In fact, that’s the swear word people like about the word. While that also means the title of his book inevitably gets bleeped on the radio, “animators, in my experience, love to have their engineers bleep it in creative ways,” Doctorow said. “They find it funny. It’s a good radio station, it stands out when one word in five is ‘enbipification’.”
People generally use “enshittification” to refer to “the degradation of the quality and experience of online platforms over time.” Doctorow’s definition is more specific, encompassing “why an online service deteriorates, how this deterioration takes place” and how this process spreads to other online services, such that everything gets worse all at once.
For Doctorow, enshittification is a disease with symptoms, mechanism, and epidemiology. It has infected everything from Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and Google, to Airbnb, dating apps, iPhones and everything in between. “For me, the fact that a large number of platforms experienced this at the same time is one of the most interesting and important factors of the criticism,” he said. “That makes it a structural problem and not a series of individual problems.”
This starts with the creation of a new, high-quality, two-sided online product, initially offered at a loss to attract users – say Facebook, to take an obvious example. Once users are hooked on the product, the seller moves on to the second step: degrading the product in one way or another for the benefit of their business customers. This may include selling advertisements, harvesting and/or selling user data, or changing algorithms to prioritize content the provider wants users to see rather than what those users actually want.
This blocks business customers who, in turn, invest heavily in this product, such as media companies who have created Facebook pages to promote their published content. Once business customers are blocked, the provider can also degrade these services, i.e. placing less emphasis on news and links outside of Facebook, in order to maximize profits for shareholders. So! The product is now enshitified.
