Digital can still be a force for good but only if it gives as much as it takes.
Digital went from lockdown hero to public villain in five years, with doomscrolling, AI job fears, and creepy smart glasses among the reasons why. We argue the tech itself isn't the problem: it's who the value flows to. A look at where digital still earns its place.
Rewind to the turn of the 2020s and digital was the hero of one of the time. Zoom calls kept families together through lockdowns. Vaccine rollouts were coordinated through apps and booking portals. Small brands found a route to customers through Instagram and Shopify that would once have taken years and serious capital. For a moment, "digital first" felt less like a strategy slide and more like a genuine social good, keeping us connected, entertained, fed and motivated.
Five years on, that story has curdled. Ask most people what digital and tech mean to them today and you'll hear a different set of words: doomscrolling, misinformation, burnout, AI taking jobs. The turnaround has been remarkably fast, and remarkably widespread.
And then: enshittification, everywhere
There's a word for what's happened, and it's a good one: enshittification. Coined to describe how platforms decay once they've locked users in, it now doubles as shorthand for the entire mood shift. Products get worse, not better, once the growth has been captured and the priority quietly switches from serving people to squeezing margin.
Social platforms are the clearest case. Under pressure to hold attention, feeds leaned harder into algorithms that reward anger and stickiness over accuracy and quality, endless supply built for endless scroll rather than anything approaching moderation. The result is engines that amplify conflict and conspiracy as readily as truth and connection. Layer doomscrolling and AI slop on top, with their well-documented links to anxiety, IRL disengagement, and poor sleep, and the case against social writes itself.
But enshittification isn't just about feeds. It's also visible in a quieter, more structural shift: the removal of people from experiences, not because it serves the customer, but because it serves the bottom line. Self-serve tills replace staff, then quietly narrow to fewer human checkouts still standing. Customer service becomes a chatbot maze designed to deflect rather than resolve, with a human only reachable after enough friction to make most people give up. None of this was sold to customers as an improvement and it mostly only serves the short-term P&L.
Then came generative AI, and with it a sharper, more personal anxiety. This wasn't abstract ‘automation will reshape work over the coming decades’ territory. It was copywriters, translators, programmers and support teams watching software do in seconds what used to be their job, with the savings landing on someone else's balance sheet.
This year we have a new digital villain: Meta's smart glasses, sold in their millions, now facing a very public ‘creepy’ backlash over covert filming and disabled recording indicators. Clever technology, undermined by a lack of human-centred insight and intelligence.
A justified pushback
Unsurprisingly, a counter-movement has grown alongside all this. Younger generations, the ones who grew up fully immersed in digital, are among the most vocal about stepping back from it. Film cameras and disposable cameras are having a real moment, not as irony but as genuine preference. Vinyl sales keep climbing. Dumbphones and "digital detox" retreats are no longer wellness-fringe activities, they're marketed and bought at scale. Book clubs, run clubs, and analogue hobbies are filling a gap that screens used to occupy.
None of this is nostalgia for its own sake. It's a rational response to feeds, tills, and glasses that stopped feeling like they were built for the person using them. I’m sure we will see many brands do well by pushing a people-first over a digital-first offer.
Watching this from the inside
We’ve spent most of our working lives in the digital and tech space. It's where the bulk of our research sits, helping brands understand what digital genuinely does for the people who use it, and where it falls short.
That gives us a slightly unusual vantage point on the last five years. We've watched this shift happen from close range, working with teams who set out, in good faith, to build products that made things easier, cheaper, or more connected. Watching the category's reputation collapse this quickly has been genuinely surprising, and honestly, a bit sad but also understandable. A lot of good intention and real value has been lost in the noise around the worst actors and the worst excesses.
But we don't think the answer is to write digital off. We think the pendulum swinging this hard is a sign that the value equation has been broken, not that the value has disappeared.
It’s not all turned to shit. There’s a lot of digital good out there.
Some examples we keep coming back to, because they show digital doing what it was always meant to do, adding value for the person as well as the business behind it.
Building offline skills. Apps teaching languages, instruments, well-being, sports and cooking are some of the most quietly successful digital products of the last decade, precisely because they point people away from the screen rather than keeping them on it. Someone learning guitar chords from a video, or picking up conversational Spanish before a trip, ends the experience with a skill they carry into the offline world. The app isn't the end point but an enabler.
Time given back, not attention taken.Done well, digital tools still save people meaningful time and money, whether that's price comparison, streamlined admin, or simply not having to queue. The best examples don't try to keep people glued to a screen, they help you get something done efficiently and let people get back to their day, and the businesses behind them still make money doing it.
Community that outlasts the algorithm. Some of the strongest digital communities we've researched are built deliberately around shared purpose, passions and hobbies: forums, niche groups, and platforms designed around genuine interaction rather than an engagement-maximising feed. They work because they're built to serve the community, not to maximise time spent in the app. That's the difference: it's not digital platforms that are the problem, it's platforms designed around attention rather than purpose.
Accessibility and inclusiveness. Screen readers, live captioning, voice control, and AI-assisted tools have opened up work, education, and everyday life for disabled people in ways that simply weren't possible a decade ago. This is one of the clearest, least contested cases of tech making life materially better for a group of people who were previously locked out. Notably, it's also good business: a market that was being underserved is now being served well.
What links all four is that nobody had to lose for someone else to win. The person got something real. So did the business. That's the part that's gone missing from the mainstream narrative, and it's the part worth rebuilding around.
What this means for the brands we work with
The lesson we take from all this into our own work is that digital value can no longer be assumed. Five years ago, "we're investing in digital" was often enough to look like progress on its own. That's no longer true, and people are right to be more sceptical. We’ve always taken the view that the best of digital delivers value for the user as a priority, this is how they differentiate, grow and matter in people’s lives. That hasn’t changed.
The brands getting it right now are the ones asking a harder question: not ‘how do we add more digital touchpoints’ but ‘how can we make things better for the person behind the screens.’ Sometimes the honest answer is that a human, not a chatbot, is the better answer. Sometimes it's that a self-serve till should be an option, not the only one. Increasingly, though, we're finding real opportunities where digital, designed with people in mind and human-centred from the outset, still adds genuine value to both sides of the relationship.
Keep it human-centred and digital is a force for good
Digital and tech aren't inherently good or bad. They're tools, and the last five years have been a hard lesson in what happens when those tools are built around growth and margin without sufficient consideration for the needs and motivations of the people using them.
We know there's still real, tangible good that digital does in people's lives: in the skills people build through it, in the fitness and health it can drive, in giving people back their time, in building communities that matter and letting people go deeper into the things they care about. The best of these products don't try to replace the offline world or keep people glued to slop, they enhance it, sending people out to cycle a route Strava mapped, hold a conversation in a language an app taught them, or cook a dish they first found on a screen. What separates those examples from the ones fuelling the backlash isn't the technology itself, it's who it was built for. The brands and digital experiences that will last won't be the ones that squeezed the most value out of people or caused them new stresses. They'll be the ones that start with real people (not synthetic personas), invest in trying to understand what they need, where they're underserved, and where digital can do good, and how to avoid it doing bad.
