On The Enshitification Of Everything
Or: Why I Can't Even Enjoy A Crunchwrap Supreme Anymore
A few days ago, I saw a video on TikTok where a young man was lamenting the loss of fun spaces from his childhood. As an example, he put up a picture of a McDonald’s restaurant from 2009. It was one of those classic “play place” McDonald’s, complete with zoo animals decorating the facade of the building. I remember playing in those types of environments when I was a kid. There were ball pits, slides, tunnels; I’m sure the whole thing was horrifically unsanitary, but as a kid who cared? It was a blast.
The same building, the TikTok creator revealed, had since been remodeled into a minimalist, “millennial grey” generic box with a McDonald’s Logo slapped on top. No more fun animal facade. No more ball pit. No more play place.
It might seem odd to look to McDonald’s as a barometer of economic and (by extension) emotional health in this country. But fast food has played a role in our cultural consciousness since its inception in the 50s. Fast food has become a marker of socioeconomic development and cultural hegemony. Famously, Thomas Freidman suggested that no two countries who have a McDonald’s franchise will go to war against each other. Domestically the golden arches and other fast food chains provide the American people with their requisite bread and circuses. (It’s thus appropriate that the mascot for a corporation that serves “billions and billions” across the world is a clown.) And yet, in the past few decades these institutions of American life and its comforts have been eroded to the point of being unrecognizable.
A couple nights ago I decided to act on impulse and order Taco Bell. Max, you’re probably saying to yourself, you live in one of the best food cities in the world, you have access to fresh, local produce, and you’re fundamentally opposed to corporate America in pretty much every facet of your politics: why would you ever eat Taco Bell? Well the short answer is I was hungry, tired, and didn't want to think too hard. The longer answer is, as a resident of a large American city I expect access to certain amenities, but we’ll get back to that in a second.
The experience I had at Taco Bell was one of the worst food service experiences I’ve ever had in my life. I wish I were exaggerating.
As with pretty much everything these days, my experience began on an app. After downloading and installing the Taco Bell app, providing my location and credit card information, I ordered a crunchwrap supreme, some nacho fries and a baja blast. The App instructed me to head to the store where I could pick up my order after giving the staff my name. Sure, simple enough. I walked down the street to the store, found a small crowd gathering around the walk-up window, managed to give my name to one of the workers at the window, and then waited. And waited. And waited. Inside the store seemed to be woefully understaffed. There were two or three people working the line preparing food and maybe one other floating around taking orders and performing other tasks. I should also note that the inside of the store itself is closed to customers. There’s no counter. There’s no table seating. It’s just the drive through and the online order system.
So after standing around for half an hour I started to get restless. And so did the growing crowd around me. I don’t think I’ve ever waited half an hour for food. Ever. Even at the nicest restaurants there’s an expectation that at the very least someone will come by and offer you a drink or some bread or at the very least an explanation if you have a long wait. Instead we got an exasperated (and, I’ll be quite honest, unapologetically rude) worker telling us that our orders must have been handed out incorrectly and that it wasn’t their fault that we didn’t have our food. That set some people off. Two young women who had been waiting for as long as I had started yelling. The worker told them “it wasn’t his fucking problem” and closed the window. I was appalled. One of the others in the line asked if they could get a refund and were told that the store couldn’t do anything for them. Finally after almost an hour I received my order from an apologetic employee who revealed that there had been several call outs that night. “I hear you,” I said as I walked back to my apartment, still trying to process what I had just experienced, lodging a complaint in the all-important app as I went.
Wasn’t the point of fast food to be, well, fast? Why had I bothered placing an order (and paying for it) for pick up on an app when I had to actually show up to the restaurant and announce myself before they even started preparing it? And how could anyone, customer, employee, or franchisee be happy about what had just happened? Is this the norm now?
What I fear most is that my misadventure in mexi-cali cuisine is a microcosm of larger trends at play.
In my last post, I briefly mentioned Sid Meier’s Civilization VI, an empire building strategy game I’ve spent a long time playing (over two thousand hours according to my steam account). I’m certainly no grandmaster, but the complexity and at times overwhelming attention to detail, particularly with how the game approximates things like global tourism, environmental catastrophes, conflict, etc, are what make it so fun to play and so easy to come back to. One of these features is a mechanic referred to as “amenities.”
In short, amenities make your empire more productive. These amenities can come in the form of natural or exploitable resources (e.g. diamonds, coffee, chocolate, wine) or they can be generated from buildings like sports arenas, ferris wheels, zoos, and aquariums. To be considered “culturally dominant,” one of the possible win conditions for the game, amenities are an absolute must have. They translate to an increase in food output, faster construction for districts and buildings, quicker research times to unlock new technologies, and so on.
Of course, the game wouldn’t be challenging if these bonuses were easy to maintain. Amenities can be lost through a variety of circumstances: overpopulation, bankruptcy, natural disasters, and perhaps most obviously, being at war with other players.
As a 33 year old American, I feel like we’ve been at war in some way or another my entire life. I was born the same year Bush The First oversaw Operations Desert Storm and Desert Shield. When I was ten years old we declared a “War on Terror” following the 9-11 attacks. During the Obama administration we used drones to covertly bomb parts of Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. In recent years, our “greatest ally” in the Middle East, Israel, has been conducting its ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people with the aid of billions of our tax dollars. And now thanks to our friends the Israelis, we seem to be on the eve of war with Iran, who was hit with a “preemptive strike” resulting in a death toll of 639 per the Wall Street Journal.
Domestically, a different kind of war is simmering. We’ve had failed wars on drugs and poverty since the 60s. Class war in the form of gentrification and a skyrocketing cost of living has made things like home ownership and starting a family a mere fantasy for many people in my generation. The undocumented workers that prop up many of the industries that allow us to have the amenities we’ve come to expect (and often take for granted) are under threat of arrest and deportation at the hands of an administration that at times seems to be at war with its own people. Last weekend when ICE raids provoked protests, Donald Trump responded by sending in troops to the LA area, including according to CNBC 700 Marines and 4100 National Guard.
I guess my point is, whether there’s an official declaration or not, we’re in a state of war, and perhaps we have been for a long time. And it makes everything kind of sucky. For a while it was possible to ignore, if you had enough status or privilege, the fraying of the fabric that holds our society together. As greedy corporations and power hungry maniacs rub their hands together with glee at the spectre of squeezing every last drop of profitability from the working people of the world, the everyday person on the ground is now living a life increasingly devoid of pleasure, comfort, and meaning.
Perhaps I’m overreacting. I hope that I am. I’d love for my shitty experience at Taco Bell to be a one-off. But it feels like we the people, the citizenry, the customers, the tenants, the taxpayers, are increasingly being left out in the cold by a ruling class that can’t be arsed to provide us with basic quality of life amenities, like a McDonald’s play place, or a walkable neighborhood, or an affordable home.
Even online digital spaces, where once we dreamed of democratic access to information, social connection across continents, and creative freedom of expression have largely been reduced to ads or cheap engagement-driven content. Facebook was once a place where people planned events, announced engagements, and shared their joys and sorrows. Now it’s full of AI slop, and its only usable feature is its marketplace. Twitter used to be a place to get up-to-the-second news, check in on global events, or follow your favorite thinkers and entertainers. Now it’s Elon Musk’s personal propaganda machine. The things we grew to love, the companies that became billion dollar institutions off of the loyalty of their customers, have betrayed us.
In response to my complaint on the app, Taco Bell offered me a whopping five dollars off my next order. With several caveats. No apology, no refund. Just a “thanks for reaching out” and a code to plug into the app. This, I fear, is our ruling class’s version of justice. And as our struggles continue, and the myriad wars rage on, things will continue to get shittier and shittier, until our society becomes an unrecognizable greyscale monopolised blah-scape that we can’t even afford to live in.
At least in Rome, the Bread and Circuses were free.