The Enshittification of Politics and the Hope We Find
As the year ends, a reflection on the global degradation of politics and the choices it leaves us with.
This is the last post of the year, and the last one before Christmas. It feels dishonest and irresponsible to end it with a gesture of closure, resolution, or uplift. The year itself has resisted all three with remarkable consistency. As the famous Turkish football coach Fatih Terim puts it, in his inimitable Turkish-English: “What can I do, sometimes?”
A Global Condition, Not a Regional Pathology
Gaza, in particular, has functioned over the past year or so as a site of moral exposure, revealing not only the limits but the exhaustion of international law as a meaningful constraint on state violence.
Elsewhere in the region, crises persist in quieter but no less consequential forms: the long-stalled question of Hezbollah’s integration into the Lebanese army continues to hollow out the Lebanese state from within; in Egypt, tightly controlled parliamentary elections have once again underscored how electoral politics functions less as a mechanism of representation than as a tool for extending Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s rule amid economic crisis and mounting public frustration; and the war in Yemen, shaped increasingly by diverging Saudi and Emirati priorities, persists in a condition of managed stalemate rather than resolution.
At the same time, Israel’s renewed willingness to contemplate direct confrontation with Iran underscores how quickly the region can slide back into open escalation. Syria’s transition, meanwhile, still reads like a political thriller that could turn in either direction, even as the al-Sharaa government is increasingly treated as legitimate and “here to stay,” following the repeal of the Caesar Act by the US Congress.
Yet to frame this as a regional pathology would be to misrecognize what 2025 has clarified with unusual force: the crisis of politics is no longer confined to particular geographies or regime types. For those attentive to global political dynamics, this no longer appears exceptional to the Middle East. A more general predicament that cuts across regions once assumed to be insulated from such decay.
Europe increasingly resembles not a bulwark against authoritarian reflexes but a testing ground for their normalization. It faces a dual challenge: economic pressure from China and a security dependence on the United States, whose increasingly transactional politics corrode the Atlantic alliance from within. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s United States oscillates between deal-making, authoritarian impulses, and corruption, while issuing renewed threats against Venezuelathat risk open confrontation and failing to bring the war in Ukraine to an end. Also, no strategic coherence in Western leadership.
There is a plethora of academic terms to describe regimes that suppress pluralism, preside over economic systems that extract from their citizens and deepen inequality, and cling to power through elections or without them. Authoritarianism. Competitive authoritarianism. Electoral authoritarianism. Façade democracy. Hybrid regimes. Crony capitalism. Illiberal populism. State capture. Oligarchic rule. Majoritarian rule.
Alongside these sit more journalistic or poetic attempts to capture the texture of daily politics in places such as Ankara, Moscow, Tel Aviv, Washington, or Budapest. Politics of shamelessness is one such phrase that Mehmet, my husband, and I find apt for describing our moment, though we have come up with other examples in Turkish that are perhaps too unwieldy to share here.
Still, we both sensed that another term had travelled remarkably well, one that manages to name the structural condition we are living through while also indulging, our taste for obscenity. An impulse born of accumulated anger and helplessness.
That term is enshittification, developed by Cory Doctorow, a critic of digital capitalism and platform governance, and elaborated in his 2025 book Enshittification. Although coined to describe the degradation of digital platforms, the concept proves useful far beyond that domain. It refers to a recurring trajectory in which systems initially designed to serve users are progressively reorganized to benefit advertisers and, ultimately, shareholders, until they become hostile to nearly everyone except those extracting value from them. Crucially, Doctorow treats this decline not as a moral lapse or the product of individual bad actors, but as a predictable outcome of weak regulation, enclosure, and rent extraction.
Detached from its technological origins, enshittification offers a language for understanding a more general process of institutional decay under neoliberalism, one in which organizations retain their form while steadily losing their substantive function and raison d’être. Politics, in many settings, appears to have followed a comparable path. Institutions built to mediate conflict, distribute power, and maintain accountability continue to operate procedurally, yet increasingly do so in ways that insulate incumbents, manage dissent, and extract legitimacy without delivering protection, representation, or responsibility in return. Elections persist, rights remain formally codified, and democratic vocabulary continues to circulate, but these elements function as surface features and mask a deeper reorientation toward control and exhaustion.
No Progress But Political Recurrence
What enables this transformation is not only institutional capture by certain individuals in state or private sector but a shift in how political responsibility itself is imagined.
‘Enshittified politics’ increasingly rests on an implicit logic of isolation, in which social harms are treated as disconnected events, structural violence is reframed as individual failure, and consequences are systematically detached from those who produce them. In addition, there is constant gaslighting, as I have explained in this post, through which states and governments disorient their citizens’ sense of reality and choice. From this perspective, the global convergence currently on display appears less as a sudden authoritarian turn than as a shared movement toward political impunity. The Middle East has long been governed within this register. What is new is the extent to which this logic has become legible elsewhere.
At this point, one could follow the argument toward a more radical, and ma’zallah far bleaker, conclusion. Much of the contemporary condition resonates with the work of John Gray, who has spent decades dismantling the liberal belief in historical progress as an empirical account of human history. For Gray, the idea that humanity is moving, however unevenly, toward greater rationality, moral restraint, or political decency is not only false but actively distorting, encouraging societies to treat violence, hierarchy, and cruelty as temporary deviations rather than as recurrent features of human life.
In his latest book, The New Leviathans, Gray returns to Thomas Hobbes to argue that insecurity, conflict, and fear (the core elements of the Hobbesian state of nature) are persistent features of contemporary politics, never fully overcome. He suggests that modern states have become “new Leviathans,” promising security while often reproducing insecurity, and that the post–Cold War faith in liberalism as humanity’s inevitable destination was a mirage. For Gray, this is simply not how human societies operate: there is no teleological trajectory toward moral or political improvement. Social order is always vulnerable to reversal.
Read through this lens, the current affairs of the politics, yani the enshittification of all, does not mark a fall from a stable democratic baseline, nor even a crisis that demands exceptional explanation. Periods of reform, rights expansion, and institutional constraint appear as historically contingent interludes within a longer history of domination and disorder. Rather than durable achievements. The present degradation of politics, then, is just the world reverting to well-established forms.
There is a certain intellectual austerity in this position, and I am not sure, at this moment, whether it makes life easier or harder. I understand that it helps keep us on our toes and warns against mistaking temporary gains for permanent progress. But there is something eerie about it. I may prefer to remain disappointed rather than constantly aware that all good things are passing. You know what I mean?
Solution: Embrace Uncertainty with Solidarity
hat is why I find myself drawn to another way of thinking.
The alternative does not require resurrecting faith in progress, nor denying Gray’s pessimism, but rethinking what hope can mean under these conditions. This is where the work of the historian and essayist Rebecca Solnit, most notably her latest essay collection No Straight Road Takes You There, offers a different orientation, one that accepts uncertainty without surrendering agency. No Straight Road sharpens arguments Solnit first developed in Hope in the Dark, but does so in a moment when belief in linear improvement has become harder to sustain.
Solnit insists that historical outcomes remain fundamentally open, and that there is a persistent gap between what power intends and what it ultimately brings about. Who knows where events may yet land? That uncertainty is something we have to learn to live with, and perhaps even to hold onto.
One of her interventions that I find particularly helpful is the challenge she poses to the dominance of competition as the presumed natural order of political and social life, a narrative often misattributed to Darwin and repackaged as social Darwinism. As Solnit reminds us, Darwin’s own understanding of fitness referred less to ruthless domination than to adaptation within an environment, which often depends on cooperation, symbiosis, and collective belonging rather than ferocious competition.
We are not on this world merely to compete with one another. That is not our sole survival impulse. I find it important to pause on this, to see and name an alternative to that framing.
Since the 1960s, scientific and social theory too, has increasingly moved away from competition as the primary driver of change and toward an appreciation of how deeply cooperation structures both survival and transformation.
A second, closely related point concerns isolationism, on which many of today’s authoritarian narratives are built. It connects directly to the competitive logic above. Compete ferociously for your own kind, disregard interdependence, and imagine a world in which only your kind—whatever that may be—can survive while the rest is pushed aside. There is no such thing. There is no such world.
Solnit describes this as the ideology of isolation, a worldview that insists nothing is connected to anything else and that actions either have no consequences or generate no responsibility. As she writes:
Isolationists and interconnectionists might be more useful terms for the political divides of our time than left and right… You could describe the position as: “Nothing is mutual, there is therefore no justification for aid.”
Hope, in this account, is inseparable from an acknowledgment of interdependence, from the recognition that consequences travel and that responsibility cannot be sealed off at borders, markets, or identities. This is why Solnit returns repeatedly to traditions of mutual aid and solidarity, invoking figures such as Eduardo Galeano, who insisted that charity reproduces hierarchy while solidarity affirms horizontal connection and reciprocal learning.
For example, what is mutual in mutual aid, she stresses, lies not primarily in the exchange of goods or services, but in the underlying belief that those who give and those who receive are bound together within the same moral and historical field.
Solnit is also explicit that hope has enemies, and that these enemies are not limited to despair alone:
When you take on hope, you take on its opposites and opponents: despair, defeatism, cynicism, and pessimism. And, I would argue, optimism. What all these enemies of hope have in common is confidence about what is going to happen, a false certainty that excuses inaction.
Despair, when it hardens into prediction, becomes a luxury available only to those insulated from immediate harm. For those living under bombardment, occupation, precarity, or repression, inaction is not an option, and the foreclosure of possibility becomes a form of violence in its own right. Solnit’s insistence on measuring time in larger increments, on resisting the illusion that today simply repeats yesterday, speaks directly to this point.
Memory, in her work, stands as a political resource. Continuity of memory reminds us that the present is neither original nor final, that we are both descendants of past struggles and ancestors of future ones. That the inability to imagine a different future should not be confused with the impossibility of having one.
It is also why she warns against the casual proclamation of defeat, which she treats not as neutral commentary but as a form of participation that actively shapes outcomes by discouraging engagement and narrowing the field of action.
What motivates political action, Solnit argues, is not certainty but a sense of possibility within uncertainty, the recognition that outcomes are not yet fully determined and that collective action may still matter. Hope, in this register, is not comfort. It is risk. To hope is to take a chance on losing, but also to take a chance on winning, and without that risk, nothing changes.
If there is a resolution worth carrying into the coming year, it lies here rather than in the promise of imminent transformation.
Enshittification is a process, sustained through repetition, resignation, and the slow lowering of expectations.
BUT…
Repair, too, is a process, slower and less visible, lacking institutional sponsorship and resistant to quantification, but no less real for being difficult to observe.
I will continue to write from within this tension in the year ahead, not because I am hopeful in any naive or consolatory sense, but because resignation remains the most reliable ally of degraded systems, and refusing it remains, however modestly, a political act.
Before I sign off, you didn’t really think I would leave you without a book recommendation list, did you? In this post, you’ll find a selection of books you are unlikely to see on any bestseller list, but which offer a genuine breath of fresh air.
I wish you all a wonderful new year and a peaceful Christmas, in whatever way you mark it. And thank you, sincerely, for your support of Angle, Anchor, and Voice over the past year.
In solidarity.
eb.