What Escapes Capture?

Enshittification Has Become Self-Aware

A friend of mine escaped the layoff bloodbath at Microsoft this week. The company recently posted record profits, and its stock is trading near the all-time high but they still shitcanned 6,000 people. Ironically or not, many of these layoffs are from various AI programmes. Their former employer is surely about to tell shareholders that it gave them the efficiency boost they need to be able to do so.

(Incidentally, if you’re wondering just how well Microsoft is going to do in AI, check this tweet out:)

Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification has had its Skynet moment and is now self-aware. If you are unfamiliar with the term, it is the process by which all digital platforms get shitter and shitter until death. Facebook is the poster child, obviously. But X is also on the final bullet point:

• They start by being good to users, giving them free access, etc.

• Then, the value is shifted to business customers. For a while, the advertising works, and your Facebook business page posts or tweets actually reach the people who subscribed.

• They eventually prioritise shareholders by degrading service quality for both users and businesses, leaving behind minimal value. The user experience is degraded by pushing more advertising, which gets more expensive and less effective. Free things become freemium. For business users it becomes exclusively pay-to-play: You must spend money to annoy people who don’t even want to be there in the first place and are not having a good time.

Doctorow says there is a point where a platform goes from “This is awful but everyone is here” to “This is awful and I’m leaving”. Again: Facebook and X.

Struthless has an excellent, recent video about Enshittification and how the internet in general is awful these days.

This Lovecraftian monstrous gestation cycle has escaped the internet and now shapes every economic encounter. Everything is a pump-and-dump scam. There is zero interest in cultivating customers over a long time. Get them in by lying to them and then swing the trap shut behind them so that now they have to pay a monthly fee for a service they do not enjoy but can’t not use.

The most awful ones are the endless pop-ups asking me if you want to use some new fucking AI thing whatever garbage app you are on has decided is a good idea. Opening up Zoom makes anyone suicidal at the best of times, but now you have to navigate endless pop-ups about AI gestures and whatever. Pop-ups! Like I’m browsing porn in college in 2003 again. My MacBook does the same. MS Office does the same. Google, the same. Please use our garbage tools to take longer to do the job you are already doing.

AI tools will obviously get better. But at the moment they are shit. Why are you forced to eat shit? Because they are not there for you. They are there because Director-level midwits need an answer for their bosses when they say “we need to be using AI” so they can tell their shareholders that. That’s what happened at Microsoft. It doesn’t matter that the people who got cut were, in some cases, literally the developers and managers of their AI offering. Because you need to have the AI. That’s step one. And step two is to be able to say, “Look! Look at the efficiency gains we got from our AI solution.”

Terminal enshittification of reality. None of the developments from here on out in anything have even the veneer of pretence that they are about you. All of reality has become a rental. The universe is a gym membership with an AI personal trainer you are trying to avoid.

This is an optimistic post, I swear.

Because you know what? I don’t care. It’s fine. What’s happening is what’s happening. And I don’t mean to be glib about the layoffs. (Although I have personally been laid off in tech/media more than the 6,000 employees Microsoft just dumped combined. It’s a pain I know, let’s say that.)

The whole thing reminds me of a discussion point from the time I was on the Disintegrator podcast. An academic definition of capitalism is whatever the academic doing the defining doesn’t like about contemporary life. And it can all get very Mark Fisher very quickly. You just list all the things you don’t like, assume they are getting worse and decide there is no escape. Complete overwhelm threatens. Are these overwhelming times? Sure. But it is lazy and predictable to be totalising about it.

Here’s what you do instead:

Don’t cut the sandwich horizontally: This is good, this is bad. Cut it diagonally and ask Bayo Akomolafe’s question: What escapes capture?, below:

Systems are speculative.

That is to say, systems are emergent phenomena, not artifacts of pure intentionality or design. They exceed their blueprints, overflowing the architectures of control humans try to impose on them. They are relational, processual, recursive, fungal, and promiscuous, taking shape through encounters, constraints, and the entanglement of forces beyond human "will".

The idea that capitalism, for instance, was engineered as a grand conspiracy in a boardroom - or in the mustachioed heads of profit-seeking warlords - leaves out too much. It emerged, instead, from the frictions of history, from material conditions, from desire as a weathering pattern, from microbial economies, from the logistics of grain storage, from the accidents of enclosure, from Black cadavers propped on necromantic tables, from the wooden cartographies of slave ships and trade winds, from the seductive poetry of sugar, from the whims of markets, from the movement of bodies and commodities across seas. It is not a machine that can simply be "switched off" by policy reform or radical will.

This of course complicates the idea of "alternatives." If we are seeking a clearly defined, prefigured "alternative" to a system we deem oppressive, we might already be reproducing its logic - because we assume that systems are reified things that can be intentionally replaced, redesigned, and made to conform to our sense of the good. But what if systems are less like buildings to be demolished and more like weather patterns - chaotic, non-linear, and responsive to forces, to "principalities and powers" we cannot fully grasp?

"Exiting" capitalism, white modernity, or any dominant system, is not about finding an alternative in the traditional sense, but about learning to notice the emergent, the minor, the paraontological openings that systems themselves produce as they mutate. As they speculate. It is about attuning to disruptions, to what I call "weird fidelities", the fugitive pathways that do not announce themselves as "alternatives," but as leaks, cracks, and dissonances within systemicity.

The question moves from What is the alternative? to Where is the system already leaking? Where are the undercurrents that escape its capture?

This is not a passive position. It is an invitation to touch the meandering, geosomatic, cybernetic materialities of perception. It is an invitation to an awkward grace. I'm no fan of the long-deceased 'Iron Lady', but it would seem to me that a more generative response to Thatcher's famous declaration of capitalist centrality, "There is no alternative!" isn't necessarily "Yes! There are alternatives!", but "Why think in terms of alternatives?"

Systems exceed their blueprints. Capitalism -be it AI-supported or not- “is not a machine that can simply be "switched off" by policy reform or radical will… The question moves from "what is the alternative? to "Where is the system already leaking?" Where are the undercurrents that escape its capture?”

When you extend agency beyond the human, as Bayo does above, you extend humility by precisely the same amount. You don’t know shit about what’s going on and you know even less about what’s coming next. This is the cure for total overwhelm. A humility that, as Gandalf would say, informs us there are other forces in this world besides the will of evil. That’s enough.

That and a resistance to the actually very capitalist assumption that you know exactly how this is all going to turn out. (Bayo again: “That’s how capitalism dreams.”)

The humility comes easiest to the animist. By definition, the whole living cosmos is a chorus of agencies, both physical and spiritual. The animist magician does the best job of getting in right relation with the future: Not ‘predicting’ but ‘thinking with’. (I have a whole course on Prediction and Time Magic included in the Rune Soup Premium membership, btw.)

You can -and indeed must, by definition- find your own way into what and with whom widening out these potentialities can look like. Donna Haraway calls this ‘making kin’. Let’s hold that idea while revisiting where the system is already leaking.

Name the leaks

What is already leaking or might leak around you? What is already in the escape hatch?

Side hustles turning to cooperatives, hobby forums sprouting into federated servers, backyard gardens beating supermarket shrink-flation, seed swaps, volunteer mentoring, local business groups, local currency initiatives, meet-ups of aligned online communities, renegade local councillors looking for support, networks of ‘alternative health’ practitioners.

Feed the leaks

This really is the right way to say it. To say anything else falls too dangerously close to knowing what should happen or seeking to be the sole agency forcing a preferred outcome.

It is simply to show up and give energy to what is seeking to emerge through the web of connections in which you are an intentional node. This generates a permission field conducive to novelty. (I will do a whole separate post or video on being a good node, actually.)

With regards to time, keep agendas entangled with more-than-human time-scales. Martín Prechtel says it is a sign of an intact culture to be capable of performing actions whose outcomes you will never see. Weekly KPIs make strange bedfellows with mahogany planted for your great, great grandchildren.

Compost and Companion

Begin with yourself. Ritualise the Sabbath-Mode: One day a week, switch off cloud log-ins; cook, walk, read, phone someone. The online world calls this a dopamine fast. That’s good, but it’s too small. Intentionally make room for the interior, for the emergent. The whole damn spirit world is in there. God is in there. Set that as your ritual frame -not a temporary change in neuromodulators- and see what happens.

Companion people, processes and objects. Intentionally relating in this way makes room for the more-than-human to emerge.

Seek refuge in compost. This is one of Haraway’s powerful metaphors of companioning. It allows what is current and undesirable to be the food, the energy of what comes next. Don’t discard so-called ‘modernity’, that just makes more trash. Compost it. In every sense of the term, but you can also ceremonialise this by taking it quite literally: Compost your tech, for instance. Keep old laptops alive with lightweight Linux; share repair parties; scavenge e-waste for local parts libraries. (We go from tariffs to World War III. Already, high-end processors are backordered for months.)

Embrace impure solutions. The most vibrant possibilities often emerge from unexpected combinations—open-source communities using corporate infrastructure against itself, or AI tools repurposed by artists to create rather than extract. These "mutant blends" aren't pristine alternatives but pragmatic symbioses.

Practice tentacular thinking. Haraway's imagery of tentacles suggests thinking that reaches in multiple directions simultaneously—not linear problem-solving but exploratory connection-making. How might we develop more tentacular relationships with our tools, refusing both technophobia and techno-utopianism?

Make kin

Take nodes seriously: what if you did all of it? This is what I fantasise about if Rune Soup vanished one day. I would join everything. I’d have a local Solari circle, THC meet-ups, Charles Eisenstein’s group. Back in the valley, I’d join local business groups. I already have friends in local council. I would just…. node like the wind. Get back into the regenerative ag and food growing groups. See what emerges. Make room.

Lee Morgan calls witchcraft the ‘deed without a name’. That is what is called for now. There isn’t a singular ideology or movement whose brand or mission statement, however wonderful, can be stamped all over the world. Nodal is universal now.

Make kin. Form strange alliances. The most revolutionary connections may be the most unexpected—technologists partnering with indigenous knowledge keepers, poets collaborating with programmers, the young teaching the old and vice versa. These unusual kinships create networks of resistance too strange to be easily captured.

So, what then escapes capture?

By design, this question has no definitive answer. But one small offering is this:

Anything that turns to compost before it can be enshittified.