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
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- 2024
- 2023
- Ladybird on Debian Stable
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Pluralistic: AI "journalists" prove that media bosses don't give a shit (11 Mar 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Avi Alkalay: Uniqlo T-Shirt Bash Script Easter Egg from Fedora People
- Offline 23 hours a day from Derek Sivers blog
- Pluralistic: California can stop Larry Ellison from buying Warners (28 Feb 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- On Alliances from Smashing Frames
- Acting ethically in an imperfect world from Smashing Frames
- Diffusion of Responsibility from Smashing Frames
- My AI Adoption Journey from Mitchell Hashimoto
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Keeping sponsor lists up-to-date
Keeping sponsor lists up-to-date across multiple READMEs and websites is tedious - so I wrote a tool to automate it.
via Carlos Becker March 25, 2026Code as a Tool of Process
Steve Krouse wrote a piece that has me nodding along: Programming, like writing, is an activity, where one iteratively sharpens what they're doing as they do it. (You wouldn't believe how many drafts I've written of this essay.) There’s an incre…
via Jim Nielsen’s Blog March 24, 2026Paris's Bicycle Mayor and the Hormuz Shock
Why Energy Independence is an Enduring Antidote to Trump's Demented Chaos
via High Speed March 24, 2026Generated by openring