On a 17-hour train journey I glimpsed our future – and it was ugly | Zoe Williams

The climate crisis will cause dramatic, life-threatening events, but also a general, broad-brush worsening of everything

The concept of “enshittification” was invented by the Canadian-British sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow, only last year, to describe online platforms and the process of their decay. A tech policy expert, Rose Payne, explained the concept to me; you’ll recognise it immediately from pretty much any online service you’ve signed up to: “You enter into it, and at the beginning, it’s good, but once they have network effects, they degrade the quality of their offering. So you’re trapped in a space that’s no longer useful to you.”

Pretty soon, in fact amazingly quickly, people were using the word to describe everything – to the extent that Doctorow wondered this year whether we’d entered the “enshittocene”. Repurposed to describe the effects of the climate crisis, it means something different, but just as evocative: say we sail beyond 1.5C of warming but do manage to stick at 2C, there will be dramatic, life-threatening events, there will be mass migration, but there will also be a general, broad-brush worsening of everything.

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