I’ve been researching a new talk the last few weeks and along the way stumbled across a concept that’s been rattling around in my head. I am writing to share, because I find it a satisfying description for the tech flop era.

The idea is called “a market for lemons.” The phrase comes from a 1970 paper by George Akerlof that explains how information asymmetry between buyers and sellers can undermine a marketplace. Akerlof asks us to imagine ourselves buying a used car. Some cars on the lot are reliable, well-maintained gems. Others cars are lemons, the kinds of cars that can make it off the lot but are disasters waiting to happen. The sellers know which cars are which, but you, as a buyer, can’t tell the difference. That information asymmetry affects the average price in the market and eventually impacts the overall market dynamics.

The thinking goes like this: if a buyer can’t distinguish between good and bad, everything gets priced somewhere in the middle. If you’re selling junk, this is fantastic news—you’ll probably get paid more than your lemon is worth. If you’re selling a quality used car, this price is insultingly low. As a result, people with good cars leave the market to sell their stuff elsewhere, which pushes the overall quality and price down even further, until eventually all that’s left on the market are lemons.

I think we’re in the lemon stage of the internet.

I thought about this last week while shopping online for a sleep mask. Brands like MZOO, YFONG, WAOAW popped up, and these seemed less like companies and more like vowel smoke ejected from a factory flue hole, then slotted into a distribution platform. The long tail of generic brands on e-commerce platforms is a textbook lemons market: good products get drowned out by these alphabet soup products, who use their higher margins to buy sponsored placement in search results. Both buyers and sellers eventually lose (and perhaps the platforms win, as long as they don’t wear out their reputation).

For shoppers, buying online now feels like rolling the dice on the quality of the product. For sellers, the gamble is that their survival relies more on gaming the system than actually improving the product.

I think the post-pandemic experience has been a collective realization that the value that drew us to certain digital products and marketplaces is gone. Much of this reduction in value gets pinned to ZIRP, but there’s another critical factor—the natural flight of value creators. As platforms matured, the users and sellers who generated real value were squeezed out by players focused on capturing value rather than creating it.

Once you identify a lemon market, you start to see it all over the place.

Online dating. A lemon market where participants have no familiarity with one another participate in strategic self-presentation. High-quality partners (emotionally available, looking for genuine connection) can’t effectively distinguish themselves from those just seeking validation and eventually leave.

Search results. A lemon market where platforms profit from sponsored placement, misaligning incentives with user needs. The first page is a minefield: sponsored listings posing as organic results, SEO content farms, affiliate aggregators. You add “reddit” to work around this, but even that has less success these days.

Social media. Your feed is now professional content creators, low-effort podcast video clips, algorithmic filler reaction videos, stand-up chaff, and animals. Good ideas don’t happen frequently enough to satisfy the pace of the algorithm, so many have pivoted to newsletters or stopped posting.

What makes the Market for Lemons concept so appealing (and what differentiates it in my mind from enshittification is that everyone can be acting reasonably, pursuing their own interests, and things still get worse for everyone. No one has to be evil or stupid: the platform does what’s profitable, sellers do what works, buyers try to make smart decisions, and yet the whole system degrades into something nobody actually wants.

I was first introduced to the Market of Lemons by Dan Luu in an essay titled, Why is it so hard to buy things that work well?. Luu applies the market of lemons as a metaphor, and specifically identifies hiring as a market of lemons, because of the information asymmetry for both companies and individuals.

Companies have always struggled to tell the difference between great individual contributors and mediocre ones. Lacking a clear way to separate the two, they lump everyone together and rely on proxy games to evaluate skill. Candidates, for their part, walk into interviews without crucial information: whether the company is quietly dysfunctional, whether the manager they liked during interviews is about to quit, or whether the open role itself is little more than a vestige of an abandoned strategy that’s likely to be cut once the other foot drops. The usual signals of strength or weakness don’t signify much at all when it comes to hiring. Layer on the automated scale of the application process—candidates firing off applications by the hundreds, companies screening by the thousands—and the result is a highly inefficient market that wastes everyone’s time. Meaningful signals get drowned out, everyone gets lumped together, rational players opt out to the extent they are able, and the market slides steadily downward.

There have been countless attempts to make hiring more rational and efficient—the stuff of startup pitch deck lore. But I’m not sure hiring can ever be much more efficient, because neither side has reason to show themselves as they really are, warts and all. Idealistically, both would come straight; pragmatically, it is a game of chicken. Candidates polish résumés and present curated versions of their abilities, listing outcomes and impact statistics with dubious accuracy and provenance. Companies do the same, putting culture and mission front and center while hiding systematic dysfunctions and looming existential risks. When neither side is forthcoming, you’re left with proxies: a famous logo on a resume, a polished culture deck. Gaming the meta of the system supersedes the actual development or evaluation of skill. And, much to my disappointment, gaming the meta may, in fact, be an essential aspect of most jobs.

At this point, it should be obvious how the market for lemons applies to ill-considered AI-generated content. I’ll let you sketch out that argument yourself since it’s fairly straightforward, and this thing is already long enough.

Instead, let’s zag and revisit my point earlier about system-gaming becoming the most viable playbook instead of focusing on the product. As a consumer and as a designer, I hope this is a temporary state before a massive recalibration. The primacy of meta-activities—optimizing for algorithms, visibility theater, consumer entrapment, externalization of costs, performative internal alignment, horse-trading amongst a set of DOA ideas—is poison. It is a road to nowhere worth going.

This reflects a business culture obsessed with outcomes while treating outputs as speed bumps. But outputs (code, design, the products themselves) are the load-bearing work—the actual prerequisites for the outcomes desired. Focusing on outcomes while ignoring outputs means hiding in abstractions and absolving oneself of accountability. If any output is acceptable to hit your targets, what awful things emerge at scale? What horrors happen when success detaches completely from the necessity of being good—having both skill and ethics?

The safest, smartest path is also the most mundane: keep the main thing the main thing. Outcomes matter, but output literally comes first. Outputs are the business to everyone outside it—what customers see, buy, and use. You can’t stay safe in abstractions forever. Eventually, you must attend to the reality of what’s in front of you, because that’s where work gets done and where assumptions get validated or falsified (because reality has a surprising amount of detail).

In other words, the meta ruins things for everyone. To hide in abstractions is to dodge the reality of your choices. These tactics may get you profit, but you sacrifice benefit. The climb may feel like progress, but at the end you’ll find yourself at the top of a mountain of lemons, perhaps not of your own making, but almost certainly of your own doing.