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Cory Doctorow on Why the Internet Feels So Broken
The Enshittification author says today’s digital misery is the result of deliberate policy choices
At this year’s DemocracyXChange summit, executive director of The Walrus Jennifer Hollett sat down with writer and digital-rights activist Cory Doctorow for a conversation about the internet and the decay of public trust online.
Doctorow has become one of the sharpest critics of what he calls the “enshittification” of digital platforms—the process by which tech companies systematically degrade their products in pursuit of profit and control. But the discussion ranged far beyond Silicon Valley. Together, Hollett and Doctorow explored the failures of regulation and the growing sense that citizens are trapped inside systems designed to extract from them rather than serve them.
Read Cory Doctorow’s keynote lecture here.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you come to the word enshittification?
I’ve worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation for the majority of my adult life. And getting people to care about tech issues is hard. They’re very abstract, and the things we worry about are a long way in the future. For extremely good reasons, people are mostly interested in things that are concrete and happening right now. So, you can wait and do nothing, and eventually, those issues will become very concrete, and they will be on your doorstep, but it’ll be too late to do anything about it. The trick, as with environmental activism, is to find ways to raise the salience of these issues for people before it’s too late.
I’ve spent twenty-five years coming up with framing devices and metaphors and similes and parables. I came up with this dirty word, and it caught on. It caught on, I think, for a lot of reasons. I think people appreciate a minor licence to vulgarity. It feels nice to have permission to be a bit sweary. I also think that there’s a kind of killer combination with the right to be sweary and a good technical, economic, and political analysis of how we got here.
When did you discover your interest for technology and for science fiction?
My dad was a computer scientist. We had computers in the house before computers had screens. We had teletype terminals in the 1970s. But science fiction is down to one person: a woman named Judith Merrill. If you don’t know her, you’ll know her library on College Street, the Merrill Collection, which is the largest science fiction reference collection in the world. Judy was a force of nature. She went into voluntary exile in 1968 after the Chicago police riots. She decided she didn’t want to be an American. Or bring her kids up in America. She had recently divorced from another science fiction writer, Frederick Pohl. She got the books in the divorce. She brought them here, and she gave them to the Toronto Public Library. And they became the nexus of that collection.
I first encountered Judy on TV, though; she was on TV Ontario. She used to come on every week and introduce Doctor Who. She was great. She was a tough old broad. She was a chain-smoker, grey hair. Took no nonsense. She’d come on every week and introduce the show with notes from the way that these ideas are developed. And so, she’d come out, and she’d be like, “Tonight’s episode is about time loops. I remember we invented time loops in 1948 at a spaghetti potluck dinner at the Futurion House in New York. I will never forget, because Isaac Asimov was there, and he wouldn’t stop grabbing C. M. Kornbluth’s girlfriend’s ass. We wrote thirteen stories about time loops that night. I took the A train to Rockefeller Center. I threw them over John W. Campbell’s transom at Amazing Stories. He published them all in the following year. And that is where we get our time loops.”
She was great. We took a school trip to her library when I was about ten, when it was back up at Spadina and Bloor. She said,........