12 Dezember 2024

by Monika Reif

When you enlarge something, you make it bigger. When you encourage someone, you make them grow in confidence. When you enshit something, you … ?

Given recent political and economic trends in the US and in Europe, it’s not too surprising that the term enshittification has not only been crowned “word of the year” by Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary Committee, but has also won the people’s choice award.[1] (By the way, this is not the first time the term was voted “word of the year”; the American Dialect Society awarded it the same honour in 2023.)

However, it wasn’t primarily politics or the economy that Canadian-British author and journalist Cory Doctorow had in mind when he coined the term in 2022: “We’re all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit.”[2]

The services Doctorow is referring to are part of the virtual world, the world of social media -- and enshittification is meant to describe what is gradually happening to platforms that many of us (used to) hold dear, as a result of monetisation and increasing “asocialisation”. According to Doctorow’s blog entry “Too big to care”, service providers such as Google, Amazon, Facebook or TikTok are increasingly shifting value away from both end users and business customers to -- themselves.

The process of ‘enshittification’ is said to involve several steps: It all starts with an innovative idea for a platform that puts the end user first and builds a loyal community by making itself valuable to its users. As the platform grows, so do its financial obligations, leading to an increase in ads, subscription models, and so on and so forth. Value begins to shift from the end user to the business customer. The tipping point is reached when the financial interests of the platform provider and the stakeholders begin to weigh everything else down, and the user experience carries hardly any weight anymore. To quote Doctorow: “Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit.”[3]

Morphologically speaking, Macquarie’s choice is an interesting one. Starting with the root word, shit, we can see a number of “add-ons”. Those who paid attention when the topic of word formation was on the plate will have identified the morpheme en- as a derivational prefix (“pre-” because it attaches to the beginning of the word stem). As we saw with enlarge and encourage, en- carries the meaning of ‘to make someone or something be in a particular state or have a particular quality’ (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English online). Here, it’s debatable whether en- is word class changing or preserving, depending on whether we take our root word shit to be a noun or a verb. Besides the prefix, we can see not just one, but two derivational suffixes on the word. Just as you can codify and solidify something, you can also enshittify it (note the double consonant in the spelling!). Finally, to add an aura of formality and scientificity, our verb enshittify is expanded into the noun enshittification. The fact that affixation is used to form a new word is not surprising in itself, since affixation is one of the most productive (= most frequently used) word formation processes in English. (The other two are compounding and conversion.) However, the sheer number of affixes as well as the stark contrast between the informality of the lexical word and the formality of the affixes (especially -cation, as in application, certification, demarcation, qualification) make it a fascinating creature.

Macquarie defines enshittification 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”. When asked about the motivation behind their choice, the Macquarie Committee stated: “A very basic Anglo-Saxon term wrapped in affixes which elevate it to being almost formal; almost respectable. This word captures what many of us feel is happening to the world and to so many aspects of our lives at the moment.”[4] 

To find out exactly what aspects of our lives are being (verbally) enshittified, a linguist would normally conduct a search of a contemporary native-speaker corpus of English and do an n-gram search of the World Wide Web. (An n-gram is a sequence of n words or other symbols.[5]). In this way, you can find out with which other words and phrases enshittification, enshittify, enshittified, enshittening and enshittocene collocate and how their frequency of occurrence has changed over time. You may remember the term collocation from your language practice courses, when you were looking for the “company” a word keeps. Unfortunately, in our case the expressions are too new to produce enlightening search results. This means that we will have to revisit enshittification again in a few months or years.

Incidentally, when the language experts at Oxford University Press were asked to come up with a shortlist of six words that reflected the moods and conversations of the past year, their list included brain rot. Well, after enshittification, it doesn’t come as a big surprise that brain rot was also chosen as Oxford’s “word of the year”, following a public vote in which more than 37,000 people had their say.[6] Gloomy times lie ahead of us…

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/nov/26/enshittification-macquarie-dictionary-word-of-the-year-explained

[2]craphound.com/news/2024/02/05/my-marshall-mcluhan-lecture-on-enshittification-from-berlins-transmediale-conference/

[3]www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

[4]www.macquariedictionary.com.au/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2024/

[5]web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/3.pdf

[6]corp.oup.com/news/brain-rot-named-oxford-word-of-the-year-2024/