enshittification

2 October 2026

Use of enshittification exploded in 2023, leading to its being voted as the Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society when that organization met the following January. Enshittification was popularized by writer Cory Doctorow in a blog post of 21 January 2023 that went viral:

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, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

And Doctorow had previously used the word, as well as enshittified, in a post to Medium on 28 November 2022:

In Bezos’s original plan, the company called “Amazon” was called “Relentless,” due to its ambition to be “Earth’s most customer-centric company.” Today, Amazon is an enshittified endless scroll of paid results, where winning depends on ad budgets, not quality.

[…]

This brings me back to the enshittification of Amazon search, AKA late-stage (platform) capitalism. Amazon’s dominance means that many products are now solely available on the platform. With the collapse of both physical and online retail, Prime isn’t so much a choice as a necessity.

Doctorow would go on to pen a 2025 book titled Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do about It.

But Doctorow did not coin the word. The form shittification has been used, off and on, since at least 1922, when it appears in an English translation of Charles Baudouin’s Studies in Psychoanalysis. The original French word was merdalisation. The word appears in a list of word associations by a psychoanalytic patient:

Psychoanalysis itself comes in for:

verbal shittification (merdalisation verbale)
I spit
tiring colloquy
internal radiography
infantile radiography.

Application of shittification to the internet dates to at least 3 September 2012, when the following appeared on the subreddit r/circlebroke in a discussion of attempts to eliminate the downvoting of posts on Reddit:

So, no cynical circlebroke-ness yet? well this is related to the shittification of Reddit and its about to get a little more cynical so I think it belongs here. Have these lonesome subs found the solution to reddit's problems?

And the en- is added by 19 November 2013 when enshittification appears on Twitter:

Wow. The Onion's AV Club just turned into a pile of hot garbage. Who is behind the ongoing enshittification of web design?

While enshittification is certainly a feature of late-stage capitalism, as Doctorow claims, the concept is hardly unique to our present age.

Sources:

@St_Rev. Twitter.com (now X.com), 19 November 2013.

acetylserine. “Downvote-free subreddits probably aren't the future, or, why ‘it still might be poop’.” r/circlebroke, Reddit.com, 3 September 2012.

Baudouin, Charles. Studies in Psychoanalysis. Eden and Cedar Paul, trans. New York: Dodd Mead, 1922, 428. Google Books.

Doctorow, Cory. “How Monopoly Enshittified Amazon.” Medium, 28 November 2022.

———. “Tiktok’s enshittification.” Pluralistic.net, 21 January 2023.

Friedman, Nancy. “Enshittification.” Strong Language (blog), 1 February 2023.

Merriam-Webster.com, 25 August 2026, s.v. enshittification, n.

O’Toole, Garson. “enshittification.” ADS-L, 29 June 2023.

———. “Enshittify, enshittification.” ADS-L, 3 February 2023.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, June 2026, s.v. enshittification, n.

Walker, Aiden and Triplem. “Enshittification.” Knowyourmeme.com, 2024.

Zimmer, Ben. “2023 Word of the Year is ‘enshittification.’” ADS-L, 6 January 2024.

Image credit: Microsoft Corporation, 2022. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under the MIT License.