Enshittification became popular in 2023 after it was used in a blog post by author of The Internet Con, 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.”
“Enshittification,” Cory Doctorow’s coinage describing the process by which internet media platforms become increasingly unusable and un-quittable, has been named 2023’s “Digital Word of the Year.” Here, we break down what the term means and Doctorow’s solution to the internet’s relentless enshittification.
Cory’s original usage of the word gave it a useful and specific meaning. But that has evolved extremely rapidly with popular usage into the word simply meaning “I don’t like this thing.” Which takes away the usefulness because now it’s no longer describing a specific reason for not liking it.
It’d be like if every kind of ailment started being referred to as an “infection.” Concussions, sprains, hypothermia, etc, all being passed off as “he got infected.” We already have generic terms for that like “he got hurt,” and now when someone does get literally infected we’ve lost the word that would be used to specify that.
Languages evolve, sure. But that doesn’t mean it’s always in a good direction. In this specific case evolution is enshittifying the language and that’s worth a little (admittedly futile) push-back.
Old words fade or shift and new words will keep coming. It’s not necessarily a bad direction.
Not necessarily, but in this particular case it seems bad to me. We’re losing a specialized term for something that IMO warrants having one.
But often it is a bad direction, and it feels like it’s becoming politically incorrect to point out when that’s happening.