“W.“We are all living in the enshitocene, a big enshitocene, in which the services that we care about, that we depend on, are turning into giant piles of shit,” author Cory Doctorow. he wrote earlier this year.
In 2023, Doctorow coined the word “enshittification”, which has just been crowned word of the year by Macquarie Dictionary. The dictionary defined the word as follows.
“The gradual deterioration of a service or product caused by a reduction in the quality of the service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of the pursuit of profits.”
Social media users, if they don’t know the word, will viscerally understand the concept, the way trolls, extremists, liars and empty criminals have taken over the platforms.
Consider Twitter, a once useful and often amusing microblogging site, transformed by a tech sibling into X, a post-truth morass.
Or Facebook, where you’re now more likely to be introduced to assless crocheted dudes from Shein than a humblebrag from a dear friend.
Or Instagram, where cute dog videos once reigned. Now, another unfathomable algorithm serves a diet of tradwives, gym buddies, and uwu girls.
The dictionary committee described enshitification as “a very basic Anglo-Saxon term wrapped in affixes that elevate it to almost formality; almost respectable.”
Without those affixes (if one were to say, for example, simply that X has a bit of shit), the deliberate degradation of the platform is erased.
With such affixes, the impression is conveyed that the platform owners manipulate their own product until the bad material, like guano on a rock, eclipses the original form.
Doctorow wrote that this decline was a three-stage process.
“First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business clients; ultimately, they abuse those business customers to recover all the value for themselves,” he wrote.
“It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. It’s even terrifying.”
Honorable mentions from the Macquarie Dictionary committee went to “right to disconnect” and “crossover”.
But enshittification not only won his vote, but also took away his popular election prize.
“This word captures what many of us feel is happening in the world and in so many aspects of our lives right now,” the committee said.
Doctorow himself is surprisingly optimistic about where all this could end.
Actions on competition to avoid market dominance, regulation of aspects such as digital privacy, more power for users to decide how they use platforms and addressing the exploitation of workers could reverse the process, he wrote, because “everyone has a interest in desenshitification”. .
Big Tech Can’t Be Fixed, He Argues, But Maybe It Can can be destroyed.
It adds a fourth stage to the eschatological journey of tech platforms, from being good to users to abusing them in favor of their customers to abusing their customers to serve themselves.
“Then they die,” he wrote.