The Shape of Enshittification.
The Shape of Enshittification: Books That No Longer Get Read, An Internet That No Longer Gets Surfed, & The End of Social Media As We Know It...
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“Strategic Insights for Digital Entrepreneurs Who Think Differently.”
It turns out, slop has a shape.
And it’s the reason why AI generated writing sounds the way it does.
In a new study, a team of researchers at the University of Maryland and Google DeepMind ran an experiment.
They took 10,272 writing prompts and gave each one to a human author and to five AI models: Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Kimi.
They generated 61,608 stories, at around 5,000 words each.
Then, they looked at the underlying structure of each story: how the plot progresses, where the tension and conflict is placed, etc. etc.
And from that structure, they could identify a human-written story from AI-generated slop nearly 93% of the time.
What you’re seeing here in that image is the shape of AI Slop vs. Human Writing.
And there are five distinct ways that the shape of human writing is decidedly different from the so-called slop generated by today’s AI models:
AI over-explains its themes. (instead of letting readers infer)
Human writing is less linear. (more time-jumps and flashbacks.)
AI relies on bodily metaphors to explain emotion (81% vs. 38% human)
Humans reference specific texts, brands, places (nearly 2x the AI rate)
AI narrative is less diverse (fewer subplots and scenes, less dialogue)
And it’s the onslaught of AI writing that’s at least is partially responsible for….
2 | Why Nothing Feels Real Anymore.
This past week, Arthur Brooks and Chris Williamson did an interview together on Modern Wisdom titled “Why Nothing Feels Real Anymore.”
The interview made its way to me because it’s a question I explore deeply in my upcoming book, Return to Real.
Interestingly, Brooks makes several observations consistent with my findings. (Though he misses on a few key things we disagree on…)
That said, there’s one observation he offers that I think is worth adding to our conversation here, and that’s this:
One of the reasons why nothing feels “real” anymore, is because we live in a world today that rewards and recognizes one type of cognitive work above all others.
Left-brain activity.
The split between a logical “left brain” and a creative “right brain” is somewhat of an oversimplification. The two hemispheres do most things together. But as a way to name what the modern world values and where we spend time as a result, it’s a useful lens.
One way to think about the left-brain / right-brain split is as follows:
Your Left Brain runs the “how” of your life. Analyzing, measuring, optimizing, executing.
(Think: Spreadsheets and dashboards and KPIs and goals.)
Your Right Brain holds the “why.” Meaning, beauty, awe, wonder.
(Think: Loving the mystery of something vs. trying to reduce it to its parts.)
When you look at these two lists side by side, it becomes blindingly obvious:
In the modern world, with a few exceptions, left-brain work is what gets rewarded.
(It’s literally what we get paid to do.)
Right brain work, on the other hand, is the stuff that gets squeezed out. And for most people, on many days there’s barely any room for it.
Brooks’s deeper point is that we’ve taken our oldest right-brain questions, the ones that were never meant to be solved, and handed them to the left brain to try to figure out:
We have apps for “connection.”
We have KPIs for “happiness.”
We have project plans for achieving “meaning.”
But in return, what we get back is a kind of simulated result.
It’s not… real.
The environment we’re immersed in day-to-day (largely digital) is engineered to harvest our attention and pay us back in small hits of dopamine.
It’s stimulating enough to keep us scrolling.
But hollow enough to leave us feeling empty.
So we don’t feel connected. We don’t feel happy. And our lives feel devoid of meaning.
This ache (and what to do about it) is the whole reason I wrote Return to Real.
(Pre-orders are slated to begin at the end of this month… Stay tuned.)
* * *
There’s a word to describe all of this and what we’re experiencing right now:
That word is…. Enshittification.
Cory Doctorow is the author of Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. The term “enshittification” went on to be named word of the year in the US, the UK, and Australia…
Coined by author Cory Doctorow, “Enshittification” describes the rapid decline in the quality of digital life and online platforms that we’re experiencing.
How online platforms abuse users to benefit business customers, then abuse those businesses to squeeze out maximum profits…
As it turns out, just like AI Slop, Enshittification also has a “shape”…
And that shape is materializing right now as we speak…
3 | The Beginning of the End of Social Media?
The clearest place to watch this shape materalize?
Social media.
This week, Farah Cormack mapped the predictable sequence, in a piece called “The Beginning of the End of Organic LinkedIn.”
Her argument is that every platform moves through the same five stages:
Early adoption. A small group forms around something they love. It feels like a secret.
Scaling. The crowds show up, and so does the money.
Critical mass. Everyone’s here now. Organic and paid are both running hot.
Enshittification. The business model takes over the product. The feed fills with ads, and the place starts to feel like every other place.
Decline. The people who made it worth showing up for get fed up and leave.
Her read is that LinkedIn just crossed into stage four. The tell is its new Creator Marketplace, a feature that literally puts your reach openly up for sale.
(If your own posts have been reaching fewer people lately, you’re not imagining things… this has been engineered.)
The shape of Enshittification is a five-stage decline, and most of the social media platforms we use are somewhere at stage 4 or 5 right now.
Futurist Sinead Bovell goes further, and argues we’re watching the beginning of the end of the social media era itself.
The reality is that people don’t really post for friends/social circles like we used to even just a few short years ago.
Bovell argues that the entire reason we post is to be seen by other humans.
That’s the whole deal.
We post to signal that we’re employable, or interesting, or worth following, or because we want to sell something…
And we do that, because real people are on the other end, watching us.
Take those real people away, and the entire thing stops making sense…
But that’s exactly what’s happening.
As the feeds fill with AI-generated content, and we lose the ability to tell whether a human or a bot is the one reading and commenting on our stuff….
The whole reason to post in the first place begins to dissolve.
This is why virtually every social media platform has devolved into some form of digital TV….
Platforms are doubling down on short form video to do whatever it takes to keep zombified users glued to their platform, even as engagement wanes.
So if this is what’s happening…. where do real people start going to share stuff?
Increasingly, what’s happening is that stuff we use to share on social media publicly is now being shared on WhatsApp/iMessage groupchats privately…
(One of the reasons why YouTube just brought back private in-app messaging this past week….)
This may explain why we’re slammed with so much short-form video…
But where does this leave long-form content?
Where does this leave the written word?
And most importantly…
Where does this leave the original form of written long-form content:
The book?
4 | Books That No Longer Get Read.
This week, Tim Ferriss published a piece titled “Has AI Already Killed How-To Nonfiction?“
In it, he shared his own book sales data from the last 5 years.
Tim has five books in print. Year over year, here’s the decline in his book sales since 2022:
2023: -5% vs. 2022
2024: -13% vs. 2023
2025: -46% vs. 2024
2026: -57% vs. 2025
That’s roughly 80% fewer copies than what he sold in 2022. Almost all of the drop lines up with the moment ChatGPT went mainstream.
And it’s not just Tim’s books.
Publishers Weekly reported that in the first quarter of 2026, adult nonfiction was down 9% year over year. Self-help fell the hardest, down 26.3%.
So does that mean that the book is dead??
Not quite.
And the distinction here is important:
What’s dying is a specific kind of book. The how-to book. The one you bought to get the seven-part formula on how to do something step-by-step.
In 2019, the best place to get that type of information was a book.
In 2026, it’s a chatbot that has already read that book, plus a thousand more like it, and will hand you an answer in fifteen seconds, shaped to your exact situation.
Which means the how-to book has the same problem as an AI story.
It has a “shape” that AI can easily copy.
But Tim is just as clear about what doesn’t.
The market for information is collapsing into the chatbot. But the market for transformation is moving the other way.
Books that offer a unique point of view.
Books that offer a bold new Big Idea.
Books that offer an escape.
Books that tell a story only a single person in the world can tell.
Books that transform your thinking.
Those kind of books….
Are actually hotter than ever.
(Seth Godin turned up in the comments to say he’s seeing the same thing happen.)
So no, the book isn’t dying.
A certain type of book is dying.
But look again at what’s happening here.
If we’ve stopped opening books and instead now ask ChatGPT or Claude for our “how to” information…
This means the chatbot is doing our reading for us….
But what is the chatbot reading, exactly??
5 | An Internet That No Longer Gets Surfed.
What the chatbot is reading of course is “the Internet.”
But not same internet you and I grew up with.
There’s a mutation taking place…
Nick Thompson, the CEO of the Atlantic, flagged this on LinkedIn this week:
“According to Shopify, the best e-commerce platform is Shopify.
On its blog, the company has published at least 60 different ranked listicles, including “10 Best Ecommerce Platforms for Small Business in 2026…
…The No. 1 pick is always Shopify.”
Now, no human reads a company ranking itself as the #1 option on its own website and takes that ranking seriously
So then, who is all of that content actually for?
The chatbot, of course.
Because if you ask ChatGPT for the best way to set up an online store…
It will point you to…. Shopify!
And if you check the sources behind the answer…
Guess what ChatGPT cites as its reference?
Shopify’s own list, where it ranks itself as the #1 option.
That’s the “shape” of an internet built for chatbots instead of people.
Content engineered to be scraped, and to manipulate the answer the chatbot hands back to you, the human trying to make sense of it all.
Here’s why that should bother all of us.
If books are no longer being read…
If the internet is no longer getting surfed…
And our only keyhole into the world is an AI chatbot we rely on to give us the answer to every question…
Then we are dangerously close to being fooled… like the fools we are for trusting those answers.
Because once we’ve stopped doing the work of seeking out the source and evaluating it ourselves…
This is what the future looks like at the scale of the entire internet.
* * *
But slop is showing up at at different level.
And this is perhaps even more troubling….
6 | The Rise of..... Message Slop?
It’s not just that the internet being written by AI…
It’s now our conversations as well.
The screenshot above is a joke.
But last week, I experienced a real-life version of this first-hand…
I was in a back-and-forth message exchange with someone who works for one of our clients…
And partway through, it became blindingly obvious that this person was taking what I wrote, dropping it into Claude or ChatGPT, and sending me back an AI-generated response…
“We” were having a conversation.
Except we weren’t. I was talking to a person. The person was talking to AI. And AI was talking to me.
And I couldn’t stop wondering… why?
Did this person not trust themselves to message me directly?
Had they lost all ability to say what they actually thought?
Did they know how obvious it was, and were they doing it shamelessly?
Or did they have no idea, and were they doing it cluelessly?
I’ll be honest. It was not enjoyable. It came across as being incredibly impersonal.
And frankly?
It felt…. gross.
Then another thought crept in.
Maybe I’m just the old man now?
Maybe a back-and-forth private conversation run through an AI filter…
With a chatbot whispering in your ear, telling you exactly what to say…
Is about to be completely normal for a segment of the world, and I’m the one who needs to catch up.
Or maybe it’s exactly as distasteful as it felt.
We’ve got work-slop.
We’ve got story-slop.
And now?
We’ve got message-slop.
Which brings me to the question hiding underneath this entire issue.
If slop like this is everywhere…
If this is what the Enshittification tastes like…
Then where does that leave our future?
7 | The 3 Types of Work That Are Coming...
Believe it or not…
There’s actually good news hiding inside all of this.
Because when everything that can be faked…. is being faked…
The things that can’t be faked?
That becomes the whole game.
Slop is cheap.
But real is rare.
And rare is what people will pay for.
So the world is splitting in two. On one side, an ocean of slop. An internet that doesn’t get surfed.
On the other, a smaller set of things that take time, care, and attention…
What only a real human (or group of humans) can deliver.
I’ve written about this before: The Great Bifurcation. Where the middle hollows out, and the value rushes to the two edges.
This is why it is essential for you to adopt an AI barbell strategy for your business, like we explored together back in [Issue #091].
The question is, where does that leave YOU?
Entrepreneur Natalie MacNeil put it about as clearly as I’ve seen. What’s coming is a world where there are essentially three kinds of work:
People who orchestrate AI systems and agents.
Skilled trades, craftsmanship, artistry rooted in the physical world.
Human-to-human work where trust and discernment matter.
Each of these paths comes with a degree of uncertainty and risk…
And each these paths offers a way out of the Enshittification…
The question is….
Which of these paths is the best one for YOU?
8 | One Last Thing Before We Wrap...
If you enjoyed this piece, then I think you will enjoy my upcoming book Return to Real: The Last Human Advantage in an Age of Artificial Everything.
Drawing on evolutionary biology and behavioral economics, the book dives much deeper into everything we’ve explored in this piece, including why this moment is unlike anything we’ve lived through as a species and how to respond.
In age of artificial everything, more than anything else, what the world is craving is what’s real, which means the Return to Real might be the most important strategic pivot of our time.
Get onto the pre-launch notification list by visiting:
* * *
Okay!
I’m going to leave you with that for now…
Everything is coming together all at once, and I’ve been burning the midnight oil to get it all done.
I couldn’t be more excited to get this book into your hands…
It’s the best thing I’ve ever created.
And the wait is almost over.
Stay tuned…
And in the meantime…
Remember to hug the ones you love.
Until next week,
Ryan :-)
If true, then I would change up your writing style... because it too is slop-shaped. 😞
In other words...
AI is good at following rules. Human beings worth listening to are good at breaking them.