Sign of decline? Macquarie names its word of the year

Do you suffer from the niggling sense that every time you log online, things appear to be getting worse and worse?

Websites once deemed helpful are now harmful; social media is a toxic wasteland where the loudest (and most obnoxious) have their say, and algorithms have become so powerful at personalising content that most of us now exist in a depressing echo chamber.

If only there were a word to sum up this collective digital malaise. Oh wait, there is, and our friends at Macquarie Dictionary have named it the 2024 Word of the Year: Enshittification.

While “cozzie livs” came out on top in 2023, this year’s Word of the Year is more of a headscratcher.

The dictionary has chosen a Word of the Year since 2006. It generally settles on a term that has developed widespread social and cultural capital. Last year, we had “cozzie livs”, a shortened version of “cost of living”, and the year before that, it was “teal”.

While enshittification may not have as much colloquial recognition as previous winners, it’s a term that feels painfully appropriate. Enshittification became popular in 2023 after it was used in a blog post by Cory Doctorow, author of The Internet Con, 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,” Doctorow wrote.

Under Elon Musk, X is widely thought to have contributed to the enshittification of the internet.Credit:

“Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification.”

According to the Macquarie Dictionary committee, “This word captures what many of us feel is happening to the world and to so many aspects of our lives at the moment.”

Depending on whom you believe, we are living in the age of great digital decline, and the “enshittification of the internet” has come about thanks to increased spam, an influx of AI-generated content and algorithms that prioritise engagement over user benefit.

Everywhere you scroll, from Spotify to Amazon, X to Instagram, surfing the internet feels more like surviving the internet.

However, like many of the best words, enshittification has evolved into a whole new (and all-encompassing) meaning, transforming into a term that broadly represents the belief that everything is just a bit shit right now. See also: the enshittification of everything.

Elsewhere on the list, honourable mentions went to “rawdogging” (“a personal endurance test that lends itself to social media exposure”) and “right to disconnect” (“a law which grants employees the right not to work or be contacted during non-work hours”).

Here are some other words from the Word of the Year shortlist:

• Brainrot (used to describe internet content deemed to be of low quality or value)
• Sigma (slang that refers to a person who is independent and self-sufficient and who prefers to be alone)
• Skibidi (no inherent meaning. It can be used as an adjective to mean cool, bad or dumb, depending on context)
• Fairy porn (a genre of romance books featuring magical creatures or mystical words, often sexually descriptive and explicit).

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