The world is now familiar with the term “enshittification”. Coined by science fiction writer Cory Doctorow, it accurately describes today’s tendency towards lower quality and worse service in every facet of modern life. There’s another term we need to know to understand today’s Clown World: enclownification. This essay explains.
Enshittification is predictable: the quality of everything gets lower over time. Manufacturers of decent products start to take shortcuts in production, or substitute lower-grade materials for higher-grade ones, or they outsource customer service to a country that can’t speak English properly. The user experience is frustrating and humiliating.
Enclownification is not predictable. The quality might stay the same, but be harder to access, or be only available at certain times, or you might just get so confused by the craziness of it all that you don’t know what’s what anymore.
Enclownification is when things become absurd. Not necessarily bad, just absurd. The difference is that, with enshittification, you feel like you stepped in dogshit. With enclownification, you feel like the world is laughing at you.
A recent example: I was trying to install a printer. In attempting to make a WiFi connection, it turned out that my printer operates on one frequency GHz, and my computer another, and they were not compatible. Who knows why they were manufactured this way? Then I tried plugging in the USB cable, which allowed me to print but, for some unfathomable reason, not scan. Scanning required that I register an account with the scanning software, which was then able to detect the printer but not connect to it over USB. So ultimately I could only half use the printer.
I could imagine the customer relations department of the printer manufacturer getting inundated with complaints about this lunacy – and them having a good laugh about it rather than caring. That’s enclownification.
People frequently encounter enclownification through dealing with the Government. Anyone who has had the experience of waiting on the phone and then being randomly disconnected knows this. Likewise anyone who has called Department A, to be forwarded to Department B, to be forwarded to Department C, to be forwarded back to Department A.
The school system is perhaps more ruthlessly enclownified than any other aspect of today’s world. HONK HONK can be heard every time another Holocaust Awareness class begins. Unfortunately, the rulers of the modern West understand that manufacturing consent for their rule depends on brainwashing young people into accepting it. The best time to do this is while they’re too mentally vulnerable and soft to resist. Hence, young people are taught at school that their ruling class is the wisest, smartest and best of all ruling classes, their current standard of living the highest and their freedoms the broadest of any culture in history.
Race relations in general have been enclownified by the Brown Communist narrative that Western societies are structurally racist, and therefore that even the most wretched, broken and impoverished white person is an oppressor and riding high on inherited privilege. This has led working-class whites and working-class blacks and browns, who would otherwise have had class in common, to resent each other.
The narrative that white men are privileged, and therefore that disprivileging young white men is racial justice, is pure Clown World. Yet it endures. So many young white men have been disadvantaged by diversity, inclusion and equity practices that some call it a lost generation. The enclownification of the workplace can be seen in the difficulty that young white men have finding work today, no matter how high their education or experience levels.
Class relations have been enclownified by the above phenomena plus the severe inaffordability of housing in the modern West. This has led to a situation where anyone in line to inherit housing is doing extremely well, but anyone who isn’t is looking at a lifetime of poverty: the feudal era in all but name. Many a person will have sat down, looked at their mortgage numbers, realised that they won’t pay off their house until after they’re dead, and laughed about it, because otherwise they would have cried.
The most totally and utterly enclownified aspect of modern life, however, is spirituality. Russell Brand is the face of this phenomenon. Brand’s shamelessly performative evangelism – which began in the wake of a series of sex crime accusations – would normally convince no-one. But because widespread enclownification has affected people’s judgment, he is able to convince millions that he’s sincere.
The spiritual enclownification of today is summarised in the Clown World Fork. This concept describes how people are directed to choose between soulless, meaningless, atheistic materialism on the one hand or delusional, hypocritical, junkie-dream Christianity on the other, and strongly discouraged from exploring genuine spirituality. Anyone who does explore genuine spirituality is pathologised as a schizophrenic by the mainstream medical system (to the sound of honking).
The solution to enclownification is for things to start making sense again. Confucius spoke of beginning the process of restoring society with a “rectification of names“, a widespread movement to use language as accurately as possible. This would minimise disorientation and confusion, leading to a more harmonious society.
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