Sometimes, words take on new meanings, and in other instances, meanings are thrust upon them. Some words have several meanings, like, say ‘Fly.’ It is a mode of transportation, a bothersome insect, and an important part of your apparel (pants in particular). I can’t speak any other language, but English has its fair share of these and the Internet invents new ones all the time.
Enshitification, for example.
In 2022, Doctorow coined the word “enshittification”, which has just been crowned Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year. The dictionary defined the word as follows.
“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.”
In an article from The Guardian, where they can’t seem to grasp their own enshitification, they offer examples like “…Twitter, a once useful and often fun microblogging site twisted by a tech bro into X, a post-truth swamp.”
“First, platforms 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,” he wrote.
“It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. It’s even terrifying.”
So, this contradicts what you said about X. It used to be a partisan, censorious wasteland, and now, while not everything you see or hear (just like when reading The Guardian) is accurate, at X, unlike the Guardian, people can engage, challenge, correct, and find a path to the truth.
Enshitification won the Macquarie Dictionary committee’s word of the year, which they justified because “This word captures what many of us feel is happening to the world and to so many aspects of our lives at the moment,” the committee said.”
And we should give a shitification how you feel?
I am wondering out loud if you’d have picked something else if Donald Trump had lost to Kamal Harris. Joy, perhaps.
