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ALERT: NEW REPORT COMING!
🕑 Added 2025-05-07 18:54:44 +0000 UTCHello gang, the past couple months I've been busy writing and researching for a new report set to debut next month: THE ZIRP SLOP REPORT.
In this report, I trace how the Federal Reserveβs Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) reshaped the American economy after 2008, shifting power from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. With interest rates held near zero, investors funneled unprecedented amounts of capital into venture-backed startups throughout the 2010s.
This era of easy money gave rise to the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy: a brief window during which startups, flush with VC funding, offered artificially low prices on goods and services in a race to acquire users and monopolize their markets.
As many of these startups achieved market control, they entered the next phase: enshittification. This is the process by which platforms gradually degrade -first prioritizing user growth, then advertisers, and finally shareholders- by jacking up prices, spamming users with ads, and gutting the teams responsible for quality and moderation.
This has led to our current landscape: a post-ZIRP internet full of slop. Streaming services are bloated, social platforms are unreadable, and once-beloved apps now exist primarily to harvest attention and extract payment. What was sold as innovation has curdled into managed decline.
COMING SOON :-)
Comments
Jared Kelley
Hopefully bringing Cory Doctorow into this, who has been reporting on this phenomenon for over a decade, and coined enshitiffication.
Gabriel Kent
π₯
