Remember when today's technology was new and exciting and everyone was talking about how great the internet was, or Facebook, or Twitter? Things aren't so rosy now. And while that may sound like an Abe Simpson-like rant, it's easy to understand why "enshittification" has been crowned word of the year.
Enshittification is defined 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.
It's a helpful term for describing many of today's tech products, from Google search being a
slush of ads, link farms, forum posts, and useless AI content, to social media platforms becoming a hate-filled nightmare. Don't forget those products that move from being one-off purchases to subscriptions before their quality starts becoming diluted, or once-great video game franchises that become little more than a way for publishers to push more microtransactions and season passes onto people. Companies are putting yearly increases in profits and share prices above absolutely everything else, including making sure the products they offer aren't, well, #####.
Generative AI's ability to create unlimited amounts of crap and lies has exacerbated an already bad situation, of course.
We should thank author Cory Doctorow for coining a word to describe this phenomenon. He first used enshittification in a 2022 essay on how difficult and annoying it had become to shop on Amazon.
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