Its modern jargon that refers to multinational, corporate focused, globalized markets. Its gone through a few definitions over the last century, but most recently its been used by the anti-work movement to deride a culture that has all but abandoned individual people in favor of the ultra wealthy. A culture where greed and money are the only virtues and all choices are driven by the bottom line.

Jokes on them, that's how its always been.

Originally, it's the idea that capitalism will have a terminal crisis (i.e. die off) and we are in this final crisis because it will hit a state where productivity cannot be increased and so profit will be too difficult to increase.

In practice, technology and some major events have prevented this from happening. The modern left-wing view is that we have run out of new frontiers to exploit, so the capital class will (has) return to reducing labor costs with more extreme measures among other tactics.

With recent events like a major labor shortage (or future one due to declining population) in the developed world, climate change, a stagnation in productivity per person, gig economy emergence, and widespread privatization being viewed as very destructive; this idea has gotten more popular. Part of this is driven by some companies, especially in tech, having manic levels of optimism about frivolous things.

Personally, it kind of sounds like Malthus. But it is hard to deny that we are in a slump of sorts and that startups that sound like scams appeared to be more common for a while.

You'll get a lot of answers, but I think The Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall[1] is key.

Capitalism means competition. Competitors mean reduced profits. As we get into the later stages of the game, that pesky competition aspect comes into play and firms do whatever they can to worm their way out of its consequences.

As profits inevitably fall, firms flail around doing whatever they can to maintain them and cause all sorts of misery for employees, customers, and the world at large. Increasingly brutal exploitation of workers, rotting product quality, all sorts of shenanigans with regulatory capture and rent-seeking as firms try to avoid competition and the need to sell a quality product at a competitive price.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...

An implication that capitalism is a fatal disease rather than a way to efficiently exchange value.

Basically, it's the theory that capitalist economies demand continually increasing growth, even increasing rates of growth, in order to remain stable enough to stay hegemonic. The industrial revolution, through most of the 20th century, exhibited this growth, driving capitalism to be the dominant (eventually only) economic system on earth.

Unfortunately, growth is hard, and it slows down. Over time, providing meaningful improvements to the lives of the participants in the economic system fails to keep up with the demands of growth, and you start to see the system going full ouroboros, consuming all the positive impact its created in the lives of its participants in a downward spiral of exploitation and value extraction until there's nothing left. The period of time after the inversion from "making people's lives better" to "making people's lives worse" is "late-stage capitalism", equivocating it to cancer or other terminal diseases.

Personally, I'm more of a "threshold events" theorist, and that enshittification is just reversion to the mean, but that's the pitch.