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jonny

as was predicted as soon as it was coined, the term enshittification has completely lost its original meaning and now just means "made bad"

13 comments
jonny

it is (was? does the use go away?) an extremely useful concept to make sense of what happens with corporate information platforms. it remains a very funny word, but I now see it completely robbed of its critique of informational capital. the latest thing going around equates a number of platforms at various stages of enshittification, landing on a "just use them for fun," which basically gets the concept backwards.

jonny

I am not a linguistic prescriptivist, I am an anti-capitalist, and seeing such a useful concept used to soften people towards the next vector of enshittification gives me another sign we didn't learn from this round.

Charles ☭ H

@jonny

We are being propagandised by capital. The failure to learn isn't a stubborn naivety as much as its a deliberate obscuring of the lesson.

серафими многоꙮчитїи

@jonny metaenshittification, wherein capitalism co-opts its own criticism in order to sell t-shirts and reduce it to an aesthetic stance

jonny

@derwinmcgeary
it is the way. the dynamics of earnestness and irony are the same. the revulsion at deeply held belief and reduction of all things to collectible tropes and baubles. it is one reason I am fascinated by conspiracy theories and scams, which manage to completely evade irony while still steeped a deeply commodified symbolic economy.

серафими многоꙮчитїи

@jonny I tried to look up the famous Bill Hicks bit ("gotta get that anti-marketing dollar... smart") and I feel like you will appreciate* the end of the article I found...

* with some gallows humour

benx

@derwinmcgeary @jonny

"semantic drift" is another useful, though less specific term.

Admin

@jonny best to not stick to #fahernista thinking and use the hashtag #dotcons as a better 20-year-old categorization for this same mess, it's more on subject.

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