Lev Lazinskiy

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.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/man-oh-man-why-male-voters-shifted-right/id1583132133?i=1000677748073

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.