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I Learned a New Word Today: Ensh!ttified [1]

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Date: 2025-06-17

Charlie Sykes has a column in his Substack To The Contrary: Ten Years of Trump: The world turned upside down. It starts out with a bang:

After shilling for Putin and humiliating himself at the G-7, Donald Trump left early to let the actual leaders of the free world confer on their own. Meanwhile he flip-flopped on his latest deportation TACO; even as dreams of bombing Iran danced in his head. And it’s only Tuesday.

But a little further down is a line that really caught my eye:

Conventional political analyses do not come close to describing the way our world has been turned on its head. Yes, the GOP lost its spine and its balls; Democrats flailed; the electorate realigned. The entertainment wing of the GOP routed the establishment. Much of the rest of the media has been enshittified. [bold in original]

Turns out “enshittified” is a real word, going back to at least 2022: Enshittification (Wikipedia)

Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders. Writer Cory Doctorow coined the neologism enshittification in November 2022, though he was not the first to describe and label the concept.

Sykes probably knew what he was doing when he used that word:

But that really doesn’t capture the velocity or the scope of the transformation. It’s not just our politics. America has become dumber, crueler, crazier, and more violent. To much of the rest of the world, we have become unrecognizable. Institutions we thought were solid turned into vapor. “Principles” were discarded like used Kleenex. Truth was battered, twisted, and drifted toward irrelevance. Ancient bigotries were revived and became mainstream. The fever swamps overflowed. The best lacked all conviction while the very worst were full of passionate intensity. [bold and italics in original]

Correction: he definitely knew what he was doing. Anyone who can use a Yeats quote in such a perfectly appropriate way (even if he changed the tenses) along with the tune that the British military (maybe) played as they surrendered at Yorktown (“The World Turned Upside Down”) can be trusted to know the intricacies of English.

“Enshittification” of the media notwithstanding, we can’t dump all the blame on the media for this (nor do I read Sykes as saying that). The media is as much a reflection of our times as it is a shaper of them, the more so since much of our new social media is still beyond corporate control.

Historians like to argue whether the person makes the times or the times makes the person. Personally, I hold that it’s generally a mix of both. And while one can argue that in prior epochal moments, such as Alexander’s conquest of Persia or Hitler’s Nazi movement, a single individual did make the difference, I think what we’re seeing now is a combination of individuals and circumstances that are coming together in a perfect storm.

Specifically: there would be no Trump without Putin. And while Putin was determined to expand Russia and reclaim its great power status, he would have taken a different, slower, and less reckless route had he not been able to take advantage of Trump the useful idiot. Nor would Trump have been able to seize the Republican party for his own purposes had the various oligarchs and far-right religious fanatics not spent decades weakening it for their takeover. (These same forces didn’t believe Trump could just up and steal their hard work until after he had done so.)

This is Trump’s talent — he knows how to steal an opportunity someone else made for themselves and make it his. But he doesn’t really know how to make it work for him once he’s done that; his understanding of politics and of international relations is superficial, because all he really knows is real estate (and he faked his way through much of that). So he blusters and he bluffs and he runs away, all the while insisting that he won, and that he is the only one who could have won.

So there is one more talent Trump possesses — the ability to enshittify the world and to not care as he does so.

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