World going down toilet? There’s a word for that

Enshittification: Noun, colloquial the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the enshittification of times.

Which is what Charles Dickens might have said if he were around now and had seen the Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year.

The Macquarie defines it thus – Enshittification: Noun, colloquial 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.

The dictionary judging committee noted that it was ‘‘a very basic Anglo-Saxon term wrapped in affixes which elevate it to being almost formal; almost respectable. This word captures what many of us feel is happening to the world and to so many aspects of our lives at the moment.’’

Perhaps if William Shakespeare were alive now, his words in the mouth of Jaques in As You Like It might have gone thus: All the world’s an enshittification, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages of enshittification.

Or perhaps it was back to the future, as per George Orwell’s 1984: ‘‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen enshittifications.”
So, now we can say of 2024, farewell to you, you’ve been more than a tad shitty, you’ve been such a crap year an award has been bestowed on you that takes out 16 letters in one hit over six syllables.

This may seem long in word terms, but it is far from the longest, notwithstanding scientific names which can encircle the globe. You’d have to be a sesquipedalian to love them. (My primary school trick was to pronounce supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. There was nothing atrocious about it to my small mind.)

But has 2024 been any worse a year than others in its enshittification? No year of course is going to be all sweetness and light, that’s not in humankind’s nature. And compared to 1914-18 and 1939-45, positively balmy.

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The word’s origin comes from writer Cory Doctorow, who a couple of years ago in relation to online platforms, observed: ‘‘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.’’

While the word homed in on the online world, it’s not that far a stretch to let it encompass all manner of society. Politics? Quite an enshittification. Crime? Ditto. War, famine, destruction and death, poverty, homelessness? All part of the great wave of enshittification. In America, the White House is now the colour of enshittification. In Australia, the level of political debate is now carried along on the waves of enshittification.

The Macquarie also gave honourable mentions in its awards to ‘‘Right to Disconnect’’ and ‘‘Rawdogging’’.

While I had heard of the the first, and followed the news on its pros and cons among interested parties, the latter was a mystery. It turns out to be ‘‘the act of undertaking a long-haul flight with no electronic entertainment, devices or reading material, as film, music, games, laptops, books, etc’’.

So, basically, being left to one’s own devices. Shock, horror.

This actually dovetails nicely into the people’s award of an honourable mention to ‘‘brainrot’’, which as a noun Macquarie defines as ‘‘content, especially as viewed on a social media platform and for an extended duration, which is considered to be of low quality in terms of intellectual stimulation’’.

Brainrot, however, in the Oxford Dictionaries poll of 37,000 voters, came out on top. Oxford says the word’s origin goes back to 1854 when Henry David Thoreau used it in his book Walden, as per this: “While England endeavours to cure potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brainrot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”

If Thoreau were alive now, would he find intellectual stimulation on social media? Now there’s a novel idea.