The 2023 Word of the Year

It is, "Enshittification," a neologism coined by Cory Doctorow to describe the path of companies, particularly digital companies, become worse and worse as time goes on:

The American Dialect Society, in its 34th annual words-of-the-year vote, selected “enshittification” as the Word of the Year for 2023. More than three hundred attendees took part in the deliberations and voting, in an event hosted in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America’s annual meeting.

The term enshittification became popular in 2023 after it was used in a blog post by author 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,” Doctorow wrote on his Pluralistic blog. 

Presiding at the Jan. 6 voting session were Ben Zimmer, chair of the ADS New Words Committee and language columnist for the Wall Street Journal, and Dr. Kelly Elizabeth Wright of Virginia Tech, data czar of the New Words Committee. “Enshittification is a sadly apt term for how our online lives have become gradually degraded,” Zimmer said. “From the time that it first appeared in Doctorow’s posts and articles, the word had all the markings of a successful neologism, being instantly memorable and adaptable to a variety of contexts.”

What Doctorow describes is a situation where the companies set themselves as a monopoly seller to their customers and a monopsony purchaser of users.

Think about how Google has 90% of the search market, and so has a monopoly on the product, which is you, and they are a part of a meticulously constructed oligopoly, along with Apple, Facebook, and Amazon, on advertising.

The net result is shitty search, and increasingly ineffective and expensive advertising.

In a word, the 2023 word of the year, this is "Enshittification."