Yes, the Internet Is Starting to Suck More. Neuroscientists Say This ‘Enshittification’ Might Actually Hurt Your Brain.
Platform-decay is real—and potentially brain-changing.By Lauren VinopalPublished: Nov 20, 2025 9:44 AM EST
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IF THE INTERNET feels worse than ever recently, the good news is that there are many people who agree with you. The bad news is that your brain might be suffering as a result.
The slow erosion, or “platform-decay,” of the quality of major online platforms like Google, Facebook, and Instagram is a well-documented phenomenon so pervasive that there’s even a new word for it: enshittification.
And this process, at least according to technology ethics experts, is hurting our mental health. “I do indeed believe that digital platform use has harmed my ability to direct and sustain attention,” says Edward Lenzo, PhD, a visiting assistant professor of philosophy at Muhlenberg College. “Anecdotally, this appears to be the case for all of my students and basically every adult I’ve spoken to on the topic.”
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In a recent paper, Lenzo and Michael Ardoline, PhD, an assistant philosophy professor at Lousiana State University, argue that “platform decay constitutes cognitive damage to a platform’s users,” and the harm is “at least analogous to a minor concussion to the majority of those users.”
While the mild concussion claim is more of a metaphor and not a clinical observation, there are some brain health experts, including neuroscientists, who are concerned about what enshittification is doing to our grey matter.
And, for many of us who’ve felt less focused the past few years—or mentally foggier in general—all this raises an uncomfortable question: Are we enshitting ourselves?
What is enshittification?
ENSHITTIFICATION IS THE process that occurs when digital platforms are helpful, reliable, and affordable at first, but once people start relying on the convenience—and there are seemingly no competitors with comparable services left—the quality of what the platforms offer decreases significantly. More simply, enshittication is when “a digital platform is made worse for users, in order to increase profits,” according to Merriam-Webster. The term was originally coined by tech journalist Cory Doctorow in 2022 and was the topic of his 2025 book.
The inconvenience of Amazon’s decline, Google’s placement of more ads at the top of search results, or Uber and Lyft fares going up while customers complain that the ride-share service has gone down—the walking-back all of these modern conveniences can feel annoying and even infuriating.
Nowhere is enshittification more apparent than on social media services, where A.I.-generated brain rot has taken the place of pictures and videos from people you cared about (or at least once did).
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You might assume that enshittification cause people to stop using the product or service, but because these platforms are so entrenched in daily life (ahem, Google), abandoning them is tough. Especially when you consider that teams of designers and engineers at these companies work hard to track your habits and increase clicks, views, time spent, and to find new ways to capture attention through distraction.
But so what? Isn’t this just capitalism at work? Don’t consumers just kind of have to put up with this stuff? And, come on, Italian brain rot was fun for a little while, right?
Maybe, but there’s also a cost.
Is enshittification harmful?
Experts believe so, in a few ways.
Enshittification feeds compulsive tendencies.
Smartphones and the tech platforms are designed to hijack the brain’s reward system in the same way, says psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dave Rabin, MD, PhD.
“The anticipation of reward and then the potential receiving of reward through the use of the phone results in a dopamine hit,” Dr. Rabin says. Silly brain rot memes and even rage bait—two forms of enshittification now common on social media platforms—releases dopamine. “Whether using an illicit drug or a legal drug or a smartphone, it’s those bursts of dopamine that result in the addictive tendencies.”
This may explain why people are compelled to check their phones more than 200 times a day. Habit? Eh. Compulsion? Very probably.
Enshittification erodes memory and focus.
People have what experts call semantic memory and transactive memory. Enshittification can disrupt how each operates.
Semantic memory is how we recall specific information. Transactive memory is how we remember how to find that information. Google search has done wonders for enhancing transactive memory. “You remember what to Google to get the information, and how to access it,” Ardoline says. When this is effective, transactive memory becomes more useful for achieving a lot of tasks, but the tradeoff is that your semantic memory gets weaker. So instead of thinking of how to solve a problem, you think of what words to search for a solution.
“If Google search gets worse, your transactive memory is now worse, but you’ve also atrophied your semantic memory,” Ardoline says. “Now your overall cognitive capacities are lower. Your cognition is worse than it was when you started using Google search. Lenzo and Ardoline refer to this process as “cognitive deskilling.”
Enshittification wrecks attention.
Cognitive neuroscientist Kevin Woods, PhD, describes enshittificaiton’s toll on attention as a “vicious cycle.” If enshittification makes us check our phones more often—and keeps us entertained there by dompamine-spiking content for longer period—the less capable the brain becomes of sustaining deep focus at any time. And, in turn, that condition makes the brain “increasingly dependent on external, fast-paced stimulation, which further erodes attention capacity,” he says.
The brain’s working memory can only process so much, and there’s a limit to how much information a person can take, a phenomenon known as Cognitive Load Theory, or CLT. There is plenty of evidence that smartphones accelerate the rate at which we max out our loads, “leaving us progressively less equipped for the kind of deep, sustained thinking that complex problems and meaningful work require,” Woods says.
