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
- 2024
- Reinstalling Windows at 1am
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- How to Disable Wayland in Debian Testing
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Give Your Spouse the Gift of a Couple's Email Domain from mtlynch.io
- Skip the Next iPhone from Articles on Jose M.
- Have smart glasses finally hit an inflection point? from The Torment Nexus
- The McPhee method from the jsomers.net blog
- Pluralistic: LLMs are slot-machines (16 Aug 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Pluralistic: Bluesky creates the world's weirdest, hardest-to-understand binding arbitration clause (15 Aug 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Just a Little More Context Bro, I Promise, and It’ll Fix Everything from Jim Nielsen’s Blog
- The Futzing Fraction from Deciphering Glyph
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Give a Problem. Grow a Programmer.
In 2009, I kicked off my senior year in college with a class that ultimately changed the way I thought about my degree—and my future.
via flower.codes September 15, 2025Yala stablecoin depegs after theft
The YU bitcoin-backed stablecoin list its intended dollar peg after what they described as "an attempted attack", later writing that there was an "unauthorized transfer of funds". Although they initially wrote that &#…
via Web3 is Going Just Great September 15, 2025How big a solar battery do I need to store *all* my home's electricity?
I have a modest set of solar panels on an entirely ordinary house in suburban London. On average they generate about 3,800kWh per year. We also use about 3,800kWh of electricity each year. Obviously, we can't use all the power produced over summer an…
via Terence Eden’s Blog September 15, 2025Generated by openring