accessible, tackling the convenience barrier head-on.
- Alignment with Political Interests: Planned obsolescence was never properly tackled. Though the European Economic and Social Committee explored it since at least 2013[16], only last year did the EU enforce a “right to repair”, without following more recommendations such as clear lifespan labels for devices. Yet, the broader push to foster European consumption and industrial self-sufficiency aligns naturally with current EU political goals like economic resilience and strategic autonomy. Only in the last few weeks, they have been exemplified by:
- Updates on the Digital Euro: a system allowing Europe to decouple from VISA, Mastercard or Paypal, a move championed by the President of the European Central Bank Christine Lagarde herself;
- The AI Continent Action Plan: driving AI innovation while ensuring that AI serves Europe, not exploit it;
- The ReArm Europe Plan/Readiness 2030: embracing the development of pan-European defence capabilities through new financial resources as the Ukraine War rages on;
- And the forthcoming retaliation countermeasures against the USA-initiated trade war.
I wasn’t completely honest by the way. There is a fourth part. The most important actually. For such a boycott to succeed and truly shift behaviour, we needed a catalyst. The election of Donald Trump as the 47th President of the United States was that catalyst.
Building from day one an oligarchy as billionaires publicly flocked to him to bend their knee and attack the European Union, he neatly tied the worse practices of Big Tech with his own authoritarian leanings. In just three months, he:
- Threatened allies with annexation[17];
- Slashed aid to Ukraine and blamed their leader in the process for getting invaded[18];
- Played with the world economy with all-encompassing blanket tariffs[19];
- Endorsed mass deportation and incarceration programs in El Salvador[20];
- Ordered customs checks of tourists’ phones and laptops to reject those who happened to be critics of the “Great Leader”[21]. Straight out of North Korea’s Juche playbook, that one.
All these moves weren’t merely disgusting, they felt sinister on a personal level. That feeling helped #BuyEuropean take off. And if that still wasn’t enough, the Trump administration’s relentless use of the “flooding the zone” strategy (a far-right tactic popularised by Steve Bannon to overwhelm the news cycle and distract from critical matters) ensured that European consumers, business and nations remain repulsed for the foreseeable future.
Through this sustenance, they now pursue ways to avoid the risks tied with American dominance. Tourism to the USA is plummeting[22]; competitors to Gmail report staggering increases of paying customers; EU representatives were issued burner phones and laptops[23]. A level of precaution usually reserved for dictatorships.
A bleak development, yes. But a catalyst nonetheless.
By tying Decay Capitalism so visibly to authoritarianism, defenders of the system made a critical mistake. Suddenly, boycotting wasn’t just about denting corporate profits. It became a defensive act, protecting Europe from being consumed by an unchecked, exploitative, and coercive economic model.
Now, the public awakening is still emerging, but the demand is real: for companies operating in Europe to follow EU laws, uphold consumer rights, and rein in profit-driven KPIs that undermine the public interest. It’s a call for sustainability, balancing growth with core European values: privacy, environmental care, labor protection, diversity, equity, and solidarity, all enshrined in the Charter of Fundamental Rights, itself a part of the Treaty of Lisbon.
And, as mentioned: the tools are emerging to make this shift not just possible, but easy.
Tackling Decay Capitalism the #BuyEuropean Way
1st Way: #BuyEuropean online
If you’re part of the 77% of European users who buy goods or services online, there are multiple directories to help you get started:
- European Alternatives: focuses on alternatives for digital services and products, like cloud services and SaaS.
- Buy-European: easy-to-navigate and exhaustive database covering more than just digital, distinguishing between EU, wider Europe, and European entities with non-European ownership.
- Go European: community-driven website relying on volunteers to track, study and recommend alternatives.
And who knows? Perhaps you’ll find something not only better, but more suited to your needs.
2nd Way: #BuyEuropean locally
Decay Capitalism thrives on scale and monopoly. Supporting local businesses bypasses this model entirely. Buying locally sustains neighbourhood economies, fosters relationships, and keeps value circulating within the community, rather than flowing to distant shareholders via growth-at-all-costs models. Every euro spent at an independent bakery, bookshop, or hardware store is a vote against decay and for vibrant local centres over out-of-town fulfilment warehouses.
3rd Way: #InvestEuropean
Shareholder-Driven Degradation occurs when investor demands override user needs. Investing consciously in European companies (after due diligence on who controls them or where are its manufacturing sites located) or European index funds help keep capital within Europe, supporting businesses who showed their commitment to sustainable or respectful business models. This also directs financial resources towards companies subject to stronger European regulations regarding consumers and labour. And since shareholders are listened to understand where a company should navigate, it allows individuals to align their investments with their principles, gaining a voice (small individually, collectively significant) in how they operate. Don’t leave investing to whales and their purely extraction-focused objective.
4th Way: #UseOpenSource
Open-source software presents another strategy for reclaiming digital sovereignty. Under this assumption, I wrote the first Ecu Radio’s Buy European bulletin to present several of them and redirect readers to a list offering 500+ open-source alternatives. Because rather than remaining captive to proprietary platforms that will degrade over time and exploit your data, choosing open-source offers transparency and control. They won’t be paywalled, they won’t be gatekept, and they will stay open for inspection, fundamentally shifting the power dynamic. Opting for open source is stepping away from brand lock-in and their profit-driven value-siphoning exploitative surveillance. It avoids the emergence of unavoidable “super-apps” -indispensable digital companions creating convenience while locking users into a single heavily-surveilled corporate ecosystem, think WeChat or Grab (a concept Elon Musk wants to emulate for X[24]) and sends the right message to the for-profit competition: be better.
5th Way: #Petition
One fantastic strength of living in a democracy is that your voice not only matters but can be formally heard. The right to petition the European Parliament, enshrined in Article 44 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights (I love it so much), is a great example. Any EU citizen or resident can submit a petition concerning matters within the EU’s fields of activity (reporting infringements of EU law or highlighting where rights are at stake) in any official EU language, from Bulgarian to Swedish. Given that Decay Capitalism clashes directly with consumer rights and seeks to undermine EU’s normative power, the need for petitioning will always arise, ensuring accountability and complimenting above actions.
Hell, the European Parliament explicitly lists consumer protection as one of the primary matter that fall within its remit. And if the European Parliament is not enough, there are numerous alternatives here too. Truly, #BuyEuropean is all about pivoting for more solutions.
6th Way: #D4 – Don’t Depend. Don’t Defend.
Ultimately, being European offers no inherent immunity to decay. If a European company adopts the Decay Capitalism playbook, the principle remains: stop using their services, even if you previously respected them. Avoid defending companies when they prioritise profit over value and ethics. Strive to avoid deep dependency on any single platform, as undeserved loyalty enables further decay. Furthermore, resist the pressure to constantly upgrade, replace, or optimise everything. Slower, more deliberate consumption breaks the cycle of engineered obsolescence and endless monetisation. What isn’t relentlessly monetised cannot be easily siphoned.
From the Bottom of Decay Capitalism to the High of Autonomorphosis
I debated myself to put this paper under the Autonomorphosis label, as it is part of my call for a stronger, bolder, more independent and ethical Europe. Ultimately though, it is a challenge on its own.
Decay Capitalism isn’t new, but its systemic nature is becoming undeniable. It’s not just isolated incidents; it’s the dominant business ethos driven by a relentless, greedy pursuit of value extraction, often through unethical and degrading means. This culture encourages emulation, fostering dreams of personal abundance built on collective detriment. We see a stark example in the US with the rise of the now unified tech bros under the “broligarchy” neologism. Ultra-wealthy tech leaders leveraging their immense power to bend legislation towards further resource siphoning and societal decay.
Buying European, while not the one-size-fits-all solution to a global issue, is however a springboard for the continent to contain it and enforce more sustainable, respectful and simply good practices. What’s happening overseas is unpalatable for many and a model to absolutely not reproduce. By deciding with our wallets can we stop the contagion of the ailment.
Ultimately though, our efforts need to resonate with the current leadership of the European Union, both the Commission and the Council. Yet, these institutions are vulnerable, subject to intense lobbying and the risk of elections empowering Eurosceptic figures willing to dismantle regulations or serve external interests. Vigilance and sustained pressure are thus essential.
Ecu Radio, on his side, will commit to its coverage of Decay Capitalism, striving to shift the current trajectory towards a more constructive future.
And that’s starting with #BuyEuropean, so we can decouple from the Decay Capitalism Machine.
Sources
Sources
[1] About Us – AboutAmazon.com
[2] Google Code of Conduct – Google Investor Relations (Archived)
[3] Full Self-Driving (Supervised) Subscriptions – Tesla.com
[4] Google Code of Conduct – Alphabet Investor Relations
[5] Mark Zuckerberg wants more ‘masculine energy’ and less diversity policy – Alexandre Piquard, Le Monde
[6] Musk accused of making Nazi salute: How 4chan culture entered the White House – Damien Leloup and Martin Untersinger, Le Monde
[7] Digital sovereignty for Europe – European Parliament
[8] Is Amazon a good place to work? – OXFAM America
[9] Spotify Co-President says AI-generated music is welcome on the platform – but it won’t generate music itself – Emma Wilkes, Music Tech
[10] Elon Musk fired 80% of Twitter, and Silicon Valley companies adopted the practice, finds report – Jocelyn Fernandes, Livemint
[11] Gig Work Wages In U.S. Are So Bad They’re a Human Rights Issue, U.N. Poverty Expert Says – Jules Roscoe, Vice
[12] Zuckerberg calls on US to defend tech companies against European ‘censorship’ – Chris Powers, Euractiv
[13] Amazon Lays off 4,500 Workers in Quebec to Bust Their Union – François L’Ecuyer, Labor Notes
[14] China’s Repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang – Lindsay Maizland
[15] Bittersweet Chocolate – Andrew Stroehlein, Human Right Watch
[16] EESC Study on Planned Obsolescence – European Economic and Social Committee
[17] Trump stirs tensions with remarks on buying Greenland, seizing Panama Canal – France24
[18] US military aid for Ukraine is about to cease. Is Europe ready? – David Shimer, The Guardian
[19] Global trade takes a hit from Trump’s tariffs – Miguel Jimenez, El Pais
[20] US/El Salvador: Venezuelan Deportees Forcibly Disappeared – Human Right Watch
[21] French scientist denied US entry after phone messages critical of Trump found – Robert Mackey, The Guardian
[22] European travellers cancel US visits as Trump’s policies threaten tourism – Eva Xiao, Philip Georgiadis, John Burn-Murdoch and Claire Bushey in Chicago, Financial Times
[23] Burner phones only for EU staff on US trips, Commission says – Magnus Lund Nielsen, Euractiv
[24] Super Apps Are Terrible for People—and Great for Companies – Edward Ongweso Jr., Wired
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