The American Dialect Society has chosen the neologism "enshittification" as its 2023 word of the year:
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.
Presiding at the Jan. 6 voting session were Ben Zimmer, chair of the ADS New Words Committee and language columnist for the Wall Street Journal, and Dr. Kelly Elizabeth Wright of Virginia Tech, data czar of the New Words Committee. "Enshittification is a sadly apt term for how our online lives have become gradually degraded," Zimmer said. "From the time that it first appeared in Doctorow's posts and articles, the word had all the markings of a successful neologism, being instantly memorable and adaptable to a variety of contexts."
The term was first seen over at Cory Doctorow's current blog, Pluralistic. It is a form of rent-seeking also known as platform decay.
Previously:
(2023) Enshittification Everywhere. Your Car, Your Phone, Your Tractor, Your Computer...
Related Stories
Companies are willing to make their products less reliable, less attractive, less safe and less resilient in pursuit of rents.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/
Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car's digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare – but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it's a dream they can't give up on.
[...] Don't drive a cab, create Uber and extract value from every driver and rider. Better still: don't found Uber, invest in Uber options and extract value from the people who invest in Uber. Even better, invest in derivatives of Uber options and extract value from people extracting value from people investing in Uber, who extract value from drivers and riders.
Go meta.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday January 10, @03:10AM (4 children)
... enfuckening? Denotes an intention behind (yes, always from behind in this case), while enshittification may just happen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 10, @03:29AM (1 child)
Perhaps.
But consider that shit keeps on happening (unless you are on a starvation diet).
Fucking is somewhat optional...
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday January 10, @07:33AM
I'd like to hear you telling this to the, figuratively speaking, compulsive sexual predators that run those digital platforms Doctorow speaks about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 11, @08:55PM (1 child)
Nah, enshittification describes perfectly the passage of delicious food as it enters the body, passing though the organs nourishing the body, and then ends up in its final, permanent form.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday January 14, @05:57AM
1. that's digestion
2. the shit is not final/permanent form - e.g. if you'll be using to fertilize your vegie patch, you are going to eat part of it under the form of a delicious vine-rippen tomato
3. as a result of digestion, a lot of nutrients are used in maintaining the eater's body and part of the food transform into an energy the eater could use for more constructive purposes than smearing her/his shit over what others considers value
4. if your entire purpose of life is to transform food into shit, you're not more valuable to this word than bacteria or mold and your existence can be substituted by the latter without the world noticing it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Funny) by crafoo on Wednesday January 10, @03:57AM (4 children)
https://liberalarts.vt.edu/departments-and-schools/department-of-english/faculty/kelly-elizabeth-wright.html [vt.edu]
let's talk about midwits at all levels of academia, doing nothing useful. making up words where other words already exist that convey the meaning quite well. writing about social justice. go get real jobs.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 10, @07:39AM (3 children)
I remember a guy that was doing pretty much the same, around 1600BC; and they praised him too [wikipedia.org], the fucker.
(Score: 3, Informative) by PiMuNu on Wednesday January 10, @09:28AM (2 children)
Ahem. 1600 AD.
(Score: 5, Funny) by gtomorrow on Wednesday January 10, @09:31AM (1 child)
I think AC meant William Shakerock. He lived across the street from Mr Slate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 10, @10:46AM
1600 Anonymous Coward, yes.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 10, @04:42AM
The tragedy of crapitalism
(Score: 2) by mrpg on Wednesday January 10, @05:19AM (3 children)
English is not my first language, so I ask, does it sound rude?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 10, @08:42AM (1 child)
I don't think you'll be hearing this word on the evening news anytime soon.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Wednesday January 10, @09:58AM
I don't think you'll be hearing this word on the evening news anytime soon.
The evening news won't cover it even using the phrase platform decay. It would tread on their advertisers' toes.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Informative) by stormreaver on Wednesday January 10, @03:45PM
It's going to depend on the listener, but it is generally intended to be somewhat rude and to show a large degree of disrespect to the target.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by gtomorrow on Wednesday January 10, @09:43AM (8 children)
I detest that term. Damn Doctorow for coining it but especially damn anyone whose vocabulary includes it. It's not clever in the least but a grade-school-level, snickering-behind-teacher's-back term and anyone who uses it reveals their true intellect, especially when used earnestly, without without sarcasm or irony, as if it makes you sound smart.
You're just another clod for using that term.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Wednesday January 10, @10:20AM (7 children)
It may not be to your liking, but this word has one advantage: when you use it, people know what you mean. That's the power of words.
I feel the same about hacker: it used to be a noble thing to be a hacker. Hackers pursued technical excellence and pushed hardware and software to their limits.
Now it just mean someone who writes malware (when they have some coding talent) or breaks into systems to sell their victims' ill-gotten data or scam them out of their money.
I used to describe myself as a hacker. I don't anymore. The word's meaning has shifted, so now I use it like everybody else so people understand what I mean.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by gtomorrow on Wednesday January 10, @10:55AM (6 children)
Forgive me for using such strong examples, nothing personal, but when I say "fuck you" or "eat shit," people know what I mean as well. It doesn't mean I use it at, say, the airport or the supermarket and most certainly not (or very rarely) on the internet where potentially millions of people may read it. It certainly doesn't make me sound like Fitzgerald or Hemingway either. It doesn't even make me sound like Bukowski because people who freely use terms like that usually don't have Hank's mental muscle.
"Enshittification" apparently doesn't concern itself with these trivialities.
Archaic or prudish as it may seem, I'm of the school of thought that using "curse words" is a lazy means of communication. Reliance on such terms is a crutch for a more precise expression of thought. IT'S LIKE ALWAYS TYPING WITH CAPS LOCK ON or punctuating every other word of a sentence with "like" or "uhmm" or "muthafucka."
It's an intellectual race to the bottom. And I have a problem with that. Apparently, you and many others don't.
(Score: 5, Touché) by SomeGuy on Wednesday January 10, @01:08PM (1 child)
So, in other words, it is enshittification of the English language.... 💩
(Score: 5, Funny) by Gaaark on Wednesday January 10, @01:49PM
See, what we have HERE, is an enshittification of the communication. ;)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 4, Funny) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Wednesday January 10, @02:49PM
You said bottom!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by crm114 on Wednesday January 10, @04:49PM (2 children)
100% agree. I was trained from an early age to not use "curse words." But all words have specific meanings. And my mom never got that point.
One of the best comments I ever heard is "excessive use of curse words is a weak mind trying to express itself forcefully."
Note the "excessive" - if every other word is a "foul" word, you know you are talking to a weak minded fool. But.... when you hear that same word from me, it indicates "stop, and think /carefully/ about what I just said."
As for the word being described in this thread, no, I will not be using it like it is 'the word of the year'. But it does have a very specific meaning. If someone told me to do what that word describes, I would probably just end the conversation, and say that word to myself.
Just my opinion.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Wednesday January 10, @05:19PM (1 child)
And that's a rather poor training. Instead, you should have been trained to use as few curse words as possible, and reserve them for when you truly need to say something impactful.
Also, people who swear are perceived to be more honest [sagepub.com]. I can attest to that: I lived in Utah, and while most Mormons I knew were real good pals and honest to a fault, their ultra-polished, ultra-sanitized way of speaking always left me the feeling that they were hiding something or trying to sell me something like a slick salesman.
I knew they weren't like that at all. But for the longest time after landing in Salt Lake, I had the distinct feeling that they were running a long frame on me to recruit me into the church. Their overly cleansed English actually makes them sound really quite suspicious to people who aren't from the state.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 11, @11:10AM
And so that perception might be wrong and not true to reality in other places/cultures.
As for swearing/cussing etc, here's scientific research (maybe not replicable YMMV) that shows why you might not want to swear so often:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1526590011007620 [sciencedirect.com]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday January 10, @02:03PM
What I don't like about it is its just rebranding "tech startup as a business model". Once people caught on to their antics, its all "well, actually all companies do this enshittification its not a tech startup thing at all" You'll note this word and the push to use it comes from the tech bros not critics of big pharma or critics of automakers it seems to be pretty strongly "uh, nothin to see here!" from the tech bros.