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Comment by fssys | Hacker News Reader

every time someone coins a new term for these phenomena i think of how Adorno already explained it all. "enshittification" SHUT UP

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There was a major campaign the last decade from many pro-capital and libertarian thinkers to label Adorno and other philosophers as the root cause of many people grievances. Remember Peterson et all all warning about "Cultural marxism" and "postmodernism"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...

I try not be against new terms like "enshittification" or "dopamine fracking" for this reason, the tech people at the levers that might be convinced to change course seem to be more open to substack and blogpost concepts (see SSC / rationalist popularity for all this new terminology that just describes old continental philosophical concepts) instead of having to read old European thinkers that use too much Marxist terminology.

Edit: case in point, literally users here are now linking to SSC essays explaining critical theory lol

> There was a major campaign the last decade from many pro-capital and libertarian thinkers to label Adorno and other philosophers as the root cause of many people grievances.

I feel it's still ongoing, the reactionary elements are campaigning against anything circa modern (not modernist as in art but modern as organisation of society, so also anything that can be traced back to Enlightenment) and later, postmodern etc. They are actively destroying natural sciences too, which is a part of this effort. Feels like going back to feudalism.

Since I can't upvote @thrance's reply, I'll second it here: certainly complaints about postmodernism date to the 90s or earlier and fear of Marxism is as old as Marx (less sure about when "cultural Marxism" specifically became a scare-term of art)

Well, people don't read Adorno or others, maybe have their favorite sci-fi book, and then go and describe, sometimes centuries old, ideas as some novel insight.

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