Culture

The Enification of Enification

May 6, 2026 • 4 min read

I’m fed up with Enshittification. And I don’t mean “I'm fed up with hardware, software, and services constantly being constantly getting worse and worse by companies that put profits above all other considerations.” I’m fed up with the word itself.

“Enshittification” started off as Cory Doctorow’s fun, quotable term that neatly expressed our collective frustration with useful, valuable online services that decline in Goodness. Then it kind of exploded. It’s everywhere, and it gets applied to everything.

It’s become clumsy, blunt, and lazy. Worst of all, it’s cynical.

Yes, the concept of Enshittification has become Enshittificated.

When your favorite locally-owned restaurant gets sold to an investment group, and its kitchen — which used to be filled with chefs and line cooks manipulating fresh raw ingredients with expertise and care — is now filled with minimum-wage drones heating up pouches of frozen food from the same Sysco catalogue that every other investment-group restaurant gets all of its food from…yes, that’s enshittification. Enshittification is a real thing.

But! When there’s a change to a thing and you don’t like it or approve of it, you need to consider a frightening alternative possibility. Maybe it isn't enshittification. Maybe it’s just change.

Maybe your preferences are no longer considered paramount. Other factors (including the needs of other kinds of users) are exerting more influence over the direction of this thing. This sort of thing is inevitable when a product or service attains the level of success that its creators had been chasing all along. Its creators are still diligently trying to make all its users/fans/customers happy. But now there are thousands (or tens of, or even hundreds of thousands) of them, instead of just you and 127 like-minded people in the beta Discord. Your voice isn’t as loud as it used to be.

Maybe the makers of this thing are making decisions that reflect the fact that the world is just changing in general. And deep down you just don’t like it. Nor do you understand it. And it frightens you a little bit.

Or maybe the makers are simply doing what they need to do in order to make payroll. And if the changes leave you out in the cold…it sucks, but it's better than cutting staff next year.

These situations can leave you feeling scared, lost, alone, irrelevant, unheard. It can be tempting to avoid confronting that fear. Hey! Why not choose to attribute the change to a monstrous overall trend to take things that are perfect and make them objectively worse?

It’s soothing as hell. It also validates all of our existing choices, beliefs, and prejudices; to our considerable relief, no personal growth or examination is required. Hooray!

Why, here's an example from my own interior monologue:

”I am, as always, a shrewd, flawless arbiter of what constitutes a good superhero movie. The fact that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has sold billions of dollars’ worth of tickets and has thrilled audiences of diverse cultures worldwide only goes to demonstrate how rare my brave, lonely resistance to the enshittification of movies is, in these dark times.”

The misapplication of the term "enshittification" can often be tied to not wanting to feel like you’re being left behind, or that you’re being dragged into a future that you don’t understand. It’s as if the music has changed and the world around you is still merrily dancing, while you struggle to find the beat and learn the steps.

”This photo app used to be MY photo app. It appealed to a small, tight community of users. We were all members of an exclusive club, consisting of folks who were able to find out about it and appreciate its unique, subtle genius. But now, it has millions of users. The philosophies that were originally the core of its experience are now fringe features that haven’t received any attention whatsoever in the past four rounds of updates.”

Maybe the app hasn’t been enshittified. Maybe you just don’t understand these changes yet (which is fine). Maybe the thing’s evolution and yours are no longer running on parallel tracks (also fine).

My larger concern about the explosion of "enshittification" is that it’s metastasizing into a worldview that’s cynical and defeatist. We've been using the term without thinking about the term; over time, it might slowly contaminate how we perceive everything.

Q: “Why is this thing I’ve always liked damned-near useless? And what should I do about it?”

A: “Well, as you know, everything that’s good turns to crap eventually. And you can’t do anything about it, so don't even try. This is the inevitable death-spiral of everything we love and value. The forces that empower it are unaccountable and unstoppable.”

I remind you that I’m a member of Generation X. And when a member of Gen-X is criticizing something for being too cynical…WOW!!

I was much, much more cynical when I was young. Thank God there came a day when I realized how much better, lighter, and less burdensome day-to-day life feels when it’s built on a foundation of optimism.

If you’re a cosmological physicist, you’re required to say that it’s the nature of our universe to spin towards chaos and entropy. It's true, as a matter of science. But it isn’t true as a matter of philosophy. We do not live in a world where everything’s breaking down constantly and there’s no way to slow it down or stop it. If you’re committed to that belief, why build anything?

No. When things break down, go make something better. If you don’t have that skill set, then support the work of people who do. When Microsoft steers Windows away from the needs of individual users and towards software as a service and AI…that’s not a defeat. It’s an opportunity to find out how great Linux has become in the five or ten years since the last time you looked at it.

As the street photographer Bill Cunningham famously said: "Those who seek beauty will find it."

In summary:

Sure. You and I can cite far too many examples of a good thing being made objectively worse solely because the people in charge of it are pursuing objectively wrong, business-hyperfocused goals. Canonical example: Byron Allen’s Comics Unleashed is now airing at 11:35 on CBS, instead of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.

But according to the best research currently available, humanity has been around for about 300,000 years and the party’s likely to continue for at about 1.5 million years before our extinction. You and I will only get to experience about 0.00425% of that epoch together. We can’t waste a moment of it on careless, unproductive negativity and fatalism. And that’s what “enshittification” is in danger of encouraging.