What does “enshittification” mean, and why is it such an appropriate term for the modern age?
In this episode, we'll explore the term, its original definition, and how this has expanded to cover everything from chocolate bars to British farm shops.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it’s part three of our three-part mini-series on the loose theme of words and language.
[00:00:32] In case you missed them, part one was on words of the year, and part two was on euphemisms.
[00:00:39] Today, we’re talking about something different altogether. We’re going to be focusing on the word “enshittification”.
[00:00:48] It was coined in 2022 and was named Word of the Year by various dictionaries for its perfect capture of a cultural moment.
[00:00:58] So in this episode, we’ll talk about the word, what it means, why it matters, and I’ll share a recent personal experience that I think is a perfect example of real-world enshittification.
[00:01:14] OK then, let’s not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:20] One of the best things, I think, about learning different languages is that it gives you an appreciation for the sound of different words to describe the same thing.
[00:01:34] For example, in English, we say “child” or “children” to describe a young person.
[00:01:42] It’s a perfectly good word, and if you only spoke English, you probably wouldn’t think twice about it.
[00:01:50] But I think several other languages better capture the essence of being a child, Bambino” in Italian is one example. Or “niño” in Spanish. Even “barn” in Swedish, if you ask me, does a better job. It sounds more like “child” than the English word “child”.
[00:02:16] It is, of course, simply personal preference; perhaps you think the word “child” sounds more appropriate than whatever it is in your language.
[00:02:27] And when you learn another language, you realise that there are some words that don’t have a perfect translation, a word or expression with a meaning you can understand, but a translation that misses some of the nuance, the implicit meaning.
[00:02:48] But sometimes, putting language learning aside for a minute, there is a word that comes along that perfectly encapsulates something that had never previously been named.
[00:03:02] One example of this is “enshittification”.
[00:03:07] It was coined in 2022 by a Canadian journalist called Cory Doctorow, and it touched such a nerve that it was made the word of the year by the American Dialect Society in 2023, then by Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary the next year, and it went on to be added to both Dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster’s lists of English words.
[00:03:36] Before I tell you what it means, let’s try to break it down and see if we can guess.
[00:03:44] So, it’s en - E N - shit - ification.
[00:03:50] There are three component parts: en, shit, and ification.
[00:03:57] En, E-N, is a prefix that is often related to process or action, of changing state.
[00:04:07] Enrich means to become rich. Entrap means to become trapped. Enlarge means to become larger.
[00:04:17] If there’s an “en” at the start of the word, then an adjective or a verb, there’s a good chance that this word means to become that thing.
[00:04:28] Then “ification” at the end of the word, as a suffix, has a similar function, but it means “the process of making or becoming something”. And importantly, it turns the word into a noun.
[00:04:46] So, simplification is the process of making something simple, clarification is the process of making something clear, and notification is the process of notifying someone about something.
[00:05:05] Then the word in the middle is perhaps not so high-brow, not so formal. It’s “shit”, an informal and rude word for bad.
[00:05:18] Now, you will probably know that I don’t tend to talk about swear words on this show, but as we are talking about “enshittiification”, I do need to spend a little more time talking about what “shit” really means.
[00:05:33] On the scale of swear words in British English, it’s far from the worst, and although you shouldn’t say it in any kind of formal or professional context, it’s not deeply offensive.
[00:05:49] As an adjective, it means “bad”, but it also sometimes has this connotation of being frustratingly and unnecessarily low quality.
[00:06:03] So, “enshittification”, if we were to use our linguistic Sherlock Holmes detective skills, might be defined as the process of something becoming increasingly shit and frustratingly low quality.
[00:06:21] When it was coined back in 2022, it was in reference to social media and sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as it was known back then.
[00:06:33] And here was the theory, as set out by Cory Doctorow:
[00:06:39] First, a platform starts out as pretty good. It’s useful, it’s free, and it genuinely works in the interest of its users. People like it, they tell their friends, and the platform grows.
[00:06:55] Then, in order to attract businesses, the platform shifts slightly. It starts prioritising things that make money. Maybe showing a few ads here, tweaking an algorithm there. It’s not terrible, but the experience is no longer quite as good as it was.
[00:07:16] Finally, once the user base is locked in and the businesses are too, the platform shifts again.
[00:07:24] This time, it turns hostile to both.
[00:07:28] It bombards users with low-quality content, pushes ads in every possible corner, and quietly removes useful features. Businesses are forced to pay more to get less, and the value starts flowing to the shareholders.
[00:07:47] The platform has become worse for everyone, but it’s more profitable, at least in the short term.
[00:07:55] That, Doctorow argued, is enshittification.
[00:07:59] A slow, deliberate transformation from something that people love… to something that they can’t stand, but can’t escape.
[00:08:10] The primary example he used, and one which I imagine you will be familiar with, is Facebook.
[00:08:17] It started out as a site exclusively for Harvard students, then you needed to have a university email address, and then it was open to anyone.
[00:08:28] I remember those early days. One of my friends from school started university before I did, so in the autumn of 2005, he was able to get a Facebook account, and I wasn’t. It seemed like magic; real profiles, no adverts, just authentic, unfiltered connections with friends and people you really knew.
[00:08:55] Then businesses were encouraged to create Facebook pages, whether that was your friendly neighbourhood coffee shop or the BBC News. Facebook was already where everyone was spending their time, so by creating a Facebook page and encouraging people to “follow” you, this was a new and free way to connect with your audience.
[00:09:20] Perhaps this wasn’t so great for individual users.
[00:09:25] After all, people weren’t really opening up Facebook to see a link to a news story or a poster about a special deal on coffee; they wanted to see their friends. But it was kind of ok.
[00:09:40] Then Facebook started encouraging advertisers onto the platform. We have all these people. We know all of this stuff about them. If you pay us a small amount of money, you can advertise to them.
[00:09:54] Again, this wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t exactly what people had signed up for. Mark Zuckerberg had initially said this wouldn’t happen.
[00:10:04] And then the same thing happened to the businesses that had spent time and resources in building up their Facebook pages; Facebook now turned around and said, “well, if you want your followers to see your posts, you need to pay us to make sure that happens”.
[00:10:20] Again, a bit annoying for these businesses, but they had put a lot of time and effort into their Facebook pages. It seemed like an overreaction to walk away now simply because Facebook wanted some money.
[00:10:35] Then it got more expensive for businesses to advertise, Facebook started cramming more and more adverts, the same thing happened on Instagram, and slowly but surely, the experience has degraded so much from its early iteration that it’s hardly recognisable.
[00:10:54] Still, there hasn’t been a mass exodus on either side, neither by the users nor the businesses. Yes, user growth is down, and many users have left entirely.
[00:11:08] But there are still over 3 billion monthly active users, 37% of the global adult population.
[00:11:18] People have invested too much, Doctorow argued; their photos, friends, and connections are all there, and although the experience has significantly degraded, they don’t leave.
[00:11:32] And the final element is to do with corporate value capture; all the value from the platform has flowed to shareholders, turning Meta–Facebook’s parent company–into a trillion-dollar business.
[00:11:48] It happened with Facebook and Instagram, and has also happened with many other social media sites, from Twitter through to Pinterest, Reddit, and TikTok.
[00:12:00] And this is enshittification; the gradual process of social media networks becoming worse and worse, or shitter and shitter, all while extracting the maximum possible value from their users.
[00:12:16] And no sooner had Doctorow coined and explained the term than it began to change shape, and people started pointing out enshittification in every aspect of life.
[00:12:30] Now, this wasn’t just your classic people saying “things were better back in my day”, but real-life examples of how we are often asked to pay more for something that is lower in quality.
[00:12:45] Whether that was video games forcing people to spend money on all sorts of in-game upsells, Disney Plus or Netflix doubling their prices for less content, or showing adverts even when you pay for it, or just your favourite chocolate bar getting smaller and more expensive at the same time.
[00:13:06] Even Duolingo has been accused of enshittification by getting rid of its forum, switching its gamification system and stuffing its free version with more ads.
[00:13:18] And it’s something that’s not restricted to the digital world, either; it’s something you can see almost everywhere.
[00:13:27] I was reminded of this late last year in the UK.
[00:13:31] I was visiting my parents with my two young kids. My mother suggested that we go to a sort of farm centre, which she had heard had a nice little shop, a playground, some animals, and a place where kids could pick pumpkins for Halloween.
[00:13:50] It sounded great in theory, so off we went.
[00:13:55] It wasn’t a particularly nice day weather-wise, but it was the end of October in England. A bit of wind and rain comes with the territory.
[00:14:05] We arrived, and everything seemed perfectly acceptable. We had an unremarkable coffee and snack at the cafe to warm up, then headed towards the animals. To get towards the animals, you had to walk through a little fairground, a little bit like how airports often force you to walk through the Duty Free section to get to your gate.
[00:14:29] Slightly annoying, but there we go.
[00:14:32] We arrived at the animal bit. There were a couple of sad-looking donkeys, two pigs, and that was about it. Obviously, my kids wanted to go to the fairground, because we had been forced to walk through it, and I agreed they could do one thing of their choosing: one ride, or activity.
[00:14:53] They chose the merry-go-round, the ride where there are all of the horses and carriages that move around on a disk, with music and stuff.
[00:15:04] As we approached the merry-go-round, I had seen groups of people go up to the cashier's desk and walk away seemingly in disgust, which didn’t bode well, but I figured I’d promised my kids they could go, so how bad could it be?
[00:15:22] It was only about 11 o’clock in the morning, but the man behind the desk looked like he’d been arguing with customers for hours.
[00:15:31] The price was £3 per child, but because one of my children was under 1 metre tall, I’d have to come on with him and buy my own ticket. £9 in total. A little over €10.
[00:15:47] Now, the ride itself was perfectly ok. It was a bit sad and old, the music was a bit squeaky, and the horses looked like they needed a lick of paint.
[00:15:59] Still, my kids liked it, which I guess is the most important thing.
[00:16:04] The thing was, by the looks of how many people had walked up to the merry-go-round and not gone on, or were standing around watching, presumably put off by the high price, it seemed to me like they could have reduced their prices significantly and had many more kids on the ride, and actually made more money overall, but instead they extracted as much value as they possibly could from each paying customer, extremely begrudgingly I must add.
[00:16:36] And if you think this was an isolated incident, it wasn’t.
[00:16:41] There was a marshmallow barbecue, which was a nice enough idea, but nobody was there, because they were charging £5 for a stick of what looked like around 5 small marshmallows.
[00:16:55] There was a “throw a hoop around the rubber duck” game, but nobody was there, because it was £4 for a single throw.
[00:17:04] There were, we found out later, more animals than the pair of donkeys, but these were kept in another part, and it was another £13 per person, I think, to go in. And looking at the online reviews, most people seemed to be pretty disappointed with the experience.
[00:17:25] We decided against it and asked the lady selling tickets how to get back to the car park, to which she responded that she didn’t know because the part she worked in was actually operated by a different company, so she didn’t have anything to do with it.
[00:17:41] Now, you might think that this is just a complaint about paying for stuff; it isn’t.
[00:17:49] I appreciate that running a business like this must be tough. You have to pay staff, rent, look after the animals, and all this costs money. And comparing costs to those of my childhood isn’t helpful, because everything has got significantly more expensive since then.
[00:18:07] But why I bring up this experience in the context of enshittification is that, for me, it encapsulates offline enshittification.
[00:18:20] This animal farm had put up adverts all over the Oxford area, bringing people to it. Once they got there, they didn’t want to just turn around and go home, but they begrudgingly stayed, paying the inflated prices for a lower-than-expected quality of experience.
[00:18:39] Every possible corner had been cut, and every possible activity cost extra.
[00:18:46] And the thing was that it doesn’t have to be that way.
[00:18:51] Just a few days before this, my family and I had gone to a theme park in Sweden. The entry price was relatively high, but once you got in, it seemed like no expense had been spared; there were real pumpkins piled up high, lots of smiling staff, free shows, all this stuff that made you think that they were really trying to put on a good experience for you.
[00:19:18] And this isn’t just a question of Sweden vs. the UK; there is another really good animal park we’d been to with my kids a couple of years before, quite close to this other one in England, which hadn’t yet been subject to enshittification.
[00:19:36] But it is an increasing trend, especially in the UK, and once you notice it, you see it everywhere.
[00:19:45] So, there we go, enshittification, a word I think perfectly captures the essence of something we can see all around us.
[00:19:55] And going back to what we talked about at the start of the episode, I looked into how the term “enshittificaiton” is translated into different languages.
[00:20:06] Most seem to keep the English version, while others do a direct translation from the English, like “Merdification” in French.
[00:20:16] This just goes to show that sometimes there is an expression that is just so perfectly accurate it can never really be translated.
[00:20:27] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on enshittification, and with that comes the end of this three-part mini-series on the theme of words and language.
[00:20:38] In case you missed them, in part one, we talked about words of the year, and in part two we talked about euphemisms in English.
[00:20:46] As always, I’d love to know what you think. Do you see examples of enshittification in your country? Have you had an experience of enshittification in the UK? And what can we do to fix it?
[00:20:59] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started. You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:21:11] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:21:16] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it’s part three of our three-part mini-series on the loose theme of words and language.
[00:00:32] In case you missed them, part one was on words of the year, and part two was on euphemisms.
[00:00:39] Today, we’re talking about something different altogether. We’re going to be focusing on the word “enshittification”.
[00:00:48] It was coined in 2022 and was named Word of the Year by various dictionaries for its perfect capture of a cultural moment.
[00:00:58] So in this episode, we’ll talk about the word, what it means, why it matters, and I’ll share a recent personal experience that I think is a perfect example of real-world enshittification.
[00:01:14] OK then, let’s not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:20] One of the best things, I think, about learning different languages is that it gives you an appreciation for the sound of different words to describe the same thing.
[00:01:34] For example, in English, we say “child” or “children” to describe a young person.
[00:01:42] It’s a perfectly good word, and if you only spoke English, you probably wouldn’t think twice about it.
[00:01:50] But I think several other languages better capture the essence of being a child, Bambino” in Italian is one example. Or “niño” in Spanish. Even “barn” in Swedish, if you ask me, does a better job. It sounds more like “child” than the English word “child”.
[00:02:16] It is, of course, simply personal preference; perhaps you think the word “child” sounds more appropriate than whatever it is in your language.
[00:02:27] And when you learn another language, you realise that there are some words that don’t have a perfect translation, a word or expression with a meaning you can understand, but a translation that misses some of the nuance, the implicit meaning.
[00:02:48] But sometimes, putting language learning aside for a minute, there is a word that comes along that perfectly encapsulates something that had never previously been named.
[00:03:02] One example of this is “enshittification”.
[00:03:07] It was coined in 2022 by a Canadian journalist called Cory Doctorow, and it touched such a nerve that it was made the word of the year by the American Dialect Society in 2023, then by Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary the next year, and it went on to be added to both Dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster’s lists of English words.
[00:03:36] Before I tell you what it means, let’s try to break it down and see if we can guess.
[00:03:44] So, it’s en - E N - shit - ification.
[00:03:50] There are three component parts: en, shit, and ification.
[00:03:57] En, E-N, is a prefix that is often related to process or action, of changing state.
[00:04:07] Enrich means to become rich. Entrap means to become trapped. Enlarge means to become larger.
[00:04:17] If there’s an “en” at the start of the word, then an adjective or a verb, there’s a good chance that this word means to become that thing.
[00:04:28] Then “ification” at the end of the word, as a suffix, has a similar function, but it means “the process of making or becoming something”. And importantly, it turns the word into a noun.
[00:04:46] So, simplification is the process of making something simple, clarification is the process of making something clear, and notification is the process of notifying someone about something.
[00:05:05] Then the word in the middle is perhaps not so high-brow, not so formal. It’s “shit”, an informal and rude word for bad.
[00:05:18] Now, you will probably know that I don’t tend to talk about swear words on this show, but as we are talking about “enshittiification”, I do need to spend a little more time talking about what “shit” really means.
[00:05:33] On the scale of swear words in British English, it’s far from the worst, and although you shouldn’t say it in any kind of formal or professional context, it’s not deeply offensive.
[00:05:49] As an adjective, it means “bad”, but it also sometimes has this connotation of being frustratingly and unnecessarily low quality.
[00:06:03] So, “enshittification”, if we were to use our linguistic Sherlock Holmes detective skills, might be defined as the process of something becoming increasingly shit and frustratingly low quality.
[00:06:21] When it was coined back in 2022, it was in reference to social media and sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as it was known back then.
[00:06:33] And here was the theory, as set out by Cory Doctorow:
[00:06:39] First, a platform starts out as pretty good. It’s useful, it’s free, and it genuinely works in the interest of its users. People like it, they tell their friends, and the platform grows.
[00:06:55] Then, in order to attract businesses, the platform shifts slightly. It starts prioritising things that make money. Maybe showing a few ads here, tweaking an algorithm there. It’s not terrible, but the experience is no longer quite as good as it was.
[00:07:16] Finally, once the user base is locked in and the businesses are too, the platform shifts again.
[00:07:24] This time, it turns hostile to both.
[00:07:28] It bombards users with low-quality content, pushes ads in every possible corner, and quietly removes useful features. Businesses are forced to pay more to get less, and the value starts flowing to the shareholders.
[00:07:47] The platform has become worse for everyone, but it’s more profitable, at least in the short term.
[00:07:55] That, Doctorow argued, is enshittification.
[00:07:59] A slow, deliberate transformation from something that people love… to something that they can’t stand, but can’t escape.
[00:08:10] The primary example he used, and one which I imagine you will be familiar with, is Facebook.
[00:08:17] It started out as a site exclusively for Harvard students, then you needed to have a university email address, and then it was open to anyone.
[00:08:28] I remember those early days. One of my friends from school started university before I did, so in the autumn of 2005, he was able to get a Facebook account, and I wasn’t. It seemed like magic; real profiles, no adverts, just authentic, unfiltered connections with friends and people you really knew.
[00:08:55] Then businesses were encouraged to create Facebook pages, whether that was your friendly neighbourhood coffee shop or the BBC News. Facebook was already where everyone was spending their time, so by creating a Facebook page and encouraging people to “follow” you, this was a new and free way to connect with your audience.
[00:09:20] Perhaps this wasn’t so great for individual users.
[00:09:25] After all, people weren’t really opening up Facebook to see a link to a news story or a poster about a special deal on coffee; they wanted to see their friends. But it was kind of ok.
[00:09:40] Then Facebook started encouraging advertisers onto the platform. We have all these people. We know all of this stuff about them. If you pay us a small amount of money, you can advertise to them.
[00:09:54] Again, this wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t exactly what people had signed up for. Mark Zuckerberg had initially said this wouldn’t happen.
[00:10:04] And then the same thing happened to the businesses that had spent time and resources in building up their Facebook pages; Facebook now turned around and said, “well, if you want your followers to see your posts, you need to pay us to make sure that happens”.
[00:10:20] Again, a bit annoying for these businesses, but they had put a lot of time and effort into their Facebook pages. It seemed like an overreaction to walk away now simply because Facebook wanted some money.
[00:10:35] Then it got more expensive for businesses to advertise, Facebook started cramming more and more adverts, the same thing happened on Instagram, and slowly but surely, the experience has degraded so much from its early iteration that it’s hardly recognisable.
[00:10:54] Still, there hasn’t been a mass exodus on either side, neither by the users nor the businesses. Yes, user growth is down, and many users have left entirely.
[00:11:08] But there are still over 3 billion monthly active users, 37% of the global adult population.
[00:11:18] People have invested too much, Doctorow argued; their photos, friends, and connections are all there, and although the experience has significantly degraded, they don’t leave.
[00:11:32] And the final element is to do with corporate value capture; all the value from the platform has flowed to shareholders, turning Meta–Facebook’s parent company–into a trillion-dollar business.
[00:11:48] It happened with Facebook and Instagram, and has also happened with many other social media sites, from Twitter through to Pinterest, Reddit, and TikTok.
[00:12:00] And this is enshittification; the gradual process of social media networks becoming worse and worse, or shitter and shitter, all while extracting the maximum possible value from their users.
[00:12:16] And no sooner had Doctorow coined and explained the term than it began to change shape, and people started pointing out enshittification in every aspect of life.
[00:12:30] Now, this wasn’t just your classic people saying “things were better back in my day”, but real-life examples of how we are often asked to pay more for something that is lower in quality.
[00:12:45] Whether that was video games forcing people to spend money on all sorts of in-game upsells, Disney Plus or Netflix doubling their prices for less content, or showing adverts even when you pay for it, or just your favourite chocolate bar getting smaller and more expensive at the same time.
[00:13:06] Even Duolingo has been accused of enshittification by getting rid of its forum, switching its gamification system and stuffing its free version with more ads.
[00:13:18] And it’s something that’s not restricted to the digital world, either; it’s something you can see almost everywhere.
[00:13:27] I was reminded of this late last year in the UK.
[00:13:31] I was visiting my parents with my two young kids. My mother suggested that we go to a sort of farm centre, which she had heard had a nice little shop, a playground, some animals, and a place where kids could pick pumpkins for Halloween.
[00:13:50] It sounded great in theory, so off we went.
[00:13:55] It wasn’t a particularly nice day weather-wise, but it was the end of October in England. A bit of wind and rain comes with the territory.
[00:14:05] We arrived, and everything seemed perfectly acceptable. We had an unremarkable coffee and snack at the cafe to warm up, then headed towards the animals. To get towards the animals, you had to walk through a little fairground, a little bit like how airports often force you to walk through the Duty Free section to get to your gate.
[00:14:29] Slightly annoying, but there we go.
[00:14:32] We arrived at the animal bit. There were a couple of sad-looking donkeys, two pigs, and that was about it. Obviously, my kids wanted to go to the fairground, because we had been forced to walk through it, and I agreed they could do one thing of their choosing: one ride, or activity.
[00:14:53] They chose the merry-go-round, the ride where there are all of the horses and carriages that move around on a disk, with music and stuff.
[00:15:04] As we approached the merry-go-round, I had seen groups of people go up to the cashier's desk and walk away seemingly in disgust, which didn’t bode well, but I figured I’d promised my kids they could go, so how bad could it be?
[00:15:22] It was only about 11 o’clock in the morning, but the man behind the desk looked like he’d been arguing with customers for hours.
[00:15:31] The price was £3 per child, but because one of my children was under 1 metre tall, I’d have to come on with him and buy my own ticket. £9 in total. A little over €10.
[00:15:47] Now, the ride itself was perfectly ok. It was a bit sad and old, the music was a bit squeaky, and the horses looked like they needed a lick of paint.
[00:15:59] Still, my kids liked it, which I guess is the most important thing.
[00:16:04] The thing was, by the looks of how many people had walked up to the merry-go-round and not gone on, or were standing around watching, presumably put off by the high price, it seemed to me like they could have reduced their prices significantly and had many more kids on the ride, and actually made more money overall, but instead they extracted as much value as they possibly could from each paying customer, extremely begrudgingly I must add.
[00:16:36] And if you think this was an isolated incident, it wasn’t.
[00:16:41] There was a marshmallow barbecue, which was a nice enough idea, but nobody was there, because they were charging £5 for a stick of what looked like around 5 small marshmallows.
[00:16:55] There was a “throw a hoop around the rubber duck” game, but nobody was there, because it was £4 for a single throw.
[00:17:04] There were, we found out later, more animals than the pair of donkeys, but these were kept in another part, and it was another £13 per person, I think, to go in. And looking at the online reviews, most people seemed to be pretty disappointed with the experience.
[00:17:25] We decided against it and asked the lady selling tickets how to get back to the car park, to which she responded that she didn’t know because the part she worked in was actually operated by a different company, so she didn’t have anything to do with it.
[00:17:41] Now, you might think that this is just a complaint about paying for stuff; it isn’t.
[00:17:49] I appreciate that running a business like this must be tough. You have to pay staff, rent, look after the animals, and all this costs money. And comparing costs to those of my childhood isn’t helpful, because everything has got significantly more expensive since then.
[00:18:07] But why I bring up this experience in the context of enshittification is that, for me, it encapsulates offline enshittification.
[00:18:20] This animal farm had put up adverts all over the Oxford area, bringing people to it. Once they got there, they didn’t want to just turn around and go home, but they begrudgingly stayed, paying the inflated prices for a lower-than-expected quality of experience.
[00:18:39] Every possible corner had been cut, and every possible activity cost extra.
[00:18:46] And the thing was that it doesn’t have to be that way.
[00:18:51] Just a few days before this, my family and I had gone to a theme park in Sweden. The entry price was relatively high, but once you got in, it seemed like no expense had been spared; there were real pumpkins piled up high, lots of smiling staff, free shows, all this stuff that made you think that they were really trying to put on a good experience for you.
[00:19:18] And this isn’t just a question of Sweden vs. the UK; there is another really good animal park we’d been to with my kids a couple of years before, quite close to this other one in England, which hadn’t yet been subject to enshittification.
[00:19:36] But it is an increasing trend, especially in the UK, and once you notice it, you see it everywhere.
[00:19:45] So, there we go, enshittification, a word I think perfectly captures the essence of something we can see all around us.
[00:19:55] And going back to what we talked about at the start of the episode, I looked into how the term “enshittificaiton” is translated into different languages.
[00:20:06] Most seem to keep the English version, while others do a direct translation from the English, like “Merdification” in French.
[00:20:16] This just goes to show that sometimes there is an expression that is just so perfectly accurate it can never really be translated.
[00:20:27] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on enshittification, and with that comes the end of this three-part mini-series on the theme of words and language.
[00:20:38] In case you missed them, in part one, we talked about words of the year, and in part two we talked about euphemisms in English.
[00:20:46] As always, I’d love to know what you think. Do you see examples of enshittification in your country? Have you had an experience of enshittification in the UK? And what can we do to fix it?
[00:20:59] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started. You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:21:11] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:21:16] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it’s part three of our three-part mini-series on the loose theme of words and language.
[00:00:32] In case you missed them, part one was on words of the year, and part two was on euphemisms.
[00:00:39] Today, we’re talking about something different altogether. We’re going to be focusing on the word “enshittification”.
[00:00:48] It was coined in 2022 and was named Word of the Year by various dictionaries for its perfect capture of a cultural moment.
[00:00:58] So in this episode, we’ll talk about the word, what it means, why it matters, and I’ll share a recent personal experience that I think is a perfect example of real-world enshittification.
[00:01:14] OK then, let’s not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:20] One of the best things, I think, about learning different languages is that it gives you an appreciation for the sound of different words to describe the same thing.
[00:01:34] For example, in English, we say “child” or “children” to describe a young person.
[00:01:42] It’s a perfectly good word, and if you only spoke English, you probably wouldn’t think twice about it.
[00:01:50] But I think several other languages better capture the essence of being a child, Bambino” in Italian is one example. Or “niño” in Spanish. Even “barn” in Swedish, if you ask me, does a better job. It sounds more like “child” than the English word “child”.
[00:02:16] It is, of course, simply personal preference; perhaps you think the word “child” sounds more appropriate than whatever it is in your language.
[00:02:27] And when you learn another language, you realise that there are some words that don’t have a perfect translation, a word or expression with a meaning you can understand, but a translation that misses some of the nuance, the implicit meaning.
[00:02:48] But sometimes, putting language learning aside for a minute, there is a word that comes along that perfectly encapsulates something that had never previously been named.
[00:03:02] One example of this is “enshittification”.
[00:03:07] It was coined in 2022 by a Canadian journalist called Cory Doctorow, and it touched such a nerve that it was made the word of the year by the American Dialect Society in 2023, then by Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary the next year, and it went on to be added to both Dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster’s lists of English words.
[00:03:36] Before I tell you what it means, let’s try to break it down and see if we can guess.
[00:03:44] So, it’s en - E N - shit - ification.
[00:03:50] There are three component parts: en, shit, and ification.
[00:03:57] En, E-N, is a prefix that is often related to process or action, of changing state.
[00:04:07] Enrich means to become rich. Entrap means to become trapped. Enlarge means to become larger.
[00:04:17] If there’s an “en” at the start of the word, then an adjective or a verb, there’s a good chance that this word means to become that thing.
[00:04:28] Then “ification” at the end of the word, as a suffix, has a similar function, but it means “the process of making or becoming something”. And importantly, it turns the word into a noun.
[00:04:46] So, simplification is the process of making something simple, clarification is the process of making something clear, and notification is the process of notifying someone about something.
[00:05:05] Then the word in the middle is perhaps not so high-brow, not so formal. It’s “shit”, an informal and rude word for bad.
[00:05:18] Now, you will probably know that I don’t tend to talk about swear words on this show, but as we are talking about “enshittiification”, I do need to spend a little more time talking about what “shit” really means.
[00:05:33] On the scale of swear words in British English, it’s far from the worst, and although you shouldn’t say it in any kind of formal or professional context, it’s not deeply offensive.
[00:05:49] As an adjective, it means “bad”, but it also sometimes has this connotation of being frustratingly and unnecessarily low quality.
[00:06:03] So, “enshittification”, if we were to use our linguistic Sherlock Holmes detective skills, might be defined as the process of something becoming increasingly shit and frustratingly low quality.
[00:06:21] When it was coined back in 2022, it was in reference to social media and sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as it was known back then.
[00:06:33] And here was the theory, as set out by Cory Doctorow:
[00:06:39] First, a platform starts out as pretty good. It’s useful, it’s free, and it genuinely works in the interest of its users. People like it, they tell their friends, and the platform grows.
[00:06:55] Then, in order to attract businesses, the platform shifts slightly. It starts prioritising things that make money. Maybe showing a few ads here, tweaking an algorithm there. It’s not terrible, but the experience is no longer quite as good as it was.
[00:07:16] Finally, once the user base is locked in and the businesses are too, the platform shifts again.
[00:07:24] This time, it turns hostile to both.
[00:07:28] It bombards users with low-quality content, pushes ads in every possible corner, and quietly removes useful features. Businesses are forced to pay more to get less, and the value starts flowing to the shareholders.
[00:07:47] The platform has become worse for everyone, but it’s more profitable, at least in the short term.
[00:07:55] That, Doctorow argued, is enshittification.
[00:07:59] A slow, deliberate transformation from something that people love… to something that they can’t stand, but can’t escape.
[00:08:10] The primary example he used, and one which I imagine you will be familiar with, is Facebook.
[00:08:17] It started out as a site exclusively for Harvard students, then you needed to have a university email address, and then it was open to anyone.
[00:08:28] I remember those early days. One of my friends from school started university before I did, so in the autumn of 2005, he was able to get a Facebook account, and I wasn’t. It seemed like magic; real profiles, no adverts, just authentic, unfiltered connections with friends and people you really knew.
[00:08:55] Then businesses were encouraged to create Facebook pages, whether that was your friendly neighbourhood coffee shop or the BBC News. Facebook was already where everyone was spending their time, so by creating a Facebook page and encouraging people to “follow” you, this was a new and free way to connect with your audience.
[00:09:20] Perhaps this wasn’t so great for individual users.
[00:09:25] After all, people weren’t really opening up Facebook to see a link to a news story or a poster about a special deal on coffee; they wanted to see their friends. But it was kind of ok.
[00:09:40] Then Facebook started encouraging advertisers onto the platform. We have all these people. We know all of this stuff about them. If you pay us a small amount of money, you can advertise to them.
[00:09:54] Again, this wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t exactly what people had signed up for. Mark Zuckerberg had initially said this wouldn’t happen.
[00:10:04] And then the same thing happened to the businesses that had spent time and resources in building up their Facebook pages; Facebook now turned around and said, “well, if you want your followers to see your posts, you need to pay us to make sure that happens”.
[00:10:20] Again, a bit annoying for these businesses, but they had put a lot of time and effort into their Facebook pages. It seemed like an overreaction to walk away now simply because Facebook wanted some money.
[00:10:35] Then it got more expensive for businesses to advertise, Facebook started cramming more and more adverts, the same thing happened on Instagram, and slowly but surely, the experience has degraded so much from its early iteration that it’s hardly recognisable.
[00:10:54] Still, there hasn’t been a mass exodus on either side, neither by the users nor the businesses. Yes, user growth is down, and many users have left entirely.
[00:11:08] But there are still over 3 billion monthly active users, 37% of the global adult population.
[00:11:18] People have invested too much, Doctorow argued; their photos, friends, and connections are all there, and although the experience has significantly degraded, they don’t leave.
[00:11:32] And the final element is to do with corporate value capture; all the value from the platform has flowed to shareholders, turning Meta–Facebook’s parent company–into a trillion-dollar business.
[00:11:48] It happened with Facebook and Instagram, and has also happened with many other social media sites, from Twitter through to Pinterest, Reddit, and TikTok.
[00:12:00] And this is enshittification; the gradual process of social media networks becoming worse and worse, or shitter and shitter, all while extracting the maximum possible value from their users.
[00:12:16] And no sooner had Doctorow coined and explained the term than it began to change shape, and people started pointing out enshittification in every aspect of life.
[00:12:30] Now, this wasn’t just your classic people saying “things were better back in my day”, but real-life examples of how we are often asked to pay more for something that is lower in quality.
[00:12:45] Whether that was video games forcing people to spend money on all sorts of in-game upsells, Disney Plus or Netflix doubling their prices for less content, or showing adverts even when you pay for it, or just your favourite chocolate bar getting smaller and more expensive at the same time.
[00:13:06] Even Duolingo has been accused of enshittification by getting rid of its forum, switching its gamification system and stuffing its free version with more ads.
[00:13:18] And it’s something that’s not restricted to the digital world, either; it’s something you can see almost everywhere.
[00:13:27] I was reminded of this late last year in the UK.
[00:13:31] I was visiting my parents with my two young kids. My mother suggested that we go to a sort of farm centre, which she had heard had a nice little shop, a playground, some animals, and a place where kids could pick pumpkins for Halloween.
[00:13:50] It sounded great in theory, so off we went.
[00:13:55] It wasn’t a particularly nice day weather-wise, but it was the end of October in England. A bit of wind and rain comes with the territory.
[00:14:05] We arrived, and everything seemed perfectly acceptable. We had an unremarkable coffee and snack at the cafe to warm up, then headed towards the animals. To get towards the animals, you had to walk through a little fairground, a little bit like how airports often force you to walk through the Duty Free section to get to your gate.
[00:14:29] Slightly annoying, but there we go.
[00:14:32] We arrived at the animal bit. There were a couple of sad-looking donkeys, two pigs, and that was about it. Obviously, my kids wanted to go to the fairground, because we had been forced to walk through it, and I agreed they could do one thing of their choosing: one ride, or activity.
[00:14:53] They chose the merry-go-round, the ride where there are all of the horses and carriages that move around on a disk, with music and stuff.
[00:15:04] As we approached the merry-go-round, I had seen groups of people go up to the cashier's desk and walk away seemingly in disgust, which didn’t bode well, but I figured I’d promised my kids they could go, so how bad could it be?
[00:15:22] It was only about 11 o’clock in the morning, but the man behind the desk looked like he’d been arguing with customers for hours.
[00:15:31] The price was £3 per child, but because one of my children was under 1 metre tall, I’d have to come on with him and buy my own ticket. £9 in total. A little over €10.
[00:15:47] Now, the ride itself was perfectly ok. It was a bit sad and old, the music was a bit squeaky, and the horses looked like they needed a lick of paint.
[00:15:59] Still, my kids liked it, which I guess is the most important thing.
[00:16:04] The thing was, by the looks of how many people had walked up to the merry-go-round and not gone on, or were standing around watching, presumably put off by the high price, it seemed to me like they could have reduced their prices significantly and had many more kids on the ride, and actually made more money overall, but instead they extracted as much value as they possibly could from each paying customer, extremely begrudgingly I must add.
[00:16:36] And if you think this was an isolated incident, it wasn’t.
[00:16:41] There was a marshmallow barbecue, which was a nice enough idea, but nobody was there, because they were charging £5 for a stick of what looked like around 5 small marshmallows.
[00:16:55] There was a “throw a hoop around the rubber duck” game, but nobody was there, because it was £4 for a single throw.
[00:17:04] There were, we found out later, more animals than the pair of donkeys, but these were kept in another part, and it was another £13 per person, I think, to go in. And looking at the online reviews, most people seemed to be pretty disappointed with the experience.
[00:17:25] We decided against it and asked the lady selling tickets how to get back to the car park, to which she responded that she didn’t know because the part she worked in was actually operated by a different company, so she didn’t have anything to do with it.
[00:17:41] Now, you might think that this is just a complaint about paying for stuff; it isn’t.
[00:17:49] I appreciate that running a business like this must be tough. You have to pay staff, rent, look after the animals, and all this costs money. And comparing costs to those of my childhood isn’t helpful, because everything has got significantly more expensive since then.
[00:18:07] But why I bring up this experience in the context of enshittification is that, for me, it encapsulates offline enshittification.
[00:18:20] This animal farm had put up adverts all over the Oxford area, bringing people to it. Once they got there, they didn’t want to just turn around and go home, but they begrudgingly stayed, paying the inflated prices for a lower-than-expected quality of experience.
[00:18:39] Every possible corner had been cut, and every possible activity cost extra.
[00:18:46] And the thing was that it doesn’t have to be that way.
[00:18:51] Just a few days before this, my family and I had gone to a theme park in Sweden. The entry price was relatively high, but once you got in, it seemed like no expense had been spared; there were real pumpkins piled up high, lots of smiling staff, free shows, all this stuff that made you think that they were really trying to put on a good experience for you.
[00:19:18] And this isn’t just a question of Sweden vs. the UK; there is another really good animal park we’d been to with my kids a couple of years before, quite close to this other one in England, which hadn’t yet been subject to enshittification.
[00:19:36] But it is an increasing trend, especially in the UK, and once you notice it, you see it everywhere.
[00:19:45] So, there we go, enshittification, a word I think perfectly captures the essence of something we can see all around us.
[00:19:55] And going back to what we talked about at the start of the episode, I looked into how the term “enshittificaiton” is translated into different languages.
[00:20:06] Most seem to keep the English version, while others do a direct translation from the English, like “Merdification” in French.
[00:20:16] This just goes to show that sometimes there is an expression that is just so perfectly accurate it can never really be translated.
[00:20:27] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on enshittification, and with that comes the end of this three-part mini-series on the theme of words and language.
[00:20:38] In case you missed them, in part one, we talked about words of the year, and in part two we talked about euphemisms in English.
[00:20:46] As always, I’d love to know what you think. Do you see examples of enshittification in your country? Have you had an experience of enshittification in the UK? And what can we do to fix it?
[00:20:59] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started. You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:21:11] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:21:16] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
