I spent over twenty years in commercial banking in Belgrade, Serbia. My entire professional life revolved around balance sheets, credit risk, debt restructuring, and cash-flow statements.
When you spend that long reading financial reports, you develop a permanent allergy to marketing spin. You learn to ignore what executives say on stage and look exclusively at who is paying whom, at what interest rate, and who takes the haircut when the music stops.
That is why I find the current public shock over the state of the internet slightly amusing.
People open their phones and wonder why everything has suddenly become so aggressive, cluttered, and expensive. They complain that Google no longer gives straight answers, that food delivery apps add three layers of mysterious service fees, and that canceling an online subscription feels like escaping a hostage negotiation.
They treat this deterioration as a mystery, or an engineering failure.
It is neither. I have seen this exact lifecycle play out across half a dozen corporate restructurings. The internet did not break because software engineers forgot how to code. It degraded because Silicon Valley burned through fifteen years of cheap money, and the bill has finally come due.
The Era of the Free Lunch
For over a decade after the 2008 financial crash, central banks kept interest rates near zero. Trillions of dollars in institutional capital sloshed around the globe looking for returns that traditional investments could no longer deliver.
A massive chunk of that liquidity poured into venture capital.
Venture capitalists funded tech startups with a single instruction: capture market share at any cost. Startups did not need to turn a profit. They barely needed a realistic plan for one. They only needed user growth metrics to show the next round of investors.
For everyday consumers, this era felt miraculous. We were handed cheap private taxi rides, unlimited cloud photo storage, ad-free streaming catalogs, and instant doorstep deliveries.
Every ride you took in an Uber and every discounted order you placed through a delivery app was quietly subsidized by sovereign wealth funds and venture equity. We mistook predatory pricing for technological innovation.
In retail banking, if a new competitor enters a neighborhood and offers loans at zero percent interest while handing out free coffee, you do not call them visionaries. You call it a loss leader designed to crush the existing lenders. Once the local competition goes bankrupt, that competitor closes the free branch and hikes loan origination fees through the roof.
Silicon Valley simply ran that playbook at a planetary scale.
The Mechanical Trap
Writer Cory Doctorow coined a precise term for this process: enshittification. He outlines the cycle cleanly. First, platforms treat users like royalty to lock them in. Once users are trapped, the platform turns its back on them to attract business customers. Finally, the platform squeezes both users and businesses to harvest every remaining cent for shareholders.
To a banker, this is not a technological shift. It is the classic transition from customer acquisition to aggressive rent extraction.
Consider what happened to search engines. Google began as a clean, astonishingly effective tool. It gave you the best answer in milliseconds.
Today, searching for a basic utility or financial comparison gives you an obstacle course. You have to scroll past sponsored shopping carousels, algorithmic AI snippets, and pay-per-click directories before you reach an organic link.
Google did not become worse at indexing the web. The economic imperative shifted. The platform discovered that resolving your problem instantly produces zero billable interactions. Keeping you on the page, hesitating, clicking two sponsored links by mistake, and bouncing around makes money.
The goal is no longer utility. The goal is toll collection.
Squeezing Both Sides of the Ledger
Once platform monopolies secure captive audiences through high switching costs, they begin squeezing suppliers just as aggressively as consumers.
Take online retail. In the early days, sellers were promised a direct pipeline to millions of hungry buyers with negligible platform fees.
Fast forward to the present day. The FTC’s antitrust lawsuit against Amazon detailed how the platform extracts enormous revenue from third-party merchants through mandatory fulfillment services and sponsored product ads. If an independent seller does not buy advertising on the platform, their own products become practically invisible to shoppers searching for them by name.
The consumer feels this as inflation. The merchant feels it as margin collapse. The only entity winning is the intermediary sitting on the transaction pipeline, taking a cut of every dollar that moves.
In streaming, the trajectory was equally predictable. Netflix trained millions of people to cut cable by offering massive libraries for eight dollars a month with zero commercial interruptions.
Once subscribers became habituated and debt obligations mounted, the script flipped. Prices climbed steadily, password sharing was restricted, and Netflix launched an ad-supported subscription tier.
Consumers ended up paying cable prices for cable-style advertising, just delivered over an internet protocol instead of a coaxial wire.
The Banking Industry Was Forced to Stop This
What bothers me most as a former financial professional is the deliberate engineering of friction.
In the tech industry, they give these deceptive interfaces cute names like dark patterns. If you want to sign up for a service, it takes one tap. If you want to cancel, you are routed through hidden menus, fake discount offers, misleading confirm-shaming buttons, and requirements to call support during narrow business hours.
The FTC’s enforcement work on deceptive design patterns shows how widespread this corporate behavior has become.
In commercial banking, regulators spent decades outlawing practices like this. If a bank hides loan fees in micro-print, obscures interest calculation tables, or makes it intentionally impossible for a borrower to close an account, regulators impose massive fines.
Yet tech companies operated for years under the defense that an abusive cancellation sequence was just experimental product design. It is not design. It is unearned balance-sheet retention. When an app traps you in a subscription you forgot about, they are counting your inertia as recurring revenue on their quarterly investor calls.
Learning to Walk Away
Whenever people complain about platforms deteriorating, the standard Silicon Valley response is simplistic: if you do not like it, switch to another app.
Economists call this ignoring switching costs. If all your family photos, professional contacts, business reputation, and messaging groups are housed inside a proprietary walled garden, leaving is not a matter of downloading a different icon. It requires convincing hundreds of other busy human beings to coordinate an evacuation with you.
Monopolies know this. They build proprietary formats and block interoperability precisely because high switching barriers allow them to degrade service quality without losing volume.
Some relief is slowly emerging through regulation. The European Union’s Digital Markets Act represents a serious attempt to force large digital gatekeepers into opening up their messaging protocols and allowing fair data portability.
Regulation, however, always moves slower than financial extraction.
The real remedy begins with a personal financial reality check. We need to stop treating digital platforms like public utilities or benevolent charities. They are corporate enterprises balancing debt, and their current business strategy relies heavily on our collective passivity.
I have started auditing my digital footprint the same way I used to audit non-performing corporate portfolios:
First, assume anything offered for free carries an invisible balloon payment charged in privacy, attention, or price discrimination down the road.
Second, refuse to keep subscriptions that build artificial cancellation mazes. If an app makes canceling painful, cancel it immediately on principle.
Third, favor open, boring, interoperable tools. I use RSS feeds to read journalism directly instead of relying on an algorithmic feed designed to provoke anger. I store my critical files on local hard drives rather than trusting proprietary cloud services that quietly change their terms of service every eighteen months.
The golden era of the subsidized web is over. The venture capital loans have matured, and the platforms have turned on their users to balance their sheets.
You do not have to volunteer your attention to fund their corporate debt. Once you understand the balance sheet, you stop waiting for these services to get better, and you start looking for the exit.