Minimizing luck, maximizing lock-in

TechCrunch just ran a profile of Bending Spoons’ massive $18 billion initial public offering, dutifully laundering founder Matteo Danieli’s claim that his staggering wealth derives from minimizing luck and executing so-called operational excellence. Let us strip away the euphemism and translate that into the material reality it represents. When private equity firms boast about optimizing margins through operational playbooks, they are describing a highly specific, systemic transfer of wealth. They are executing the Roach Motel Equation: the deliberate, algorithmic weaponization of high switching costs to trap you in a decaying platform, meticulously calculating exactly how far a digital hostage can be squeezed before the sheer agony of leaving finally outweighs the ransom demanded to stay.

Bending Spoons systematically eliminates consumer choice through market consolidation. Their operational playbook relies on a well-documented phenomenon in antitrust jurisprudence: acquiring a target company that already enjoys massive market dominance alongside highly inelastic demand. The model is brutally straightforward: buy up a beloved, heavily relied-upon utility, immediately fire the engineers who actually maintained the infrastructure, and raise prices on the deeply entrenched, captive user base. Here is what that highly optimized operational excellence looks like in practice:

We saw this raw math in action immediately after they swallowed the iconic note-taking app Evernote, moving with ruthless speed to lay off nearly its entire US-based staff. They deployed the exact same structural maneuver a few months later by acquiring Meetup, clearing out the executive tier and applying the identical margin-juicing squeeze to a platform built for real-world community organizing. The goal is strictly to acquire your digital life, fire the caretakers, and start charging you exorbitant monthly fees for the privilege of not having your memories or communities abruptly deleted.

It's incredibly dirty.

The Roach Motel Equation requires a delicate touch to avoid sparking a full-scale user revolt, and Bending Spoons has perfected the calculus of manufactured pain. Look at the December 2023 Evernote update, an exercise in deploying structural friction. Under the guise of streamlining the service, Bending Spoons effectively bricked the free tier, capping users at an insulting fifty notes and a single notebook. If you wanted to keep adding to your decade-old archive of recipes, D&D campaigns, or tax receipts, you had to cough up a suddenly massively inflated subscription fee. The underlying code remained fundamentally identical while your trusted digital archive was dangled over a fire.

To understand why this racket works, we must map the systemic drivers that make this structural extortion so consistently profitable. Bending Spoons is simply exploiting a tech ecosystem built entirely on replacing competition with capture. In his foundational definition of the enshittification cycle, Cory Doctorow maps exactly how these traps are engineered, documenting the process where platforms firmly lock in their users before systematically withdrawing all the value they once offered:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

When switching costs are this artificially high—when leaving means manually abandoning a decade of community ties or irreplaceable research notes because the export tools have been deliberately bricked—you aren't a customer. You're a captive. Bending Spoons knows that without a standardized, legally protected way to port your data to a rival service, they can extract rents indefinitely.

We don't need to beg enshittification-thirsty corporate sociopaths to improve their 'operational excellence.' We need to legally immunize the hackers building the escape hatches. It's time to mandate adversarial interoperability, smash the digital roach motels, and let the trapped users walk out the front door.