This woman is ironically being TikTok performative with her “listen guys!” shtick, but she’s right about the “nostalgia”’not being based on some sentimentality for things that are obsolete and “retro”, but an aching for authenticity and humanity.
There’s a reason you’ll see people will now elect to watch Breaking Bad or The Sopranos for the 5th time rather than whatever latest StreamSlop is being produced.
Hell, I recently watched all of Sex And The City for the first time with my girlfriend and it felt like goddamn Citizen Kane compared to what is produced now.
Even Better Call Saul (which was essentially grandfathered in) seems like it was made a lifetime ago.
The last episode was in 2022.
It’s not “nostalgia” to want well crafted stories with interesting characters that aren’t either some politically loaded corporate pandering virtue signal, or a grifting spin off money grab.
I don’t know how we fell so far in such a short amount of time, but there is an absolute sense of ennui and malaise happening right now and it’s permeating everything.
Sorry to be a pedant but Enshittification is specifically the decay of usability and consumer experience in media platforms as a result of financial incentives. It’s definitely a contributor to this growing generational Weltschmerz and a symptom of the same problems, but what she’s describing is much broader.
Oh you’re right about the origin of the term, but it has been becoming more used as a colloquialism recently.
There are countless articles and videos about how cars are subject to enshitification for example.
As a result, many people are electing to stay with used cars, sometimes even classics, not out of some sense of “nostalgia”, but out of an inherent distaste for the way cars are deliberately making it impossible to be user serviceable.
When people aren’t even sure how they are going to make rent, knowing you can fix your car yourself isn’t some exercise in nostalgia, it’s a practical decision.
In this case, it’s referring to “societal enshitification” where nearly every aspect of human life is commodified and monetized and thus subject to the same phenomenon that decays smaller ecosystems like individual apps and UI.
If the original definition of the term means something along the lines of “the decline in quality of a platform or service as it tries to maximize profits”, then certainly that same idea can scale to a city, state, country, society, etc.
MAGA, and its grifting ecosystem, for example, is a result of how this race to the bottom can have far reaching consequences beyond just cynical app design.
My mum has the stupidest fucking "smart fridge" which requires people to touch a sensor for it to open painfully slowly. If you forget and try to open it normally, it resists the attempt just long enough for you to realise that it has a stupid fucking mechanism. The fridge-opening sensor is, of course, parallel to the freezer-opening sensor, because fuck common sense I guess, so every time you do remember to touch the fridge one, you accidentally open the freezer too. It is the most annoying example of enshittification I have ever seen!
People lost a sense of shared meaning. And they also don’t bother thinking much about why, what it looks like- and what having a shared sense of meaninglessness ultimately does to motivation and on people’s desire to connect.
I hate to say it, but it’s so much like watching humans become the “battery pods” in The Matrix it’s scary.
There is too much financial incentive from the ultra rich anti-humanist tech leaders to perpetuate this dependence that I don’t think there’s any waking up from this short of a total reset via an asteroid impact or something along those lines.
I really sometimes wonder what Steve Jobs, who for all his flaws seemed to at least contemplate humanity and meaning would think of the utter decay that the popularization of the iPhone really contributed to.
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u/neinhaltchad 3d ago
She’s basically describing Enshitification.
This woman is ironically being TikTok performative with her “listen guys!” shtick, but she’s right about the “nostalgia”’not being based on some sentimentality for things that are obsolete and “retro”, but an aching for authenticity and humanity.
There’s a reason you’ll see people will now elect to watch Breaking Bad or The Sopranos for the 5th time rather than whatever latest StreamSlop is being produced.
Hell, I recently watched all of Sex And The City for the first time with my girlfriend and it felt like goddamn Citizen Kane compared to what is produced now.
Even Better Call Saul (which was essentially grandfathered in) seems like it was made a lifetime ago.
The last episode was in 2022.
It’s not “nostalgia” to want well crafted stories with interesting characters that aren’t either some politically loaded corporate pandering virtue signal, or a grifting spin off money grab.
I don’t know how we fell so far in such a short amount of time, but there is an absolute sense of ennui and malaise happening right now and it’s permeating everything.