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This Happened

This Happened—November 20: A Royal Wedding

Updated Nov. 20, 2023 at 12:10 p.m.

Princess Elizabeth and Prince Phillip tied the knot in a royal wedding in 1947 that sealed the couple together for more than 70 years, including Queen Elizabeth's record-setting reign.

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When did Elizabeth and Phillip marry?

On Nov. 20, 1947, the bells of Westminster Abbey could be heard ringing all over London as Elizabeth and Philip celebrated their wedding. Two thousand guests attended the ceremony, which was radio broadcast by the BBC to over 200 million people around the world.

Then-princess Elizabeth was just 13 years old when she fell in love with Philip Mountbatten, a former prince of Greece and Denmark, five years her senior. The two exchanged letters for years until getting engaged secretly in 1946.

In order to become her husband, Philip adopted his maternal grandparents’ surname and gave up his titles. He would later be known as Prince Philip Mountbatten, Duke of Edinburgh. Queen Elizabeth II spent almost her entire 70-year reign with Prince Philip by her side, until he died in April of 2021.

Were Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip blood related?

Prince Philip was Queen Victoria’s great-great-grandson through his maternal side, and Elizabeth was related to the same queen through her paternal family. Elizabeth's father, King George VI, was a great-grandson of Queen Victoria, making the couple third cousins.


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Ideas

Look At This Crap! The "Enshittification" Theory Of Why The Internet Is Broken

The term was coined by journalist Cory Doctorow to explain the fatal drift of major Internet platforms: if they were ever useful and user-friendly, they will inevitably end up being odious.

A photo of hands holding onto a smartphone

A person holding their smartphone

Gilles Lambert/ZUMA
Manuel Ligero

-Analysis-

The universe tends toward chaos. Ultimately, everything degenerates. These immutable laws are even more true of the Internet.

In the case of media platforms, everything you once thought was a good service will, sooner or later, disgust you. This trend has been given a name: enshittification. The term was coined by Canadian blogger and journalist Cory Doctorow to explain the inevitable drift of technological giants toward... well.

The explanation is in line with the most basic tenets of Marxism. All digital companies have investors (essentially the bourgeoisie, people who don't perform any work and take the lion's share of the profits), and these investors want to see the percentage of their gains grow year after year. This pushes companies to make decisions that affect the service they provide to their customers. Although they don't do it unwillingly, quite the opposite.

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Annoying customers is just another part of the business plan. Look at Netflix, for example. The streaming giant has long been riddling how to monetize shared Netflix accounts. Option 1: adding a premium option to its regular price. Next, it asked for verification through text messages. After that, it considered raising the total subscription price. It also mulled adding advertising to the mix, and so on. These endless maneuvers irritated its audience, even as the company has been unable to decide which way it wants to go. So, slowly but surely, we see it drifting toward enshittification.

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