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by zcw100 146 days ago
Why have I been seeing people use "enshitification" so much lately? Yes I know where it comes from and what it means. It's like Cory Doctorow is the new Noam Chomsky of IT and enshitification has replaced "manufactured consent".
4 comments

My belief is that its rise to popularity is a result of the underlying concept being something that everybody has been feeling for a long time, but lacked a word that could serve as its face in a satisfying manner. It's snappy and encodes a certain frustration and anger with the state of things that isn't conveyed as well or as succinctly with other terms.
Also there seems to be more of it about. Like facebook is crazy these days if you don't have things to block the junk. What used to be holiday pic from friend, post from mum is now holiday pic then three in your face hot / AI generated influencers doing in your face stuff then maybe your mum. It makes my head hurt.
Because it's such a great word! It names something we have all begun to see but didn't have a name for.
karl marx saw this in the 1800s; modern media just eliminated any discussion of these concepts
Its the current term-slop to label anything changing in a way they dislike without nuance. Yes many things are incredibly getting objectively worse, but it enables them to look at unsustainable practices in the eye and feign shock when it fails to keep steam.
Even enshitification suffers enshitification.
So much so it's losing letters!