“We’re all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit,” author Cory Doctorow said earlier this year.
In 2022, Doctorow coined the word “enshittification”, which has just been crowned Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year. The dictionary defined the word as follows.
“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.”
Social media users, if they don’t know the word, will viscerally understand the concept, the way trolls and extremists and bullshitters and the criminally vacuous have overtaken the platforms.
Think Twitter, a once useful and often fun microblogging site twisted by a tech bro into X, a post-truth swamp.
Or Facebook, where you’re now more likely to be presented with crocheted arseless chaps from Shein than a humblebrag from a dear friend.
Or Instagram, where cute dog videos once reigned. Now, yet another unfathomable algorithm serves up a diet of tradwives, gym bros and uwu girls.
The dictionary’s committee described enshittification as “a very basic Anglo-Saxon term wrapped in affixes which elevate it to being almost formal; almost respectable”.
Without those affixes – if one were to say, for example, merely that X has got a bit shit – the deliberate degradation of the platform is erased.
With those affixes, the impression is conveyed of the platform owners tampering with their own product until the bad stuff, like guano on a rock, eclipses the original form.
Doctorow wrote that this decay was a three-stage process.
“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.
“It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. It’s even terrifying.”
The Macquarie Dictionary committee’s honourable mentions went to “right to disconnect”, and “rawdogging”.
But enshittification not only won their vote, it took out the people’s choice award.
“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.
Doctorow himself is surprisingly optimistic about where this could all end up.
Action on competition to prevent market dominance, regulation on things such as digital privacy, more power for users to decide how they use platforms, and tackling the exploitation of workers could reverse the process, he wrote, because “everyone has a stake in disenshittification”.
Big tech can’t be fixed, he argues, but maybe it can be destroyed.
He adds a fourth stage to the tech platforms’ scatological journey from being good to users, to abusing them in favour of their customers, to abusing their customers to serve themselves.
“Then they die,” he wrote.
