Respectfully, I don’t think I am. I have been following Doctorow’s work for over a decade. I am currently reading his book, and I don’t think I misinterpreted or misappropriated the term.
Have you watched Cory Doctorow’s recent podcast interview with Adam Conover? In it, he defines enshittification as platform decay as you say, but he allows it to be applied to any business that deliberately gets worse to force customers into a certain behavior. Hence, me applying the term to Proton and other companies like Evernote and Microsoft for what they are doing with Windows.
At 9:35 Cory explains how he first used the term to describe his horrible experience with Trip Advisor’s website. Then at 11:11 Adam goes into how the term became popular to express anger that everybody feels, and at 11:39 Cory says the following:
Here’s your permission officially to use this word in a loose, non-technical term. There are a bunch of weird scolds who follow people around online and say “No you’re using enshittificaiton wrong! You have to use it in this strict technical sense.” […] Use it to mean things getting rotten. That’s fine. I don’t want to confine its use to a group of irrelevant insiders who use it in a precise technical sense. Use it loosely! That’s fine.
I hope this clarifies the matter.
I noticed you didn’t contest my use of the term dark pattern to describe what Proton is doing.
Does that mean you agree with it?