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“ENSHITTIFICATION (noun, colloquial): the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking”
https://www.macquariedictionary.com.au/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2024/
…used by folks who don’t understand how venture capital/capitalism works to blame individual platforms instead of the system at large.
e.g., Do you think this latest VC-funded platform will enshittify like the others or is it safe to use?
Either enshittification is a synonym for capitalism or it is bullshit.
@aral Soviet Russia enters the chat
(enshittification isn't really new)
@aral Cory Doctorow, anarchist, came up with the word, and he absolutely knows that it's the standard capitalism pattern. Part of the point of the word is to describe the capitalist process in a way that people who support capitalism can understand, but won't reflexively reject as "communism" or whatever.
I thought that was a given, considering the roots of the word are the description of what happens when services we all use move more and more towards profit, which results in shittier, damn near unusable service
Edit: the way threads appear in the timeline make the 2nd, 3rd, etc post/toot show up first in the feed, so I didn't see you already addressed this. My bad
@aral it's a particular process in capitalism, so yes it's capitalism, but it's a specific process that occurs in certain kinds of capitalist industries (provide useful service to create 'monopoly', use that monopoly to serve your business partners not your service users, translate your monopoly into siphoning the profit from the business partners to yourself, with each step enshittifying the previously useful service that attracted people in the first place).
@Outpatientzero @aral I agree. Enshittification is one part of capitalism - or better: one process form of capitalism. It's not capitalism in it's entirety.
@Outpatientzero @jhamre Exactly. In a similar way, "gentrification" is another process of capitalism that affects the territory. It IS capitalism working as intended, but also a useful separate concept by itself.
@aral
@aral Enshitification requires capitalism as it is the profit drive that causes the enshitification.
Enshitification is the end state of software in a capitalistic society.
@aral
It is precipitated by choke point capitalism.
The book by that name describes it in detail.
I like Venn diagrams; they can show us more nuance and detail in something, helping avoid false dichotomies and oversimplified statements. Enshitification is largely contained within capitalism and brings more information to the conversation.