He might have invented the word but he didn’t invent the phenomenon. People have been aware of capitalism’s eroding effect on the quality of goods and services for a while now. While he may have specifically been talking about online products and services it’s not like it even originated there. The decline of products due to capitalism’s entropy is well established and preceded the decline of online services. I think it’s rather safe to say it’s taken on a meaning for more than just the internet. Certainly that’s what most people use it for I’ve noticed.
That’s also in no way a tragedy. Kind of ironic to be bemoaning a word losing its original specific meaning and then using the word tragedy to describe that.
The specific meaning in the sidebar is explicitly about differentiating it from other generic capitalist decay. It’s specific to online platforms, and in that specificity, is narrowly tailored and more relevant to what we experience in the 2020s.
That’s the beauty of words - you don’t need to reuse the same word for vastly different phenomenon, and by allowing words to have specific meanings, you increase the deftness with which we articulate and discuss the world.
He might have invented the word but he didn’t invent the phenomenon. People have been aware of capitalism’s eroding effect on the quality of goods and services for a while now. While he may have specifically been talking about online products and services it’s not like it even originated there. The decline of products due to capitalism’s entropy is well established and preceded the decline of online services. I think it’s rather safe to say it’s taken on a meaning for more than just the internet. Certainly that’s what most people use it for I’ve noticed.
That’s also in no way a tragedy. Kind of ironic to be bemoaning a word losing its original specific meaning and then using the word tragedy to describe that.
The specific meaning in the sidebar is explicitly about differentiating it from other generic capitalist decay. It’s specific to online platforms, and in that specificity, is narrowly tailored and more relevant to what we experience in the 2020s.
That’s the beauty of words - you don’t need to reuse the same word for vastly different phenomenon, and by allowing words to have specific meanings, you increase the deftness with which we articulate and discuss the world.
Vastly different? How are they vastly different? It’s the exact same phenomenon with the exact same cause.