The concept of “enshittification” was invented by the Canadian-British sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow, only last year, to describe online platforms and the process of their decay. A tech policy expert, Rose Payne, explained the concept to me; you’ll recognise it immediately from pretty much any online service you’ve signed up to: “You enter into it, and at the beginning, it’s good, but once they have network effects, they degrade the quality of their offering. So you’re trapped in a space that’s no longer useful to you.”
Pretty soon, in fact amazingly quickly, people were using the word to describe everything – to the extent that Doctorow wondered this year whether we’d entered the “enshittocene”. Repurposed to describe the effects of the climate crisis, it means something different, but just as evocative: say we sail beyond 1.5C of warming but do manage to stick at 2C, there will be dramatic, life-threatening events, there will be mass migration, but there will also be a general, broad-brush worsening of everything.
