Enshittification is not a theory. It is a business strategy with a name because it happens so predictably it needed one. First, a platform is good to its users. Then it is good to its business customers. Then it is good to its shareholders. Then it dies.
You have watched this happen to every platform you ever loved. Facebook. Instagram. Twitter. YouTube. Spotify. Uber. DoorDash. Airbnb. The product gets worse every quarter. The price goes up every quarter. Your experience is the thing being optimized away.
The same trajectory
AI tools are following the same trajectory. Free tiers get throttled. Response quality degrades as the provider optimizes for cost. Features move behind paywalls. Your data trains their next model, which they sell back to you at a higher price.
Free ChatGPT trains on your data, sells your usage patterns, and gets worse every quarter as they optimize for inference cost. You are not the customer. You are the training corpus.
You pay $200 per month for ChatGPT Pro and the model still hallucinates. You pay $30 per month for Midjourney and the outputs still require three rounds of editing. You pay $60 per month for Adobe and the app still crashes. The value declines. The price climbs.
There is no escape within the subscription model because the incentives are structurally broken. A company that makes money when you keep paying makes money when you never stop needing them. They do not make money when you become self-sufficient.
Gen Z knows this. You have watched it happen for your entire adult life. You are not naive about platforms. You are platform-traumatized. The trauma is rational.
Aligned incentives
EVEREST has no incentive to make the product worse because EVEREST makes money once, when you buy the hardware. After that, EVEREST's only incentive is to make the product so good you tell your friends. The incentives are aligned.
The Studio runs offline. No telemetry. No usage data collection. No model trained on your conversations. The company cannot enshittify a product it cannot reach. The device does not phone home.
Enshittification requires access. No access, no enshittification. The Studio is the only AI product that is structurally immune to its own industry's business model.