On why I am not a fan of the word “enshittification”
TLDR: This is not an impassionate rant. I’m simply not fond of vulgarity and I think that we could have come up with any other neologism to describe the phenomenon that acquired this unfortunate name.
You may get more out of this essay if you skim the Wikipedia article on the term. As of today, the definition reads: “Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users. Over time, they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers. Ultimately, they degrade their services to both users and business customers to maximise short-term profits for shareholders.”
It’s true: The products and services that we use on a daily basis, are all slowly but noticeably losing their quality.
I see this as the consequence of the corporate world’s rise to power, not just in the tech industry, but in all industries (food, drugs, entertainment, travel, etc.). Multinationals (mostly American ones) that at one point sold high-quality products and services, grew into monopolies or duopolies (often through aggressive litigation, hostile takeovers, or other means), placed the globe’s governments under a corporatocratic chokehold via lobbying, and now maximize their profits by offering the bare minimum in quality and features (if not by also laying off staff en masse).
Cory Doctorow, a man who I think I probably would get along with (because of his stance on Copyright and DRM), accidentally popularized that putrid term (which had probably existed for a decade or longer) by using it once in a (very good and insightful) blog post of his from 2022.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think that he intended it to become the de facto word to describe what could simply be called “platform decay” (as the Wikipedia article proposes). I don’t think that he intended for people to propagate its verbal stench by repeating it ad nauseam.
What Cory did in his blog post, I (want to) assume, was doing what so many of us would do when trying to publicly demonstrate how outraged we are over certain affairs: He used the term once, in a sort of “pardon me for the term but” manner.
Perhaps I’m wrong though, and he just retrained himself because he knows how many prudish people like me are out there.
I find it doubly sad, because he’s demonstrated that he’s clearly capable of using the term “platform decay” instead, like here:
Enpoopification, soon coming to a book from Farrar, Straus and Giroux next October, is a theory that describes platform decay, how these platforms lock people in and then abuse them and become worse and worse, but we can’t seem to leave them, until they’re just a giant pile of crap. And we’ve all experienced this decay of platforms that we relied on in so many ways.
ugh
OK. I guess I was wrong. He managed to find two other unnecessary words to describe the same idea. He probably likes those words.
The same probably apples to all the YouTubers that I keep hearing using that word.
YouTube is the only entertainment platform whose content I still moderately consume (with the goal of ridding myself of even that someday in the future). I’m subscribed to a small number of hand-selected channels. A few of them either revolve exclusively around tech platforms or tangentially touch on them every once in a while. Some have on occasion expanded the concept of platform decay into the niches that they are in (other industries, education, healthcare, society, etc.).
This is a problem, because at this point, I probably hear the word once a week, and it’s more disturbing for me than all the other buzzwords that refuse to disappear from the common vernacular. I’ve come to imagine what a blessing it would be if a tool akin to an ad blocker could magically change the word to “platform decay” on the fly without me noticing it. That’s how much I wish for it to vanish.
I dislike it for two reasons:
1. I can clearly tell from the body language of the YouTubers that I watch and listen to, they they use the word because it allows them to giggle their way into sounding highly intellectual, while also blurting out vulgarities. They also always like to make sure to credit Doctorow for “coining” (he didn’t) the word, very obviously acting as if “citing the source” gives it legitimacy. It’s obvious that all these people know that if they tried to pull this stunt a couple decades ago in a classroom or in front of their parents, they’d get reprimanded, and told to use a different word to express the same idea. It’s childishness dressed up as sophistication (which, honestly, describes the state of the world in general, but I digress).
2. In isolation, the word doesn’t even mean anything. If you didn’t already know what definition society has attributed to it, and if you didn’t have any context to attach it to, then you’d assume that it could be applied to just about any concept or idea. “Platform decay”, in comparison, immediately gives you a precise description of the context and the problem. It also sounds like you put some thought behind coming up with the term. In contrast, the affixation of prefixes and suffixes is about the most lazy, most primitive, most amateurish method of word formation. Anyone can do it. There’s no art to it.
If it sounds to you like I’m “tone policing”, then don’t worry. This rancid word is here to stay. Our world’s society has fully embraced the grotesque, linguistic or otherwise. My rambling won’t make any difference, and “platform decay” is not going to supplant its clearly inferior sibling.