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I WAS ONCE privy to a PR firm’s behind-the-scenes discussion of client feedback relating to a campaign proposal. The PR firm felt they had put their best foot forward with an exciting and dynamic proposal, but were cynical about the process of dealing with clients who are invariably more concerned with hitting audiences over the head with their campaign message, than creativity. Thus, the PR firm, tongues firmly in their cheeks, expected their client’s feedback to go something like this: ‘We love the concept, we were just wondering if you could make it a little bit shitter’.

I thought about that exchange this week when the Macquarie Dictionary announced its word of the year: enshittification. While the word is relatively self-explanatory, its precise definition is the “deterioration of a service brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit seeking”.

While my PR firm example is not a one-for-one fit, I would argue that there was certainly an element of ‘enshittification’ at play.

The term enshittification was coined by British-Canadian blogger and journalist Cory Doctorow to describe the way tech platforms evolve and deteriorate in the absence of regulation or competition.

“All the streaming channels making you pay extra to not have ads is the perfect example,” Macquarie Dictionary managing editor Victoria Morgan said.

Morgan added that the term is usually associated with businesses looking for ways to make more money, but now people are adapting the usage to other aspects of life. “Now people are applying it to anything,” she said, citing the shrinkage in the size of food products as a way to use the word.

In awarding enshittification with its top prize, Macquarie’s selection committee said that the word reflects what many Australians feel is happening to so many aspects of our lives at the moment.

At this point, I have to call bullshit, or just take a minute, to shit on Macquarie’s choice. Certainly, you could argue there is a general malaise in society right now. In the consumer sphere, many people are struggling with ‘cozzie livs’ – Macquarie’s 2023 word of the year – a struggle likely exacerbated by the enshittification of various aspects of the online purchasing and retail experience. You could perhaps invoke the wars in the Ukraine and Gaza and the re-election of a convicted felon in the US election earlier this month, as being emblematic of a broader, systemic enshittification of society and life in 2024.

I have no issue with that. I just don’t see many people using the word in this context. For me, enshittification is a crude collision of irony and rhetoric but too unwieldy for mainstream use and therefore unlikely to enter the cultural vernacular. Pervasive use, particularly among Australians – historically a semantically lazy people – often relies on shortening of longer words or phrases: see cozzie livs. Enshittification, with its origins in academia, may pop up in a few PhDs over the next few years. It may be used in the odd op-ed by a desperate columnist in a misguided grasp for cultural relevance, but mass usage is likely to remain elusive. That, for me, makes it an unworthy winner.

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Contrast enshittification with the word that received a lowly honourable mention in this year’s awards: rawdogging – an online trend where people, mostly men, travel on long-haul flights with no electronic entertainment, devices or reading material.

Anecdotally, at least, use of this term has spread beyond air travel. I’ve heard it used to describe going for a run without listening to music or a podcast. You could conceivably use it to describe a night in on the couch without watching TV or given the ubiquity of people using aural accompaniments to get through everything from commutes to housework, to describe going unplugged in these scenarios too: I rawdogged hanging out the washing last night. Tough gig, man. Started thinking about who makes pegs . . . The point is, the term has the potential for widespread application and its crude, slightly hyperbolic properties lend it all-important ironic heft. It would have been my pick for word of the year.

Meanwhile, the word that was the People’s Choice Runner-Up in Macquarie’s awards and is in the running for the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year is ‘brainrot’. This describes “social media content viewed for an extended duration, which is considered to be of low quality in terms of intellectual stimulation”. While apt, this word doesn’t feel wholly original, at least to me. Many times, as a kid, my mum would tell me that various TV shows had the capacity to rot my brain – she might have been right.

Another word that made the shortlist is the Gen Alpha term sigma: a person who is well regarded as being exceptional in some way, especially a male. They’re often dominant, popular or sometimes a lone wolf. Somewhat adjacent, we have ‘looksmaxxing’, the act of improving one’s physical attractiveness as much as possible, especially as undertaken by young men. These two terms are very 2024, very online, very Tik-Tok-y. It should be no surprise that the origins of more and more slang terms that receive recognition by mainstream dictionaries, can be traced back to the web/social media; that is where people congregate and share ideas, however brain-rotting some of them are.

Many of these terms will largely stay online, despite dictionary recognition, unlikely to penetrate much beyond their original digital demo. Some, like rizz, last year’s Oxford Dictionary word of the year, do break out IRL, particularly among teens. But they’re unlikely to be picked up by older generations for the simple fact that when used by those outside of the intended demo, the effect is often cringeworthy. Here, let me demonstrate: that dude is so sigma, his looksmaxxing is off the charts. Motherfucker probably has rizz, too, said no Gen Alpha ever.

But at least these terms are widely used, even if most of that use is online. Enshittification, on the other hand, feels like a headline-grabbing choice (I should add that it was also the People’s Choice winner) but one unlikely to occupy the zeitgeist for long or ever achieve pervasive use.

It’s a shit choice, in other words, and if we were to be unkind, perhaps reflective of the increasingly dubious merits, or enshittification of dictionaries’ annual awards. That, of course, would be both ironic and fitting, the two overriding objectives, it would seem, in the creation of any new word or phrase in the digital age.

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