[Cory Doctorow] With An Audacious Plan To Halt The Internet’s Enshittification And Throw It Into Reverse
[Cory Doctorow] With An Audacious Plan To Halt The Internet’s Enshittification And Throw It Into Reverse
Those of us old enough to remember BBS servers or even rainbow banners often go down the nostalgia hole about how the internet was better “back in the day” than it is now as a handful o…
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Am I the only one that really detests the word “enshittification”? It feels like someone couldn’t be bothered to look up the correct term and lots of other lazy people ran with it.
Mind you, that feels like modern language in a nutshell.
It was a term coined to describe the step-by-step process modern tech platforms go through:
- be good, get customers, grow
- get large enough to corner market, concentrate on profits
- get large enough to move to politicise their approach, drive out competition through aggressive tactics, and lock in consumers
- drive more profit through dark patterns and ensure nobody wins but the stakeholders
It's specifically that, and there wasn't a word that described that process previously, as it's only something that's possible in a modern, "web scale" worldwide platform.
Maybe I’m just thinking the crudeness of the term is downplaying the seriousness somewhat.
I’ll award virtual internet points that you can redeem for absolutely nothing to anyone who can come up with a better term.
Too late. it is a widely used term with a very specific meaning now. that's language for you. not just modern language. all of language.
Yeah, you’re right. If I’d have spoken up earlier then people would have listened!
I feel your pain. I am not a native english speaker but I see lots of comparable words come up in my language. I believe they are wrong but I know many "wrong" examples that were wrong a century ago but they are part of the daily language now.
Maybe you could call it recoupment but it doesn't have quite the same ring. It's not quite the same thing, either.
You could also talk about coercive monopolies but that doesn't mean exactly the same thing.
I mean its a bombasticatic term for "capital accumulation" in the tech sector. Or, more accurately, the effects of capital accumulation and monopoly in the tech sector.