[Plura-list] Dirty words are politically potent
Cory Doctorow
doctorow at craphound.com
Mon Oct 14 12:13:59 EDT 2024
Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/
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On October 23 at 7PM, I'll be in Decatur, presenting my novel *The Bezzle* at Eagle Eye Books:
https://eagleeyebooks.com/event/2024-10-23/cory-doctorow
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Today's links
* Dirty words are politically potent: Why "enshittification" took hold.
* Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
* This day in history: 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023.
* Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
* Recent appearances: Where I've been.
* Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
* Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
* Colophon: All the rest.
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☂️ Dirty words are politically potent
Making up words is a perfectly cromulent passtime, and while most of the words we coin disappear as soon as they fall from our lips, every now and again, you find a word that fits so nice and kentucky in the public discourse that it acquires a life of its own:
http://meaningofliff.free.fr/definition.php3?word=Kentucky
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toilet-has-no-central-nervous-system
I've been trying to increase the salience of digital human rights in the public imagination for a quarter of a century, starting with the campaign to get people to appreciate that the internet matters, and that tech policy isn't just the delusion that the governance of spaces where sad nerds argue about Star Trek is somehow relevant to human thriving:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell
Now, eventually people figured out that a) the internet mattered and, b) it was going dreadfully wrong. So my job changed again, from "how the internet is governed matters" to "you can't fix the internet with wishful thinking," for example, when people said we could solve its problems by banning general purpose computers:
https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/
Or by banning working cryptography:
https://memex.craphound.com/2018/09/04/oh-for-fucks-sake-not-this-fucking-bullshit-again-cryptography-edition/
Or by redesigning web browsers to treat their owners as threats:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-director-ceo-team-and-membership
Or by using bots to filter every public utterance to ensure that they don't infringe copyright:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/09/today-europe-lost-internet-now-we-fight-back
Or by forcing platforms to surveil and police their users' speech (aka "getting rid of Section 230"):
https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/
Along the way, many of us have coined words in a bid to encapsulate the abstract, technical ideas at the core of these arguments. This isn't a vanity project! Creating a common vocabulary is a necessary precondition for having the substantive, vital debates we'll need to tackle the real, thorny issues raised by digital systems. So there's "free software," "open source," "filternet," "chat control," "back doors," and my own contributions, like "adversarial interoperability":
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability
Or "Competitive Compatibility" ("comcom"), a less-intimidatingly technical term for the same thing:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/competitive-compatibility-year-review
These have all found their own niches, but nearly all of them are just that: *niche*. Some don't even rise to "niche": they're *shibboleths*, insider terms that confuse and intimidate normies and distract from the real fights with semantic ones, like whether it's "FOSS" or "FLOSS" or something else entirely:
https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/262/what-is-the-difference-between-foss-and-floss
But every now and again, you get a word that just *kills*. That brings me to "enshittification," a word I coined in 2022:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola
"Enshittification" took root in my hindbrain, rolling around and around, agglomerating lots of different thoughts and critiques I'd been making for years, crystallizing them into a coherent thesis:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
This kind of spontaneous crystallization is the dividend of doing lots of work in public, trying to take every half-formed thought and pin it down in public writing, something I've been doing for decades:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/
After those first couple articles, "enshittification" raced around the internet. There's two reasons for this: first, "enshittification" is a naughty word that's fun to say. Journalists love getting to put "shit" in their copy:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/15/crosswords/linguistics-word-of-the-year.html
Radio journalists love to tweak the FCC with cheekily bleeped syllables in slightly dirty compound words:
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/projects/enshitification
And nothing enlivens an academic's day like getting to use a word like "enshittification" in a journal article (doubtless this also amuses the editors, peer-reviewers, copyeditors, typesetters, etc):
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=enshittification&btnG=&oq=ensh
That was where I started, too! The first time I used "enshittification" was in a throwaway bad-tempered rant about the decay of Tripadvisor into utter uselessness, which drew a small chorus of appreciative chuckles about the word:
https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1550457808222552065
The word rattled around my mind for five months before attaching itself to my detailed theory of platform decay. But it was that detailed critique, *coupled* with a minor license to swear, that gave "enshittification" a life of its own. How do I know that the theory was as important as the swearing? Because the small wave of amusement that followed my first use of "enshittification" petered out in less than a day. It was only when I added the theory that the word took hold.
Likewise: how do I know that the theory *needed* to be blended with swearing to break out of the esoteric realm of tech policy debates (which the public had roundly ignored for more than two decades)? Well, because *I spent two decades* writing about this stuff without making anything like the dents that appeared once I added an Anglo-Saxon monosyllable to that critique.
Adding "enshittification" to the critique got me more column inches, a longer hearing, a more vibrant debate, than *anything* else I'd tried. First, *Wired* availed itself of the Creative Commons license on my second long-form article on the subject and reprinted it as a 4,200-word feature. I've been writing for Wired for more than *thirty years* and this is by *far* the longest thing I've published with them - a big, roomy, discursive piece that was run *verbatim*, with every one of my cherished darlings unmurdered.
That gave the word - and the whole critique, with all its spiky corners - a global airing, leading to more pickup and discussion. Eventually, the American Dialect Society named it their "Word of the Year" (and their "Tech Word of the Year"):
https://americandialect.org/2023-word-of-the-year-is-enshittification/
"Enshittification" turns out to be catnip for language nerds:
https://becauselanguage.com/90-enpoopification/#transcript-60
I've been dragged into (good natured) fights over the German, Spanish, French and Italian translations for the term. When I taped an NPR show before a live audience with ASL interpretation, I got to watch a Deaf fan politely inform the interpreter that she didn't need to finger-spell "enshittification," because it had already been given an ASL sign by the US Deaf community:
https://maximumfun.org/episodes/go-fact-yourself/ep-158-aida-rodriguez-cory-doctorow/
I gave a speech about enshittification in Berlin and published the transcript:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel
Which prompted the rock-ribbed *Financial Times* to get in touch with me and publish the speech - again, nearly verbatim - as a whopping 6,400 word feature in their weekend magazine:
https://www.ft.com/content/6fb1602d-a08b-4a8c-bac0-047b7d64aba5
Though they could have had it for free (just as *Wired* had), they insisted on paying me (very well, as it happens!), as did *De Zeit*:
https://www.zeit.de/digital/internet/2024-03/plattformen-facebook-google-internet-cory-doctorow
This was the *start* of the rise of enshittification. The word is spreading farther than ever, in ways that I have nothing to do with, along with the critique I hung on it. In other words, the bit of string that tech policy wonks have been pushing on for a quarter of a century is actually starting to move, and it's actually accelerating.
Despite this (or more likely because of it), there's a growing chorus of "concerned" people who say they like the critique but fret that it is being held back because you can't use it "at church or when talking to K-12 students" (my favorite variant: "I couldn't say this at a NATO conference"). I leave it up to you whether you use the word with your K-12 students, NATO generals, or fellow parishoners (though I assure you that all three groups are conversant with the dirty little word at the root of my coinage). If you don't want to use "enshittification," you can coin your own word - or just use one of the dozens of words that failed to gain public attention over the past 25 years (might I suggest "platform decay").
What's so funny about all this pearl-clutching is that it comes from people who universally profess to have the intestinal fortitude to hear the word "enshittification" without experiencing psychological trauma, but worry that *other* people might not be so strong-minded. They continue to say this even as the most conservative officials in the most staid of exalted forums use the word without a hint of embarrassment, much less apology:
https://www.independent.ie/business/technology/chairman-of-irish-social-media-regulator-says-europe-should-not-be-seduced-by-mario-draghis-claims/a526530600.html
I mean, I'm giving a speech on enshittification next month at a conference where I'm opening for the Secretary General of the United Nations:
https://icanewdelhi2024.coop/welcome/pages/Programme
After spending half my life trying to get stuff like this into the discourse, I've developed some hard-won, informed views on how ideas succeed:
First: the minor obscenity is a feature, not a bug. The marriage of something long and serious to something short and funny is a happy one that makes both the word and the ideas better off than they'd be on their own. As Lenny Bruce wrote in his canonical work in the subject, the aptly named *How to Talk Dirty and Influence People*:
> I want to help you if you have a dirty-word problem. There are none, and I'll spell it out logically to you.
> Here is a toilet. Specifically-that's all we're concerned with, specifics-if I can tell you a dirty toilet joke, we must have a dirty toilet. That's what we're all talking about, a toilet. If we take this toilet and boil it and it's clean, I can never tell you specifically a dirty toilet joke about this toilet. I can tell you a dirty toilet joke in the Milner Hotel, or something like that, but this toilet is a clean toilet now. Obscenity is a human manifestation. This toilet has no central nervous system, no level of consciousness. It is not aware; it is a dumb toilet; it cannot be obscene; it's impossible. If it could be obscene, it could be cranky, it could be a Communist toilet, a traitorous toilet. It can do none of these things. This is a dirty toilet here.
> Nobody can offend you by telling a dirty toilet story. They can offend you because it's trite; you've heard it many, many times.
https://www.dacapopress.com/titles/lenny-bruce/how-to-talk-dirty-and-influence-people/9780306825309/
Second: the fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a *feature*, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn - or apply - the theoretical framework. *This is good*. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is *one million normies* who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move - it would be a self-inflicted wound. As I said in that Berlin speech:
> Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It's not just a way to say 'things are getting worse' (though of course, it's fine with me if you want to use it that way. It's an English word. We don't have *der Rat für englische Rechtschreibung*. English is a free for all. Go nuts, *meine Kerle*).
Finally: "coinage" is both more - and less - than thinking of the word. After the American Dialect Society gave honors to "enshittification," a few people slid into my mentions with citations to "enshittification" that preceded my usage. I find this completely unsurprising, because English is such a slippery and playful tongue, because English speakers love to swear, and because infixing is such a fun way to swear (e.g. "unfuckingbelievable"). But of course, *I* hadn't encountered any of those other usages before I came up with the word independently, nor had any of those other usages spread appreciably beyond the speaker (it appears that each of the handful of predecessors to my usage represents an act of independent coinage).
If "coinage" was just a matter of thinking up the word, you could write a small python script that infixed the word "shit" into every syllable of every word in the OED, publish the resulting text file, and declare priority over all subsequent inventive swearers.
On the one hand, coinage takes place when the coiner a) independently invents a word; and b) creates the context for that word that causes it to escape from the coiner's immediate milieu and into the wider world.
But on the other hand - and far more importantly - the fact that a successful coinage *requires* popular uptake by people unknown to the coiner means that the coiner only ever plays a small role in the coinage. Yes, there would be no popularization without the coinage - but *there would also be no coinage without the popularization.* Words belong to groups of speakers, not individuals. Language is a cultural phenomenon, not an individual one.
Which is rather the point, isn't it? After a quarter of a century of being part of a community that fought tirelessly to get a serious and widespread consideration of tech policy underway, we're closer than ever, thanks, in part, to "enshittification." If someone else independently used that word before me, if some people use the word loosely, if the word makes some people uncomfortable, that's fine, *provided* that the word is doing what I want it to do, what I've devoted my life to doing.
The point of coining words isn't the pilkunnussija's obsession with precise usage, nor the petty glory of being known as a coiner, nor ensuring that NATO generals' virgin ears are protected from the word "shit" - a word that, incidentally, is also the root of "science":
https://www.arrantpedantry.com/2019/01/24/science-and-shit/
Isn't language fun?
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☂️ Hey look at this
* Risks vs. Harms: Youth & Social Media https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2024/10/09/risks-vs-harms-youth-social-media.html
* Privacy Policies of Sex Worker Directories https://sexworkersear.ch/2024/09/11/privacy-policies/
* "Small Yard, High Fence": These four words conceal a mess https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/small-yard-high-fence-these-four
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☂️ This day in history
#15yrsago Finland makes broadband a right https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/finland-makes-1mb-broadband-access-a-legal-right/
#10yrsago Dead Set: Richard Kadrey’s young adult horror novel https://memex.craphound.com/2014/10/14/dead-set-richard-kadreys-young-adult-horror-novel/
#10yrsago Gamergate as a hate-group https://memex.craphound.com/2014/10/14/gamergate-as-a-hate-group/
#10yrsago Lamar “SOPA” Smith dispatches GOP commissars to National Science Foundation https://gizmodo.com/the-gop-intensifies-its-attacks-on-the-national-science-1645733575
#10yrsago Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Doubt Factory” https://memex.craphound.com/2014/10/14/paolo-bacigalupis-the-doubt-factory/
#5yrsago What it would cost to build Trump’s snake-and-alligator border moat https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2019/10/snake-and-alligator-border-moat-budget-analysis/160350/
#5yrsago German bank robber staged a 5-day fillibuster with his legally guaranteed right to a post-sentencing “final word” https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/09/europe/bank-robbery-five-day-speech-intl-scli-grm/index.html
#5yrsago Apple told TV Plus showrunners to avoid plots that might upset Chinese officials https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/apple-china-tv-protesters-hong-kong-tim-cook
#5yrsago China’s new cybersecurity rules ban foreign companies from using VPNs to phone home https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/14/chinas-new-cybersecurity-rules-ban-foreign-companies-from-using-vpns-to-phone-home/
#5yrsag Orban humiliated: Hungary’s crypto-fascist Fidesz party suffers string of municipal election defeats https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/13/opposition-parties-candidate-wins-budapest-mayoral-race
#5yrsago Proof-of-concept supply-chain poisoning: tiny, undetectable hardware alterations could compromise corporate IT https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/14/proof-of-concept-supply-chain-poisoning-tiny-undetectable-hardware-alterations-could-compromise-corporate-it/
#1yrago Leaving Twitter had no effect on NPR's traffic https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/14/freedom-of-reach/#ex
Upcoming appearances (permalink)
* OKFN Tech We Want Online Summit (Remote), Oct 18
https://okfn.org/en/events/the-tech-we-want-online-summit/
* SOSS Fusion (Atlanta), Oct 22
https://sossfusion2024.sched.com/speaker/cory_doctorow.1qm5qfgn
* Eagle Eye Books (Decatur), Oct 23
https://eagleeyebooks.com/event/2024-10-23/cory-doctorow
* TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10
https://tusconscificon.com/
* International Cooperative Alliance (New Delhi), Nov 24
https://icanewdelhi2024.coop/welcome/pages/Programme
* ISSA-LA Holiday Celebration keynote (Los Angeles), Dec 18
https://issala.org/event/issa-la-december-18-dinner-meeting/
* OKFN Tech We Want Online Summit (Remote), Oct 18
https://okfn.org/en/events/the-tech-we-want-online-summit/
* SOSS Fusion (Atlanta), Oct 22
https://sossfusion2024.sched.com/speaker/cory_doctorow.1qm5qfgn
* Eagle Eye Books (Decatur), Oct 23
https://eagleeyebooks.com/event/2024-10-23/cory-doctorow
* TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10
https://tusconscificon.com/
* International Cooperative Alliance (New Delhi), Nov 24
https://icanewdelhi2024.coop/welcome/pages/Programme
* ISSA-LA Holiday Celebration keynote (Los Angeles), Dec 18
https://issala.org/event/issa-la-december-18-dinner-meeting/
Recent appearances (permalink)
* Speciale intervista a Cory Doctorow (Digitalia)
https://digitalia.fm/744/
* Was There Ever An Old, Good Internet? (David Graeber Institute)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6Jlxx5TboE
* Go Fact Yourself
https://maximumfun.org/episodes/go-fact-yourself/ep-158-aida-rodriguez-cory-doctorow/
Latest books (permalink)
* The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).
* "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)
* "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
* "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.
* "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.
Upcoming books (permalink)
* Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025
* Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025
Colophon (permalink)
Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
* Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Friday's progress: 768 words (63193 words total).
* A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
* Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025
Latest podcast: Spill, part one (a Little Brother story) https://craphound.com/littlebrother/2024/10/06/spill-part-one-a-little-brother-story/
This work - excluding any serialized fiction - is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
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