Stage 04 of 04
The Squeeze
How value is extracted once leaving is costly — enshittification’s value-shift lifecycle and the harvesting of behavioral surplus.
The Squeeze is what the Trap is for. With the exit made expensive, the relationship can be tilted from serving you to extracting from you — and you’ll largely stay anyway.
The value-shift lifecycle
Cory Doctorow’s enshittification names a three-stage pattern: platforms are first good to users; then they abuse users to please business customers; then they abuse business customers to claw value back for themselves. Named the American Dialect Society’s 2023 Word of the Year, it’s a sharp framework — but a journalistic/activist thesis, not peer-reviewed proof. (Critics note some platforms kept growing users after decline was declared.) We map the lifecycle onto this stage and label it as an interpretation.
Behavioral surplus
Shoshana Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism (2019) describes firms claiming human experience as “free raw material,” refining the excess “behavioral surplus” into prediction products. It is an influential theoretical lens — and contested in parts; economists dispute the “behavioral futures market” framing. Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants (2016) gives the historical arc of business models built on reselling attention.
Naming the source bias
These are perspectives advanced by their authors — Doctorow, Zuboff, Wu — describing intent and advancing a thesis. We cite them as primary viewpoints, not as independent empirical proof of harm, and rate them accordingly.
The way out ties back to the Trap
Notably, Doctorow’s prescribed fixes are the same lever as the Trap: interoperability and a guaranteed right of exit. Lower the switching costs and the Squeeze loses its grip — which is why the antidotes for stages 3 and 4 are, at root, the same.
In the wild
Tactics at this stage
Behavioral-surplus harvesting
Your behavior — clicks, dwell time, location, social graph — is captured as raw material well beyond what is needed to provide the service, then refined into predictions about you that are sold. The product is partly a means of producing that surplus.
Enshittification (the value-shift squeeze)
Once you are locked in, the platform reallocates value in stages: first it is good to users; then it abuses users to favor business customers; then it abuses those business customers to claw value back for itself — degrading the product because leaving has become costly.
Monetized insecurity
The final turn of the loop: the platform sells access to the very insecurity its feed helped create. Behavioural and emotional signals can identify when a user feels low or appearance-anxious, and advertisers of beauty, diet, cosmetic, and ‘self-improvement’ products bid for exactly that moment. The dissatisfaction manufactured upstream becomes a targetable, sellable state downstream — and the products promise to close a gap the feed keeps reopening.