Nothing fucking works anymore

19 Jul, 2025

I went to top up my phone. It should be fairly straightforward, right? Load up the app, choose the package, pay for it. Job done. It took me twenty minutes because I needed to change the card associated with the app and just trying to find the option to do that, never mind complete the actual task, took a ridiculous amount of effort.

Because nothing fucking works anymore.

I spotted a comic book bundle, I’ve got a chunk of it on paper but hey, at the price and for some easy to move around digital copies? Yeah, why not. I went to buy it, pressed the button repeatedly and the web page wouldn’t progress from the payment selection so I guess I’m not buying that after all. No error messages, no indications as to whether the button I’m pressing even does anything.

Because nothing fucking works anymore.

I went to grab some groceries in a hurry on Amazon. A ridiculously laborious task compared to what it used to be, windows overlaying other windows, search showing me the wrong things, a sponsored ad at the start of each page for some completely different, entirely unrelated, item, the categories only showing a tiny portion of what’s available and them leading to the wrong page sometimes or to a generic Amazon search. I gave up.

Because nothing fucking works anymore.

So I went to order some headphones from the main store and it took me two minutes to find where the “yes, I actually want to pay for this basket” button is because it’s buried in a sea of other shit.

Because nothing fucking works anymore.

I went to pay my internet bill the other day, online. Once I’d finally spotted enough busses, traffic lights and motorbikes to be let in to the inner sanctum, once I’d managed to find the option that let me pay a cash number I wanted to so that the bill would be fucking well paid, I couldn’t pay the bill. Because it needed confirmation from my bank but the “confirm this please” button on the website was obscured and unreachable. Impossible to go any further, impossible to work around online, just useless, broken, shite.

Because nothing fucking works anymore.

Every couple of months school will ask me to install a new app for whatever weird ass stuff the education trust has decided to buy into now and guaranteed, it’ll be a piece of barely working, broken shit. Thanks for that. I hate it.

Because nothing fucking works anymore.

And don’t even start me on whatever autocorrect is doing half the time. Fuck me. Or what half the icons in a thing are even supposed to fucking be.

To quote The Pool, “I could go on”. Folks talk a lot about the concept of enshittification in recent times and sure, as a concept it makes a lot of sense. Technology made worse because it saves a few quid, because it’s not designed for what the person using it wants or needs but for some bell end with a spreadsheet who wants you to be doing something else so they can make a number go up. It sucks.

But every single day online now, whatever I’m trying to do, ends up frustrating as fuck. For all the talk of things making me more productive, bringing more efficiency into my life, I’m spending more time now wasting my life away on needlessly broken things, wondering why a button isn’t working, how the fuck I navigate to where I need to be, throwing hours of my life away on a pile of broken shit that never needed to be this broken, things we solved years ago just broken now. I come out fed up, sometimes furious, I dread having to do anything online half the time now because I’m just going to find someone else’s broken piece of shit to deal with, aren’t I?

I don’t think whatever this is deserves a quaint little phrase like ‘enshittification’ as useful as it is to define a trend of making things worse. This is just broken stuff that you’re lucky if it does the job it purports to do in the first place let alone works in some sort of sane, reasonable, way.

You have companies with all the money in the world and their shit doesn’t fucking work and there’s no sign of any will to fix it from them either. That’s not being made shitty, that’s just flat out this fucking stuff doesn’t fucking work. What the fuck.

There has to be better than this, surely to fuck.