Cory Doctorow coined a vulgarity for how platforms rot, and two dictionaries named it word of the year

The word entered the record in a complaint about Amazon

Doctorow writes a daily blog, Pluralistic. The post that carried the first public use, “How monopoly enshittified Amazon,” tracked the store’s slide from showing you what you searched for to selling the top results as ads. Near the end he wrote: “This brings me back to the enshittification of Amazon search, AKA late-stage (platform) capitalism.”¹ The word was one coinage at one target, a company getting worse. It did not yet name the mechanism that made it travel.

Two months later he turned it into a mechanism

On 21 January 2023, in a Pluralistic post about TikTok, Doctorow defined the word, in his now most-quoted sentences.

The force under the sequence is structural. Doctorow called enshittification “a seemingly inevitable consequence” of how easily a platform can change the way it allocates value inside a “two sided market,” where the 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.”² The operator turns that mutual lock-in into rent. Two days later Wired reprinted the essay as “The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok, or How Platforms Die,” carrying the word from a personal blog to a national magazine.³

The cause he named is the loss of four disciplines

If decay is inevitable, why were platforms ever good? Doctorow’s answer, from a January 2024 lecture, is that four outside forces normally discipline a firm, and enshittification is what follows as they fail: competition, the fear of losing your business; regulation, the fear of a fine larger than the gain from cheating; self-help, the software users run to undo a platform’s impositions; and labor, workers who refuse to build the abusive feature.⁴ Let monopoly, captured regulators, locked-down devices, and weak labor erode all four, and nothing restrains the operator.

The dictionaries certified a swear word

In early January 2024 the American Dialect Society named “enshittification” the word of 2023, in its 34th annual vote of more than three hundred linguists and lexicographers.⁵ Ben Zimmer of the society said it “had all the markings of a successful neologism, being instantly memorable and adaptable to a variety of contexts.”⁵ The construction is plain: it buries the noun shit inside a Latinate abstraction, the prefix en- and suffix -ification that also build electrification and simplification. Naming it Australia’s word of the year for 2024 in late November, the Macquarie Dictionary committee caught the same tension: “A very basic Anglo-Saxon term wrapped in affixes which elevate it to being almost formal; almost respectable.”⁶ Macquarie gave it both the committee’s and the public’s vote, only the third such alignment in the award’s history.⁶ Neither body claims permanence: past ADS winners like Y2K (1999) and chad (2000) faded within years.⁵

In use, it left tech behind

A word’s reach shows in a writer using it without stopping to explain it. Within six months, the critic Mike Masnick reached for it to describe Elon Musk’s Twitter: “it’s not the content moderation learning curve that he’s speedrunning. It’s the Enshittification learning curve.”⁷ By March 2023 it was in a newspaper headline, over John Naughton’s Guardian column: “Users, advertisers – we are all trapped in the ‘enshittification’ of the internet.”⁸ By 2026 it had left technology altogether: two management scholars in The Conversation applied it to academic publishing, writing that “the scholarly system is overwhelmed by quantity, distorted by profit motives, and is stripped of its purpose of advancing knowledge.”⁹ The sense had generalized to any enterprise that hosts a captive public and bleeds it.

What “decline” and “selling out” leave out

English already had words for a good thing going bad. None sufficed. “Decline” gives a direction with no driver; a currency or an empire declines with nobody choosing it. “Selling out” supplies a driver but shrinks the change to a single moral event, a band signing to a major label, and lodges it in the seller’s character rather than a market’s structure. “Decay” is passive and natural, the way fruit rots, with no one profiting. Enshittification keeps what each of those drops: an agent, the platform’s owner acting on purpose; a route for the value, from users to business customers to owner; and an order, which is why Doctorow could open with “here is how platforms die” and mean a schedule rather than a mood.² That precision is why two national dictionaries could print a vulgarity: the word was crude and also exact, holding what the language had been reaching for with looser words.