Possible Plagiarism Made me Cringe
I was listening to “The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart” and he had a guest on, Annie Lowrey, who is a staff writer at The Atlantic. They were talking about Trump and politics and somewhere along the line she used the term “enshittification” to describe what is happening to our government.
Jon let out one of his famous big belly laughs. It seemed like he hadn’t heard of the term before. He then said “if that’s not coined, you should put it on a T-Shirt!” Annie just let out a small chuckle.
Ok, so what?
This whole thing rubbed me the wrong way because the term “enshittification” was coined by Cory Doctorow in 2022 and was the word of the year in 2023. Even if she had not heard of Doctorow, certainly she has heard of this term before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
It’s posible I read into this way too much, but it felt like she was taking credit for this term. If so, this would the first time that I actually saw an instance of casual plagiarism, using someone elses ideas as your own, and it made me cringe. It was like watching a white collar crime being committed in broad daylight and no one seemed to care. It was especialy dissapointing to see this coming from a journalist.
Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- One Year of Foxglove
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- Lev Lazinskiy
- Microblog
- Vagrant Box for ROS2 on Apple Silicon
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- The contagion of fear from The Observation Deck
- The revolt of the reader from The Observation Deck
- Deeper dive: Were Touch Bar’s problems software rather than hardware? from Unsung
- Joining Cursor from Fatih Arslan
- Pluralistic: Digital sewer socialism (08 Aug 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Pluralistic: Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs go global (29 Jul 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making from Ludicity
- The default person from https://popagandhi.com/
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
“Insert your favorite nursery rhyme.”
Make Some Noise is one of many fantastic improv comedy shows on Dropout. I noticed one of the ongoing themes is “tech gone bad,” so I compiled a short list below. I just find these really funny. Video call with shitty wifi: Logging in with 30-factor authen...
via Unsung September 17, 2026Why are short videos bad for learning?
An essay version of the video is below – not just a transcript but a text that I’ve rewritten thoroughly to work as text. As is an audio version. You can subscribe to the audio-only unlisted podcast feed here if audio is more your speed. Overview # In this...
via Baldur Bjarnason's Notes on the Web September 17, 2026Why we should be very worried about the Hugging Face hack
(Note: This is a re-run of a piece I published on September 3rd. I am backwoods camping this week in the Canadian wilderness and will have no signal so please excuse me for the repeat!)About a month ago, I (and many others) wrote about an incident in which
via The Torment Nexus September 17, 2026Generated by openring