![[Audio/Capitalizing on unconsciousness - audio 2026-10-15T16-49-05-614Z-d94e7b3e.mp3]] You probably remember deciding to subscribe to a streaming service. There was something you wanted to watch, the price seemed reasonable, and you signed up. You might have a harder time remembering the last time you decided to stay. The payments continued. The service became familiar. Perhaps the price increased, advertisements appeared, or the shows you wanted moved elsewhere. None of those changes necessarily prompted another decision. You had already made one. The company, however, never stopped making decisions about you. That gap interests me. One side is actively evaluating the exchange. The other is continuing an old decision under new conditions. There is money to be made in that gap. ## The decision that keeps spending Enshittification gives us a name for the experience of a service getting worse after people have come to depend on it. Shrinkflation describes something more specific: the package contains less, but the price stays the same. I see a common mechanism underneath them: capitalizing on unconsciousness. By unconsciousness, I mean continuing an exchange without noticing that its terms have changed. The customer remembers a product being worth the money and keeps buying it. The seller discovers how much of that value can disappear before the customer makes a new decision. A slightly smaller package may not attract attention. Neither may another small subscription increase. Each change can seem too minor to investigate, even when the accumulated difference would have changed the original purchase. Not every increase is an attempt to exploit inattention. Costs rise, circumstances change, and a business can need a higher price to keep providing the same service. I am interested in the cases where the business improves its return by relying on the customer not reconsidering theirs. A company may begin by working very hard to offer something people want. It has few customers, little reputation, and no established habit working in its favor. It needs to persuade people to try it. Later, growth becomes harder. The obvious customers have signed up. Reaching new ones may require a substantial improvement, and producing that improvement can be expensive and uncertain. Management changes. An owner wants a better return. Someone starts looking at the customers who are already paying. The business can keep trying to create more value. It can also test how much less it can provide without losing enough customers to make the change unprofitable. The second option may be easier. ## Getting someone to buy is hard I think this is easy to underestimate because most of us experience commerce primarily as buyers. We spend money constantly. A meal, a shirt, a trip. From our side, people appear quite willing to hand over money because we keep doing it ourselves. But consider everything you did not buy. You walk into a store, choose one shirt, and walk past hundreds of others. Every one of those shirts was an opportunity for someone to make a sale. Almost all of them failed to persuade you. Our purchases attract our attention. Our refusals usually do not. We can decline hundreds of offers without even experiencing them as decisions. Trying to sell something makes the other side of this much clearer. Someone has to notice your offer, want it, trust you, and prefer giving you their money to everything else they could do with it. That takes work. Most salaried workers encounter that difficulty most directly when looking for a job. They have to convince a buyer that their services are worth the price. Once hired, they can go years without having to make that sale to someone new. A returning customer is valuable partly because the seller does not have to persuade them from the beginning every time. There is nothing wrong with that. Familiarity saves effort on both sides. The problem starts when the relationship continues because the buyer stopped evaluating it, and the seller begins treating that inattention as something to monetize. ## Your job is an exchange too We tend to put buying a subscription and working a salaried job into different mental categories. Economically, both involve a buyer and a seller. When I buy a service, I provide money and receive something I value. When I take a job, my employer provides money and receives my time, effort, and expertise. The direction of the money changes. The need to examine the exchange does not. Suppose a job begins with reasonable hours and manageable responsibilities. Over time, the responsibilities expand. Evenings become available to the company. Weekend requests become routine. The salary stays the same. The employer is receiving more service for the same price. From the employee's side, the compensation buys less of the life it was supposed to support. The paycheck may look unchanged while the deal has become substantially worse. If I continue accepting those terms, the company may have little immediate financial reason to improve them. My dissatisfaction matters to me, but if it never affects what I provide or what the company must pay, the arrangement can continue. That does not mean every employee can simply leave. Health insurance, dependents, immigration status, limited savings, and a weak job market can make departure costly or dangerous. A customer can also be trapped by missing alternatives or the difficulty of moving their data. Staying is not proof that someone likes the deal. It may reveal how expensive it is to escape. Still, where I do have choices, I want to notice them. I can discuss the changed workload, negotiate compensation, set limits, or begin looking elsewhere. I do not have to quit tomorrow to stop treating yesterday's agreement as a permanent decision. ## The friendliness is part of the offer There is another reason these changes can feel so personal: businesses often invite us to understand the relationship personally. They describe customers as a community and employees as family. They remember our preferences. They make us feel recognized and welcome. That treatment can have real value. A pleasant interaction is part of what I might be paying for. The people involved may also genuinely like me. But friendliness does not remove the commercial relationship underneath it. A boss can care about me and still decide that the company no longer needs my services. I can like a business owner and still buy elsewhere because their product no longer makes sense for me. Neither side's affection automatically settles the transaction. The confusion becomes especially costly when the expectations run in only one direction. A manager asks me to work extra hours because we are family, then treats compensation as a strictly business decision. A company appeals to my loyalty while steadily reducing what it gives me in return. I do not want to offer the obligations of friendship to someone who reserves the right to respond only as a buyer. This does not mean business exists outside morality. Honesty, consent, and keeping promises still matter. A financial incentive can explain conduct without excusing it. It means I should understand what kind of relationship I am participating in. I can appreciate kindness without mistaking it for a promise that the other party will protect my interests at its own expense. ## What our choices reward Airline tickets offer a useful example of how our decisions can work against our stated preferences. Suppose I say I want more space, better service, and a ticket that includes my bag. Then I search for flights, sort by the displayed fare, and choose the cheapest one without comparing the full experience or total cost. I have rewarded the lower displayed price. An airline trying to win that sale has a reason to make its offer look cheaper, even if doing so means charging separately for things I wanted included. Some travelers will pay more for comfort or flexibility. Others cannot afford to. The point is not that everyone secretly wants bad service. It is that a business responds to the choices that produce revenue, and those choices can differ from the preferences we express. I cannot insist that personal service is priceless, refuse every opportunity to pay anything for it, and expect the seller never to notice. I also cannot assume that the cheapest offer today will remain the best exchange after I have stopped comparing it with anything else. Better data gives businesses more opportunities to study this difference between what we say and what we do. They can test prices, watch cancellations, and measure whether a reduction in service actually drives enough people away to cost them money. I think some of what we describe as a decline in business morality is businesses becoming more precise about what customers will tolerate. They do not have to guess how much we value a feature when they can remove it and see whether we leave. That does not reveal everything we value. It reveals what we will pay for, give up, or endure under the choices available to us. But when I have a reasonable alternative and keep buying something I say is no longer worth it, the business learns that my objection does not require a response. I may care about quality. I may also care more about avoiding the inconvenience of changing. My purchase gives the company a reason to act on the second preference. ## Better businesses need the sale There is someone missing from the usual complaint about enshittification: the person trying to offer something better. Somewhere, someone may be doing the work I say I want businesses to do. They are making a better product, offering clearer prices, or providing service that requires more care. They still have to persuade customers to leave what is familiar and try it. Every time I recognize that their offer is better but stay with the worse one because changing is inconvenient, they lose a potential sale. The business I criticize keeps the revenue. The business whose behavior I want to encourage receives my approval, but none of my money. Approval does not pay its employees. Better offers need customers willing to find them, evaluate them, and occasionally endure some discomfort to make the change. Otherwise, I am asking someone to take the risk of building a better business while refusing the effort of becoming its customer. This applies to work too. An employer offering reasonable hours and a healthier environment needs people willing to consider that offer. If I insist that those conditions matter but never investigate what another employer offers, my current employer may continue buying more of my life at the old price. I do not owe a sale to every business claiming to be better. The alternative has to earn it. But if I want better offers to survive, I have to be willing to let them win. ## Choosing again I want to stop treating every worsening deal as a personal betrayal. A seller trying to improve its return is not, by itself, evidence of a moral failure. When I expect it to preserve my interests out of affection or loyalty, I am bringing the expectations of friendship into a commercial exchange. I can object to dishonesty and broken promises. I can also recognize an honestly presented offer as a bad deal and refuse it. Those are different objections, and the second does not require me to prove that the seller is a bad person. Where I have a viable choice, I want to stop complaining about enshittification while continuing to finance it. I can hold a standard and accept that holding it may cost me something: time spent looking, the inconvenience of learning another service, or a higher price for something I actually value. I do not need to audit every purchase continuously. Attention has a cost too. A price increase, a reduction in service, or another request for unpaid availability can be enough of a prompt to look again. Sometimes I will still choose the familiar option. Its convenience may genuinely be worth more to me than the improvement elsewhere. But I want to acknowledge that trade rather than pretend I am rewarding quality when I am paying to avoid the effort of changing. The answer is not to expect businesses to stop pursuing their interests. It is to participate in the exchange with enough attention to pursue my own. Choose one recurring exchange: a subscription, something you buy out of habit, or the job you return to every morning. Look at its present terms. Decide what would make it worth continuing, and what you will do if it no longer meets that standard. If someone else is offering the better deal, give them a fair chance to earn your business. The company you wish would do better already has your money. The one actually doing better might be waiting for you to look.