Personal review:
A good recap of his previous writings and talks on the subject for the first third, but a bit long. Having paid attention to them for the past year or two, my attention started drifting a few times. I ended up being more impressed with how much he’s managed to condense explaining “enshittification” from 45+ minutes down to around 15.
As soon as he starts building off of that to work towards the core of his message for this talk, I was more-or-less glued to the screen. At first because it’s not exactly clear where he’s going, and there are (what felt like) many specific court rulings to keep up with. Thankfully, once he has laid enough groundwork he gets straight his point. I don’t want to spoil or otherwise lessen the performance he gives, so I won’t directly comment on what his point is in the body of this post - I think the comments are better suited for that anyways.
I found the rest to be pretty compelling. He rides the fine line between directionless discontent and overenthusiastic activist-with-a-plan as he doubles down on his narrative by calling back to the various bits of groundwork he laid before - now that we’re “in” on the idea, what felt like stumbling around in the dark turns into an illuminating path through some of the specifics of the last twenty to forty years of the dynamics of power between tech bosses and their employees. The rousing call to action was also great way to end and wrap it all up.
I’ve become very biased towards Cory Doctorow’s ideas, in part because they line up with a lot of the impressions I have from my few years working as a dev in a big-ish multinational tech company. This talk has done nothing to diminish that bias - on the contrary.
This was never supposed to be a word. Why are we doing this
Your head is going to hurt even more if you are a German: The prefix “ent” usually means to lose or get rid of something. I.e. “I got rid of it” -> “Ich habe es entsorgt” so everytime I read “enshittification” I had to remind myself it’s the process of making something worse not better.
So “disenshittification” is a double knot in my brain. I propose “disshittification” as alternative.
My suggestion would be to do treat it like German has other potential loan words and make a new word that is a literal translation.
Maybe something like “sheißemachen” / “entsheißemachen”?
Your proposal is so much better than the original word itself, too.
I hate it. I’m soooo tired of reading it.
I’ve started just mentally replacing it with “rot”
Because if one uses the word “good” sea lions en masse migrate immediately and surround the speaker demanding to change the subject to are ethics real and why the mean tone and is that even a word.