Macquarie's 2024 WOTY is "enshittification"
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The Macquarie Dictionary's Word of the Year was announced yesterday, and it's enshittification.
Macquarie is catching up here, since enshittification was the American Dialect Society's WOTY in 2023.
The Macquarie announcement gives us a gloss ("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"), but not a citation or a quotation for the origin. The ADS announcement explained the source, and gave a quote, but didn't give us a link:
The term enshittification became popular in 2023 after it was used in a blog post by author Cory Doctorow, who used it to describe how digital platforms can become worse and worse. “Here is how platforms die: first, they 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. Then, they die. I call this enshittification,” Doctorow wrote on his Pluralistic blog.
So here's the source for that ADS quote: Cory Doctorow, "Tiktok's enshittification", pluralistic.net 1/12/2023.
The Wiktionary entry for enshittification attributes the word to Cory Doctorow in 2022, without a link, but cites a Know Your Meme page and a 2/1/2023 post by Nancy Friedman, both of which link to "How monopoly enshittified Amazon", pluralistic.net 11/28/2022. A slightly earlier citation is Doctorow's 11/15/2022 Medium post "Social Quitting", which also appeared in the January 2023 issue of Locus Magazine.
Despite being the ADS 2023 WOTY, enshittification has not yet had its Word Induction Ceremony at either the OED or M-W.
FWIW, the Macquarie WOTY announcement tells us that the official committee's "Honorable Mention" winners were right to disconnect and rawdogging. The "People's Choice Winner" was also enshittification, while the People's Choice Honorable Mentions were brainrot and social battery.
Some other Cory Doctorow posts about enshittification (and also disenshittification):
"Freedom of reach IS freedom of speech", 12/10/2022
"Microincentives and Enshittification", 7/28/2023
"Enshitternet", 8/13/2023
"My McLuhan lecture on enshittification", 1/30/2024
"The specific process by which Google enshittified its search", 4/24/2024
"The disenshittified internet starts with loyal 'user agents'", 5/7/2024
"Red Lobster was killed by private equity, not Endless Shrimp", 5/23/2024
"Disenshittify or Die", 8/17.2024
"An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification and Throw It Into Reverse", 8/27/2024
"Bluesky and enshittification", 11/2/2024
"Antiusurpation and the road to disenshittification", 11/7/2024
"Reverse engineers bust sleazy gig work platform", 11/23/2024
Among the other related words is enshittocene, from Cory's 1/29/2024 Marshall McCluhan Lecture:
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.
It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. It’s even terrifying.
I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the ‘great forces of history,’ and into the material world of specific decisions made by named people – decisions we can reverse and people whose addresses and pitchfork sizes we can learn.
And the same text can be. found in his 2/8/2024 Financial Times article "‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything", following this introduction:
The term describes the slow decay of online platforms such as Facebook. But what if we’ve entered the ‘enshittocene’?
Last year, I coined the term “enshittification” to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers; it really hit the zeitgeist.
The American Dialect Society made it its Word of the Year for 2023 (which, I suppose, means that now I’m definitely getting a poop emoji on my tombstone).
Aardvark Cheeselog said,
November 26, 2024 @ 9:10 am
"Enshittification" is a somewhat unfortunate coinage, because it sounds like you know what it means without explanation. But you don't, so everybody (to a good zeroth approximation) uses the word incorrectly. It absolutely does not mean "getting shittier over time" or even "being made shittier by profit-seeking."
It describes a specific kind of of back-to-back bait-and-switch triple-cross whereby an online service gets between other businesses and their customers using a sequence of loss-leader moves to gain market dominance, followed by using monopolistic pricing once that dominance is attained. A less-memorable, less-deceptively-self-explanatory-seeming word would have been better.
Peter Taylor said,
November 26, 2024 @ 9:33 am
It's curious to compare the Macquarie gloss of rawdogging:
with comment
vs the Urban Dictionary gloss:
The fourth of four examples given in UD corresponds to the meaning which Macquarie implies is the original one.