âWeâre 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,â author Cory Doctorow said earlier this year.
In 2022, Doctorow coined the word âenshittificationâ, which has just been crowned Macquarie Dictionaryâs word of the year. The dictionary defined the word as follows.
âThe 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.â
Social media users, if they donât 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 youâre 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 dictionaryâs committee described enshittification as âa very basic Anglo-Saxon term wrapped in affixes which elevate it to being almost formal; almost respectableâ.
Without those affixes â if one were to say, for example, merely that X has got a bit shit â 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.
âFirst, 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,â he wrote.
âItâs frustrating. Itâs demoralizing. Itâs even terrifying.â
The Macquarie Dictionary committeeâs honourable mentions went to âright to disconnectâ, and ârawdoggingâ.
But enshittification not only won their vote, it took out the peopleâs choice award.
âThis word captures what many of us feel is happening to the world and to so many aspects of our lives at the moment,â 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 âeveryone has a stake in disenshittificationâ.
Big tech canât be fixed, he argues, but maybe it can be destroyed.
He adds a fourth stage to the tech platformsâ scatological journey from being good to users, to abusing them in favour of their customers, to abusing their customers to serve themselves.
âThen they die,â he wrote.