The biggest word of 2024 is a profane critique of capitalism first coined in 2022. The Macquarie Dictionary, the national dictionary of Australia, has picked “enshittification” as its word of the year.
The Australians define the word as “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.”
We’ve all felt this. Google search is filled with garbage. The internet is clogged with SEO-farming websites that clog up results. Facebook is an endless stream of AI-generated slop. Zoom wants you to test out its new AI features while you’re trying to go into a meeting. Twitter has become X, and its owner thinks sharing links is a waste of time. Last night I reinstalled Windows 11 on a desktop machine and got pissed as it was finalized and Microsoft kept trying to get me to install Onedrive, Office 360, Call of Duty Black Ops 6, and a bunch of other shit I didn’t want.
This is all enshittification. The market demands geometric growth. Companies want the number to go up. As Silicon Valley has run out of wonders and innovation, it has turned to mining its existing customer base by making its products worse. If you’re lucky, they’ll sell you the cure. Most of the time they’re just trying to make a sale. What are LLMs like ChatGPT if not the final attempt of the Valley to devour and regurgitate the user-generated internet back into our mouths?
Writer Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification in an essay about Amazon in 2022. He was talking about what a nightmare it’s become to shop on the site. I recently experienced this when buying a new CPU (which is why I reinstalled Windows.) The processor I wanted, a Ryzen 7 9800x3D, is in high demand. I got it a few weeks ago from Amazon, but it required navigating a list of scam listings selling the CPUs below MSRP to find a reputable retailer. I was eventually able to find an order fulfilled by Amazon itself, but it wasn’t the first one Amazon tried to sell me.
This is all enshittification. It was a big word last year too, the American Dialect Society picked it as the word of the year in 2023, but it’s gotten worse and we all feel it.
Doctorow feels it too. “The most gratifying part of the public attention for my dirty, silly little word is that it is attached to a deadly serious, complex, nuanced critique of platform capitalism, monopoly, the tech labor market, and regulatory capture,” he told Gizmodo in an email. “These are not normally subjects that the public leans into, and I’ve spent 20+ years trying to rouse some passion for them. Most of the time, it felt like pushing on a piece of string.”
Doctorow said one of the reasons the word caught on was that it’s a bit naughty. “Somehow, giving people a minor license to be a bit rude is a magic key that opens the door to a longer, more thoughtful conversation. Not for everyone who uses the word, but that’s *fine*. If ten million people use the word colloquially, and 10 percent of them go look up what I have to say about it, that’s a million normies that I get a chance to radicalize,” he said.
Doctorow isn’t done spreading the bad word, either. He told Gizmodo that he’d just turned in the manuscript for a new book about the phenomenon called, naturally, Enshittification. “There’s also a graphic novel and a documentary in the offing,” he said.
In Australia, “enshittification” almost lost out to “rawdogging,” the practice of flying or doing another boring task without the benefit of a distraction like a movie, video game, or book. Doctorow said he does not engage in rawdogging.
“I’m actually sending you this email from a hotel room in New Delhi, where I’m going to give the closing keynote (about enshittification!) at a joint UN/International Cooperatives Association conference,” Doctorow said. After this, he’ll board two long flights. First from Tokyo and then to L.A.
“I fly with a bag I call ‘the most comfortable man in the sky bag,’” he said. “It’s got a pair of really nice PJs, a hot water bottle (I’ve got rotten chronic pain and just had both hips replaced), a pair of slippers, a very comfy eyemask and a soft headband-style Bluetooth headset, as well as a super-compact sleeping bag that’s down on one side and silk on the other. I’m going to change into my PJs, get my hot water bottle filled, zip myself into the sleeping bag, put on an audiobook, pull down the sleep mask, and estivate like a lungfish.”
While Doctorow is in a state of torpor in the air, resting up to fight enshittification, I’ll be on the ground with the rest of the mortals fighting it as I install drivers on my new PC. Why does everything in Windows 11 think it needs to push a notification to the desktop now? Sweet universe save me from this tide of enshittification.
