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
- 3 packs
- Coming of Age in the Craw
- Coursera Rails Module 2 Notes
- Growing the CircleCI Community with Discourse
- I sold all my shit
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- DEP-18: A proposal for Git-based collaboration in Debian from Optimized by Otto
- [RIDGELINE] No Phones in The Ten-don Shop from Craig Mod — Writer + Photographer
- My next chapter with Mastodon from Mastodon Blog
- How many pillars of observability can you fit on the head of a pin? from charity.wtf
- The Software Essays that Shaped Me from Refactoring English
- 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
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Pluralistic: Meta's new top EU regulator is contractually prohibited from hurting Meta's feelings (01 Dec 2025)
Today's links Meta's new top EU regulator is contractually prohibited from saying mean things about Meta: It's one thing to hire an ex-Meta lobbyist, another entirely if she's signed a non-disparagement contract. Hey look at this: Delights…
via Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow December 1, 2025Getting Warmer
ESA/Hubble & NASA, ESO/ Lutz Wisotzki et al The early Universe as seen by the MUSE spectrograph on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. So first the Big Bang happens. Everything is incredibly hot and dense; there are photons flying everywhere, but they keep coll…
via Brian Koberlein December 1, 2025Recently
This’ll be the last Recently in 2025. It’s been a decent year for me, a pretty rough year for the rest of the world. I hope, for everyone, that 2026 sees the reversal of some of the current trends. Watching This video from Daniel Yang, who makes spectacular b…
via macwright.com December 1, 2025Generated by openring