Bugman Ratrace

Food delivery apps as enshittification

The 2023 word of the year, according to the American Dialect Society, was “enshittification,” a term popularized by Cory Doctorow in a blog post describing the gradual degradation of digital platforms. About a year ago, Doctorow wrote,

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

For purely aesthetic reasons, I don’t love the word—it has that smarmy epic bacon tone—but it has deservedly resonated, entering the lexicon because it describes something we all experience regularly but which is so subtle it often goes unnamed. That’s the point of enshittification, after all: to be incremental and subliminal, to toe the line but not cross it, to slowly extract value from you rather than drive you away entirely, like an expert poker player. If we notice the enshittification, it becomes harder to sustain. (One function of AI, I wrote last year, could be concealing or bypassing the visual chaos that often signals an underlying decline in quality.)

This phenomenon also extends to physical products, of course: shoddy fast fashion clothing and furniture; self-checkout CVS stores where all the merchandise is under lock and key; market consolidation ensuring we get worse stuff that costs more. The meatspace version of enshittification may not feel as suffocating as that of a digital platform, but it’s often equally pervasive.