The English language offers a remarkably flexible range of linguistic elements and combinations, thanks in part to the island getting conquered by Celts, Britons, Vikings, Belgians, Romans, French, Germans, and probably a few other nationalities lost to history. All these nationalities inserted words, pronunciations, spellings, and meanings into the language, and on occasion, these spellings and meanings from various cultures crash into one another to create words that have no right to exist.
For example.
A clever journalist took the Latin prefix “en-” (meaning “to cause”) and the French “-tification” (a suffix used to convert a verb into a noun) and placed them on either side of the Anglo-Saxon term “shit”.
Enshittification.
The noun form of the transitive verb, “to enshittify…”
Basically, the process of taking something that was once useful, and transforming it into something shitty.
Canadian writer Cory Doctorow coined the word enshittification in 2022, to describe a particular business pattern he found when using internet platforms.
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.
Although Mr. Doctorow originally applied the term to ever-more-frustrating online platforms, other people began using the word to describe the general direction of capitalistic enterprises in the 21st century.
Because, when we look around, almost everything seems to be getting shittier.
Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com now include enshittification. The American Dialect Society selected it as its 2023 Word of the Year, with Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary following suit in 2024. Does this reflect negatively on our dictionaries? Or is it merely a symptom of everything getting shittier?
Not everything has been getting enshittified, however.
Back when I was in college, all the available beers tasted like Budweiser. We now have access to a much wider selection of styles, and for that, I am eternally grateful.
Same with apples. Once upon a time, you had your choice of red delicious or yellow delicious; now you can find more than half a dozen different kinds of apples, if you shop around.
Ditto, bread. Who knew bread could come in so many different flavors and textures?
But a man does not live by bread — or beer, or apples — alone.
(Although you can survive a remarkably long time on just those three items. Ask me how I know.)
Mostly, though, what we see going on around us is continual enshittification.
The first chapters in Mr. Doctorow’s 2025 book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, focus on online businesses, who will not be named in this column, but their names start with various letters like A, G, M, O, and X.
He explains that online platforms evolve through three steps. Step one, they offer users a valuable and pleasant service at very little cost. They can offer this at very little cost because computers — who have no moral compass and are willing to work 24/7 for very little pay — handle most of the actual work.
Once the platform grows a critical mass of dependent users, they flip the script and make the experience all about delivering advertisements. But the transition happens slowly enough that the users slowly get accustomed to the change, and hardly notice how shitty the service has become.
In step three, the advertisers have become dependent on the online platform, and they hardly notice how the advertising rates have slowly turned into a mild form of extortion.
All this happens because the platforms were never really about providing a decent service for the users or the advertisers. They were about extracting ever greater profits.
I didn’t mention the names of these tech businesses because I hope to someday own stock in those companies.
The enshittification has spread — according to Mr. Doctorow — far beyond the internet, as other type of companies have discovered way to extract excessive profits… from the customers they supposedly “serve”, but who in fact “serve” the corporations.
I must say, however, that I didn’t appreciate the implication in Mr. Doctorow’s book title, that “…Everything Suddenly Got Worse…”
It’s been worse for a long, long time.
Except the beer, apples and bread. Thank God for small favors.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all. You can read more stories on his Substack account.