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It’s unfortunate that he is continuing to use the term enshittification, because that pretty much guarantees that no serious academic, legal scholar, or politic
by keiferski 1y ago
It’s unfortunate that he is continuing to use the term enshittification, because that pretty much guarantees that no serious academic, legal scholar, or politician is going to engage with these ideas publicly. Which is a shame, as many of the solutions here are explicitly legal ones. Words and names matter, especially when it comes to political actions.
- smitty1e 1y agoMarket decay?
- keiferski 1y agoSurely there is a better synonym: decay, decline, rot, degradation, etc. Enshittification sounds like an immature bad joke.
- piva00 1y agoAcademics are completely free to rebrand the naming if they need to sound more pompous and serious, the semantics are the same.
- keiferski 1y agoIt has nothing to do with being pompous, and this attitude is precisely why none of these solutions will ever go anywhere. If you want laws to be passed, you need senators and judges and legal scholars to engage with your ideas. None of those people are going to take the idea of “enshittification” seriously with a name like that, nor are they going to put their name on a bill referencing it. There are plenty of examples of citizen activism that lead to a bill, and these bills often are name directly after the activist/movement name. I’ll say it again: if you want political change, accept that you need to care about the names of concepts.
- TheOtherHobbes 1y agoThis is tone policing. "Why are you being so impolite about your abuse?" The terminology is irrelevant. Senators and judges won't deal with this because they're being paid not to, not because there's a rude word in the name. Government itself has been enshittified, clearly and comprehensively.
- keiferski 1y agoNo, it’s just basic communication skills. Which seems to be a tough ask these days.
- card_zero 1y agoCory Doctorow suggests using "platform decay" if the term enshittification bothers you. https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/ https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/ "just use one of the dozens of words that failed to gain public attention over the past 25 years".
- keiferski 1y agoI've already written about 5 comments in this thread explaining why it's a poor choice of a word from a pragmatic point of view. I'm also not super interested in his rant about people criticizing his approach are just "pearl clutchers."
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago> I've already written about 5 comments in this thread explaining [my opinion]. Other people have written more comments in this thread explaining a different opinion. It doesn't really matter how many times you've explained yours. For what it's worth, I think an ancestor comment to this one poignantly addresses a particular perspective: > The terminology is irrelevant. Senators and judges won't deal with this because they're being paid not to, not because there's a rude word in the name. It might help to tailor your arguments to this perspective as I suspect it is the most common one. I also get the feeling that's how Doctorow figures it's "pearl clutching": it's less about the "bad word" and more about the "profits".
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- croes 1y agoThey all miss the point that it’s done on purpose. It’s not because some underlying physical law. decay, decline, rot, degradation, etc. all sound like the poor companies couldn’t do anything about it
- Ygg2 1y agoPlatform decay. But I think people are confusing effects of capitalism with just how bad online stuff gets.
- ajb 1y agoI totally agree. The term is a puerile way of "owning the cons" following Haidt's idea that conservatives have a strong sense of disgust and liberals do not. The problem is that a) many conservatives are also a potential constituency for increasing integrity in the private sector, and b) many people on the political left also have a strong sense of disgust. Doctorow himself I think has a weak sense of disgust (a lot of his writing, and the site he used to run (boingboing) serve the market of people for whom disgusting things are entertaining or funny, so I think he has a blind spot here.
- keiferski 1y agoI don't even think it goes as deep as right vs. left. It's more of a "hacker culture" (whatever that means in 2025) obsession with being subversive and fighting anyone that suggests metaphorically putting on suit and tie could actually solve the problem. ...as evidenced by the responses to my comment – the sheer hostility to the idea that maybe it's not a great idea to use the word shit in an activist project that aims at political change. And so you're really not going to get any real change here, because it's easier to complain online and do nothing, while simultaneously shouting away anyone that suggests some minor changes would be more productive. The exact same conversation happens in the open source / free source movement.
- p3rls 1y agoI can barely remember the boingboing era of the internet, but when I found out Doctorow was a serious writer I remember having a similar reaction... Then again, look how the term has taken off, perhaps it's we who are the shit-marketers.
- pjc50 1y ago> no serious academic, legal scholar, or politician is going to engage with these ideas publicly Eh. Either they weren't going to do so anyway, because doing so goes against the money, or they can come up with a more public-friendly term.
- rolandog 1y agoYes, agree. I think this fake outrage at the rudeness of the word is performative pearl clutching from staunch capitalism apologists. Everyone knows that synonyms exist, and them not having found the more "polite term" in Wikipedia — platform decay — says more about them and their reluctance to engage with the subject and the proposed solutions.
- eyesofgod 1y ago[flagged]
- ikr678 1y agoI think that's a bit of projection on your part, not everyone is scared of naughty words. It was the Australian word of the year in 2024 and appears in our senate hearing transcripts.
- keiferski 1y agoIt has nothing to do with my own personal opinion on vulgar words. It's a basic understanding of how the political system works. The name of a political movement matters. Always has, always will. It's no different for adjacent concepts that describe a phenomenon the movement is organizing against.
- komali2 1y agoI disagree that your personal opinion isn't tainting your perspective. You presume that this name negatively affects the political movement opposed to enshittification - even when faced directly with the fact that sovereign governments are engaging seriously with the term. Is Australia not big enough to count?
- keiferski 1y agoWhat laws have been passed that explicitly use vulgar words in their names? Plenty of terms are used in senate hearing transcripts. Hearings are a completely different thing from actual laws being passed. As I said, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the government operates.
- komali2 1y ago> What laws have been passed that explicitly use vulgar words in their names? Is that the argument? I understood your argument to mean that the term "enshittification" is holding back the movement because nobody will use it. As others are saying, I don't think there's any issue people take with some drop-in term being used if actual laws are passed discussing the topic. Plenty of movements involving vulgar language, however, did result in laws being passed - "Fuck the Draft" comes to mind, the attitude surrounding which led to the draft ending (after all, why else would it end?), but also was a central fixture in a supreme court ruling that furthered defined 1st amendment rights in the USA. So again, I just don't understand how one intellectual describing one aspect of the digital rights movement could negatively impact the movement as a whole, which I interpret as your argument.
- flir 1y agoValue engineering. When you can't grow by selling more widgets, your only real choice is to make (almost) the same thing, but cheaper. But Cory's a polemicist. He'd absolutely prefer the memorable word he coined himself to the acceptable, drab one that already exists. (Plus value engineering is only one way to enshittify a product. There's also subscription models, selling data, jamming ads in everywhere... the advantage of Cory's word is that it captures everything).
- Voultapher 1y agoI'd suspect value engineering to bounce off most people as some abstract concept, enshitification is so much more visceral and evokes an emotional response that matches the feeling of platforms turning to shit.
- phrotoma 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit
- patapong 1y agoI agree with this - beyond the sound of the term, it is also not very obious in what it refers to. In the beginning, it was used with a very specific meaning, of platforms squeezing market participants on both sides. Now, it seems to have come to refer to all instances of online services getting worse and more user-hostile over time. Dare I say, enshittification of the term enshittification?
- rolandog 1y agoI disagree with your definition; from Wikipedia [0]: > Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. [...] > platforms squeezing market participants on both sides. Wasn't that chokepoint capitalism? [1] (i.e. controlling supply and demand IIRC) From Cory Doctorow's original article [2], one might say that enshittification is the degradation of a platform that transforms it from being customer-centric to prioritizing profit extraction at the expense of user experience. I think that the definition has expanded to include other things non-platform, but I feel that that isn't too far a stretch. Nowadays, I might say that enshittification is just unchecked capitalism doing its thing (and we need to be protected from exploiting us). But I do concede that Cory was indeed exploring some ideas on his original post [2] that may have made it to his book (and thus, are related to your definition): > Amazon's monopoly (control over buyers) gives it a monopsony (control over sellers), which lets it raise prices everywhere, at Amazon and at every other retailer, even as it drives the companies that supply it into bankruptcy. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification [1]: https://chokepointcapitalism.com/ https://chokepointcapitalism.com/ [2]: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittificaiton/#relentless-payola https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittificaiton/#relentl...
- patapong 1y agoFair enough! That was not precise of me. I guess my concern is that the term is broad enough to shift this way, from a very precise (and important!) issue to a more broad concept. I feel like picking a more specific term (such as indeed, platform decay), would have made it easier to keep the concepts apart and discuss them. Alas, it is good that the term was coined at all, as it gives a word to something that many of us clearly experience.
- subjectsigma 1y agoI hate the name too, it has this distinct Toys R’ Us feel to it. It makes Doctorow seem like a petulant baby, even though his general message is sound. And every time I see Doctorow mentioned there’s at least one comment saying it’s a bad name. People criticized RMS for years for using terms like “iCrap”, etc. but for some reason Doctorow is allowed to do this
- bregma 1y agoPerhaps encrapification would be more acceptable amongst the erudite classes? Or maybe endoodycated? encacapated?