Isn’t enshittification about products and services? I’ve never heard anyone use it for work culture, and I think “salaryman-ification” is more descriptive here.
i always thought of it as the general worsening of something in the pursuit of the short term increase in capitalist benefits (or the delusion of such).
It’s used a lot for products and/or services but underlying those is probably the enshittification of all the supporting structures, mental and physical health of the workers etc.
It is. They’re being pedantic. It’s a complete made up term within the last few years to describe anything getting shittier for the benefit of shareholders. Applying it to a specific thing and saying it can’t be used to describe what this article is talking about is silly.
Here’s a quote from Cory Doctorow himself at the end of his book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It:
The longer I think about this, the more names I come up with. I’m going to stop now, but I’ll leave you with one final word: enshittification.
Specifically, I am giving you explicit permission to use this word in a loose sense, whenever you think it makes sense to do so. As I wrote in my essay “Dirty Words Are Politically Potent”: The fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term “enshittification” very loosely indeed, to mean “something that is bad,” without bothering to learn—or apply—the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use “enshittification” loosely and inspire 10 percent of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I’ve done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of “enshittification” is worse than a self-limiting move—it would be a self-inflicted wound.
I’m pretty sure it can be used for anything that is getting shittier.
maltasoron@sopuli.xyz 9 hours ago
It’s about platforms specifically:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification