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Comment by cdoctorow

3 days ago

It's not incorrect to use this word colloquially. See this post:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toi...

Specifically:

> The fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound.

4 comments

cdoctorow

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fragmede  3 days ago

lol damn well I can't argue with the man who created the term! Still, it seems anti-intellectual to want words to have specific meaning and nuance and flavor, and for people to want to be able to have a common dictionary in order to have elevated discourse.

In the days before the Internet, there was only space for a 30 second soundbite and that was the level of discourse. These days, we have Twitter and Substack, so there's slightly more nuance available to us (only slightly), and I'd like to think the "normies", as you put it, are smarter than you think, and are capable of nuance.

  • mindslight  2 days ago

    To be clear here, as the person who originally used the term in this thread, in light of your grandstanding about "anti-intellectualism" - I did use the term for its general connotations, not just to mean "bad".

    The healthcare industry is obviously not an online platform. And I would say it's being done to "lower costs" rather than "raise profits" (the two are often related, but not the same). But other than these, it strikes me as the same basic dynamic in a different industry. I spelled it out in a different comment:

    > it's part of a continual gradual march down in quality/services to a captive customer base. Basically the opposite environment of innovation aiming to serve customers

    The thing with online platforms is that they are new and fresh having been built out of whole cloth by subsidizing investments, allowing for multiple discrete enshittification steps as management focuses on one area after another. Doctorow:

    > This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit.

    Whereas the healthcare industry has been turning the screws for years. Now it's just an environment of making things worse wherever new ways to "control costs" can be created.