In 2018 I started a journey to incorporate gratitude into my daily life. To see the small positives around me. To focus less on the negatives that felt like an albatross hanging around my neck when it was just a small inconvenience of life.

This got me thinking the other day, I feel like we are living in the “Good Old Days” of AI. The early days before “Enshittification” as defined by Cory Doctorow in his book Chokepoint Capitalism.

Enshittification as defined by Claude.ai

Stage 1 - User Acquisition: Platforms start by being generous to users, offering excellent service, useful features, and good user experience to build a large user base. They operate at a loss or minimal profit to grow quickly.

Stage 2 - Business Customer Focus: Once they’ve locked in users, platforms shift focus to extracting value from business customers (advertisers, sellers, content creators). The user experience begins to degrade as the platform prioritizes revenue from these business relationships over user satisfaction.

Stage 3 - Self-Extraction: Finally, platforms extract maximum value for themselves and their shareholders, squeezing both users and business customers. Quality declines significantly as the platform prioritizes short-term profits over long-term sustainability.

I am a user of multiple AI platforms: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot. They all seem magical when you put the effort in. They are helpful and patient. They aren’t trying to make me buy anything. They aren’t pushing an overtly biased agenda. They aren’t sending notifications asking me to come back to the app. I’m not following other users. There aren’t algorithmic feeds when I open the app. The switching costs are low. It’s just a useful tool.

But I can see where this is going. In the future these platforms will try to learn more about me. Keep those details in their “memory” and make my experience richer across interfaces (apps, speakers, voice, etc.). They will find a way to lock me in by being useful.

Soon we will be in Stage 2. I don’t know when but it will come. So right now I’m enjoying this time. I’m being more productive. I’m learning to have a childlike inquisitiveness again.

I’m grateful for Stage 1.