Article“Enshittification” was Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year in 2024. It’s safe to say that, in 2026, everything is still going to poo.
The term isn’t even about, say, global stability, but something more mundane: the worsening of our online lives. It feels especially acute this week, as I toggle between the hollowed-out wasteland of social media – where it seems literally everyone is trying to sell me something – and the weighty rituals of Easter.
Coined by the writer Cory Doctorow in 2022, “enshittification” is defined as:
The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.
Since then, we’ve seen the proliferation of AI slop; unsolicited and overwritten “this obscure person changed the world” stories; interminable and highly dubious “why I, a normal relatable person, founded this company” reels; and seventy billion ads for a product you idly googled last week, many of which you suspect do not actually exist.
“We’re all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit,” Doctorow elaborates.
I remember musing, years ago, on the strangeness of life online being built on advertising. Like a too-slender neck upholding a teetering, comically large head, it seemed bizarre that this massive complex of human effort, attention, and ingenuity should be funnelled towards something so trivial as the selling of random crap. I even felt a bit relieved that, given the influence of social media, it wasn’t primarily being channelled towards more sinister ends.
I don’t feel that way anymore. Not just because life online has since served many other sinister ends. But because the way we do advertising now seems to me as sinister as any of them.
This has especially been so as I’ve watched ads mimic (and so destroy) any form of genuine interaction on social media. The longer you can trick a user into thinking they’re not watching an ad, businesses seem to think, the better your chances of selling something. (Does this really work? Or does it just give everyone the you-know-whats?)
Advertising has always sought to leverage or reshape our desires. But the intimacy of social media has made it extra-icky.
Instagram knows how old my kid is, and how sleep-deprived I am. So suddenly, products from shape sorters to magnesium “oil” are marketed to me as the silver bullet for my sleep woes.
Companies zero in on our pressure points and brazenly declare their product the answer to any and all of them. This is old-fashioned quackery, turbocharged by the algorithm.
Producers of goods need to advertise in order to be found by those who want them. Producers of content need to “monetise” in order to make a living. But enshittification has distorted these mechanisms from their original purpose (theoretically) of trying to add something meaningful and useful to the world, to doing whatever it takes to wring a few extra dollars out of us at our most desperate or insecure.
The psychological effects of this are captured well in a sardonic rewrite of Psalm 23 – which famously begins “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” – by Australian-born, NYC-based pastor Jon Tyson:
The algorithm is my shepherd, I shall always want.
It makes me doom scroll through digital pastures.
It leads me beside the rapids of engagement.
It activates my anxiety.
It guides me along paths of monetization for profit’s sake.
Where the original concludes, “Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever”, this version anticipates that
Surely dissatisfaction and envy will follow me all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in your monetized data analytics forever.
This Easter, I’m struck by the contrast between Jesus – called the Good Shepherd – and the algorithm.
One promises extravagantly to remove pain and stress and inconvenience from my life; the other invites people to deny themselves, to take up their cross, to count the cost. (If this is a marketing strategy, it’s got to be the least manipulative on record.)
One presses on my wounds and longings in order to manoeuvre me into laying down my credit card; the other lays down his own life in order to buy me back from slavery to my own greed and selfishness.
One leaves me only more parched and dissatisfied; the other extends a free offer of “living water” that he says will satisfy forever. This God urges me to come and eat and drink, “without money and without cost”, that my soul might “delight in the richest of fare”.
The promise of Easter is the opposite of enshittification. Instead of turning value into poop, it turns water to wine, mourning to laughter, and death to life. The story of Jesus bucks the dreary logic of monetisation and profit-seeking: under the economics of faith, the cost is paid by him, and the profit he seeks is mine.
Natasha Moore is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity. This article was first published by Eureka Street.