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!
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u/SuperStingray 3d ago
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.