Macquarie's 2024 WOTY is "enshittification"

November 26, 2024 @ 6:56 am · Filed by under Words words words

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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).

November 26, 2024 @ 6:56 am · Filed by under Words words words


15 Comments »

  1. 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.

  2. Peter Taylor said,

    November 26, 2024 @ 9:33 am

    It's curious to compare the Macquarie gloss of rawdogging:

    noun Colloquial the act of undertaking a long-haul flight with no electronic entertainment, devices or reading material, as film, music, games, laptops, books, etc..

    with comment

    A kind of personal endurance test that lends itself to social media exposure, rawdogging caught the public’s attention this year. The word’s meaning was quickly extended to apply to other aspects of life.

    vs the Urban Dictionary gloss:

    While it's originally used to describe having sex without protection, it can be used as slang for doing anything TO something, without something else that that something would require, such as some form of preparation, protection, or anything to make it go smoother that one would consider almost essential, typically out of callousness.

    The fourth of four examples given in UD corresponds to the meaning which Macquarie implies is the original one.

  3. Yuval said,

    November 26, 2024 @ 10:02 am

    Peter Taylor: That Macquarie gloss is bizarrely misinformed and oddly specific; the sexual usage definitely predated the mild ones (yes, plural, it's way more productive than just the flight thing). Here are two recent posts exploring the scene.

  4. J.W. Brewer said,

    November 26, 2024 @ 10:26 am

    Subject to the comment above re "unfortunate coinage" in terms of matching the specific and fairly precise intended meaning, it seems to my ear that unprefixed "shittification" could have been an equally cromulent coinage. Which led me to wonder what if any semantic work the en- prefix was doing. Wiktionary offers a bunch of different sorts of semantic content that that prefix may add to a compound, but maybe the most parsimonious analysis here is that it's just their sense 4 of "intensifier." https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/en-#Prefix

  5. Haamu said,

    November 26, 2024 @ 1:37 pm

    @J.W. Brewer — If en- is doing any semantic work, then surely it's Wiktionary's sense 2: "to become." Aardvark Cheeselog's prescriptivist objections aside, the word now describes, in a general sense, a process of becoming shitty (or some more specific subtype of such process), and so you have en- suggesting a process of becoming and -ification suggesting a process of becoming. I think the redundancy is the point, i.e., en- is doing not just semantic work but humor work.

    To my mind, be- would have done the job just as well, except that (to me) beshittification somehow suggests that the transformation is being externally motivated or imposed, while enshittification is more neutral on this point: it might be imposed, or it might be an inevitable consequence of the nature of the thing. I have no idea if anyone else would distinguish these prefixes in this way.

    Alas, Wiktionary reports that the relevant sense 8 of be- is "rare or no longer productive." That's a loss for English, I think, but in this case that aspect would add to the wry effect.

  6. David Marjanović said,

    November 26, 2024 @ 1:47 pm

    More lexical creativity from the "audacious plan" post:

    Remember when we said the internet would disintermediate everything?

    It did.

    And then it reintermediated everything.

    Also enshitternet (the current stage of the internet, hoped to be transitional) and crapulent (attribute of Rupert Murdoch and of MySpace), wicked apparently as short for "wicked smart", and perhaps bigfoot in "Step two: tech companies play a high-speed shell-game on the back end, and use their consolidation to bigfoot any attempt to constrain their twiddling (like privacy, labor, or fair trading laws)."

    …though I'm pretty sure that "radioactivelyillegal" (no space in the original) is a mistranscription of "retroactively illegal".

    Anyway, one click away is this quote:

    The first time I used "enshittification" was in a throwaway bad-tempered rant about the decay of Tripadvisor into utter uselessness, which drew a small chorus of appreciative chuckles about the word:

    https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1550457808222552065

  7. David Marjanović said,

    November 26, 2024 @ 1:59 pm

    …and lower down on the page I just quoted, there's this (all italics of course in the original):

    Second: the fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound.

    and this:

    Finally: "coinage" is both more – and less – than thinking of the word. After the American Dialect Society gave honors to "enshittification," a few people slid into my mentions with citations to "enshittification" that preceded my usage. I find this completely unsurprising, because English is such a slippery and playful tongue, because English speakers love to swear, and because infixing is such a fun way to swear (e.g. "unfuckingbelievable"). But of course, I hadn't encountered any of those other usages before I came up with the word independently, nor had any of those other usages spread appreciably beyond the speaker (it appears that each of the handful of predecessors to my usage represents an act of independent coinage).

    If "coinage" was just a matter of thinking up the word, you could write a small python script that infixed the word "shit" into every syllable of every word in the OED, publish the resulting text file, and declare priority over all subsequent inventive swearers.

    On the one hand, coinage takes place when the coiner a) independently invents a word; and b) creates the context for that word that causes it to escape from the coiner's immediate milieu and into the wider world.

    But on the other hand – and far more importantly – the fact that a successful coinage requires popular uptake by people unknown to the coiner means that the coiner only ever plays a small role in the coinage. Yes, there would be no popularization without the coinage – but there would also be no coinage without the popularization. Words belong to groups of speakers, not individuals. Language is a cultural phenomenon, not an individual one.

    Which is rather the point, isn't it? After a quarter of a century of being part of a community that fought tirelessly to get a serious and widespread consideration of tech policy underway, we're closer than ever, thanks, in part, to "enshittification." If someone else independently used that word before me, if some people use the word loosely, if the word makes some people uncomfortable, that's fine, provided that the word is doing what I want it to do, what I've devoted my life to doing.

    …and then Doctorow reminds us that shit is a root cognate of science.

  8. J.W. Brewer said,

    November 26, 2024 @ 2:26 pm

    @Haamu: I take your point, although perhaps one person's redundant-affix-for-humor-value is another person's affix-serving-only-as-intensifier?

  9. Nancy Friedman said,

    November 26, 2024 @ 7:36 pm

    @J.W. Brewer: I touched on the morphological redundancy of "enshittification" in a February 1, 2023, post for the Strong Language blog:
    https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2023/02/01/enshittification/

  10. Haamu said,

    November 26, 2024 @ 8:31 pm

    From Slate today: "Rawdogging Ulysses", which is defined as "reading it without supplementary materials."

    The author seems a little too enamored of the word, using it multiple times in the article.

  11. Jaap said,

    November 27, 2024 @ 7:54 am

    The German word "verschlimmbessern" has a similar but more general meaning, namely making something worse by trying to improve it.

  12. Aardvark Cheeselog said,

    November 27, 2024 @ 2:36 pm

    @David Marjanović

    Alas there is no upvote button, that reply was heroically done.

    And it might be a feature, not a bug, that words get repurposed according to what people in a statistical sense think they mean. But they you are lost with the word for the technical meaning that it was trying to represent.

  13. Keith Ivey said,

    November 27, 2024 @ 3:35 pm

    I don't understand how Doctorow thinks the word is an example of infixation. Is he thinking of it as "entification" with "shit" inserted? If so, he might be the only one.

  14. Jonathan Smith said,

    November 27, 2024 @ 5:57 pm

    ^ for "infix" read more technical "circumfix" I guess…
    OK it would be nice if this term ("enshittification") were both catchy AND more etymologically transparent wrt the process it was coined to name. But it would be nicer if more people, when they noticed platforms enshittifying, simply abandoned them. The notion that users are "trapped" by Twitter or Amazon is largely enbullshit.
    More generally I don't totally understand the trend towards Section 230 textual originalism. Who cares? What would make the internet better, or at least somewhat less enshitty, is the question.

  15. SlideSF said,

    November 27, 2024 @ 6:59 pm

    @Jaap Tje difference between "enshittification" and your German word is not really a question of specific vs. general, The meanings differ. With "enshittification" there is no attempt to make things better, failing, and making them worse. The object is to make things worse (at least for the user) but to somehow make you think they are better. Or at least to make you think they are trying to make them better. Better and worse are of course highly subjective, depending on whether you are a user or whoever it is that makes the money.

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