At some point you might have seen the decade-old tweet that gave us the phrase “monetizing the rot”, to describe an enduring vibe of contemporary capitalism. It’s unwise to put too much stock in narratives of social decline, but I think terms like “enshittification” are resonating because they’re tracking a kind of increasingly apparent degredation. Perhaps it can be summarized concisely as a shift from data collection in the 2010s to a focus on the extraction of profit in the 2020s, via the prior decade’s infrastructure. In the US, I think there’s a category of SaaS that exemplifies this behavior, what we might call “vultureware” or “leechware”. This is a form of software or technology performing a service that’s only possible or necessary because parts of our society are, well, rotting.
The most recent example I’ve seen is the emergence of services like DeleteMe or Incogni. These services navigate the tedious and unstandardized process of making requests to various data brokers to delete data pertaining to the service-user from their collections. The business model appears to be subscription based, where you pay the service to automate takedown requests and engage in monitoring. In theory, this results in something I think is desirable: less of one’s digital traces being traded for ad/product targeting, surveillance, and scamming.
Still, there’s something absurd about this, in that the need for the vultureware doesn’t really disappear. You can only temporarily restore (some of) your dignity, and it costs a monthly fee. Eventually, one’s activity will be repackaged and sold by another broker, restarting the cycle. Individuals can’t meaningfully address the root cause; abstaining from the internet isn’t very realistic for many in 2026. It’s still very difficult (if not impossible at times) for an average person to know the full extent of inputs they’re supplying into the network of websites and apps they use. We have to hope that each company we interact with honors its promises, despite numerous examples in which firms evaded or neglected their responsibilities. The machine keeps producing rot, ensuring the vultures have plenty to eat.
Another classic example of what I’m thinking of is tax-prep software. This species is more established, but has the same hallmarks of performing a service that’s needlessly tedious or arduous for a normal person. As members of any society, paying taxes is normal and expected— but the extent to which it’s a pain in the neck in the US is not. As journalist Ryan Cooper has written, we have numerous positive examples of how the burden of compiling and reporting information could be shifted off the plates of everyday people:
Some years ago, I traveled to the Faroe Islands, an autonomous territory of Denmark, to report on their tax authority, which is arguably the best in the world. There, all normal wages are routed through a central government database, which automatically keeps track of how much you are making, and what benefit programs you are eligible for.
While this computerized system is quite sophisticated and required a lot of initial investment, it is incredibly easy to operate. For an ordinary worker, what you owe automatically comes out of the paycheck, and any benefit payments automatically go right into your bank account. Ordinary employees don’t have to file their taxes or any enrollment paperwork (if they have a child and become eligible for the Faroese child allowance, for instance, the money just starts showing up), while employers don’t have to hire a payroll processor to handle their tax payments.
It’s difficult to imagine a system like this one being installed in the US, but it has a number of benefits over what’s normal today. There’s no intrinsic need for the niche that’s filled by companies like Intuit. Their services may produce value for their users, in that they make a mandatory process more convenient, but we shouldn’t miss that their existence (and profits) is contingent on our system’s irrationalities and labyrinthine features.
Finally, we might also consider the current wave of “AI” as largely a form of vultureware/leechware. As is now well-known, the foundation models used to build products like ChatGPT and Claude were developed using massive corpuses which contained substantial amounts of copyrighted material. It is simple fact that these companies (whose extreme valuations continue to warp the economy), would not exist without the work, thoughts, care, and time of countless people that didn’t consent (and likely wouldn’t have consented) to the production of their models. In my opinion, an artist or blogger creating a project from scraped website text feels qualitatively different from a company effectively monetizing the contributions of all of GitHub, StackOverflow or Reddit. These are deep imbalances of power, and I’m not sure that the precedents we have concerning fair-use are in the same category due to the scale at which these companies/models are operating at.
It’s possible this concept of vultureware is too broad, and risks being merely a bucket to lump together firms/tech that I find irritating. Again, in fairness to my second example, tax-prep software is useful given the status quo. For those with uncomplicated situations, they’re able to make the choice to value their time higher than what it costs to pay TurboTax, etc. However (with apologies to the actual birds), if an ecosystem is encouraging the rapid or widespread proliferation of scavengers, this probably says something about its overall health! It’s inevitable that some entities/agents will exploit features of their society in ways that are arguably socially harmful or degrading. But, our current society is contingent, not eternal; it’s complex, but mutable. Perhaps we can pay more attention to where these metaphorical vultures flock, and gradually reduce the role they play.