The Words That Define Our 'Enshittified' World

Dan Clayton picks out the words contributing to the 'enshittification' of our world, in the era of Donald Trump and Elon Musk

When the American Dialect Society sat down in January 2024 to vote on its various Word of the Year nominations, it had a pretty clear definition in mind for its ultimate winner: “Worsening of a digital platform through reduction in quality of service”. And the word? Enshittification. If only they had known quite how enshittified 2024 would become and how much certain digital platforms (and their owners) would contribute to that process.

Originally coined by author and tech commentator, Cory Doctorow to describe the degradation of the experience of users on digital platforms, the term immediately rang true for many social media users.  As Doctorow put it himself, “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.”

Ironically, as I write this, googling the previous winners of the Word of the Year, I have to insert an “-ai” at the end of my search to avoid the enshittified hallucinations (Hallucinate: when an artificial intelligence generates false information – Cambridge WOTY 2023) of the AI-enhanced search engine.

While some of those hallucinations can be fairly harmless, or even amusing, what is more disturbing is a report from David Gilbert in Wired that some of the largest AI-enhanced search engines were presenting widely debunked race science theories at the top of their search results. And recent political developments in the USA do not augur well for either the regulation of technology or challenges to its billionaire owners and their schemes.

So, if enshittification was a prescient choice in early 2024, what might be the watch words for 2025 and the rest of the second Trump presidential term?

He has already given us post-truth (Oxford WOTY 2016) and fake news (Collins WOTY 2017) from his first term of office, but it is clear that with scores to settle and the support of a coterie of far-right advisors and tech billionaires, things are about to take a very dark turn.

And while making predictions about future buzzwords can leave you a hostage to fortune, we can already see some threads emerging from what has gone before.

Here are some of the new words that are coming to define our newly enshittified world