This term (in Portuguese “merdification”, which I had the good sense not to put in the title) is not a joke, corresponding to a concept developed since 2022 by the Canadian author and journalist Cory Doctorow to describe the decline and transformation of the service of digital platforms and social networks from something innovative to mere tools for extracting commercial value, both from their users and from their own customers, with the core concern of increasing the profits of the shareholders of the parent companies.
After some articles in the press, the concept received a detailed explanation in the book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (2025), in which Doctorow explains how platforms that seemed to offer a new world of services and functionalities, with almost unlimited horizons, after developing a phenomenon of addition in their users and commercialization of their data, ended up becoming gears for obtaining increasing profits, without any social concern alongside the progressive degradation of their services.
When reading the description of the “merdification” of digital platforms that, at least in part, have been part of my daily life in recent decades, I couldn’t help but notice that something similar can be guessed, for example, in the relationship between multiple Artificial Intelligence platforms and Education.
Because the signs are all there: we have the “offer” of innovative services, which seem to allow us enormous gains in efficiency and time in the preparation of everyday tasks, from the preparation of materials to the creation of tools for evaluating knowledge, including immense research capabilities and the production of attractive graphics; We have a group of prophets of a new digital world, which will allow us to radically transform a daily routine of bureaucratic work that overloads us. But we also have the beginning of the process of extracting value, material and intellectual, because everything we ask these platforms to do, all the materials we provide them, the evaluations we make, the corrections we introduce in the initial instructions are allowing their improvement and the creation of gigantic databases.
The most worrying thing is that we can see the growth – and I’m not just talking about the students and the growing laziness in going beyond improving their skills. promptsrequests to one platform to apply to another – from the additive, addictive phenomenon, born from the speed of the reward in relation to the requests. Until dependence sets in and it becomes almost inconceivable to stop using the tools that do everything for us, that give us a semblance of “liberation”, when they increasingly imprison us. Which, in the case of Education, means the withering away of what has always distinguished it, its character of human transmission of skills, knowledge, even emotions.
Everything becomes a simulacrum from which it seems impossible to escape. And this is the moment when everything comes together merdifica.
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