Trust is not merely adjacent to enshittification — it is its prerequisite, its fuel, and its first casualty.
Platforms arrive offering genuine value. Users invest time, data, social capital. They build lives within these architectures. They trust. This trust is not irrational; early platforms deliver real benefits. The problem is that trust is exploitable. Enshittification depends on trust as a predator depends on prey — not as opposition, but as sustenance.
The first paradox: trust is both rational and self-defeating. The user who trusts acts reasonably based on evidence; the platform that exploits that trust acts according to structural incentives. They operate on different timelines.
Enshittification is organized degradation following a logic: court users with genuine value, shift to courting advertisers at users’ expense, then squeeze both for shareholders. Each phase requires betraying a previous relationship. Trust persists even as it’s exploited because it has inertia. The cost of leaving exceeds the cost of tolerating incremental degradation.
The second paradox: trust’s durability, its greatest strength, becomes its greatest vulnerability.
As platforms degrade, they deploy narratives framing it as natural, necessary, beneficial. Gaslighting, repetitive lies, narrative shifting — these prevent pattern recognition. Each degradation is presented as isolated, novel, unavoidable. Trust becomes a tool of confusion. Users who want to trust find themselves unable to locate solid ground.
The third paradox: the more carefully you calibrate trust, the more vulnerable you become to timing errors. Trustworthiness is not a fixed property but a phase in a cycle. A platform can be trustworthy today and exploitative tomorrow.
What remains after enshittification consumes trust? Two possibilities:
Cynicism — trust is always foolish, perpetual suspicion is the only rational stance. But communities cannot form without trust. The cynic protects themselves from exploitation and from connection.
Structural trust — trust placed not in institutions but in structures that constrain them. Trust in the possibility of exit. Trust in your ability to detect degradation and respond. Trust in your capacity to adapt. This acknowledges enshittification as structural reality, not moral failing. It requires systems to be legible, not institutions to be good.
Trust and enshittification are co-constitutive. Each shapes the other. By naming the pattern, Doctorow made it legible. By making it legible, he made it resistible. Trust informed by understanding becomes engaged vigilance — trust provisionally, invest wisely, exit early.
This places the burden on users. It accepts that degradation will occur. But it may be the only honest response. The task is not to choose between trust and enshittification but to understand their dance well enough to avoid being crushed.