colin

edit:

i hate to break character, especially months after a post, but i feel people need a little more context to read this post than assumed:

• this is a mean post about a thing that annoys me

• cory doctorow is the originator of the term "enshitification", and he is by any and all measures, a disney adult. that's the joke in the title. i feel like stewart lee having to spell things out here, but understanding this joke is the entry qualifications for the rest of the flippant commentary.

• the really big take home message, for the people still following along, is this: enshitification, albeit defined in market terms, is regularly used as if it's a problem capitalism is afflicted by, rather than a problem capitalism causes.

• the other, less important message: i find the people who use this term in this way annoying, and unfortunately many of them found this post. i did not realise how deeply upset people would take jokes at the expense of "new york times readers" but in hindsight, you can only read so many op-eds before clutching your own pearls on impulse.

• i use "walking past a picket to complain to the manager" to talk about that "i'm politically liberal but why can't protests be quieter" mentality, the idea that any and all problems can be fixed by the regular channels. the person in question is used to being at the top of some power structure. apparently i need to explain this too. go figure.

• wait. one more thing, if you find yourself "but i use that word, but i don't use it in the way you complain about!" if so, this post isn't about you, no matter how rude i am.

got all that? great.

here's the original inflammatory post. please enjoy posting about it in places i can't see:

look, i hate the term "enshittification" as much as anyone. it feels like one of those made up swear words that came out of a doctorwho/supernatural fanfic, and for a while i was happy to continue dismissing it on those terms

it took me a while to realise that i hate it for entirely legitimate reasons too.

when people say "enshittification", it's as if their core complaint about capitalism is the customer service, rather than the systematic exploitation of other people. people don't talk about union busting as "enshittification", or wage theft as "enshittification", let alone deeper systematic issues.

people talk about enshittification to mean "i can't watch my favourite tv show any more"

in my experience "enshittification" has been used almost solely by people who do have more than a surface-level understanding of capitalism and its processes specifically to refer to the process of companies who operate Web services changing those services in a way that makes the users' experience worse, in order to tailor the service to further pursue profits.

i think this is a useful term because:

1. it clearly describes a subprocess that happens over and over again within and because of the capitalist mode of production
2. it can be used to facilitate dialogue with people who do not yet have a deep understanding of capitalism and its flaws but who are clearly frustrated with negative experiences resulting from enshittification
3. it is actually okay to be frustrated because a product or service that functioned well for you now functions like shit

2, i think, is the important bit. there are a lot of people who are frustrated because of this but don't understand the what or why of it. this is a concept that you can use to help others understand what is going on and why it is so endemic to capitalism.

because, sure, some people are right now of the mindset "i can't watch my favorite tv show". this is a tool you can use to help them move toward being critical of capitalism, and you can use it in conjunction with other ideas to develop a criticism that does not stop at "product bad now" and instead continues on to, say, "these practices are fundamentally exploitative of laborers"

my biggest issue with "enshittification" is most of the time it's used, it's thought-terminating. I'll discuss actual issues going on and people (on "the left") come into replies just saying "that's enshittification" instead of actually thinking about or advancing whatever's being talked about. It's replaced "yeah, it's capitalism. capitalism is the problem" replies whenever I talk about specific aspects of capitalism.

Does the word itself have that use? no, and some people use it correctly. But internet people wanting to sound smarter or more progressive or more plugged in than they are, or people who only heard the term from them, has largely auto-coöpted it's meaning.

and so, it becomes circular instead of enlightening.

edit to clarify:

it's a useful concept! but it's rapidly being watered down and shifted past what it ~usefully describes as jargon, faster than most things, because of it's utility and placement in time. Faster than a stable foundation is able to be built around it. which is more just a portent of things to come, but seems important to highlight how it's losing it's usefulness almost in real time as people with no real knowledge of what it means start defining it when asked.

jargon is the compression of several paragraphs of explanation into a phrase that can be used as a "link" to the original concept, but stops being useful for that outside of people who already deeply know it when it starts being used offhandedly like this.

my issue isn't that enshittification-as-described-canonically is a bad concept (the word itself isn't great but it has enough of the kiki nature that it's the right kind of phonetically spiny) but that the term has become functionally useless at describing more than the "woe the company has turned against me", even though the point is that the turning against isn't just the business plan, but a budget line item planned from the start because it's the only way these places can become profitable at the scale they are, especially with VC money.