The Enshittification of Everything.
Cory Doctorow invented the perfect word for our time of collapsing complexity.
Andrew Nikiforuk
The Tyee
5 Jul 2024
Last year the American Dialect Society chose as its word of the year “enshittification.”
Cory Doctorow, a clever fellow and Toronto-born internet dude, invented the term to characterize the declining service and products made by IT monopolies that generate armies of algorithms to bully people like storm troopers.
But [sic] I think the descriptor has far broader applications. Everywhere you turn, it seems, civilization is facing a massive and cumulative failure of excessive complexity. Enshittification explains the state of just about everything.
Doctorow laid out his concept in a brilliant Marshall McLuhan lecture delivered at the Canadian Embassy in Berlin earlier this year.
Doctorow writes with flair: “The capitalism of today has produced a global, digital ghost mall, filled with botshit, crap gadgets from companies with consonant-heavy brand names and cryptocurrency scams.”
But [sic] make no mistake: the Communist Party of China has delivered the same breakfast from hell. Technology overrides ideology.
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…once enshittified, where to next? Clay Shirky, an internet maven like Doctorow, finds wisdom in the work of anthropologist Tainter, who outlined the perils of accelerating complexity. “When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to,” wrote Shirky in an essay on failing TV business models.
“It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But [sic] there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.”
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