I am a Cory Doctrow fan also, and actually a fan of yours too. I think Cory's term "Enshittification" is pretty much genius.
Neither of you are short on intelligence. But if I may say so respectfully, you both, in common with pretty much all folk from US, seem much more conditioned / programed by the system of profit, which seems far more intense for Americans than maybe any other country.
I notice this in General in Medium. It seems like almost a crime for Americans to question the system of profit itself, rather than the internet, or people.
When we do a formal stakeholder analysis on the benefits and cons of the internet in presence of profit, relative to a similar analysis, with the requirements for everyone to make profit removed, we see clearly that the issue is not the internet, or technology, it is actually just the requirement for everyone to make profit.
Remove the latter, and there is no longer any problem, the motivation to deceive, and to propagate deception, both consciously and unconsciously are removed.
That done, we can much more clearly see also how things like Metcalfe's law hold true.
Metcalfes law says the value of a network (thus the value of being networked), is proportional to the square of the number of members in the network.
Value, means the benefit to humans in general, regardless of profit or money, we might say value in essence is the availability of energy to each of us, where the source of the energy is for free, costing nothing to Earth.
Availability of energy is what we each seek, at the most fundamental level of our being, each and every human has a fundamental physical need to make available to ourselves at least 150 Joules per second, 24/7, for life.
If we can't do at least that, then we die.
We generally get it by our connections, by a combination of money, information, and/or goods.
People lucky enough to have significant money, goods, or information (education) saved / invested in themselves, have less need to depend on being networked, to obtain their personal energy.
I am willing to bet both you and Cory are in the latter category, as am probably too. We are middle class, and not the youngest.
Certainly Elon Musk is in the self invested category.
Being personally invested, makes us less dependent on being networked, for survival.
Note this is physical systems Engineering, it is beyond opinion or politics. It is something fundamentally applying to, and driving every human, at a level so fundamental we are mostly completely unaware of it.
Remove the need for every human to make profit, and all of the problems you describe are removed.
I explain elsewhere how we can do that, by monetising solar energy (We commonly think it is already monetised, but we are easily deceived around that too).
Only solar energy has the fundamental property of being donated.