The biggest word of 2024 is a profane critique of capitalism first coined in 2022. The Macquarie Dictionary, the national dictionary of Australia, has picked “enshittification” as its word of the year.
The Australians define the word 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.”
We’ve all felt this. Google search is filled with garbage. The internet is clogged with SEO-farming websites that clog up results. Facebook is an endless stream of AI-generated slop. Zoom wants you to test out its new AI features while you’re trying to go into a meeting. Twitter has become X, and its owner thinks sharing links is a waste of time. Last night I reinstalled Windows 11 on a desktop machine and got pissed as it was finalized and Microsoft kept trying to get me to install Onedrive, Office 360, Call of Duty Black Ops 6, and a bunch of other shit I didn’t want.
This is all enshittification. The market demands geometric growth. Companies want the number to go up. As Silicon Valley has run out of wonders and innovation, it has turned to mining its existing customer base by making its products worse. If you’re lucky, they’ll sell you the cure. Most of the time they’re just trying to make a sale. What are LLMs like ChatGPT if not the final attempt of the Valley to devour and regurgitate the user-generated internet back into our mouths?