Remember when Facebook was just a useful website that helped you stay in touch with your friends? And Google did more than serve you half a page of ads? And Twitter ― well, let’s not go there.
There’s a word for this decline: enshittification.
The term, made famous by the tech critic Cory Doctorow in 2023, was just selected by Macquarie Dictionary ― Australia’s oldest! ― as its 2024 word of the year.
Here’s how they defined it:
noun Colloquial: 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.
The Macquarie committee politely described the phrase as “a very basic Anglo-Saxon term wrapped in affixes which elevate it to being almost formal; almost respectable.”
As Doctorow described it in 2023, enshittification is about more than the outcome. It’s a deliberate business strategy in which everyone loses except the platform and its shareholders (at least in the short term).
First, says Doctorow, a digital service gains a foothold by making itself useful to its users. Having locked them in, the platform leverages those users to appeal to businesses. Then, in its third and final step, the platform abuses both businesses and customers to extract all the value for itself.
“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,” Doctorow remarked in a 2024 lecture after the word went viral.
“Today’s giants are not constrained by competition,” he added. “They don’t care. They don’t have to. They’re Google.”
Indeed, countless tech giants can be said to fit the mold: Meta (Facebook, Instagram, etc.), Alphabet (Google), Uber, Amazon, TikTok, Twitter (now known as X). Doctorow predicts that AI-driven search and chatbots will inevitably meet the same fate.
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Macquarie Dictionary’s selection marks the second time “enshittification” has earned a spot atop the dictionary hall of fame. The American Dialect Society selected it as the word of the year in 2023.
Other words the Macquarie committee considered include “brainrot” (social media content that’s of such low quality it leads to diminished mental function); “overtourism” (the degradation of a tourist destination caused by too many tourists); and “right to disconnect” (a law guaranteeing the right to not be contacted about work during non-work hours).
