Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic.
The coinage is apt Cory. However I would have preferred instead of comparing Facebook to crab which have evolved through 1000s of years of sleek and appropriate adaptation, I’d suggest perhaps a rabid psychopathic hog eating its own offspring and choking on an overabundance of rotten food supplied to it by the same offspring who were force-fed brain rot feed by this megahog. Technopigheadedcannibalizuckerfucked . Not as elegant perhaps
If people didn’t like Apple and Google, nobody would use them.
That kind of thing is true of purely standalone products. Your local Starbucks franchise is making more money than your cool indie coffee shop because on average, people like Starbucks better.
People use smartphones to run third-party apps. They want to have the kinds of smartphones that run the apps they use. The same effect made Windows dominant even though most people didn’t really like it.
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This is an article by the guy who coined the term enshittification, so uhhh, pretty sure he knows what he means.
After reading the article:
Enshittification: The process by which a company starts by giving away everything seemingly for free, doing everything they can for both users and business customers. Then, after they have achieved enough network effect to keep people tied to their product, they begin to degrade the experience for users to make more money. Eventually, the same process happens to their business customers as well, as they have an effective monopoly over the space.
Technocarcinization: The tendency of technology companies to become both more surveillant and controlling of their devices (which they truly treat as theirs, not as ours) over time. Essentially tech companies all slowly become 1984 Nanny States in corporate digital form. Yes, enshittification is part of this process, but they are different things.
That’s… that’s literally the point they are making… did you click the link and read?
I’m ashamed to admit i didn’t.
I get that this guy has coined a term we like in the past, but gonna have to agree with you that “technocarcinization” is not another winner.
He just couldn’t let it be. Couldn’t be happy having coined a word use all the time now, he had to try to recreate the magic. But he flew too close to the sun. He’s a nerd, not a wordsmither. And his wordsmithing was bad.
“Technocarcinization” is us watching him fall to his own law of enshittification. He hath enshat himself.
To be clear, this is just how Doctorow has always been, he’s always been that annoying nerd who needs to come up with new words/phrases. Enshittification is just the one that caught one.
See also: Whuffie, metacrap, and Schneider’s law. Those are all from before 2005. Like I said, this is who he has always been.
I am of two minds on Doctorow: One one hand, I appreciate his thoughtfulness and insight, and on the other hand I cannot stand how much of a weirdly pedantic nerd he is, especially when it comes to his own ideas.
Also I remember him kind of really sucking at journalism at first in the early 2000’s. I recall an article about Napster where he said “Napster’s original goal was to sell music to people” which blew my fucking mind because it was always meant to be a peer-to-peer network and my god, we have both lived through this era, how could he manage to get it so fucking wrong? I was especially galled because he had just been given a class to teach at UCLA while my friend who actually had a masters degree and his thesis was on the social network aspects of piracy and the co-evolution of control and resistance in computer networks was struggling to find a job as a teacher.
So due to those early memories, I may be a little biased.
You’re allowed to be biased. We seem to be in the same age range, but I went the route of burning disdain for all who tried to get online notoriety, followers, clicks, etc.
That might be built up resentment from going through those formative years painfully aware how different things could have been if I’d been a young, attractive girl with a good webcam.
Every accusation…
I accuse you of being a swell guy that people love being around, with a huge wang and a great life.
