Re-Humaning in the Era of Big Bros

On beach days, reclaiming our lives and non-compliance

Image and text by John Beske and Marla Rose

In these polarized times, one thing that unites us is the recognition of how absolutely, well, shitty, everything has become, at least in the United States. While enshittification was originally coined to describe the worsening quality of online platforms, I think it’s reasonable to just go ahead and carry over that to apply to other aspects of life, because why not? Enshittification is clearly afoot much more broadly and we shouldn’t be constrained by pedants, especially not with such a perfect word, especially not when there is so much of it. With the internet and daily life linking up inextricably in their commitment to degradation, there is no escape from it anyway.

Image and text by John Beske and Marla Rose


Living under an emboldened, brakes-off authoritarian rule and all that encompasses, we can’t even properly dissociate online for a few minutes because the internet –obnoxious, frustrating, spring-loaded with ugly ads and clown cars of endlessly exiting scammers and trolls – is not much better than real life. It’s a mirror world of our lived shitty experience. With the phones and the tabs and the notifications and the alert noises and the backed up emails, is there any wonder why so many of us are distracted, irritated and out of sorts? Every day, we’re the main course in a tech-driven, data-hungry, algorithm-scanning feeding frenzy. The good news is that many of us who are paying attention are starting to cut or reduce ties to the products and bad actors that attach themselves to us and feed off us like unholy, insatiable leeches.

In a culture and economy of extraction – extracting priceless natural resources for cheap, disposable goods; extracting our data for the cost of use; extracting our phone numbers to track our spending habits in exchange for occasional discounts; extracting our attention through clickbait to make a website’s numbers look good for advertisers; a stranger on social media extracting our peace so we can seethe and feed an algorithm’s relentlessly ravenous engine – pouring into ourselves and starving the bros at least of us seems like a reasonable and worthwhile step toward freedom and empowerment.

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Over the weekend, I stood with the soft sands of Lake Michigan squishing under my toes as the gentle waves rolled in and out, talking to my friend and my husband about this ever-worsening horror show we have found ourselves in as the process of enshittification lurches forward, lapping up our legs like this water we were standing in, but instead of life-sustaining freshwater, it’s crap. (Which it probably will be when all the Trump 2.0 environmental deregulations come into effect.)

Maybe this is how it happens, my friend said. Maybe this is how decline has always happened. We just continue living our lives, because what else can we do, as things circling the drain. The normalcy of enshittification is perhaps what is most eerie. It just gets accepted and digested into our quotidian normality. Each day is just a little worse than the previous.

As we stood there processing the heaviness in the midst of all this lighthearted beauty, I became anxious and protective. I didn’t want the long shadow of Big Bro to encroach upon my day at the beach.

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I am honestly so sick of hearing myself talking about this, too, trying to put some kind of rough order, or at least flimsy, imprecise words, on what it feels like to live in a rapidly collapsing society. As imperfect as our democracy was, and as much as it was decidedly exclusionary, it was something inarguably better than its freefall. I feel like I am both fighting for its life and grieving its death every day.

The end stage of democratic norms is so weird and formulaic. It looks like standing there, pointing at a cartoonish abuser, aghast, saying, “You can’t do that!” and they prove you wrong, again and again. “Just watch me.”

It’s seeing a phalanx of masked, unidentified agents shove people who have been racially profiled into vehicles and speed off to who knows where. (Essentially the process of disappearing an enemy of the Party that George Orwell referred to as “vaporizing” in Nineteen Eighty-Four.) It looks like pushing through the Big Burglary Bill that no one seemed to want but Trump’s cohort of billionaire keepers, which we knew was going to happen, because Trump, though convinced of his persecution, always gets what he wants. It looks like HIV research and the global distribution of life-saving medicines, institutions of higher education, Planned Parenthood, public libraries, PBS and NPR and your community’s safety nets having critical funds vanish into thin air because the cruelty seems to be the point, and it is throwing red meat to this regime’s sadistic, fanatic base. It looks like the Department of Education, dismantled like that. Who knew things could crumble so fast? (Oh, yes, those of us who were paying attention and painted as hysterical alarmists.)

Checks and balances? Congress determining how funds are distributed and tariffs are implemented? Those things have been fire-hosed with a thick patina of Trump Organization enshittification now. It looks like toxic gold leaf made in a sweatshop in China.

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On a personal level, enshittification is being stuck in limbo trying to find some measure of accountability for the white supremacist who assaulted me after months of mind-numbing delays by his legal representation. It is getting banned from Facebook by some random AI bot due to a supposed community standards violation never identified to me. This is pretty minor, yes, I get it, especially given the scale and scope of what is happening in the world, but I have more than 15 years of photos and memories there, not to mention writings that should be my property, that I’d like to get back.

On Sunday, though, there were gulls and waves at Loyola Beach in Chicago. There were children, teens and adults alike playing in the lake, running for footballs, scooping up wet sand into cups for building castles and water for moats, people laughing, yelling happily, their voices merging with the waterbirds. It was so multicultural, not just the beach itself, but the groups of people with their towels and chairs clustered together. There was the big, perfect sky. There were the vegan hot dogs and pineapple soft-serve at the beachfront café, which could have been anywhere on a lovely day – Negril, Lisbon, Guatemala City, Venice Beach – which is not to say that it was generic, because it wasn’t, but that there is a universal thread that connects these kind of warm, friendly vibes and outdoor spaces together. You can just inhale and exhale. No one is pushing ads or extraction on you. It is the antidote to Trump 2.0 and Big Bro.

More of this, I thought to myself, standing in the water, and I changed the subject. This is what they want to dissolve; this is why we must save it. The simple things. The joyful things. The unplugged things. The un-monetized things. The connective things. The natural things. The essential, core, beautiful human things.

We start by remembering what we love and protecting it.

No, bros. We are not your meal. Feed off each other.