Doctorow: "enshittification" — the three-phase decay pattern of platforms (Word of the Year 2023 + 2024)
Claim: Cory Doctorow coined "enshittification" in November 2022; the American Dialect Society named it 2023 Word of the Year; Macquarie Dictionary named it 2024 Word of the Year. Doctorow's book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It was released October 2025.
Quote (Doctorow, Pluralistic, Jan 21, 2023):
"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."
Source: Pluralistic (Doctorow's blog), Jan 21, 2023; Wikipedia "Enshittification"; Locus Magazine coverage.
Confidence: Verified.
For Candid use: Useful framing for client conversations about platform choice — but deploy as a diagnostic, not a law. Some platforms (Stripe, Cloudflare, Postgres, Linux) have not enshittified despite being enormous. The pattern applies most cleanly to vertically-integrated, two-sided, advertising-funded platforms with switching costs. See Doctorow's prescription: "right of exit" requires interoperability, not just open source for the prescription side.
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