Enshittification became popular in 2023 after it was used in a blog post by author of The Internet Con, Cory Doctorow, who used it to describe how digital platforms can become worse and worse:
“Here is how platforms die: first, they 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. Then, they die. I call this enshittification.”
“Enshittification,” Cory Doctorow’s coinage describing the process by which internet media platforms become increasingly unusable and un-quittable, has been named 2023’s “Digital Word of the Year.” Here, we break down what the term means and Doctorow’s solution to the internet’s relentless enshittification.
I usually say Twitter/X, but Musk began the process of cancelling the Twitter part, and the part that will continue to get shittier is X :-P.
Like Disney did to Star Wars, he took people’s community engagement and feelings of ownership, and… well he just took them. Things don’t truly belong to us unless we keep them out of the hands of billionaires - like “our” media, now “their” media. It’s a life lesson I suppose.