Macquarie Dictionary, Australia’s national dictionary, has recognized the importance of the term enshittification in today’s tech by crowning it the word of the year – it also won the people’s vote.
Enshittification is defined 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.
It’s a helpful term for describing many of today’s tech products, from Google search being a slush of ads, link farms, forum posts, and useless AI content, to social media platforms becoming a hate-filled nightmare. Don’t forget those products that move from being one-off purchases to subscriptions before their quality starts becoming diluted, or once-great video game franchises that become little more than a way for publishers to push more microtransactions and season passes onto people. Companies are putting yearly increases in profits and share prices above absolutely everything else, including making sure the products they offer aren’t, well, shit.
I think that’s overly broad in comparison to Doctorow’s original meaning (which they also cite in the article). The critical element missing from their definition is that the enshittified product/service never had a viable business model to begin with: it uses the hype cycle to sell users and investors on an unsustainable mirage before inevitably collapsing.
That is absolutely not a critical part. One of the primary examples doctorow uses is an online marketplace like Amazon. The missing part is the specific steps the business takes of first trapping consumers, then sellers, and finally raking in that cash.
There’s plenty of products with viable business models that have undergone enshittification in recent years…
You are right, but I would go one step further: enshittification is specifically a subsidized (artificial, unsustainable) capture of a free market by a middle man, followed by a squeezing of both buyers and sellers in that market using bought leverage.
It’s just another variety of antitrust that happens to be legal because society has not yet outlawed that behaviour.