Over the course of a nearly four-decade career, Cory Doctorow has written 15 novels, four graphic novels, dozens of short stories, six nonfiction books, approximately 60,000 blog posts and thousands of essays.
And yet for all the millions of words he’s published, these days the award-winning science fiction author and veteran internet activist is best known for just a single one: Enshittification.
The term, which Doctorow, 54, popularized in essays in 2022 and 2023, refers to the way that online platforms become worse to use over time, as the corporations that own them try to make more money. Though the coinage is cheeky, in Doctorow’s telling the phenomenon it describes is a specific, nearly scientific process that progresses according to discrete stages, like a disease.
Since then, the meaning has expanded to encompass a general vibe — a feeling far greater than frustration at Facebook, which long ago ceased being a good way to connect with friends, or Google, whose search is now baggy with SEO spam. Of late, the idea has been employed to describe everything from video games to television to American democracy itself.
“It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. It’s even terrifying,” Doctorow said in a 2024 speech.
On Tuesday, Farrar Straus & Giroux will release “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It,” Doctorow’s book-length elaboration on his essays, complete with case studies (Uber, Twitter, Photoshop) and his prescriptions for change, which revolve around breaking up big tech companies and regulating them more robustly.
Still, given the thousands of words Doctorow has already, characteristically, written on the subject, the question arises: Why write a book at all?
Over an avocado malted and poached eggs at a Lower Manhattan diner, Doctorow used a nerdy simile — care of Nintendo’s “Legend of Zelda” series of games — to explain.
“The books are kind of like the save game point in a long ‘Zelda’ game,” Doctorow said. “The articles are like the individual missions, but the books are where I crystallize everything up to that point.”
And if it’s possible to crystallize such a prolific writing life into a single word, this one isn’t half bad.
“It might look like he’s all over the place because he does so many things, but they are all part of a coherent plan — his push to make a more humane and democratic, user-friendly, non-capitalist, non-exploitative internet,” ”said Kim Stanley Robinson, the eminent science fiction author and a friend of Doctorow’s.
Doctorow had arrived to the diner with custom-printed poop emoji stickers, a design that appears on the cover of the new book. He’d won favor with the owners on an earlier visit by explaining that their seltzer maker could be modified to fit a large carbon dioxide tank, rather than frequently replacing smaller, proprietary canisters.
Across Doctorow’s fiction and nonfiction is a central theme: That technology can be used either as a tool of human empowerment and creativity, or repression and control by the state or big corporations. In this vision, tinkering, customization, and individuality are good. Conformity, consolidation, and passive consumption are bad — even if it’s about something as seemingly small as seltzer.
“I am simultaneously extremely excited and hopeful and energized about the possibilities of what technology can do for us as people trying to thrive,” Doctorow said, “and terrified of how bad technology will be for that project if we get it wrong.”
If things feel bad on digital platforms at the moment — and feel worse with every Netflix price increase and A.I. slop video served by the Instagram algorithm — that’s because the pendulum has swung too far in the latter direction. Like any activist, Doctorow’s project is to convince the public that it doesn’t have to be this way. And unlike many of the people spending hour after worsening hour on the platforms he detests, he remembers a time when things were different.
‘Paradise Lost’
The son of two Marxist schoolteachers, Doctorow grew up in Toronto, in a house full of computers. In the 1970s, his father brought home a Teletype terminal from the University of Toronto, where he was a graduate student, and his mother borrowed paper towels from the kindergarten where she taught to feed the machine, then brought them back to school for her students to wipe their hands on the used sheets, covered in code.
At the alternative elementary school Doctorow attended, students from kindergarten through 8th grade all sat in the same classroom, where they were free to pursue their interests. For Doctorow these included communism, nuclear disarmament, Dungeons and Dragons, Mad Magazine, and most of all an Apple II, on which he spent countless hours learning to code with his friend Tim Wu, a legal scholar and antitrust advocate who served in the Biden Administration as a special assistant to the president for competition and tech policy.
“To us, they were machines of liberation and personal development,” said Wu in an interview. “We saw them in the most optimistic possible terms.”
Wu remembered Doctorow the schoolboy as a leader, but one with a temperamental streak who did not suffer fools, qualities that sometimes brought bullying from older students in the class. But these protean days of home computing — long before the slick, monetized surfaces of today’s digital world — represented for Doctorow and Wu a refuge, and a kind of prelapsarian ideal.
“The ‘Paradise Lost’ motive is big with Cory and with me too,” said Wu.
As an adolescent, Doctorow organized protests against the Persian Gulf war, and spent a year living in Mexico, where he composed stories on a Sears word processor. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he bounced off a series of attempts at college, where he found computer programming curricula tedious.
After stints working in a science fiction bookstore, coding for the pioneering CD-ROM company Voyager and developing a media start-up, Doctorow ended up in 2002 at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital rights group. There, he threw himself into the fight against digital rights management — a term most commonly associated at the time, the age of Napster, with attempts to prevent consumers from copying and distributing digital media.
“He’s an idea machine,” Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said of Doctorow. “He’s the source of more ideas about how technology and people should interact than any single person.”
The notion that digital information could be controlled by a corporation even after a consumer bought it was anathema to the internet activists of Doctorow’s era.
Doctorow helped pull off attention-grabbing stunts like a parody of the “Mickey Mouse Club” theme song about the rapacity of Disney when it comes to intellectual property. (Sample lyric: “They sell us stuff/ It’s overpriced/ Then lock it up / And that’s not nice!”) He worked on wonky good-government projects, producing near real-time transcripts of World Intellectual Property Organization meetings.
At the same time as Doctorow did battle over copyright, his writing career took off. In 2001 he started as an editor at Boing Boing, whose mix of ephemera, tech news, retrofuturist aesthetics and left commentary made it one of the most popular blogs in the world.
In 2008, he published “Little Brother,” a novel about four Bay Area teenagers who use technology to fight back against an oppressive Department of Homeland Security. It was a New York Times best seller and a finalist for the prestigious Hugo Award. (As he did with all of us books until 2017, when his publisher stopped him, he made “Little Brother” available for free under a Creative Commons license.)
A proud didacticist, Doctorow sees his fiction and his activism as different expressions of the same set of concerns about technology. He speaks quickly and confidently, with the trace of a Canadian accent, giving the impression of a man who has been arguing in writing for years, and has already mapped most of the back roads those arguments can take.
“You can see his mind working when you’re talking to him,” said Rob Beschizza, the managing editor of Boing Boing. “The way it will move from agreement to skepticism. It’s very fortifying if you’re someone who enjoys that kind of back and forth.”
In 2010, when Forbes released its list of the top 25 “web celebs,” Doctorow was number 10. (Perez Hilton, the gossip blogger, was in first place.)
It was from this prominent perch that Doctorow watched the public’s relationship with computing turn much more mediated and passive. That same year he railed against Apple’s shiny new device, the iPad, as wasteful, infantilizing, and dumb, and quit Facebook over privacy concerns.
He’s spent years predicting Facebook’s demise: through the Cambridge Analytica scandal, through reports of ad fraud, through lurching changes to its video strategy and approach to news, and through younger generations who prefer Instagram and TikTok.
Then, in the fall of 2023, Doctorow postulated his theory.
‘Trapped in their carcasses’
Here’s the quick version.
First, a platform is good to its users. That may look like Facebook connecting you to all of your friends, or Amazon providing a giant, reliable marketplace for goods.
Then, when enough people have joined a platform that there aren’t any alternatives, the platforms start exploiting their own users to entice businesses. That may look like Facebook providing personal data about its customers to advertisers, or Google prioritizing paid ads over organic search.
Then, when those business customers are also stuck on one dominant platform, the platform puts the screws to them, too: Ad rates skyrocketing on Facebook amid reports of ad fraud, or Amazon sellers having to pay Amazon to be featured on Prime, just to appear high up in search results.
In the end, according to Doctorow, no one is happy except the shareholders of the big platforms.
“All our tech businesses are turning awful,” Doctorow writes in the book. “And they’re not dying. We remain trapped in their carcasses, unable to escape.”
Doctorow said he manages his anxiety over the current state of affairs by writing — no surprise there — and consuming “too much brown liquor,” which he takes in a custom-built “pirate” bar in the backyard of his Burbank, Calif., home, where he lives with his wife. (He has a daughter in college.)
He’s needed it to unwind from what he called a period of “extreme fecundity,” even for him. This has come about, in part, due to the intellectual momentum behind a group of influential thinkers who share his concern with breaking up big tech firms.
Chief among the “neo-Brandeisians,” a group of politicians, lawyers, and activists inspired by the work of the early 20th century Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, is Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission in the Biden Administration.
She is a Doctorow fan.
“He’s making real intellectual contributions in presenting a framework for how to think about what we experience as consumers,” Khan said in an interview. “I’ve always found him so lucid and astute and able to synthesize a lot of experiences that people were having and be able to distill them in a digestible way.”
While under Khan, the F.T.C. brought attention-grabbing suits against many tech powerhouses, and the second Trump Administration has sometimes taken an aggressive rhetorical posture toward Big Tech, a recent settlement with Amazon may be a sign that the fight to rein in the industry has limits.
Ultimately, Doctorow said he’s not overly concerned with semantics. That one infamous word, he knows, has entered the culture at large to refer to something broader than he has defined it. And as befits the longtime foe of overly aggressive copyright enforcement, Doctorow is comfortable with the concept of the remix.
As he writes in the new book, “I am giving you explicit permission to use this word in a loose sense.”
Joseph Bernstein is a Times reporter who writes feature stories for the Styles section.
The post A Powerhouse
Writer Found
One Word to Change the Debate About Tech appeared first on New York Times.
