Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

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The enshittification of enshittification

I wonder if Cory Doctorow finds the misuse of the concept of ‘enshittification’ as annoying as I increasingly do. It had a precise analytical meaning which is increasingly lost in an idiomatic use which means something ‘gets shit’. The concept concerned HOW this happened rather than THAT it happened. The idiomatic use could be deployed to say “the concept of ‘enshittification’ has itself been enshittified”. It would be attention grabbing and catchy but it simply wouldn’t fit with what the word actually means. Yet social platforms have made the concept of enshittification a bit, well, shit.

Don’t get me wrong, I like academic buzzwords. I must have used the phrase ‘accelerated academy’ literally thousands of times in 2010s. But they serve a purpose for coordinating attention rather than performing analysis. It’s sad when an analytical concept becomes a catchphrase.

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