The Sun and The Air

It's fine to use words wrong, sometimes.

Funny to see people doing "Enshittification" discourse (i.e. "is it a useful term? people keep using it wrong!") last night, literally in time with me talking about it with my brother over dinner. He has a degree in economics but isn't exactly on the pulse of internet discourse, so he'd only just heard of the term a couple of days ago in reference to YouTube's latest ad-block crusade, and didn't really love it until he saw it described as "a form of rent-seeking" where it suddenly clicked for him - it's not about the term being uniquely defined, but specifically applicable to the online services platform. He understood implicitly from his expertise what was going on, but seeing it framed that way clarified the true purpose of the term - shitting on corporations for being bad at business.

I get why people get annoyed at terms being used inaccurately - Netflix is indeed not enshittifying when they cancel a show - but that's just the internet, people are exposed to ideas in the form of headlines and consider themselves experts without reading any further. They do this with everything remotely approaching jargon, so if this is the first time you've got mad about it it's probably just because you're an economics dork. It's cool, the 10th or 11th time you see a word of relevance to you get completely butchered, you'll be numb to it.

I think "enshittification" has a particular use in being utterly disrespectful to those it applies to. This isn't "segmentation of services" or "aggressive monetisation", no - you're making your product shitty because it's not profitable enough. Or more likely because it's not profitable at all. That people will apply it to other ideas doesn't really faze me, because it's become a bit of an alarm bell - accurate or not, it'd be good for a phrase like that to be something companies don't want applied to them.

I could go on about this at length, but just generally - people inaccurately shitting on the people who created the modern corporate internet is better than having even the smallest amount of deference to them imo.

#cohost