The Dude has verified his Mastodon account on this blog, hopefully to inspire him to post more frequently on both platforms. With the implosion of Twitter (now “X,” in a ridiculous rebranding by a billionaire man-child), most of the people The Dude is interested in interacting with have migrated to Mastodon. It’s a pretty good platform—it was designed with features to counter some of the more destructive behaviors of Twitter.

In other news, Cory Doctorow has been absolutely on fire with his coining of the word enshittification—it was declared the 2023 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society and has appeared in multiple news stories and newscasts (often bowdlerized, but still). It seems to be a perfect word to describe the general downward trend in services that seems endemic right now—all driven by MBAs trying to wring every last penny out of us in the late-stage capitalistic dystopia that much of the internet seems to be today. It will be interesting to see what new services emerge to replace search engines, social media, online shopping, video publishing, and more. Each of those categories has been enshittified to varying degrees—you can’t help but notice it.