The rise of enshittification: officially the word of the year
Editor’s take: Remember when today’s technology was new and exciting and everyone was talking about how great the internet was, or Facebook, or Twitter? Things aren’t so rosy now. And while that may sound like an Abe Simpson-like rant, it’s easy to understand why “enshittification” has been crowned word of the year.
Enshittification is defined as the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.
It’s a helpful term for describing many of today’s tech products, from Google search being a slush of ads, link farms, forum posts, and useless AI content, to social media platforms becoming a hate-filled nightmare. Don’t forget those products that move from being one-off purchases to subscriptions before their quality starts becoming diluted, or once-great video game franchises that become little more than a way for publishers to push more microtransactions and season passes onto people. Companies are putting yearly increases in profits and share prices above absolutely everything else, including making sure the products they offer aren’t, well, shit.
Generative AI’s ability to create unlimited amounts of crap and lies has exacerbated an already bad situation, of course.
Related reading: The Zero Click Internet
We should thank author Cory Doctorow for coining a word to describe this phenomenon. He first used enshittification in a 2022 essay on how difficult and annoying it had become to shop on Amazon.
Macquarie Dictionary, Australia’s national dictionary, has recognized the importance of the term enshittification in today’s tech by crowning it the word of the year – it also won the people’s vote. According to the dictionary’s committee, it is “a very basic Anglo-Saxon term wrapped in affixes which elevate it to being almost formal; almost respectable.”
“This word captures what many of us feel is happening to the world and to so many aspects of our lives at the moment,” the committee said.
Speaking about the enshittification of online platforms specifically (via The Guardian), Doctorow described it as a process that occurs in three stages: “First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves,” he wrote. He added a fourth stage: “Then they die.”
“It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. It’s even terrifying.”
Doctorow believes that the recent anticompetitive cases, tighter regulations on privacy, and giving users more power over how they use online platforms and what data they hand over is helping to reverse the enshittification.
Doctorow said he has just handed over the manuscript for a new book. Its title? Enshittification. There’s also a graphic novel and documentary in the works.
Enshittification had a close fight with rawdogging for Australia’s word of the year. While the latter has several meanings, it has gained popularity recently over its use for enduring long-haul flights, or other monotonous tasks, without the benefit of distractions such as phones, movies, games, or books. Even sleep, food, or water aren’t allowed. I tried asking Google why people do this, but there were too many pages of unhelpful crap to wade through to find the answer.
