If you find yourself ignoring your phone because most calls are spam, or discovering the subscription you cancelled has quietly renewed at full price, you are already living inside what Stanford economist Neale Mahoney and Chad Maisel of the Groundwork Collaborative are calling the “annoyance economy” — a system of engineered friction that acts as a hidden tax on households.
What once looked like poor service has in fact become a business model. Companies have realised they can extract more value from consumers by making simple everyday tasks more difficult — consuming our time, attention and patience. The result is an economy that feels harder to navigate, where the cost of participation rises not only in money terms but also in hours, clicks and cognitive bandwidth.
Mahoney and Maisel’s recent report — “Taking on the Annoyance Economy” — estimates that US households lose at least $165bn a year to the cumulative drag of spam calls, hidden fees, hold times, subscription traps and bureaucratic hurdles. As the Groundwork report notes, “the system is being designed not to help you but to wear you down”.
These frustrations are not minor inconveniences — they are actual economic transfers. South Africa’s version of the annoyance economy is amplified by local structural weaknesses. Municipalities rely heavily on administrative charges and penalties to stabilise their finances, while state‑owned entities such as Eskom pass inefficiencies through to consumers via rising tariffs and complex billing systems. Private sector firms increasingly rely on subscription models, automated service deflection and opaque pricing to protect margins. Friction has become a design principle.
Globally, the annoyance economy is colliding with a broader shift in business models. Over the past decade, companies have invested heavily in digital customer service deflection — chatbots, automated menus and self‑service portals. While these tools reduce costs, they also turn consumers into the system’s unpaid administrator.
One of the clearest expressions of this trend is the phenomenon now widely known as “enshittification”, a term popularised in 2022 by journalist and author Cory Doctorow. Merriam‑Webster defines enshittification, which it recognises as a legitimate word, as the process by which a digital platform is “made worse for users in order to increase profits”.
Amazon illustrates the pattern. It began as a highly user‑centric platform offering low prices, fast delivery and a clean site. Once it became dominant and users were effectively locked in, Amazon shifted its incentives towards advertisers and marketplace sellers. Sponsored listings and paid placements now crowd the search page, making it harder for users to find what they are looking for.
Enshittification explains how online platforms decay, while the annoyance economy explains what that decay costs households and the broader economy. Both rely on the same basic economic logic: lock‑in and extraction. High switching costs, opaque pricing, administrative friction and concentrated market power create the same incentives across sectors — from telecoms and banking to medical aids, municipal billing and e‑commerce returns.
A small but encouraging counter-trend is emerging in South Africa as a new generation of firms quietly position themselves as the opposite of the friction-heavy incumbents
In South Africa, the annoyance economy has expanded across multiple sectors. Telecoms providers have lengthened call‑centre waits while pushing consumers into self‑service loops. Banks have added fees and slowed dispute processes, while medical aid authorisations and claims have become more complex. E‑commerce returns are harder and subscription traps more common.
The rise of the annoyance economy reveals a deeper truth about today’s economy: value is no longer created solely by improving products and services, but increasingly by manufacturing and monetising inconvenience. Time itself has become a commodity, with firms effectively harvesting it.
Mahoney and Maisel estimate that $75bn of the annual cost of the annoyance economy comes from wasted hours. Complexity has become a business model, nudging consumers into paying more than they intended. Worst of all, the burden is regressive: lower‑income households lose a larger share of their time, money and cognitive bandwidth to friction because they have fewer choices, thinner margins and no way to buy their way out of broken systems.
Increasingly, the same logic behind consumer‑level irritation is visible in geopolitics. Just as firms degrade services to extract value, states now exploit global interdependence to exert power, using sanctions, export controls and chokepoints as instruments of coercion. As the old order crumbles, the global economy is shifting from systems designed to reduce friction to systems that manufacture it, either for profit or for power.
The result is an economy with fewer shock absorbers, more friction baked into everyday life, rising costs of participation, declining trust in institutions and lower productivity.
A small but encouraging countertrend is emerging in South Africa as a new generation of firms quietly position themselves as the opposite of the friction-heavy incumbents that consumers have learnt to endure.
Digital‑first banks such as TymeBank and Bank Zero have built their brands on transparent fees and instant onboarding. Payment platforms such as Yoco market themselves on simplicity and speed, while service sector disruptors such as SweepSouth, Naked Insurance and Udok compete by stripping out administrative drag.
Even fibre and ISP disruptors, from Afrihost to Cool Ideas, differentiate themselves through no‑contract offerings and clear pricing. While none of these companies uses the language of “enshittification”, their value proposition is unmistakable in a low‑trust, high‑friction economy.
The next frontier of consumer value may lie not in price or product but rather in the elimination of irritation. Transparency, simplicity and accountability are economic necessities. The Competition Commission’s recent focus on price transparency in food retail — via its essential-food pricing monitoring reports — shows that regulatory attention can shift behaviour. A similar focus on administrative friction could yield real gains for consumers.
The annoyance economy is a reminder that modern economic life is shaped not only by prices and wages but also by the design of everyday interactions. It taxes time, patience and cognitive bandwidth.
If the past decade was defined by the rise of convenience, the next may well be defined by the fight against engineered inconvenience. The companies that understand this will win trust.
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