Monopolies are miserable. You can learn this from playing the board game, from studying history, and also from using any communication service operated by a big tech company in 2026.
It's been said that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and it seems that the same goes for monopoly power. We saw it happen with oil and tobacco. It happened with steel and railroads. It happened with newspapers, television channels, and phone companies. It happened with computer operating systems. It seems to be happening with restaurants and airlines.
Heck, it happened with tea and spices as early as the 1600s -- they taught me about the Dutch East India Company in public high school!
Perhaps the title of Sally Hubbard's book says it most succinctly: Monopolies Suck.
And yet, here we are in 2026, with a small handful of companies that own and operate almost the entirety of the digital communication industry. Sure, it is technically an oligopoly, not a monopoly. There are a few of them, so the car manufacturing industry may offer a more accurate analogy than Standard Oil.
My book, Algorithmic Media, explores the unchecked power of big tech companies, particularly in the context of digital communication. The chapters discuss communication challenges that arise for three groups of communicators in the "digital town square:" (1) journalists and news organizations, (2) advertisers, and (3) common social connections like friends and family. Here are a few more details.
Marshall McLuhan famously said the medium is the message, and Neil Postman offered a revised version -- the medium is the metaphor. I prefer to say that the medium is a message or a metaphor -- a very important one, just not the only one.
(I am also attached to one other revision of McLuhan, related to the terminology of the "Global village." His idea was that the spread of new media technologies would connect everyone in the world, allowing us to communicate as if we all lived in the same village. Sounds nice. What the big tech oligopoly has created instead seems to resemble a global casino, where elite owners adjust dials to control the flow of different resources. The enshittified town square has a lot more in common with a casino than a real town square -- TikTok, SnapChat, and Instagram offer addictive entertainment, through features that encourage compulsive use.)
Back to "the medium is the message." In today's digital communication ecosystem, the medium/metaphor/message in question is often algorithmic. That is to say, the media through which we exchange messages will often use algorithmic processes to determine who receives what messages, as well as when and where they are received. To rephrase McLuhan and Postman, "the algorithm" itself has thus become a sort of message -- a central metaphor in our day-to-day thoughts and decisions.
There seems to be broad (and growing) awareness around "the algorithm" (or "my algorithm") as an influential mediator in our communication. But what exactly does this entail? What are the effects and implications of algorithmic media? And why does it matter?
One important implication of our current algorithmic media ecology is that big tech companies have come to dominate. They own us. Hundreds of millions of people spend hours a day on their screens, only to use a handful of services from the big tech oligopoly: YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Snapchat are among the most dominant.
Whether the messenger is a news organization, an advertiser, or a friend / family member, there are fewer and fewer guarantees as to how their messages will be delivered. Many people know this intuitively -- your post may or may not reach your followers, regardless of its quality. Cory Doctorow describes this as a breakdown of the "end-to-end" principle. In a service that follows the end-to-end principle, messengers can reliably send messages to people ("receivers") who have willingly chosen to receive such messages.
Some services used to follow the end-to-end principle, for example, when your feed showed posts from people you willingly chose to follow. It was nice! But it turned out to be a trap -- a setup for future enshittification. The typical three-step enshittification, according to Doctorow, goes like this:
- Be good to users
- Be good to business customers, in part by abusing users
- Abuse business customers and claw back all possible value
Here is how that plays out in the context of algorithmic media services.
Phase 1
In phase 1, the communication service works well. It follows the end-to-end principle, such that you can expect your posts will reach your followers, and your feed includes posts from people you willingly followed.
Nostalgia can be dangerous, but sometimes it's worth remembering the good old days. Remember when you opened Instagram, and you got to see posts from friends and family? And you could scroll through the new posts until you saw a picture that you recognized, at which point, it really was a good time to close the app. It was nice, but it was short-lived.
Before November 2013, Instagram did not even have advertisements. In the beginning, before their enshittification, services like Instagram actually worked: they showed your posts to anyone who asked to see them. To use Cory Doctorow's terminology again, the service reliably delivered messages "from willing senders to willing receivers." It was an effective communication tool, attracting millions of active users.
Phase 2
Then came advertising. This is phase 2, in which the feed remains somewhat usable, showing posts from people you followed. But in phase 2 of enshittification, any advertiser willing to pay the price is able to put a post in your feed.
Phase 2 is the key growth period for companies to build up their business clientele. The advertisers have a heyday. As long as the feed is usable (not necessarily good, just usable), people keep using it. In this phase, the owners sit back and relax. All they have to do is get the advertisers hooked. And if your company is bringing in millions of dollars in advertising revenue, it's worth the investment to hire full-time employees whose only job is to make sure advertisers keep up their spending.
You can think of phase 2 like adding a toll to a road, but only after people have become used to driving on that road every day to get to work. Oh, and the alternative roads are no longer maintained. With advertising, the company starts turning communication into a challenge. If you want to reach your followers, you cannot simply publish a post and expect it to appear in their feeds. Now, to communicate with your friends, you need a strategy: multiple posts per day, carefully-selected hashtags, engaging captions, etc. etc. etc. Even then, your message might not reach your intended audience. Welcome to the great audience competition of algorithmic media, may the odds be ever in your favor.
Phase 3
Phase 3 is the current state of affairs. We all know some things are wrong. I can't speak for everyone, but at the very least, it seems like more and more people recognize that these apps suck.
The platform becomes so saturated with advertisements that users develop genuine fatigue. By the early 2020s, Instagram users were seeing about 4 ads for every 10 posts. The only one who benefits in phase three is the technology company itself -- users and advertisers are frustrated, but they have no meaningful alternatives (thanks to phase one and phase two locking everyone in). Instagram is no longer fun, unless you own it.
This third phase of enshittification makes for a structurally chaotic and unpredictable communication ecosystem. The primary goal is no longer to facilitate interpersonal communication, but to keep advertisers paying and keep users coming back -- to build a better mousetrap. Feedback loops emerge that reward a small portion of users while undermining the more balanced, two-way communication that made these services usable in the first place. Pew Research found in 2024 that about half of adult U.S. TikTok users had never posted a video, and the top 25% of users produced 98% of public videos. A similar study of Twitter users found that the top 10% created 80% of tweets.
The monopoly / oligopoly patterns thus show up in multiple ways. We have a few companies that own these apps. And within these apps, there is a select group of users who dominate the attention field. Again, welcome to the audience competition of algorithmic media!
What next?
As I have talked to more people about the topics in this book, I have become more and more encouraged to realize that more and more people are simply fed up with big tech companies and their services. We hate it. We know these apps suck. Maybe that means this book is late to the party. And, maybe, that means we are ready to organize for better media futures.
How do we do that? Perhaps by some combination of public media, public education, real democratic governance, and probably some other changes that will require us to do more than click. I am convinced that we need to keep making a big fuss about how much these apps suck, and why big tech companies are to blame. Technology can still be cool!
But the purpose of this blog post is just to give you a taste of my book, not to solve all these problems. So if you enjoyed reading this post, you might enjoy the full book. If not, well, thanks for your time.