People actually like the swearing in this word. While this also means his book's title will inevitably be heard on the radio, “In my experience, presenters like to make their engineers sound creative,” Doctorow said. “They find it funny. It's good radio, it stands out when every fifth word is a 'beep'.”
People commonly use the word “enshittification” in colloquial speech. mean “the decline in quality and experience of online platforms over time.” Doctorow's definition is more specific and includes “why an online service gets worse, how that degradation occurs,” and how the process spreads to other online services so that everything gets worse at the same time.
According to Doctorow, enchittification is a disease with symptoms, mechanism and epidemiology. It infected everything from Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and Google to Airbnb, dating apps, iPhones and everything in between. “To me, the fact that there were multiple platforms going through this at the same time is one of the most interesting and important criticisms,” he said. “That makes it a structural problem rather than a series of isolated problems.”
It all starts with creating a new, high-quality, two-sided online product initially offered at a loss to attract users—say, Facebook, to take an obvious example. Once users are hooked on the product, the supplier moves on to the second stage: somehow degrading the product for the benefit of its business customers. This may include selling advertising, collecting and/or selling user data, or tweaking algorithms to prioritize content that the provider wants users to see rather than what those users actually want.
This locks out business customers who in turn invest heavily in the product, such as media companies that have set up Facebook pages to promote their published content. Once business customers are locked out, the provider may degrade these services as well, i.e., de-emphasize news and Facebook links to maximize shareholder profits. Voila! The product is now enchitified.
