Cory Doctorow

But you'd ideally like to raise the salience while there's still time to do something about it.

Right.

So I have just spent a couple of decades coming up with words and concepts and framing devices and metaphors and similes and whatever.

And in this case, I was on vacation with my family in Puerto Rico and we had rented a little cabin in a cloud forest and it was serviced in probably by microwave, uh,

internet.

And one of the reasons that's improbable is that if you know one thing about microwave internet, the one thing everyone knows is that it doesn't go through clouds.

And I remind you, we were in a cloud forest.

And so before we would drive down into town, which was a couple hours away, there are a couple little towns we could go.

We try and look up on TripAdvisor which restaurant to go to, whether it was open, that kind of thing.

And you'd load like 20 TripAdvisor tabs, and they just time out because there's like 75 trackers on TripAdvisor, and it would load about 40 of them and then just die.

And the only thing in the window would be what's called the favico.

It's the little icon that goes in the tab, and it would just fill the whole screen, like a high-res vector image of the TripAdvisor logo.

So in a fit of pique, I tweeted, has anyone at TripAdvisor ever been on a trip?

This is the most enshitified website I've ever used.

And people did what you're doing.

They kind of polite chuckle.

And then, you know, a year later, I was thinking about this bigger critique of platform decay.

And I was like, you know, I kind of got a laugh out of that word and shitification.

Maybe I'll use that to describe this thing.

The reason that I think that story matters is it tells you that it's not merely the minor license to vulgarity, although I think that's important.