Cory Doctorow's enshittification concept applied to language and culture

Christian Caliandro applies Cory Doctorow's concept of 'enshittification'—the progressive degradation of digital platforms for value extraction, exemplified by Twitter-X's decline after Elon Musk's acquisition—to culture and language. He argues that this process, where initial high quality gives way to decline once users are locked in, now affects art, music, design, literature, and TV series. More alarmingly, language itself has undergone rapid hypersimplification, echoing George Orwell's 'Newspeak' in 1984, which restricts thought by eliminating words and meanings. Caliandro warns that this linguistic erosion threatens collective life, as language is the most delicate infrastructure of society.