13 November—St. Augustine’s birth 1,671 years ago today has nothing to do with the topic of today’s disquisition, although it’s doubtful that the sainted Bishop of Hippo would have approved of enshittification. In fact, had enshittification been a practice in his day, Augustine surely would have denounced it in no uncertain terms, in the elegant Latin he’s noted for.

The word enshittification has been around for only a few years. The concept, less commonly known as crapification and platform decay, had been elucitated in print several years earlier. The actual practice has been a fact of life as long as most of us can remember.

Enshittification is the noun. The verb is enshittify.

Cory Doctorow, a Canadian writer now living in the United Kingdom, came up with the word enshittification three years ago, in November 2022, specifically to describe the decline in quality of online products and services. But it’s applicable to and entirely appropriate for all products and services.

Put simply, manufacturers and vendors—providers—start out by creating and marketing high-quality products at attractive prices—sometimes at a loss—to reel in customers; and once the products and services have become established and customers locked in, the products and services are degraded and otherwise compromised to maximize profit.

Thus it’s mostly a function of capitalism, of course. But not all the time, as governments also degrade services for any number of reasons—as is often seen after politicians get elected, for instance.

Enshittification was the American Dialect Society’s 2023 Word of the Year. It’s comfortably ensconced in Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary (and was its 2024 Word of the Year), and the Cambridge Dictionary. But, true to form, the Oxford English Dictionary hasn’t yet taken enshittification seriously. The word, any way.

Back to the practice of enshittification, then, online we can see—and have experienced—it in the growth of Amazon.com and Google.com, for instance, whose profits have grown substantially while quality of their services has decreased in numerous ways, not limited to the metastatic increase in intrusive advertising customers must suffer—unless they pay extra for relief.

Shrinkflation of grocery products is a form of enshittification, wherein customers get less and pay more for the smaller quantities of product they may become addicted to. Price optimization—finding the price point, the sweet spot to maximize profit however it has to be done while not pissing off too many customers—is a form of enshittification.

So the purpose of enshittification is simply to enhance the bottom line. But isn’t that what capitalism is all about?