this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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To be clear, this is just how Doctorow has always been, he's always been that annoying nerd who needs to come up with new words/phrases. Enshittification is just the one that caught one.
See also: Whuffie, metacrap, and Schneider's law. Those are all from before 2005. Like I said, this is who he has always been.
I am of two minds on Doctorow: One one hand, I appreciate his thoughtfulness and insight, and on the other hand I cannot stand how much of a weirdly pedantic nerd he is, especially when it comes to his own ideas.
Also I remember him kind of really sucking at journalism at first in the early 2000's. I recall an article about Napster where he said "Napster's original goal was to sell music to people" which blew my fucking mind because it was always meant to be a peer-to-peer network and my god, we have both lived through this era, how could he manage to get it so fucking wrong? I was especially galled because he had just been given a class to teach at UCLA while my friend who actually had a masters degree and his thesis was on the social network aspects of piracy and the co-evolution of control and resistance in computer networks was struggling to find a job as a teacher.
So due to those early memories, I may be a little biased.
You're allowed to be biased. We seem to be in the same age range, but I went the route of burning disdain for all who tried to get online notoriety, followers, clicks, etc.
That might be built up resentment from going through those formative years painfully aware how different things could have been if I'd been a young, attractive girl with a good webcam.