The name of a political movement matters. Always has, always will. It's no different for adjacent concepts that describe a phenomenon the movement is organizing against.
Is Australia not big enough to count?
Plenty of terms are used in senate hearing transcripts. Hearings are a completely different thing from actual laws being passed.
As I said, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the government operates.
Is that the argument? I understood your argument to mean that the term "enshittification" is holding back the movement because nobody will use it. As others are saying, I don't think there's any issue people take with some drop-in term being used if actual laws are passed discussing the topic.
Plenty of movements involving vulgar language, however, did result in laws being passed - "Fuck the Draft" comes to mind, the attitude surrounding which led to the draft ending (after all, why else would it end?), but also was a central fixture in a supreme court ruling that furthered defined 1st amendment rights in the USA.
So again, I just don't understand how one intellectual describing one aspect of the digital rights movement could negatively impact the movement as a whole, which I interpret as your argument.
There is a phenomenon that is very clearly happening. Doctorow and others use a vulgar term to describe this phenomenon.
Because this vulgar term is used, it limits the ability of lawmakers, academics, and other "serious" people to care about, discuss, or pass laws that aim to address this phenomenon.
As an analogy: imagine if the concepts of inequality or social injustice were primarily described by a vulgar term. Instead of discussing, "democratic backsliding" or "failure of democracy" we said "democracy shit the bed." This would limit the range of the critique, which if one is interested in actually solving the issue, is an immensely impractical move.
Financial Times: The enshittification of apps is real. But is it bad? https://www.ft.com/content/acaf3fb1-d971-48ad-8efb-c82787cdd...
Not in the title, but Warzel uses the term in his Atlantic article, "Streaming Has Reached Its Sad, Predictable Fate" https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/strea...
ABC Radio National interviewed Professor Inger Mewburn, Director of Researcher Development at the Australian National University, and titled the interview "'Enshittification' and social media for academics" https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/saturdayextra/enshitt...
Bonus: The Italians are using the term. "Anche TikTok sta andando in malora (il fenomeno dell'enshitting)" https://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/blog/stazione-futuro/20...
So I guess I'm just not seeing how this is limiting anyone's abilities in any way.
> it limits the ability of lawmakers, academics, and other "serious" people to care about, discuss, or pass laws that aim to address this phenomenon.
Now, to be fair, I don't think the word is going to sink the whole attempt. But I think it's just juvenile and unhelpful. Why pick a word that is deliberately impractical, and then critique anyone that says, "I agree with your ideas, but maybe pick a more political-friendly name, so it's easier to do something about it?"
Giving something a derogatory name that the yellow press (or rather some Telegram group) can sling around to vent their frustration and fear could be a win in this place. Of course, leadership persons of such groups are usually just demagogues looking out for their personal gain, so it might just as well be another rallying cry leading to really bad policies hitting those that vote in favor the most. But such is the world today ;)
Like shit.
The word spread in common usage about as fast as wildfire because everyone immediately knew what he meant. And the companies are too polite to even be able to say the word! If you can't swear in response to being degraded, pissed on, pissed off, used and thrown away, then you're the kind of sheep they want that they can abuse more and more and more and more and more and more and more without ever facing any consequence.
God forbid that rudeness is involved in collecting the power to stand up to it
Eh. Either they weren't going to do so anyway, because doing so goes against the money, or they can come up with a more public-friendly term.
Everyone knows that synonyms exist, and them not having found the more "polite term" in Wikipedia — platform decay — says more about them and their reluctance to engage with the subject and the proposed solutions.
But Cory's a polemicist. He'd absolutely prefer the memorable word he coined himself to the acceptable, drab one that already exists.
(Plus value engineering is only one way to enshittify a product. There's also subscription models, selling data, jamming ads in everywhere... the advantage of Cory's word is that it captures everything).
> Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. [...]
> platforms squeezing market participants on both sides.
Wasn't that chokepoint capitalism? [1] (i.e. controlling supply and demand IIRC)
From Cory Doctorow's original article [2], one might say that enshittification is the degradation of a platform that transforms it from being customer-centric to prioritizing profit extraction at the expense of user experience. I think that the definition has expanded to include other things non-platform, but I feel that that isn't too far a stretch. Nowadays, I might say that enshittification is just unchecked capitalism doing its thing (and we need to be protected from exploiting us).
But I do concede that Cory was indeed exploring some ideas on his original post [2] that may have made it to his book (and thus, are related to your definition):
> Amazon's monopoly (control over buyers) gives it a monopsony (control over sellers), which lets it raise prices everywhere, at Amazon and at every other retailer, even as it drives the companies that supply it into bankruptcy.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
[1]: https://chokepointcapitalism.com/
[2]: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittificaiton/#relentl...
I guess my concern is that the term is broad enough to shift this way, from a very precise (and important!) issue to a more broad concept. I feel like picking a more specific term (such as indeed, platform decay), would have made it easier to keep the concepts apart and discuss them. Alas, it is good that the term was coined at all, as it gives a word to something that many of us clearly experience.
Enshittification sounds like an immature bad joke.
If you want laws to be passed, you need senators and judges and legal scholars to engage with your ideas. None of those people are going to take the idea of “enshittification” seriously with a name like that, nor are they going to put their name on a bill referencing it. There are plenty of examples of citizen activism that lead to a bill, and these bills often are name directly after the activist/movement name.
I’ll say it again: if you want political change, accept that you need to care about the names of concepts.
The terminology is irrelevant. Senators and judges won't deal with this because they're being paid not to, not because there's a rude word in the name.
Government itself has been enshittified, clearly and comprehensively.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/
"just use one of the dozens of words that failed to gain public attention over the past 25 years".
I'm also not super interested in his rant about people criticizing his approach are just "pearl clutchers."
Other people have written more comments in this thread explaining a different opinion. It doesn't really matter how many times you've explained yours. For what it's worth, I think an ancestor comment to this one poignantly addresses a particular perspective:
> The terminology is irrelevant. Senators and judges won't deal with this because they're being paid not to, not because there's a rude word in the name.
It might help to tailor your arguments to this perspective as I suspect it is the most common one. I also get the feeling that's how Doctorow figures it's "pearl clutching": it's less about the "bad word" and more about the "profits".
Seriously, can you back up this claim?
Then also notice the total lack of major legislation with vulgar, offensive, or immature words in the name.
It's all political theater and a real political will to end enshittification will end it. That is what's missing, not a positive-sounding name.
This is a non issue
It's not about communication, since for communication sake it's much more easily understood by a larger cohort of people if colloquial terms are used, it's simply the need for seriously-sounding jargon to be taken seriously, which is just a play in appearances.
If you want political change you need political action, the name of concepts is just one avenue for that.
Yes, and that class of people are the ones actually making the laws. The ones that could solve the problems discussed in the article (like nursing apps) legally.
Which is, I assume, actually the point.
It’s not because some underlying physical law.
decay, decline, rot, degradation, etc. all sound like the poor companies couldn’t do anything about it
Doctorow himself I think has a weak sense of disgust (a lot of his writing, and the site he used to run (boingboing) serve the market of people for whom disgusting things are entertaining or funny, so I think he has a blind spot here.
...as evidenced by the responses to my comment – the sheer hostility to the idea that maybe it's not a great idea to use the word shit in an activist project that aims at political change.
And so you're really not going to get any real change here, because it's easier to complain online and do nothing, while simultaneously shouting away anyone that suggests some minor changes would be more productive. The exact same conversation happens in the open source / free source movement.
Then again, look how the term has taken off, perhaps it's we who are the shit-marketers.