Over a remarkable four-decade career, Cory Doctorow has penned an extensive collection of works, including 15 novels, four graphic novels, numerous short stories, six nonfiction books, roughly 60,000 blog posts, and thousands of essays. Yet, despite this monumental output, the acclaimed science fiction author and seasoned internet activist is now predominantly recognized for just one potent word: “Enshittification.”
This term, which Doctorow, 54, brought into widespread discussion through his essays in 2022 and 2023, meticulously details how online platforms degrade over time as their corporate owners prioritize profit. While the coinage is playfully provocative, Doctorow asserts that the phenomenon it describes is a precise, almost scientific progression, akin to a spreading ailment.
Its meaning has since transcended its original scope, now representing a pervasive sense that things are simply getting worse online. This feeling extends beyond the frustration with a Facebook that long ago ceased to genuinely connect friends, or a Google search now clogged with SEO spam. The concept has been applied to everything from video games and television to the very fabric of modern democracy.
“It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. It’s even terrifying,” Doctorow stated in a 2024 address.
This Tuesday, Farrar Straus & Giroux will release “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.” This book-length expansion of Doctorow’s essays includes in-depth case studies—examining Uber, Twitter, and Photoshop—and outlines his proposed remedies, which largely advocate for breaking up dominant tech companies and implementing more robust regulation.
Given Doctorow’s already prolific writing on this very topic, the natural question arises: why a full book?
During a candid conversation over an avocado malted and poached eggs in a Lower Manhattan diner, Doctorow offered a thoughtful analogy, drawing from Nintendo’s popular “Legend of Zelda” game series. “The books are kind of like the save game point in a long ‘Zelda’ game,” he explained. “The articles are like the individual missions, but the books are where I crystallize everything up to that point.”
Indeed, if a prolific writing life can be distilled into a single word, this one certainly captures its essence.
“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,” observed Kim Stanley Robinson, the distinguished science fiction author and a close friend of Doctorow’s.
Doctorow arrived at the diner equipped with custom-printed stickers of the poop emoji, a design prominently featured on his new book’s cover. He’d previously endeared himself to the owners by demonstrating how their seltzer maker could be modified to use a larger, more economical carbon dioxide tank, rather than requiring frequent replacements of smaller, proprietary canisters.
A consistent thread runs through Doctorow’s fiction and nonfiction: technology can be either a force for human empowerment and creativity, or an instrument of repression and control wielded by states and large corporations. In his philosophy, tinkering, customization, and individuality are virtues, while conformity, consolidation, and passive consumption are detrimental—even when applied to something as seemingly minor as a seltzer machine.
“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 stated, “and terrified of how bad technology will be for that project if we get it wrong.”
If the current state of digital platforms feels disheartening—compounded by every Netflix price hike and AI-generated video algorithm on Instagram—it’s because the balance has tipped too far towards the latter. As an activist, Doctorow’s mission is to convince the public that this trajectory is not inevitable. Unlike many who passively endure the platforms he critiques, he vividly recalls a time when the digital landscape was fundamentally different.
‘Paradise Lost’
The child of two Marxist schoolteachers, Doctorow grew up in Toronto, in a home constantly filled with computers. In the 1970s, his father, a University of Toronto graduate student, brought home a Teletype terminal. His mother, a kindergarten teacher, would borrow paper towels from her school to feed the machine, later returning the code-covered sheets for her students to reuse as hand wipes.
At the alternative elementary school Doctorow attended, students from kindergarten through eighth grade shared a single classroom, encouraged to pursue their individual interests freely. For Doctorow, these included communism, nuclear disarmament, Dungeons and Dragons, Mad Magazine, and, most significantly, an Apple II. On this computer, he spent countless hours learning to code with his friend Tim Wu, now a renowned legal scholar and antitrust advocate who previously served in the Biden Administration overseeing competition and tech policy.
“To us, they were machines of liberation and personal development,” Wu recalled in an interview. “We saw them in the most optimistic possible terms.”
Wu described Doctorow as a childhood leader, albeit one with a strong personality who had little patience for incompetence, characteristics that sometimes led to friction with older classmates. However, these formative years of home computing—long before today’s polished, monetized digital interfaces—represented a sanctuary and a “prelapsarian ideal” for both Doctorow and Wu.
“The ‘Paradise Lost’ motive is big with Cory and with me too,” Wu added.
As a teenager, Doctorow organized protests against the Persian Gulf war and spent a year living in Mexico, where he crafted stories on a Sears word processor. Unsurprisingly, he found traditional college computer programming curricula unengaging and dropped out of several attempts.
After working in a science fiction bookstore, coding for the pioneering CD-ROM company Voyager, and developing a media startup, Doctorow joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group, in 2002. There, he immersed himself in the battle against digital rights management (DRM)—a term then primarily associated, during the Napster era, with efforts to prevent consumers from copying and distributing digital media.
“He’s an idea machine,” said Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, praising Doctorow. “He’s the source of more ideas about how technology and people should interact than any single person.”
The idea that corporations could control digital information even after a consumer purchased it was anathema to internet activists of Doctorow’s generation.
Doctorow was instrumental in orchestrating high-profile stunts, including a parody of the “Mickey Mouse Club” theme song, which satirized Disney’s aggressive approach to intellectual property. (A memorable line: “They sell us stuff/ It’s overpriced/ Then lock it up / And that’s not nice!”) He also contributed to impactful good-government projects, such as producing near real-time transcripts of World Intellectual Property Organization meetings.
Simultaneously, Doctorow’s writing career flourished. In 2001, he became an editor at Boing Boing, a popular blog known for its blend of cultural ephemera, tech news, retrofuturist aesthetics, and left-leaning commentary.
In 2008, he published “Little Brother,” a novel depicting four Bay Area teenagers who use technology to resist an oppressive Department of Homeland Security. The book became a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the prestigious Hugo Award. True to his principles, Doctorow, until 2017 when his publisher intervened, made “Little Brother” and his other works available for free under a Creative Commons license.
As a proud didacticist, Doctorow views his fiction and activism as complementary expressions of his core concerns about technology. He speaks with rapid confidence and a hint of a Canadian accent, conveying the impression of someone who has refined his arguments over years and anticipates every possible counter-point.
“You can see his mind working when you’re talking to him,” said Rob Beschizza, 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 secured the 10th spot (Perez Hilton, the gossip blogger, held first place).
From this prominent position, Doctorow observed the public’s relationship with computing becoming increasingly mediated and passive. That same year, he vehemently criticized Apple’s new iPad as wasteful, infantilizing, and simplistic, and he exited Facebook due to privacy concerns.
For years, he has predicted Facebook’s eventual downfall, citing events like the Cambridge Analytica scandal, reports of ad fraud, shifting video strategies, changes in its approach to news, and the growing preference of younger generations for platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
Then, in the fall of 2023, Doctorow articulated his now-famous theory.
‘Trapped in their carcasses’
Here’s the distilled version of “enshittification”:
Initially, a platform strives to be excellent for its users. This might manifest as Facebook effectively connecting friends or Amazon providing a vast, dependable marketplace for goods.
Next, once enough users are locked into the platform, with no viable alternatives, the platform begins to exploit its users to attract and retain businesses. This could involve Facebook sharing personal user data with advertisers or Google prioritizing paid advertisements over organic search results.
Finally, when those business customers are also dependent on the dominant platform, the platform tightens its grip on them as well. Examples include ad rates skyrocketing on Facebook amidst reports of fraud, or Amazon sellers being compelled to pay Amazon for Prime features just to achieve visibility in search results.
In Doctorow’s grim assessment, ultimately, no one benefits except the shareholders of these colossal platforms.
“All our tech businesses are turning awful,” Doctorow writes in his book. “And they’re not dying. We remain trapped in their carcasses, unable to escape.”
Doctorow confesses that he manages his anxiety about the current state of affairs through writing—an unsurprising revelation—and by indulging in “too much brown liquor.” He enjoys this in a custom-built “pirate” bar nestled in the backyard of his Burbank, California, home, where he resides with his wife and has a daughter in college.
This period of what he calls “extreme fecundity,” even by his own standards, has been necessary for him to decompress. It also coincides with a growing intellectual momentum behind a group of influential thinkers who share his commitment to dismantling big tech monopolies.
Prominent among these “neo-Brandeisians”—a collective of politicians, lawyers, and activists inspired by early 20th-century Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis—is Lina Khan, the current chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the Biden Administration.
She is a notable admirer of Doctorow’s work.
“He’s making real intellectual contributions in presenting a framework for how to think about what we experience as consumers,” Khan remarked 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 Khan’s tenure at the FTC has seen several high-profile lawsuits against major tech companies, and the second Trump Administration has at times adopted an aggressive stance toward Big Tech, a recent settlement with Amazon suggests there may be limitations to the battle to rein in the industry.
Ultimately, Doctorow asserts that he isn’t overly concerned with precise definitions. He understands that his infamous word has permeated popular culture to describe something broader than his initial definition. As a long-standing opponent of overly restrictive copyright enforcement, Doctorow is entirely comfortable with the concept of the “remix.”
As he explicitly states in his new book, “I am giving you explicit permission to use this word in a loose sense.”