The whole idea of "artistic value" is vague, subjective, class-bound, culturally contingent, and notoriously easy to manipulate. It protects the famous, the canonical, the university-approved, the politely transgressive, the books with blurbs and pedigrees and respectable defenders.
But it does not protect cheap paperbacks, exploitation novels, underground comix, anonymous erotica, obscure zines, fanfiction, pulp horror, badly written shock fiction, or the work of people too poor, strange, stigmatized, or low-status to have critics rushing to declare them Important. It is worth pointing out that marginalized sexualities and subcultures have often only been able to speak through these low-status, disreputable forms.
The right to express yourself should not depend on whether your prose is elegant or meaningful in the eyes of a judge or jury. If a human made it, then it is meaningful to them, and that is enough to give it intrinsic value.
I do not defend ugly, stupid, tasteless, or exploitative books because I think they are somehow secretly noble. I defend them because freedom that only covers the respectable is a fraud.
If a book must audition for its right to exist by proving its cultural worth to authorities, then liberty has already been replaced with permission.
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cw: size difference, dirty talk, teasing, long-distance frustration, breeding kink, dom!idol Riki, possessive vibes, slightly unhinged energy, soft humiliation, praise/degradation mix, not proofread 'cause I was feral (esto es muy corto) lo leĂ en algĂșn lado, y decidĂ ser mas cruda! UwU
"Of course⊠if I werenât an idol, everything would be different. Iâd take you out for a candlelit dinner here in Paris, kiss you at the top of the Eiffel Tower⊠and then weâd do things straight out of a romance movie."
You know he means it, even if he wraps his words in that sharp sarcasm he loves so much. Heâs been moody this entire call â irritated, restless â all because you're not physically there with him.
"But no. Here I am. Surrounded by cameras, managers, people breathing down my neckâŠ"
He pauses, voice dropping to a deeper, darker tone.
"Sometimes, in the middle of the night, all I can think about is how wet and tight youâd be if you were here with me⊠and I just want to lock myself in the bathroom and jerk off. But even thatâs impossible. Thereâs always someone outside. Always in my damn way. Jesus..."
You stifle a laugh, but a small squeak still escapes
Silence on the other end
"Oh, really? You think thatâs funny? Letâs see if youâre still laughing when I get back home. I swear Iâm gonnaâ"
"Riki! Stop being so obvious on the phone. What if your fans are undercover FBI agents or something?"
You cut him off, faking alarm, but he knows you too well.
You can already picture him rolling his eyes dramatically.
"As far as Iâm concerned, they can all go to hell," he replies flatly"
"Wait... you said that like Iâm not one of mine fansâŠ"
You tease, voice playful.
This time, your laugh bursts out freely, echoing through the room
"Who said Iâm your fan? Donât get cocky, asshole."
His deep, husky laugh on the other end sends butterflies storming through your stomach â the kind that hit hard and leave you dizzy.
"Youâre not my fan. Youâre my pretty little fuckdoll. You like my big cock, donât you? When I get back to Korea, Iâm going to stretch you out so good youâll forget how long Iâve been gone."
"RikiâŠ"
His words make you moan, breath hitching â youâre already a mess
"Yeah, baby? Tell me what you want⊠Iâll start writing the list now. Next week, youâre getting every damn thing on it."
âSenator Mike Lee is trying to ban porn on a federal level. He wants to tighten up what the definition of âobscenityâ is in order to ban all porn. He is claiming it is to âprotect the childrenâ. This is explicitly in Project 2025: the act of banning porn, and then criminalizing and deporting sex workers, trans people, gay peopleâanyone that the âalt-rightâ decides is âpornographicâ.
âObscenityâ laws are a bad thingâespecially for queer people. Queer people are always punished under âobscenityâ laws, and so are victims of sexual crimes. These laws make it a lot easier for abusers to fly under the radar, because it makes it near impossible for victims to talk about their experiences or to share proof of their experiences. This also continues to open the door towards banning trans people from public life and encouraging ideas like conversion therapy.
You donât have to like porn to understand that this is a huge thing impeding the concept of free speech in Americaâespecially with how this administration will implement it to specifically punish marginalized groups. It will be an excuse to put people in jail. It will not do anything good. If they really wanted to protect children, theyâd be advocating for comprehensive sex ed and free healthcare for people of all ages including childrenâbut theyâre not doing that. Theyâre trying to ban porn so they can punish queer people.
Call your senators, call your reps, and tell them to protect porn. Tell them to reject Mike Leeâs billsâall of them, the SCREEN Act and any other thing he can propose to try to increase âobscenityâ laws in the United States. You all do not understand the type of hell that will be wrought if these bills go through.â
On OCTOBER 23 at 7PM, I'll be in DECATUR, presenting my novel THE BEZZLE at EAGLE EYE BOOKS.
Making up words is a perfectly cromulent passtime, and while most of the words we coin disappear as soon as they fall from our lips, every now and again, you find a word that fits so nice and kentucky in the public discourse that it acquires a life of its own:
I've been trying to increase the salience of digital human rights in the public imagination for a quarter of a century, starting with the campaign to get people to appreciate that the internet matters, and that tech policy isn't just the delusion that the governance of spaces where sad nerds argue about Star Trek is somehow relevant to human thriving:
Now, eventually people figured out that a) the internet mattered and, b) it was going dreadfully wrong. So my job changed again, from "how the internet is governed matters" to "you can't fix the internet with wishful thinking," for example, when people said we could solve its problems by banning general purpose computers:
Along the way, many of us have coined words in a bid to encapsulate the abstract, technical ideas at the core of these arguments. This isn't a vanity project! Creating a common vocabulary is a necessary precondition for having the substantive, vital debates we'll need to tackle the real, thorny issues raised by digital systems. So there's "free software," "open source," "filternet," "chat control," "back doors," and my own contributions, like "adversarial interoperability":
These have all found their own niches, but nearly all of them are just that: niche. Some don't even rise to "niche": they're shibboleths, insider terms that confuse and intimidate normies and distract from the real fights with semantic ones, like whether it's "FOSS" or "FLOSS" or something else entirely:
"Enshittification" took root in my hindbrain, rolling around and around, agglomerating lots of different thoughts and critiques I'd been making for years, crystallizing them into a coherent thesis:
This kind of spontaneous crystallization is the dividend of doing lots of work in public, trying to take every half-formed thought and pin it down in public writing, something I've been doing for decades:
After those first couple articles, "enshittification" raced around the internet. There's two reasons for this: first, "enshittification" is a naughty word that's fun to say. Journalists love getting to put "shit" in their copy:
And nothing enlivens an academic's day like getting to use a word like "enshittification" in a journal article (doubtless this also amuses the editors, peer-reviewers, copyeditors, typesetters, etc):
That was where I started, too! The first time I used "enshittification" was in a throwaway bad-tempered rant about the decay of Tripadvisor into utter uselessness, which drew a small chorus of appreciative chuckles about the word:
The word rattled around my mind for five months before attaching itself to my detailed theory of platform decay. But it was that detailed critique, coupled with a minor license to swear, that gave "enshittification" a life of its own. How do I know that the theory was as important as the swearing? Because the small wave of amusement that followed my first use of "enshittification" petered out in less than a day. It was only when I added the theory that the word took hold.
Likewise: how do I know that the theory needed to be blended with swearing to break out of the esoteric realm of tech policy debates (which the public had roundly ignored for more than two decades)? Well, because I spent two decades writing about this stuff without making anything like the dents that appeared once I added an Anglo-Saxon monosyllable to that critique.
Adding "enshittification" to the critique got me more column inches, a longer hearing, a more vibrant debate, than anything else I'd tried. First, Wired availed itself of the Creative Commons license on my second long-form article on the subject and reprinted it as a 4,200-word feature. I've been writing for Wired for more than thirty years and this is by far the longest thing I've published with them â a big, roomy, discursive piece that was run verbatim, with every one of my cherished darlings unmurdered.
That gave the word â and the whole critique, with all its spiky corners â a global airing, leading to more pickup and discussion. Eventually, the American Dialect Society named it their "Word of the Year" (and their "Tech Word of the Year"):
I've been dragged into (good natured) fights over the German, Spanish, French and Italian translations for the term. When I taped an NPR show before a live audience with ASL interpretation, I got to watch a Deaf fan politely inform the interpreter that she didn't need to finger-spell "enshittification," because it had already been given an ASL sign by the US Deaf community:
Which prompted the rock-ribbed Financial Times to get in touch with me and publish the speech â again, nearly verbatim â as a whopping 6,400 word feature in their weekend magazine:
This was the start of the rise of enshittification. The word is spreading farther than ever, in ways that I have nothing to do with, along with the critique I hung on it. In other words, the bit of string that tech policy wonks have been pushing on for a quarter of a century is actually starting to move, and it's actually accelerating.
Despite this (or more likely because of it), there's a growing chorus of "concerned" people who say they like the critique but fret that it is being held back because you can't use it "at church or when talking to K-12 students" (my favorite variant: "I couldn't say this at a NATO conference"). I leave it up to you whether you use the word with your K-12 students, NATO generals, or fellow parishoners (though I assure you that all three groups are conversant with the dirty little word at the root of my coinage). If you don't want to use "enshittification," you can coin your own word â or just use one of the dozens of words that failed to gain public attention over the past 25 years (might I suggest "platform decay?").
What's so funny about all this pearl-clutching is that it comes from people who universally profess to have the intestinal fortitude to hear the word "enshittification" without experiencing psychological trauma, but worry that other people might not be so strong-minded. They continue to say this even as the most conservative officials in the most staid of exalted forums use the word without a hint of embarrassment, much less apology:
After spending half my life trying to get stuff like this into the discourse, I've developed some hard-won, informed views on how ideas succeed:
First: the minor obscenity is a feature, not a bug. The marriage of something long and serious to something short and funny is a happy one that makes both the word and the ideas better off than they'd be on their own. As Lenny Bruce wrote in his canonical work in the subject, the aptly named How to Talk Dirty and Influence People:
I want to help you if you have a dirty-word problem. There are none, and I'll spell it out logically to you.
Here is a toilet. Specifically-that's all we're concerned with, specifics-if I can tell you a dirty toilet joke, we must have a dirty toilet. That's what we're all talking about, a toilet. If we take this toilet and boil it and it's clean, I can never tell you specifically a dirty toilet joke about this toilet. I can tell you a dirty toilet joke in the Milner Hotel, or something like that, but this toilet is a clean toilet now. Obscenity is a human manifestation. This toilet has no central nervous system, no level of consciousness. It is not aware; it is a dumb toilet; it cannot be obscene; it's impossible. If it could be obscene, it could be cranky, it could be a Communist toilet, a traitorous toilet. It can do none of these things. This is a dirty toilet here.
Nobody can offend you by telling a dirty toilet story. They can offend you because it's trite; you've heard it many, many times.
Second: the fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn â or apply â the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move â it would be a self-inflicted wound. As I said in that Berlin speech:
Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It's not just a way to say 'things are getting worse' (though of course, it's fine with me if you want to use it that way. It's an English word. We don't have der Rat fĂŒr englische Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).
Finally: "coinage" is both more â and less â than thinking of the word. After the American Dialect Society gave honors to "enshittification," a few people slid into my mentions with citations to "enshittification" that preceded my usage. I find this completely unsurprising, because English is such a slippery and playful tongue, because English speakers love to swear, and because infixing is such a fun way to swear (e.g. "unfuckingbelievable"). But of course, I hadn't encountered any of those other usages before I came up with the word independently, nor had any of those other usages spread appreciably beyond the speaker (it appears that each of the handful of predecessors to my usage represents an act of independent coinage).
If "coinage" was just a matter of thinking up the word, you could write a small python script that infixed the word "shit" into every syllable of every word in the OED, publish the resulting text file, and declare priority over all subsequent inventive swearers.
On the one hand, coinage takes place when the coiner a) independently invents a word; and b) creates the context for that word that causes it to escape from the coiner's immediate milieu and into the wider world.
But on the other hand â and far more importantly â the fact that a successful coinage requires popular uptake by people unknown to the coiner means that the coiner only ever plays a small role in the coinage. Yes, there would be no popularization without the coinage â but there would also be no coinage without the popularization. Words belong to groups of speakers, not individuals. Language is a cultural phenomenon, not an individual one.
Which is rather the point, isn't it? After a quarter of a century of being part of a community that fought tirelessly to get a serious and widespread consideration of tech policy underway, we're closer than ever, thanks, in part, to "enshittification." If someone else independently used that word before me, if some people use the word loosely, if the word makes some people uncomfortable, that's fine, provided that the word is doing what I want it to do, what I've devoted my life to doing.
The point of coining words isn't the pilkunnussija's obsession with precise usage, nor the petty glory of being known as a coiner, nor ensuring that NATO generals' virgin ears are protected from the word "shit" â a word that, incidentally, is also the root of "science":
Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
We have a major bill to block. Americans, call your representatives. https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/mike-lee-obscenity-bill-free-speech-project-2025-rcna206388
The Utah Republican introduced the Senate version of the âInterstate Obscenity Definition Actâ (IODA) â a recycled attempt to ban online por
The upcoming Republican bill to expand the definition of obscenity and criminalize pornography know as the âInterstate Obscenity Definition Actâ or IODA (article linked below) is a deeply troubling proposal that must be stopped. On top of sidestepping the first amendment, Republicans argue regularly that members of the queer communityâespecially trans peopleâare sexual and obscene by their very existence . To allow this bill to pass would be to allow them to ban anything they call pornography, with a particular threat to queer and especially trans existence for which they have regularly reinforced the notion that it is not just a choice, but a fetishâand a particularly dangerous fetish that both exposes children to a sexual act and sexualizes children themselves, hence the âgroomerâ rhetoric. IODA and every bill like it *must* be stopped, for the sake of free expression as much as for the sake of the queer community
hereâs what Iâm emailing my representatives. Feel free to copy and paste if itâs helpful.
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