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Where does enshittification come from? Enshittification is an archly elaborate formation for “having been made shittier,” or “worsened.” It combines the vulgarism shit, the prefix en- (“cause to be”), and -ification (a noun combining form meaning “making” or “producing”). Several independent coinages of enshittification are found online in the 2010s, with evidence for the similar shittification seen even earlier. The term was popularized by the Canadian writer Cory Doctorow starting in 2022, when he suggested a patterned decline in the quality of online platforms resulted from capitalistic incentives. Doctorow explained the decline as a process in which a platform first offers value to users, then to other businesses, then back to themselves and shareholders after it dominates the market. He notably applied the word enshittification in critiques of Big Tech companies and social media sites. Enshittification received considerable attention in 2023, after the American Dialect Society chose it as its Word of the Year (followed by Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary doing so in 2024).