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enshittification
DCHP-3 (Nov 2024)
1an. — Digital life, informal
a process by which digital platforms become less user-friendly as technical barriers are installed to maximize profits.
Type: 1. Origin — The term enshittification was apparently coined in late 2022 by Toronto-based tech-writer Cory Doctorow. It is intended to identify the increasing commercialization and entrapment of users in digital environments (e.g. Google searches as default settings, Facebook and X social network dependencies, and so forth), which have been producing increasingly emerging biases for the access to information ("bubble communities").
Image 1 is an example of the process of enshittification from late 2024. In it, a user of Facebook is asked to pay a sum for their posting to reach an additional few hundred Facebook "customers".
As shown in Chart 1, enshittification has quickly spread globally.
The term is not listed in OED-3.
Image 1 is an example of the process of enshittification from late 2024. In it, a user of Facebook is asked to pay a sum for their posting to reach an additional few hundred Facebook "customers".
As shown in Chart 1, enshittification has quickly spread globally.
The term is not listed in OED-3.
Enshittification is a rare case of a term appearing in a highly complex word-formation pattern with several affixes, comprising the prefix en-, the word stem (shit), the suffix -ify, the suffix -(c)ate, the suffix -ion. The term is Doctorow's wholesale creation based on existing word-formation patterns.
The best known example of enshittification is perhaps the takeover of "Twitter" and its transmutation into "X", which required the upfront payment of funds towards restoring one's previous reach in terms of number of followers. This process accelerated greatly in early 2024, though it was already discernible by tech experts since the Twitter take-over (see the 2022 quotation).
Quotations
2022
This brings me back to the enshittification of Amazon search, AKA late-stage (platform) capitalism. Amazon’s dominance means that many products are now solely available on the platform. With the collapse of both physical and online retail, Prime isn’t so much a choice as a necessity.
2023
Cory Doctorow Ideas Jan 23, 2023 12:44 PM
The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok
Or how, exactly, platforms die.
The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok
Or how, exactly, platforms die.
2023
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, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
2024
We’re seeing bold, muscular, global action on competition, regulation and labour, with self-help bringing up the rear. It’s not a moment too soon, because the bad news is enshittification is coming to every industry. If it’s got a networked computer in it, the people who made it can run the Darth Vader MBA playbook on it, changing the rules from moment to moment, violating your rights and then saying: “It’s OK, we did it with an app.”
2024
Canadian Word of the Week 136 is "enshittification". We'll include it in DCHP-3 (Dictionary of Canadianisms on Hist. Princ., 3rd ed.); it's gone global. @doctorow will get his due, when did he concoct the term? #CdnWrdoWk 136. Enshittification ensures few will see this tweet.
2024
[...] so that is phase two of enshittification. Phase one, be good to your users but lock them in. Phase two, screw those users a little so you can be good to business customers while locking them in because they need those users. Then phase three, screw everybody and take all the value for yourself.
1badj. — Digital life, informal
the state of demonstrating enshittification.
Type: 1. Origin — Also coined by writer Cory Doctorow, enshittified is most likely derived from meaning 1 enshittification. Enshittified is not as commonly found to describe the gradual restrictions on digital products and platforms, but its usage still exists (see 2022 and 2024 quotation).
Quotations
2022
Today, Facebook is terminally enshittified, a terrible place to be whether you're a user, a media company, or an advertiser. It's a company that deliberately demolished a huge fraction of the publishers it relied on, defrauding them into a "pivot to video" based on false claims of the popularity of video among Facebook users. Companies threw billions into the pivot, but the viewers never materialized, and media outlets folded in droves.
2024
Cory Doctorow has explained that equivalents exist for some of the most popular social media, alternatives that are non-profits with open standards that don’t sell us anything and that make switching to less enshittified alternatives a snap (just like email).
1cv. — Digital life, informal
the process of undergoing enshittification.
Type: 1. Origin — Stemming from the root term enshittification, multiple variants of the term have emerged to describe the decaying accessibility to digital platforms as a result of enshittification processes.
Quotations
2023
The internet didn’t enshittify because the honorable UUCP Monks who served as the internet’s patrician guardians were replaced by venal tech bros out to make a quick buck. The moneygrubbers were always there (as were those selfless guardians).
2024
It used to be that if you enshittified your product bad things happened to your company. Now, there are no consequences for enshittification which is why everyone is doing it right now.
2024
The brilliance of this is that, once Facebook and Amazon have cornered the market in their respective software niches, they can charge exorbitant ‘rents’ to the corporations for this information, information which is entirely supplied by end-users at substantially no cost to Facebook or Amazon. And they can at the same time abuse us end-users by forcing us to read and watch unlimited amounts of ads and articles that the corporations are paying Facebook and Amazon to push, rather than what we really want to read and watch, and enshittifying their software in other ways that serve them and their corporate customers.
2n.
the destruction of hitherto meaningful tools or processes in any area of contemporary life.
Type: 1. Origin — Expanding from def. (1a, 1b), the term has quickly undergone generalization into other, non-IT domains to name unsatisfactory developments with a given product, situation, service, context and so forth.
Quotations
2023
The enshittification of Loblaws, easily the largest supermarket chain in Canada, is well into the “squeezing with both fists” portion of our program.
2024
Enshittification thus gets into everything, creating what Doctorow has christened the enshittocene. It’s a broad expansion of the capture–exploitation–decline cycle that can explain our analogue existence more and more as consumers become increasingly bound by limited choice, high prices, and poor experiences in oligopolistic markets.
References
- OED-3
Images
Image 1: An example of enshittification (prompt to pay to reach more users) from Facebook, late 2024 (Facebook account of the "Canadian English Dictionary", DCHP-3 sister project)
