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:

Some words and phrases and ideas are more useful, more powerful, than others, and I think it's worth identifying when one is particularly effective or ineffective.

There's also the structures of thought, formal argument, stories, emotional appeals, that people build out of these. "Internet people wanting to sound smarter or more progressive or more plugged in than they are" I think is a phenomenon that various things about the current (ad-supported, engagement-driven, neoliberal "marketplace of ideas"-y) internet have created. I think the context within which you use a given term matters immensely; I think it's context that makes a particular usage of a word "thought terminating" or the opposite.

This thread has helped me realize that "enshittification" has always needed a "Yes, And" that I took to be implicit but is probably not in many invocations: that capitalism completely fails its most basic promises to people to be the "horn of plenty" that gives us all the goods and services we benefit from in daily life (and indeed, the driver of social progress itself). It does not, as the saying goes, do what it says on the tin. It concentrates wealth.

Markets do not produce just outcomes. The story told, incompletely, by enshittification is that just outcomes - eg a marginalized person getting funded to make something, a useful technology product, an affordable transportation service - are an infrequent or temporary illusion created for recruitment/PR/marketing purposes. That larger narrative connects to the fundamental behaviors of capital, and when we're talking to persuadable people, we should make sure to give them that larger context. Otherwise all we can offer them is new words to complain to customer service with.