Notes: ‘Enshittification’, Spotted in the Wild and Run Down

The word turned up, as these things now do, in a place where it plainly did not belong: a dry policy discussion, used by someone far too senior to have coined it, deployed with the easy confidence of a term that everyone was assumed to know. Enshittification. It is ugly on purpose, unprintable in some outlets, and one of the most cleanly documented coinages of the decade — which makes it an ideal thing to run down, because for once the trail does not go cold.

Most of the phrases worth chasing resist this kind of scrutiny. Their origins dissolve into folklore the moment you press on them: a confident story about sailors, or soldiers, or medieval punishment, with no dated text to anchor it. That is the usual condition of etymology, and it is why so much of the work is negative — patiently showing that the popular tale cannot be right rather than triumphantly producing the true one. A coinage like this is a rare gift: recent enough to be filmed, as it were, from the moment of birth, with a named author, a timestamp, and a paper trail. It is worth pausing on precisely because it is the exception.

Where it comes from

The word was made by the writer and technology critic Cory Doctorow. He appears to have used it in passing in late 2022, but the piece that launched it was a post on his blog, Pluralistic, on 21 January 2023, built around the decline of TikTok. In it he set out a three-stage theory of how digital platforms rot, and gave the process its name:

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.

The essay was quickly republished for a wider technology audience, and the word did the rest on its own. It named something a great many people had felt but not labelled — the sense that the apps and services they depended on were quietly getting worse — and a term that names a shared, unspoken feeling tends to travel fast.

How the word is built

Part of its charm is structural. Enshittification is assembled from thoroughly ordinary English machinery: the prefix en-, which turns a noun into a verb of becoming or causing (as in enrich, enable, entangle); a blunt vulgar root; and the heavyweight suffix -ification, which lends the whole a mock-technical, almost bureaucratic gravity. The comedy lies in the mismatch: a crude word dressed in the grammar of a policy paper, so that it sounds simultaneously like something shouted and something footnoted. That collision is exactly why it works in the dry settings where it keeps turning up. It lets a speaker be precise and rude in the same breath, and English has always had an appetite for words that manage both.

How fast it moved

The speed is the remarkable part. A coinage from a single blog post, in January 2023, was chosen as the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year for 2023 — voted on in early January 2024, barely twelve months after the post appeared. The Society, whose annual vote is run by linguists and lexicographers rather than by marketers, is a serious barometer of which new words are actually being used, and its citation pointed straight back to Doctorow’s coinage and its application to platform after platform. The word’s momentum did not stop there: Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary went on to make enshittification its Word of the Year for 2024, confirming that the term had jumped continents and outlived the news cycle that produced it.

Why this one stuck

Most coinages die in the cradle; the interesting question is why this one did not. Three things seem to have helped. First, it filled a genuine gap: there was no compact word for the specific phenomenon of a platform degrading its own users to extract value, and the concept was suddenly everywhere in lived experience. Second, its very crudeness was an asset — the word is memorable, faintly transgressive, and impossible to say neutrally, which makes it stick in the ear and spread in conversation. Third, and least visible, it came with a theory attached. Doctorow did not just insult bad products; he supplied a mechanism, a sequence of stages, that let people use the word analytically rather than merely as abuse. A word that carries an argument inside it is far harder to forget than a word that only carries a sneer.

It also helps to see enshittification against its recent neighbours, because the speed that looks startling in isolation turns out to be the new normal. Oxford’s Word of the Year was goblin mode in 2022 — chosen, for the first time, by a public vote of more than three hundred thousand people — and rizz, a clipping of charisma, in 2023. Both travelled from niche online use to dictionary recognition in roughly a year, on the same rails: a term coined or popularised in a small community, amplified by social platforms, and ratified by a lexicographic body scrambling to keep pace. What used to take a generation now takes a season. The channel that spreads these words is, tellingly, the very platform economy that enshittification was coined to describe.

What to be careful about

Running a phrase down means being honest about the soft edges, and there are a few here. The precise moment of coinage is a little fuzzy: the January 2023 post is the launch, but Doctorow himself has indicated he used the word earlier, and pinning an exact first utterance for any recent term is notoriously hard. It is also worth resisting the story’s own neatness. A word being named Word of the Year is evidence that commentators and voters noticed it, not proof that it has permanently entered the everyday vocabulary of ordinary speakers; plenty of past winners have since faded. And there is a mild irony in a term coined to describe decay becoming, itself, a fashionable label slapped on any product anyone happens to dislike — a small enshittification of enshittification.

One further caution is about attribution itself. It is tempting, with a word this well documented, to imagine that coinage equals ownership — that Doctorow controls the term the way an author controls a character. He does not, and no coiner does. Once a word is loose it belongs to its users, who bend it to their own purposes; the drift from a precise, staged theory of platform decay towards a loose synonym for ‘gone downhill’ is not a corruption of the word but simply what happens to every successful one. The coiner supplies the seed. The language decides what grows.

Still, as a case study the word is close to ideal. It has a named author, a datable launch, a documented path from niche blog to the record of a professional linguistic body, and a clear reason for its survival. Most of the phrases this publication chases have origins that dissolve into rumour the moment you press on them. This one, for now, does not — and watching a coinage go from a single post to a dictionary’s Word of the Year inside a year is as good a demonstration as any of how quickly, in the present, a word can enter the language and get itself written down.