For those unaware, the name and logo are inspired by NERV from the Japanese anime Evangelion (1995): https://evangelion.fandom.com/wiki/NERV
THE year’s at the spring,
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hill-side’s dew-pearl’d;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn;
God’s in His heaven –
All’s right with the world!
Robert Browning (1812-1889)
The thing is, The Metaverse wasn't a problem in Snow Crash. It just was - it was a thing, and it was generally regarded as one of the last places not totally under the dystopian corporate lawlessness that the rest of the world was.
So the motivating example is built on misunderstanding the original text, in the same way that Meta doing it was built on misunderstanding everything about the concept.
In fact, there was a whole HN thread about an article on just that phenomenon recently[0,1].
The meme is used so often because there are many, many torment nexuses. Just as the definition of "enshittification" ceased to be bound to a description of platform decay almost as soon as it went viral here, and "literally" has been its own contronym for literal centuries, "torment nexus" has evolved to communicate a broader concept than was originally intended. And that's OK. It doesn't take anything away from the original usage.
Yes, one can be angry that human language doesn't follow the strictly defined, rigid rules of a programming language, and that the meaning of words can change quickly, and that language is fluid, sometimes vague and even self-contradictory. But to be mad that other people are using a meme in a way you don't approve of is petty and silly, because that's how the internet works. Such people need to touch grass and get a life.
[0]https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tech-billionaires...
"The radio is powered by satanic devils"
A change in the meaning of enshittification would be worse, IMO, because it is a nice description of a widespread phenomenon. It didn’t really have a great name before (“platform decay” sounds too passive, enshittification is good because it emphasizes the fact that it is incentivized to proactively make the platform bad).
So, I think we should go along with the former but not the latter.
However, the concept still holds weight. If you want a less obnoxious motivating example, there's actually a very, very old Torment Nexus that we've been trying to build for over a hundred years: humanoid robots. The play that literally coined the term robot - R.U.R.[0] - very much made them the central problem of the story. Building humanoid robots IRL is a very bad idea, and yet people still do it, resulting in all sorts of creepy robots with awful problems that could have been built as far more useful machines had they not been forcibly anthropomorphized.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.
Yes, I am aware that the robots in this story were more grown-in-a-vat than built-from-parts, but still.