Marxists have a hundred years of text dedicated to alienation from labor, the falling rate of profit, degeneration of art and creative disciplines under later capitalism due to the profit motive, cycles of class struggle, all based on a materialist analysis of changing production and class relationsi

But for some reason a trendy term like enshittification that vaguely means things are getting worse, without going into the basis about why they're currently getting worse, has caught on.

I'm convinced it's part of the tech grifter trend to take things that were already invented, slap a new name on it, repackage it, and sell it.

It's the enshittification of internet discussion

Okay but if we use "Late stage capitalism and the quest for profit above all else is causing the quality of goods and commodities to drop while their value stays the same or goes up," it's going to result in 20 minutes trying to explain things correctly followed by 20 hours of anti-communist arguments.

I'm also sick of it, but I also sort of like how it's gone viral. I had a very non-techy friend mention it to me the other day. I feel like most of the people who I see talking about it are jazzed because it makes them feel seen. My friend, for example, said to me that before she learned of "enshittification", she felt like she was going mad because of how things don't seem to work like they used to, especially in tech; she said that for the longest time, she had assumed it must be something that she was doing wrong.

But yet it explains so much about the modern world. All this time we’ve been abused and mistreated, had our data collected and income extracted in so many scammy ways ….. and now we have a word that fits it so perfectly