Enshittification: A word for our times

On 9 October Jack Stilgoe posted a question on Bluesky: “Has Cory Doctorow done a piece on the enshittification of enshittification yet?” Ken Tindall replied: “The word enshittification has turned to shit but not through a process of enshittification.” This made me think. Is it true? Is there evidence for this? So, I started to dig and this post will be about what I unearthed.

I have been aware of the word ‘enshittification’ for several years. In 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT and the new era of LLMs and chatbots began. Chatbots soon were everywhere and people, including me, began to worry about knowledge pollution by what is now called AI ‘slop’. I soon became aware of a word that encapsulated these fears very well: ‘enshittification’, although it was initially used in a different but related context.

Cory Doctorow, a British-Canadian journalist, popularised the term ‘enshittification’ in essays published in 2022, 2023 and 2024 to describe the degradation in the quality and experience of online platforms over time. Remember the time Twitter became X in 2022/23, for example, and how that felt. In 2023 a famous AI critic, Gary Marcus, began to talk “about AI-induced enshittification“, extending the original meaning of Doctorow’s term to the new world of LLMs and chatbots.

The word emerged just at a time when our artificial and real worlds, from platforms like Amazon and Twitter/X to LLMs and ChatGPT and Google search, and from education and science to democracy and government, were becoming more and more shit. But can one now talk about the enshittification of enshittification? Let’s have a look at the history of the word and how the word has spread.

Coining the word

This is the right time to take stock, as Cory Doctorow has just published a book entitled Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (October 2025).

In a recent Guardian article Doctorow said something interesting about the word he had created: “In 2022, I coined a term to describe the sudden-onset platform collapse going on all around us: enshittification. To my bittersweet satisfaction, that word is doing big numbers. In fact, it has achieved escape velocity.” It sure did and people noticed!

Recording the word

In 2023 the American Dialect Society named ‘enshittification’ word of the year and in 2024 Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary followed suit and it was also voted “People’s Choice Winner”. Macquarie defines it 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”. ‘Enshittification’ seems to be, as Farhad Manjoo points out in Slate, “the perfect neologism for the way profit maximization inevitably ruins everything good online” and, I’d say, offline too.

The word now has an entry on Wikipedia and Rational Wiki and is recorded in other dictionaries like the online Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, and the Cambridge Dictionary, but not yet the Oxford English Dictionary.

The structure of the word

Why was ‘enshittification’ such a perfect neologism, over and above appearing at the right time? There is a certain je ne sais quoi to its morphology, which Merriam Webster calls “an archly elaborate formation for ‘having been made shittier,’ or ‘worsened.’ It combines the vulgarism shit, the prefix en– (’cause to be’), and –ification (a noun combining form meaning ‘making’ or ‘producing’).” This pomposity has a point though, I think.

As Tory Shepherd explains in The Guardian referring to the Macquarie Dictionary and its decision to chose ‘enshittification’ as word of the year:

The dictionary’s committee described enshittification as “a very basic Anglo-Saxon term wrapped in affixes which elevate it to being almost formal; almost respectable”. Without those affixes – if one were to say, for example, merely that X has got a bit shit – the deliberate degradation of the platform is erased. With those affixes, the impression is conveyed of the platform owners tampering with their own product until the bad stuff, like guano on a rock, eclipses the original form.

The resonance of the word

But the word is not only semantically and morphologically novel; it has resonance. It absolutely captured the Zeitgeist and the growing sense that many of the services we rely on are getting worse, not better; indeed this seems to apply to life, the universe and everything.

As The New York Times, pointed out, “the meaning has expanded to encompass a general vibe — a feeling far greater than frustration at Facebook, which long ago ceased being a good way to connect with friends, or Google, whose search is now baggy with SEO spam. Of late, the idea has been employed to describe everything from video games to television to American democracy itself.” An article for Wired is entitled “The Enshittification of American Power”. And The New Yorker says that we are living in “the age of enshittification”.

As yet another article about the word said recently: “Every so often the English language births a word so perfect, so painfully precise, that it becomes more than just a temporary slang expression to throw about for a few months. Instead, it becomes something closer to a diagnosis […] Doctorow didn’t just name a phenomenon; he exposed a pathology.”

This focus on disease is also apparent in the new book where enshittification is surrounded by words such as disease for example. Let’s look at these co-words that shape our understanding of the word’s meaning.

The semantic field

Every word is embedded in a semantic field of other words related to it. Some are thematically linked as in ‘intelligence’, ‘knowledge’, ‘wisdom’, ‘understanding’ and so on; some are synonyms, that is, words with very similar or identical meanings.

In case of ‘enshittification’, I have encountered thematically related words like garbage, rot, disease, decline and decay which overlap with concepts used when talking about AI, LLMs and chatbots and the dangers of AI slop, sludge, pollution and collapse.

There is a confluence of these two semantic fields, one focusing on the degradation of platforms, the other on the degradation of knowledge and meaning, which helps the word ‘enshittification’ to spread across those fields and beyond. As one article pointed out: “AI slop [especially AI generated videos] is flooding the Internet with content that essentially is garbage… This enshittification is ruining online communities on Pinterest, competing for revenue with artists on Spotify, and flooding YouTube with poor-quality content”.

There are also synonyms for enshittification, as listed on Wikipedia. They “include platform decay, crapification, and degradation of a platform or service, highlighting the gradual decline in quality as a result of profit-seeking behavior. Other terms that describe the phenomenon or its consequences are digital strip mining, extractivism, or describing the process as a form of capitalist exploitation.”

Another quasi-synonym is ‘bullshitisation’. Dagmar Monett defines this as “digital and real-life information and knowledge degrading […] as a subproduct of generative AI”. She says that this term is “inspired by Hicks, Humphries, and Slater’s must-read paper ‘ChatGPT is Bullshit‘, which they based on Frankfurt’s (1986, 2005) ‘On Bullshit‘.” Theres is much more one could say about that.

Interestingly, Rational Wiki points out that ‘crapification’ is a 2018/19 conceptual precursor of enshittification, coined by Yves Smith and Maureen Tkacik. Tkacik has just published an article on “Brown stage capitalism” where she points out that “companies like Boeing and GE had been enshittifying for years, in arguably a direct descendant of ‘planned obsolescence,’ a term whose first usage I could find came from a 1929 Christian Science Monitor essay contemplating the fashion industry’s exhausting habit of raising and lowering hemlines.”

While it spreads, the word enshittification doesn’t stay unchanged though. There are new versions of it emerging, from nouns to verbs to adjectives.

Variations of the word

The noun ‘enshittification’ has spawned a host of similar terms on the same theme. I have seen ‘shittization’ and ‘shittfication’, as well ‘shitsification’ and ‘shoddification’, ‘enshitment’ and, coined by Doctorow himself, the ‘Great Enshittening’. A wholly new noun was also created when he explains “how enshittifiers are enabled by the ludicrous architecture of Bubble 1.0-era legislation”. He also talks about the ‘enshitternet’, a portmanteau word made up from enshittification and internet, and also about enshittifiers.

Others have recorded other variations, such as ‘encrappification’, ‘endoodoofication’, ‘endreckification’, ‘kakistification’, ‘rubbishification’ and ‘enrubbishification’. I don’t think any of them will replace the original coinage.

Apart from new nouns we also find some verbs derived from the original noun. As the Merriam-Webster dictionary points out, ‘enshittify’ “is widely used as a transitive verb for the action of enshittification (‘The new CEO enshittified the site with distracting AI tools’)”. Doctorow himself uses the verb a lot, as in “Amazon’s enshittified search results”. In the Wired article mentioned before, Henry Farrall stresses that “De-enshittifying the platforms of American power isn’t just an urgent priority for allies, then. It’s an imperative for Americans too.” Jim Dickinson writing in Wonkhe calls for “Unenshittifying higher education”.

In an extract of Doctorow’s book published in The Guardian one can also find an adjective. Doctorow uses it in the context of giving advice on how one might mitigate against enshittification: “Your personal consumption choices might make a difference to the merchants you patronise, but they have no effect on the policies that created our enshittogenic environment.” (To mitigate that you’ll have to vote)

The future of the word

In the same article from 5 October Cory Doctorow looks back at the history of his word and says:  “In 2022, I coined a term to describe the sudden-onset platform collapse going on all around us: enshittification. To my bittersweet satisfaction, that word is doing big numbers. In fact, it has achieved escape velocity.” 

The word and its author are doing a good job in terms of spreading awareness of the rise in enshittification and there is some hope that by “understanding the dynamics of enshittification and taking proactive steps, we can help shape a better future for the internet.”

As an article in The New York Times notes, Doctorow is also aware that he has somewhat lost control of the word, as it “has entered the culture at large to refer to something broader than he has defined it. And as befits the longtime foe of overly aggressive copyright enforcement, Doctorow is comfortable with the concept of the remix. As he writes in the new book, ‘I am giving you explicit permission to use this word in a loose sense.’”

So, to come back to the beginning of the blog and Jack Stilgoe’s post about the enshittification of enshittification. The question is, to put it in linguistic terms: Has the word ‘enshittification’ undergone a process of semantic pejoration (where meaning becomes worse over time)? The answer, I think, is No. It has, however, undergone a process of broadening (where meaning becomes more general over time). This can, of course, go too far and the word can lose its argumentative force (meaning can become bleached), but we are not there yet. The question is: Can the word ‘enshittification’ resist being ‘enshittified’ in an ‘enshittogenic’ environment?

Image by Cory Doctorow on Flickr: Hand holding book in front of hedge