The technological innovations of the last fifteen years, from advertising enshittifcation to AI cheating, have largely been a disaster. We are sadly at the point where, as Ted Gioia says, “most so-called innovations are now anti-progress by any honest definition.” I dare say that if we could revert all digital technology to where it was in 2009 – before the invention of the retweet – we’d all be better off.

I am not a hard techno-pessimist; I don’t think I could be. I love technology too much. I remember eras where technology was making our lives better; that was most of my life, the ’80s, the ’90s, and especially the ’00s. There’s no iron law that says technology has to make things worse, things have to enshittify. It’s just that they are currently doing so, have been doing so for over a decade. The question is how we change things back – not reverting back to old technology, but reverting back to a state where new technology serves rather than opposes human interests, where it is progress and not regress.

How do we get there? Let’s start by recalling that it wasn’t always like this! Most of us remember the 2000s, the time when we allowed Apple and Google and Amazon and Facebook to get huge because they were delivering great new products that made our lives better. (Thus my own glowing obituary for Steve Jobs back in the day.) Back then, Google still had a motto of “don’t be evil” – and when you have a motto like that and you then remove it, you are sending an obvious message of what you have in fact become. We trusted the corporations to use their technology to make the world better – and they fucked it up.

So what can be done to return there, to a world where digital tech is making our lives better? It’s a tough question when the problems are so many and multifaceted, and I certainly don’t claim to have all the answers. But there are a few clear moves that would go a long way to fixing a lot. Most of them have to do with taking power away from monopolistic corporations and putting them in the hands of governments.

Consider one of the earlier examples of a ridiculous and banal enshittification. This was when Apple – that company founded on a reputation of making things easy and simple – got rid of the standard headphone jack on an iPhone and replaced it with a proprietary connection that wasn’t even the same one it used on its computers, requiring every Mac user to purchase a mess of multiple cables. (I cannot imagine Jobs ever approving of this.) Apple steadfastly refused to take up the obvious simplifying solution of having everything run on the same standard USB-C port – until it was forced to by, of all things, EU bureaucrats! Apple’s excuse for the years it didn’t do this was that the USB-C would supposedly interfere with water resistance – and yet it quickly found a way to make USB-C iPhones live up to the exact same standard of waterproofing as the ones with the proprietary cable, once the government told it it had to. All that Reaganite garbage we’ve been fed for decades about government regulations stifling technological improvement – here, at least, the opposite happened. The technological improvement didn’t happen until the government put in its regulation.

Making more useful products is the sort of thing that corporations are supposed to sort out for themselves under capitalism. When government needs to step in just to make that happen, it becomes clear that the corporations can’t be trusted to manage their own affairs: national and transnational governments, without which corporations could not operate, need to step in and regulate.

For the biggest and most obvious cause of enshittification is monopoly. Tech companies made our lives better in the ’00s when they actually faced competition. Google wouldn’t be making ads appear like real search results if it had any fear that people would switch in large numbers to DuckDuckGo. Better products through competition is supposed to be the whole point of having a capitalist economy; monopoly capitalism gives you all the bad parts of capitalism without the good. Yet governments have so far allowed corporations to kill their competition, and that needs to stop.

Here too the EU has led the way. When I was getting my computer-science degree I was shocked to learn that, if you develop an app yourself and want to install it on your own phone, Apple will charge you a fee to do this, through its requirement that apps only be installed through the App Store; the EU has now told Apple they’re not allowed to do this. (In response, Apple appears ready to allow competing app marketplaces, but only in the EU – which makes the EU a considerably better place than the US to practise the very American act of entrepreneurship!)

When Apple claims that the antitrust suit against them “would also set a dangerous precedent, empowering government to take a heavy hand in designing people’s technology”, the criticism would seem more worrying if Apple hadn’t delayed improvements everyone wanted until the government’s heavy hand forced it to do so. When a monopoly no longer cares about what its customers want, the government must do so instead.

After lessons learned the hard way, Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared “business and financial monopoly… had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs…. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.” Tech monopolies, including once-beloved ones like Apple, have now earned our hatred; a good government today is one that will earn theirs.

As we look to the future, there are dangers worse than enshittification. Artificial intelligence does hold great promise – it has already unearthed details of Plato’s last days and burial place – but also potential dangers, most memorably exemplified in Nick Bostrom’s paperclip maximizer scenario. AI does what it’s instructed to do, and if we’re not careful, that could lead to scenarios up to and including to human extinction. For this reason, researchers increasingly discuss how it’s important to make sure AI is in “alignment” with broader human values. The tricky part of this is that we already have powerful entities that are not in alignment in that sense: they’re called corporations! Just like the AI that acts only to maximize the production of paperclips irrespective of human values, corporations are explicitly designed only to maximize their own profitability irrespective of human values. They cannot and should not be trusted to act in humane or beneficial ways; they need to be constrained. There is only one organization capable of constraining them, and that is government. It can constrain them, and it must.

While the US hasn’t yet been as good about constraining corporations as the EU, there are promising signs: the Federal Trade Commission under Lina Khan has taken a much more active anti-monopoly role, most prominently by blocking the proposed merger of the US’s best airline with its worst. It is generally difficult for the US government to do much of anything these days, with the country divided into two warring camps that hate each other. Yet something unprecedented in this age is that many Republicans have significant hostility toward Big Tech – not without justification – for censoring opinions on their side of the political spectrum. Some of them are even fans of Khan. There is an opportunity for the Elizabeth Warrens and the Josh Hawleys – corporate-bashers on the left and the right – to work together on a bill that would restrain corporations in multiple ways.

Humanity – whose effective leadership is in the governments of the USA, the European Union, and a few other influential states like Japan – faces a choice. We can let the paperclip – er, profit – maximizers continue to innovate us into the dystopian direction they’ve been taking us for fifteen years, or democratically elected governments can force them into an alignment that serves human values. We need active government intervention to make sure that technology serves humanity and not the other way round. We used to have such a régime, back in the very techno-optimistic pre-Reaganite era of the 1950s, in which human beings (as a government program) came to walk on the moon. If we could go back to an era like that, where elected governments and not corporations are in control – maybe then I could go back to being the techno-optimist I’d always expected to be.