“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,” author Cory Doctorow said earlier this year.
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.”
Photo courtesy of the Macquarie Dictionary
Social media users, if they don’t know the word, will viscerally understand the concept, the way trolls and extremists and bullshitters and the criminally vacuous have overtaken the platforms.
Think Twitter, a once useful and often fun microblogging site twisted by a tech bro into X, a post-truth swamp.
Or Facebook, where you’re now more likely to be presented with crocheted arseless chaps from Shein than a humblebrag from a dear friend.
Photo: Freepik
Or Instagram, where cute dog videos once reigned. Now, yet another unfathomable algorithm serves up a diet of tradwives, gym bros and uwu girls.
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.
Doctorow wrote that this decay was a three-stage process.
“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.”
The Macquarie Dictionary committee’s honorable mentions went to “right to disconnect,” and “rawdogging.”
But enshittification not only won their vote, it took out the people’s choice award.
“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.
Doctorow himself is surprisingly optimistic about where this could all end up.
Action on competition to prevent market dominance, regulation on things such as digital privacy, more power for users to decide how they use platforms, and tackling the exploitation of workers could reverse the process, he wrote, because “everyone has a stake in disenshittification.”
Big tech can’t be fixed, he argues, but maybe it can be destroyed.
He adds a fourth stage to the tech platforms’ scatological journey from being good to users, to abusing them in favour of their customers, to abusing their customers to serve themselves.
“Then they die,” he wrote.
That US assistance was a model for Taiwan’s spectacular development success was early recognized by policymakers and analysts. In a report to the US Congress for the fiscal year 1962, former President John F. Kennedy noted Taiwan’s “rapid economic growth,” was “producing a substantial net gain in living.” Kennedy had a stake in Taiwan’s achievements and the US’ official development assistance (ODA) in general: In September 1961, his entreaty to make the 1960s a “decade of development,” and an accompanying proposal for dedicated legislation to this end, had been formalized by congressional passage of the Foreign Assistance Act. Two
March 31 to April 6 On May 13, 1950, National Taiwan University Hospital otolaryngologist Su You-peng (蘇友鵬) was summoned to the director’s office. He thought someone had complained about him practicing the violin at night, but when he entered the room, he knew something was terribly wrong. He saw several burly men who appeared to be government secret agents, and three other resident doctors: internist Hsu Chiang (許強), dermatologist Hu Pao-chen (胡寶珍) and ophthalmologist Hu Hsin-lin (胡鑫麟). They were handcuffed, herded onto two jeeps and taken to the Secrecy Bureau (保密局) for questioning. Su was still in his doctor’s robes at
Last week the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said that the budget cuts voted for by the China-aligned parties in the legislature, are intended to force the DPP to hike electricity rates. The public would then blame it for the rate hike. It’s fairly clear that the first part of that is correct. Slashing the budget of state-run Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) is a move intended to cause discontent with the DPP when electricity rates go up. Taipower’s debt, NT$422.9 billion (US$12.78 billion), is one of the numerous permanent crises created by the nation’s construction-industrial state and the developmentalist mentality it
Experts say that the devastating earthquake in Myanmar on Friday was likely the strongest to hit the country in decades, with disaster modeling suggesting thousands could be dead. Automatic assessments from the US Geological Survey (USGS) said the shallow 7.7-magnitude quake northwest of the central Myanmar city of Sagaing triggered a red alert for shaking-related fatalities and economic losses. “High casualties and extensive damage are probable and the disaster is likely widespread,” it said, locating the epicentre near the central Myanmar city of Mandalay, home to more than a million people. Myanmar’s ruling junta said on Saturday morning that the number killed had
RSS