What We Lost

A newsletter about how the tech products we use got worse, and how they're ruining our lives.

Hi, my name is Matt Hughes and welcome to What We Lost.

I started this newsletter because I needed a space to write about the practical, measurable ways that technology products have degraded into something unusable — if not entirely hostile.

We all know what I'm talking about. The terms "enshittification" and "the rot economy" have bled into our collective lexicon, and for good reason.

Nobody — not one person — is happy with Facebook, or Google, or Twitter, or Microsoft Windows. Nobody thinks that these products provide better experiences than they did a decade ago, or even five years ago.

We can all think back to a time when our search engines returned useful results to our questions, and when our social media feeds showed us posts from our friends and family. When Microsoft Office's worst sin was the much-maligned Clippy, or an entire flight simulator hidden in Excel 97, and not a bunch of generative AI features that nobody wants or uses, but that somehow manage to raise the cost of your subscription by a third.

This stuff is all visible and obvious and it's exhausting, and it's happening everywhere. At the same time, I don't think we fully grasp the extent to how badly these products have been degraded, or indeed, how many products have been ruined. And I'd argue that's by design.

The malign changes we all rant about — like how our Facebook timeline is now dominated by people we don't know, pages we don't follow, and Shrimp Jesus — happened gradually, and over a long period of time. Like frogs in a slowly-warming pot of water, we only noticed when it was too late.

So, why am I writing an entire newsletter about this? Why not a single article? One I could pitch to an editor and make myself a nice little fee, and a new byline to attach to my resumé? God knows I could use the money.

I thought about this.

A couple of months ago, I challenged myself to list the myriad of ways in which things have gotten worse over the past decade. To try and enumerate the hostile design choices that have sprung up in tech products over time. I thought I'd come up with ten or so items. In the end, I lost count.

It was startling and, frankly, depressing. And while I think a commissioning editor might let me write one or two articles, I can't imagine them indulging me with a regular column. One, perhaps, called "Everything is terrible and we should burn it all down."

So, here we are.

Some Obligatory Throat Clearing

Few will complain if I spend thousands of words to rip into Google or Meta — and trust me, I plan to. As companies go, they're about as popular as norovirus on a cruise ship. Talking smack about Facebook isn't particularly hard, in part because everyone can identify how Facebook has declined, and nobody is in Meta's corner.

I also recognize that when I eventually address generative AI, or anything else that isn't uniformly loathed, someone will probably accuse me of being a luddite, or a hater, or that speaking from fear that my job and my industry will be destroyed by large language models.

The easiest way to discredit someone without actually addressing their arguments is to accuse them of being motivated by fear or hatred. To suggest that they're not arguing from sincerity, but self-interest. It's a great way of shutting someone down without having to say anything of substance.

Let me get this out of the way. I'm not afraid of technology. I don't hate technology. And the easiest way to prove this to you is to tell you about myself.

My career has been shaped by technology — and a love of technology. Some of my earliest memories involve playing Final Doom on my family's beige Packard Bell at the tender age of four, or going to my local sixth-form college to browse the nascent Internet on Netscape Navigator. I remember sitting before an old PowerMac tower, one of those beige abominations of the pre-Jobs era, waiting for one of the few websites that existed back then — I don't remember which one — to render as it dripped through the college's slow ISDN connection.

I remember reading magazines like PC Zone or Computer Shopper in the back of my family's Vauxhall Cavalier as we drove to North Wales on a day trip, often so engrossed I didn't catch myself getting car sick until it was too late.

It's hard to explain how or why, but these early experiences would go on to shape the rest of my life.

When I turned eighteen, it was clear that my career — whatever form it would take — would involve tech on some level. I wasn't sure of the specifics, but I understood the broader direction I wanted to take. And so, I enrolled at Northumbria University, which had just launched one of the UK's first degrees in Ethical Hacking.

I loved the subject, and I loved the city. Newcastle will always hold a special place in my heart. The architecture and the people reminded me of Liverpool, my hometown. It's a very walkable city, even when you've over-indulged at one of the many bars that (and this is showing my age) offered three trebles and mixers for a fiver. Newcastle is close enough to Middlesbrough that you can get a parmo pretty much anywhere — but, crucially, isn't Middlesbrough.

That said, I didn't enjoy the slow, academic pace of the course. For reasons that should be obvious, playing around with Wireshark and Metasploit is a lot more fun than writing a perfectly-referenced essay about it. I derived more pleasure from attending OWASP events, doing vulnerability research with classmates, and co-hosting a podcast than I did from the seminars and lectures I (occasionally) attended.

Halfway through my second year, I dropped out and went to work in the industry.

Through a friend I made at BruCon, a Belgian security conference, I landed a role at an NGO in Switzerland where I did a mix of cybersecurity, software engineering, and (for my sins) SharePoint administration. It was a fun, broadening experience, especially for a nineteen-year-old.

For the first time, I was on my own, living in a different country, in a different timezone, with a different language. The people at the NGO came from all over the world — South Africa, New Zealand, India, France, Japan, Italy, to name but a few — and my IT team consisted of a motley crew of Romanians, Americans, Argentinians, and fellow Brits. But it was sadly short-lived.

When I returned to the UK, I found myself at a crossroads, unable to figure out what to do with myself. After some time treading water, doing the odd freelance gig and working in SharePoint (I swear, I must have done something heinous in a previous life), I re-enrolled in university.

Now considered a mature student, I was at a stark disadvantage when it came to applications. In the UK system, you don't apply directly to universities, but through a process called UCAS. Here, you select your preferred six courses and schools, and UCAS handles the logistics.

The first time around, I got six unconditional offers — meaning I didn't have to hit any specific grades to get in. On my second run, the only university that gave me an unconditional offer was Liverpool Hope University — a tiny teaching university with an even smaller Computer Science department.

I genuinely loved my time at Hope. I made some lifelong friends — including one whose wedding I'll be attending later this month, and who gave a reading at my own wedding. I built relationships with my lecturers, and the smallness of the department allowed for a level of informality that you probably wouldn't get elsewhere.

I don't think many college students can drag their head lecturer to a city center bar under false pretenses and force-feed them pints of 10% ale and get away with it. That, however, is a story for another time.

Looking back, I wasn't really interested in getting a degree, or any formal kind of qualifications. Sure, I knew that having a degree would help in my career, and was seen as a necessary prerequisite for many jobs. Having a degree would help me move abroad, and was a prerequisite to getting certain kinds of visas.

Really though, I wanted some time to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, and this is what Hope University provided.

The gentler pace of the course, which emphasized the practical over the theoretical, and the fact that I was living with my parents, gave me the space to pursue new opportunities.

I spent a summer interning at a local VC-funded data science startup, ScraperWiki, which has later moved to Belfast and renamed to The Sensible Code Company, and then to Cantabular. There, I learned about data science from some of the most wonderful people I've ever had the privilege to work with. I pair-programmed with some genuinely smart people, solving problems in real-time. I was exposed to languages and technologies that weren't covered in my course, like Go and Kubernetes.

My time at Liverpool Hope University gave me the space and direction to start some hobby projects. Using Flask — a web framework for Python — I built a sandboxed tool for writing data science scrapers and presented it at that year's PyCon UK conference.

I also, by total accident, stumbled into the industry where I'd spend the majority of my career to date. Technology journalism.

Here's the thing. Student loans are notoriously stingy in the UK. That's why most university students have massive, interest-free overdrafts. You literally can’t survive without getting into massive amounts of debt with a bank.

Even while living at home, with my parents covering my living expenses, I still had to pay for things like books, my bus fare, and lunch. I got a little more than £1,000 every semester from the government, which simply wasn't enough. Especially when you considered my affection for craft beer.

And so, I started writing about tech for a living.

It made sense. At the risk of sounding immodest, I've always had a way with words, and I love tech. Explaining complex — and sometimes esoteric — concepts in technology to a generalist audience came naturally to me. And if I could make some money from it, even better.

My first regular gig was with MakeUseOf — a site which broadly falls into the realm of "service journalism." Here, the articles aren't breaking stories or clinching exclusives — the kind of things you'd read about on sites like The Verge and 404 Media — but rather trying to explain how tech works and why it matters.

There's a simpler way to describe this. Have you ever typed a question into Google, and then an article answered it? That's service journalism.

Service journalism has a unique business model, where you're writing as much for people as you are Google's search algorithm. The hope is that your article will sit at the top of the first page, bringing in thousands of readers each month — and lots of lucrative long-term ad revenue. In many respects, you don't want your content to have a big early spike of traffic. You want long-term, consistent readership. Slow and steady wins the race.

Each month, I'd churn out thousands of words about how to use the latest Android feature, or explaining new cybersecurity threats to a generalist audience. Each thousand-word feature would earn me $60 (later increasing to $120). For a broke college student, it was a fortune. More importantly, it gave me the practical experience and the portfolio of work I needed to make my next step.

I left MakeUseOf at the same time I graduated. With my CompSci degree, I could easily have found a job slinging code for a tech company, but I loved writing and I didn't want to give up that part of my life.

Fortunately, I caught a break. A few months earlier, one of my colleagues at MakeUseOf, Bryan Clark, left for a full-time role at The Next Web.

Bryan is a good dude. He's generous, kind, and an excellent writer. He's principled and stubborn, and he never backed away from a fight when those principles were violated, even when it wasn't in his best interests. He'll stand his ground, even when it's not in his best interests to do so. Needless to say, I like him a lot.

Shortly after I graduated, another position came up at The Next Web. Although I wasn't convinced I was ready to join a site like The Next Web — I'd only been writing professionally for a couple of years, and I wasn't from America or London, and I wasn't verified on Twitter — Bryan still encouraged me to apply. And I did.

The Next Web is a Dutch-based publication that is best known for its annual conference, which attracts tens of thousands of attendees each year, and for being acquired by the Financial Times a few years back. Today, it mostly focuses on the European VC and startup scene. It's a serious, grown-up business website.

When I joined, it was a different place. And I don't say that in a pejorative sense. The Next Web I joined covered consumer tech and online culture, but through a puckish, chaotic lens that didn't take itself — or the companies it covered — too seriously. While we weren't exactly encouraged to flout the rules of good taste or journalistic sobriety, it wasn't exactly discouraged either. For someone with a dark sense of humor and (then undiagnosed) ADHD, it felt like home.

Bryan introduced me to Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, the CEO and co-founder of The Next Web, who then offered me a trial period. I'd join the team for a month. If they liked me and if my stuff was good, I'd get a full-time role.

For reasons I still don't fully understand, they did. The Next Web offered me the chance to write breaking news and fiery op-eds (some of which, if they were published elsewhere, would have earned me a P45), some of which I remain fiercely proud of, others I'd rather forget. I informed, educated, and, occasionally, offended.

Each day, DHL and FedEx couriers would bring me the latest gadgets to play around with. I got the opportunity to travel, spending about a third of each year on the road, where I'd meet with some of the world's largest tech companies like Huawei and Microsoft and learn about the biggest innovations in consumer technology and cybersecurity. For a guy in his mid-twenties, it was a dream job.

I also — from time to time — landed myself in trouble, like when someone tried to bribe me $10 (yes, ten whole dollars) to publish a promotional article under my byline, but mistakenly sent me a Google Doc file that anyone with the link could edit. Naturally, I posted that link to my thousands of Twitter followers, who then transformed it into what could only be described as the sponsored content equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting — if Pollock worked with memes and Inbetweeners references.

Right as I started at The Next Web, I also enrolled in a Master's in Big Data and Artificial Intelligence at Liverpool University. Having previously balanced freelance life with the demands of a degree, I figured this would be more of the same, and AI intrigued me.

In retrospect, this was a massive mistake, and I lasted about two weeks before I dropped out — partially because doing a full-time job and a full-time postgraduate degree is very bloody hard, but also because I realized very early on that I wouldn't be happy. That's a story for another time, but suffice it to say that there's a certain "vibe" associated with Russell Group universities. If you're from the UK, you likely know what I mean.

Anyway, I worked at The Next Web for about three years. Right before the pandemic hit, I moved again, this time to The Register — a publication I've admired for my entire life, and again, one that I didn't think I was ready for until someone offered me the job.

There's nothing like The Register. It's smart. It's funny. It's unbeholden to anyone. And it's so, so British. The people I worked with — Hi Jude! Hi Paul! Hi Richard! Hi other Richard! Hi Gareth! Hi everyone I missed! — are some of the best journalists in the game. And, dare I say, some of the best humans, too.

I grew so much at The Register. I learned so much. The European editor, Paul Kunert, made me a better writer and a better journalist. I regret leaving every day of my life.

Which brings me to my next stage in my career. Around 2022, I decided to work as a journalist in a freelance capacity, while also working full-time at a large publicly-traded cybersecurity company. Or, rather, cybersecurity adjacent. I suppose you'd call it infrastructure-as-a-service. Or software-as-a-service.

I'm not going to lie, I was drawn to the company by the money. The media industry doesn't pay nearly as well as tech. I also — foolishly — assumed that the tech industry would offer the kind of stability that isn't present in journalism, where layoffs and cutbacks are the norm, and people routinely bounce from salaried jobs to freelance work, and back again.

It was a new environment. I worked with some wonderful human beings (Hi Matt! Hi Salman! I miss you Jenny) and I finally was finally able to pay off my postgraduate loan for the two weeks I spent at Liverpool University (which cost me five bloody grand, not including the insane interest on top). We did some cool stuff, but I'll admit, I found the change in pace challenging.

I went from finding, filing, and publishing stories in as little as thirty minutes, to spending weeks toiling on a White Paper or Blog, making sure that every stakeholder approves the exact wording of every sentence, and then sending it off for approval by our crack team of lawyers. Occasionally, this process could take months.

One thing about me that I didn't mention in this post — although I've been open about it elsewhere — is that I have ADHD. Like so many people, it wasn't until the pandemic when I was formally diagnosed, but the signs were there from childhood.

One of my favorite writers on ADHD is a guy called Thom Hartmann, who came up with the idea of the farmer and the hunter to describe the ADHD and non-ADHD mind. Hunters are reactive, dealing with problems as they arise, whereas farmers are good at working systematically on a single thing over a prolonged period of time.

That kinda explains why I felt so at home in media, whereas I found this tech job to be so difficult. Writing four, thousand-word long articles in a day came naturally to me. My brain is well-suited to jumping from story to story, checking them off like items on a list, getting a nice hit of dopamine each time my editor pressed the "publish" button. This job — where writing was a tiny part of the day, overshadowed by negotiations and chasing stakeholders — by contrast, was really difficult.

As an aside, I have a (very neglected) Substack newsletter about ADHD healthcare in the UK, and the very broken system that's delivering it. I've written some good stuff and I plan to revive it in the coming weeks. If any of that interests you, give it a follow.

It also didn't help that, quite often, we were creating entire concepts on the fly, and I'd have to write convincingly about something that I didn't understand, and didn't really exist in a meaningful sense. I have memories — or are they nightmares? — of writing an entire white paper about a concept that someone had created internally, only to have to trash the entire thing after that person re-defined that entire concept.

At the start of 2024, I, along with most of my colleagues, got laid-off. I wasn't upset. This life — this company, nice though some of my co-workers were — wasn't for me. Clutching a nice big severance package, I dove back into freelancing.

I do a lot of things now. A few weeks ago, my eight-year-old niece asked me what I do for work, and I struggled to give her a straight answer.

I work with a lot of companies and agencies helping them with their content (Hi Lizi! Hi Natalee! Hi Marie!). I'm still pitching stories to editors. I have a few long-term projects on the boil (this newsletter being one such example).

Sidenote: I'm always open to more work, both in terms of journalism and content. If you want to work with me, drop me a line at me@matthewhughes.co.uk.

I spend a lot of time working with Ed Zitron, an old friend of mine, and one of the sharpest commentators in the tech scene. He's the only person calling out the current generative AI fad out for what it is — deeply stupid, highly-destructive, and ultimately doomed.

Like me, his career has taken him to lots of strange and unexpected places. He's a former print media guy — having previously written for one of the most iconic games magazines of the pre-internet era, PC Zone — that moved into comms, and now runs his own PR agency. That shift didn't extinguish his fire, however, as any readers of his newsletter (or, for that matter, listeners to his podcast) can attest.

Our relationship is pretty informal. I don't really have a job title, but I guess you could say I'm his editor.

Over the past couple of years, I've helped him grow his newsletter, Where's Your Ed At, to over 60,000 subscribers. I see my role here as not just catching typos, but helping Ed make the broadest, most iron-clad arguments possible. To try and anticipate what critics might say, and to counter before the story goes live. To push back on ideas, not because I disagree with them (because I so rarely do), but so that they become clearer and stronger.

Suffice to say, it's fun, gratifying work.

I also help out with his podcast, Better Offline, which just got renewed for a second season by iHeartRadio and won a Webby Award for Best Business Podcast Episode. I do a lot of stuff here, from preparing the spreadsheets that contain the hundreds of citations in each episode, to research, to editing and preparing the scripts.

I like working with Ed. We have a lot in common. We both have ADHD and dyspraxia. We both share that kind-of nihilistic, dark sense of British humor. We're both massive fans of Chris Morris and Brass Eye. Crucially, our lives were both shaped by technology, and we both feel frustrated and disillusioned with how the technology industry has changed in recent years.

What Have We Lost?

The reason why I spent so long writing what amounts to my resumé is because I want to prove to you, the reader, that I genuinely do love tech. If I didn't, I would have found a different career years ago.

Or, rather, I did love tech.

I chose to call this newsletter What We Lost because, more than anything, I feel a profound sense of grief about how the internet (and technology at large) has devolved into its current state. I'm sure you do, too.

It's not that things haven't gotten better. It's that they've become manifestly worse. Every service we use — every product, every website — feels hostile and frustrating. This newsletter aims to tell you how in clear, concrete terms.

Because there are consequences to everything we see in our digital world. It's harder to find information. To connect with our friends and family on social media sites. And, as I'll explain in the follow-up to this newsletter, I believe that this enshittification — to borrow a term from Cory Doctorow — is directly responsible for a reduction in economic mobility.

Or, putting it another way, it's making us poorer.

None of this is intended to depress you. I want to make you as furious as I am, and I want that anger to catalyze into meaningful change.

I want the products I use on a daily basis — that we all use — to get better. I want to equip you with the ability to articulate how, in specific terms, things have gotten so bad. Because we can only fight against something we can understand and describe. And, crucially, I want tech companies to stop taking the piss.

My mate Ed's work — both his newsletter and podcast — does a great job of explaining the why behind this trend. The best example of this is his article The Man Who Killed Google Search, which, using documents obtained from legal discovery, revealed how Prabhakar Raghavan — formerly Google's chief ad man, who later became Head of Search — deliberately hamstrung the Google algorithm to degrade search results.

Worse search results means, inevitably, more searches, which in turn leads to more ad impressions and clicks. Google gets richer specifically because it makes your life harder.

Similarly, Ed does a great job of explaining the perverse financial motivations underlying this decline.

The reason why shoddy, environment-shredding, unreliable generative AI integrations are proliferating like Japanese knotweed isn't because these companies think they're any good and that they'll improve their products. It's that tech companies are, for the most part, massively overvalued, and the only way they can justify their valuations is with the expectation of future growth.

The problem is that there are no growth markets left. Generative AI is their Hail Mary, and these companies will try to popularize them, even if their users actively detest them, because they have nothing else.

Ed's strength as a writer is in helping the reader see that the Emperor is not, in fact, wearing any clothes. To find the language to explain the things they're experiencing day in, and day out.

And, to be clear, this is ground that my newsletter won't tread. I don't plan to name names — like Ed did with Prabhakar Raghavan — or to talk about how the emergence of a disconnected managerial class has led to the alienation of tech companies from the customers they purportedly serve.

Rather, I intend to point and say "this is shit and it's hurting you in a very specific way," and I want you, the reader, to nod along and mutter "yeah, this is shit."

Because it is shit.