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There’s a temptation to call every platform decay “enshittification” now in boardrooms, at academic panels, in policy briefs, and especially in timeline dunks. The term has crossed boundaries with impressive speed. People love it because it’s sticky, accessible, vulgar enough to feel edgy.
And I hate it.
Not because it’s crass. Language should have muscle. Vulgarity serves purpose.
But because it’s imprecise. It flattens complex patterns into vibes. It generates the sensation of insight without delivering actual understanding. It’s the diagnostics equivalent of a TikTok dance: recognizable, shareable, and ultimately empty.
What “enshittification” gives people is the feeling that they understand what’s happening as platforms degrade. The emotional read is correct: systems are getting worse, interfaces more extractive, experiences more ad-filled. But that word, catchy as it is, tells us nothing about the mechanics.
It doesn’t map the directional flow of value extraction. It doesn’t reveal the governance structures enabling the decline. It doesn’t distinguish between different types of platform collapse. It doesn’t offer leverage points for intervention.
Instead, it gives us linguistic fast food: immediately satisfying but nutritionally vacant.
And in the process, it reveals something deeper about our moment. We’ve become so submerged in platform logic, so habituated to the velocity and flattening of our own systems, that we can’t even analyze decay without memeifying it.
What’s happening on these platforms isn’t random degradation or incompetence. It’s value reversal, a deliberate process where systems maintain their interfaces while fundamentally changing their functions.
The dashboard remains; the service transforms.
This isn’t accidental. It’s architectural. Platforms don’t just “get worse” or “become shitty.” They execute a specific pattern: Build infrastructure that creates genuine value for users. Establish dependency through network effects and habit formation. Gradually redirect value flows from users to shareholders. Maintain just enough of the original value to prevent mass exodus.
The interface stays recognizable even as its purpose mutates, creating the illusion of continuity while fundamental extraction occurs beneath the surface.
We can’t fix what we can’t accurately describe. Labeling everything “enshittification” is like a doctor diagnosing every ailment as “feeling bad”: technically true but pragmatically useless.
If we’re serious about building better alternatives, developing effective regulation, creating resilient systems, or recognizing early warning signs, then we need analytical frameworks, not catchphrases.
Calling it enshittification is like putting a funny hat on a burning house and thinking you’ve made progress understanding the fire.
We don’t need more terms that entertain. We need concepts that explain. We need the slow, boring, unmarketable language of systems diagnosis. We need clarity, not clickability.
Because this, this memetic simplification, this aesthetic flattening, this speed-driven collapse of complexity, is itself part of the problem. The internet is rotting not just in infrastructure, but in cognition. And the more we package our crises into shareable labels, the less capacity we have to address their underlying mechanics.
So call it platform hollowing. Call it value reversal. Call it interface redirection.
But please, for the sake of whatever analytical clarity we have left, stop calling it enshittification.