I have never been much taken by Doctorow’s enshitification thing. Sure, the neologism is catchy, but there is no novel insight behind it. The fact that so many view it as somehow profound begs the question of how dumb have we become, but it hasn’t bothered me enough to write about it. But the Flying Penguin has, and it is worth a read for anyone who cares.

As a side note, I see Doctorow as an example of the ‘activist class’, which is characterised by huge passion but often fairly shallow understanding of the issues in any wider context. And while we need passionate activists, it takes a bit more than passion to produce workable policies that could affect meaningful change on a significant scale (and in today’s crises scale is everything).

The failure to convert passion into significant insight that could be turned into policy is one of the reasons we are not making any actual progress on the environment. The Scottish Green Party’s brief stint in government is a telling example of that, and one of the reasons I can’t vote for them.

There are other obvious examples in my own limited purview: rewilders understand the urgency of addressing the biodiversity crisis, but not the existential nature of climate change; climate change campaigners in general have a very poor grasp of the limitations of the technologies they pin their hopes on, and technologists tend to know nothing much (and care for) outside of their limited field of expertise. At best, we are narrow specialists, whether professionally or in our leisure, and this is unhealthy.

The inescapable conclusion of this general dumbing down is that our education systems are not fit for purpose. Of course, folk involved in higher education have been saying this for decades, but with students morphing into customers it made no difference, and we are likely beyond a point of no return. And reaping the consequences for sure.