This page serves as a living glossary of terms, phrases, and concepts that recur throughout my writing, many of them unofficial, emergent, or deliberately under-defined elsewhere. Its purpose is simple: to name patterns that are widely experienced but rarely articulated, particularly those arising from late-stage capitalism’s influence on behaviour, design, labour, identity, and power. While the focus remains firmly on capitalist systems and their effects, this lexicon also includes selected terms relating to neurodivergence, disability, accessibility, and cognitive load, not as a diversion, but because these domains repeatedly collide with economic agendas in ways that expose structural priorities, hidden incentives, and ethical fault lines. This is not a neutral dictionary, nor a comprehensive one; it is a practical tool for clarity, shared reference, and resistance to linguistic vagueness.
Accessibility Theatre
Definition:
The performative display of accessibility measures that exist primarily to signal inclusivity rather than to provide meaningful or usable access. Often focuses on optics, branding, or compliance language while leaving structural barriers intact.
Critical Note:
Accessibility theatre allows organisations to claim moral credit without doing the harder work of redesigning systems. It frequently shifts responsibility onto disabled individuals to navigate broken processes while presenting the system as already “inclusive enough”.
Attention Economy
Definition:
The economic system in which human attention is treated as a scarce and valuable resource to be captured, held, measured, and sold. Platforms and services compete not primarily for money, but for sustained engagement, which can then be monetised indirectly.
Usage Context:
Commonly referenced in discussions about social media, advertising, content platforms, notification systems, and algorithmic feeds.
Critical Note:
The attention economy reframes distraction as success. Systems are optimised not for user wellbeing, clarity, or informed choice, but for prolonged cognitive occupation. This disproportionately affects neurodivergent people, whose attentional patterns are more easily overstimulated, exploited, or pathologised within environments deliberately engineered to fragment focus.
Capitalism
Definition:
An economic system based on private ownership of resources and the production of goods or services for profit, where value is primarily measured in financial terms and mediated through markets.
Critical Note:
While often framed as neutral or natural, capitalism embeds specific assumptions about value, productivity, and worth. These assumptions shape culture, behaviour, and policy in ways that privilege profit over wellbeing, sustainability, or human need.
Commodification
Definition:
The process by which something not originally produced for exchange is transformed into a product that can be bought, sold, measured, or exploited for profit.
Usage Context:
Appears in discussions of identity, creativity, labour, emotion, relationships, and increasingly, mental health and self-expression.
Critical Note:
Commodification strips context and meaning in order to standardise value. What is gained in market legibility is often lost in authenticity, autonomy, and human nuance.
Conversion
Definition:
A metric-driven concept referring to the successful transformation of attention into a desired outcome, such as a sale, signup, click, or behavioural change.
Critical Note:
When applied broadly, conversion thinking reduces human interaction to extraction efficiency. It reframes communication, creativity, and even care as funnels to be optimised rather than relationships to be respected.
Dark Patterns
Definition:
Deliberately manipulative design techniques used in interfaces, services, or systems to steer users toward actions they might not otherwise choose.
Critical Note:
Dark patterns exploit cognitive biases and uneven power dynamics. Their widespread normalisation blurs the line between persuasion and coercion, eroding informed consent while maintaining plausible deniability.
Engagement
Definition:
A broad metric used to quantify user interaction with content, platforms, or services, typically measured through time spent, clicks, reactions, or frequency of return.
Critical Note:
Engagement is often treated as a proxy for value, regardless of whether the interaction is meaningful, healthy, or voluntary. Systems optimised for engagement frequently incentivise outrage, addiction, or compulsive behaviour.
Enshittification
Definition:
The gradual degradation of a product or service over time, where initial user-friendly design gives way to increasing friction, restrictions, monetisation, and exploitation as a platform shifts its priorities toward profit extraction.
Usage Context:
Frequently applied to social media platforms, apps, subscription services, and digital ecosystems that worsen after achieving market dominance.
Critical Note:
Enshittification reveals that many design harms are not accidents or failures, but stages in a business lifecycle. What begins as “innovation” often ends as coercion. Accessibility features are commonly among the first casualties, reframed as optional extras once user lock-in has been achieved.
Extraction
Definition:
Extraction is the process by which value is taken from people, communities, environments, or systems without fair compensation, consent, or reinvestment. In late stage capitalism, extraction extends beyond physical resources into time, attention, emotion, creativity, data, and identity itself. It often operates invisibly, framed as participation, opportunity, or normal economic activity rather than loss.
Critical Note:
Extraction becomes most insidious when it is normalized or disguised as mutual benefit. When people are told they are being empowered, connected, or rewarded, the underlying asymmetry of value flow can go unnoticed. Over time, extractive systems hollow out trust, autonomy, and sustainability, leaving individuals responsible for managing the damage caused by forces far larger than themselves.
Friction by Design
Definition:
The intentional introduction of obstacles, delays, or complexity into a system to discourage certain actions or behaviours.
Critical Note:
When used selectively, friction by design can function as a form of behavioural control. It often disproportionately affects disabled, neurodivergent, or time-poor individuals while remaining invisible to those the system favours.
Late-Stage Capitalism
Definition:
A critical term describing the perceived current phase of capitalism, characterised by extreme wealth concentration, market saturation, commodification of identity and attention, and the erosion of public goods.
Critical Note:
The term highlights systemic contradictions rather than predicting an endpoint. It is often used to name the sense that existing economic logic is being stretched beyond sustainability, even as it is defended as inevitable.
Optimisation Culture
Definition:
A cultural mindset that frames all behaviour, time, output, and even identity as variables to be continuously improved, streamlined, and made more efficient.
Usage Context:
Common in productivity discourse, self-help industries, tech culture, corporate environments, and algorithm-driven platforms.
Critical Note:
Optimisation culture quietly assumes that rest, inefficiency, and unstructured existence are failures. It conflates worth with output, and progress with acceleration, often at the expense of wellbeing and meaning.
Post-Capitalism
Definition:
A speculative or theoretical framework exploring social, economic, or cultural systems that move beyond capitalist modes of production and value.
Critical Note:
Post-capitalism is not a single model but a field of inquiry. Discussions often reveal more about present limitations than future solutions, functioning as a space to imagine alternatives rather than prescribe blueprints.
Platform Dependency
Definition:
A condition in which individuals or creators become structurally reliant on a specific platform for visibility, income, access, or participation, despite having little control over its rules, changes, or long-term stability.
Usage Context:
Used in discussions about social media, creative labour, gig work, digital access schemes, and centralised online services.
Critical Note:
Platform dependency shifts risk downward. Users are expected to adapt endlessly to opaque changes, while platforms avoid responsibility for the harm those changes cause. For disabled and neurodivergent users, this dependency can mean losing access entirely when interfaces, policies, or “optimisations” change without warning.
Responsibility Laundering
Definition:
The process by which institutions shift moral or practical responsibility onto individuals while retaining control over the systems that create harm or limitation.
Critical Note:
Responsibility laundering reframes systemic failure as personal inadequacy. It allows organisations to claim neutrality or benevolence while continuing practices that generate the very problems individuals are blamed for navigating.
Value Extraction
Definition:
The process of deriving profit, data, labour, or behavioural insight from individuals or communities, often without proportional return or consent.
Critical Note:
Value extraction reframes participation as a resource to be mined. It frequently operates invisibly, embedding itself into everyday actions and relationships while externalising costs onto individuals or society.