It’s unfortunate that he is continuing to use the term enshittification, because that pretty much guarantees that no serious academic, legal scholar, or politician is going to engage with these ideas publicly. Which is a shame, as many of the solutions here are explicitly legal ones. Words and names matter, especially when it comes to political actions.
I think that's a bit of projection on your part, not everyone is scared of naughty words. It was the Australian word of the year in 2024 and appears in our senate hearing transcripts.
It has nothing to do with my own personal opinion on vulgar words. It's a basic understanding of how the political system works.
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.
There's nothing more powerful than using the real word for how the companies are treating us.
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
I think I get your meaning, but it cuts both ways. The angsty populists of today celebrate the transgression, ie. showing bad manners, dumbing down language, or flaunting low concepts.
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 ;)
I can see this angle, and agree it can be useful as a word to center frustration around. But I don’t think that actually leads to real political change.
I disagree that your personal opinion isn't tainting your perspective. You presume that this name negatively affects the political movement opposed to enshittification - even when faced directly with the fact that sovereign governments are engaging seriously with the term.
> What laws have been passed that explicitly use vulgar words in their names?
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.
I don't understand, Doctorow of course uses enshittification all the time but I've see "platform decay" used plenty of times as well. But also, plenty of "Serious" people seem to be discussing it
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...
These are individual media articles, not laws, not academic papers, not think tank reports, or anything that has actual legislative influence. Note that I wrote:
> 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?"
There is a whole branch of policy that generally covers enshittification, it's just not called that. Consumer Protection (laws, agency and enforcement) are the answer.
Being derogatory is absolutely a valid political tactic. But making it your only possible tactic is bad strategy. Sure, "not everyone is scared of naughty words", but politics is about appealing to as many people as possible, not just sounding cool to your in-group.
I hate the name too, it has this distinct Toys R’ Us feel to it. It makes Doctorow seem like a petulant baby, even though his general message is sound. And every time I see Doctorow mentioned there’s at least one comment saying it’s a bad name. People criticized RMS for years for using terms like “iCrap”, etc. but for some reason Doctorow is allowed to do this
Yes, agree. I think this fake outrage at the rudeness of the word is performative pearl clutching from staunch capitalism apologists.
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.
Value engineering. When you can't grow by selling more widgets, your only real choice is to make (almost) the same thing, but cheaper.
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).
I'd suspect value engineering to bounce off most people as some abstract concept, enshitification is so much more visceral and evokes an emotional response that matches the feeling of platforms turning to shit.
I agree with this - beyond the sound of the term, it is also not very obious in what it refers to. In the beginning, it was used with a very specific meaning, of platforms squeezing market participants on both sides. Now, it seems to have come to refer to all instances of online services getting worse and more user-hostile over time. Dare I say, enshittification of the term enshittification?
I disagree with your definition; from Wikipedia [0]:
> 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.
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.
It has nothing to do with being pompous, and this attitude is precisely why none of these solutions will ever go anywhere.
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.
They can use a different name. If someone in a position to push this really felt that advancing the cause really needed a rename they could come up with a name today, get consensus tomorrow and move on with life.
This is tone policing. "Why are you being so impolite about your abuse?"
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.
> I've already written about 5 comments in this thread explaining [my opinion].
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".
Of course it has to do with appearances, hence "pompous and serious", requiring a term change just so it can be taken "seriously" because the portmanteau sounds too crass or colloquial. It's all appearances, the underlying concept if it's called "enshittification" or "rot", "decay", etc. is the exact same, it's just that "enshittification" sounds too crass for a class of people to be allowed to use in their serious business.
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.
...for a class of people to be allowed to use in their serious business.
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.
Sure - take a look at every major piece of legislation passed in the last century. Notice anything about their names? The Patriot Act. The New Deal. They are all pretty "positive" names without any sort of vulgarity or negative connotation.
Then also notice the total lack of major legislation with vulgar, offensive, or immature words in the name.
I totally agree. The term is a puerile way of "owning the cons" following Haidt's idea that conservatives have a strong sense of disgust and liberals do not. The problem is that a) many conservatives are also a potential constituency for increasing integrity in the private sector, and b) many people on the political left also have a strong sense of disgust.
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.
I don't even think it goes as deep as right vs. left. It's more of a "hacker culture" (whatever that means in 2025) obsession with being subversive and fighting anyone that suggests metaphorically putting on suit and tie could actually solve the problem.
...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.
