With a career spanning almost four decades, Cory Doctorow has penned an impressive body of work: 15 novels, four graphic novels, numerous short stories, six nonfiction books, and tens of thousands of blog posts and essays.
Despite this extensive output, the award-winning science fiction author and seasoned internet activist is now most recognized for a single, impactful word: Enshittification.
The term, popularized by Doctorow, 54, in his 2022 and 2023 essays, describes the inevitable decline of online platforms as their corporate owners prioritize profit. While playfully coined, Doctorow explains this “enshittification” as a precise, almost scientific progression through distinct stages, much like a disease.
Its meaning has since broadened, capturing a widespread sense of decay that extends beyond the exasperation with platforms like Facebook (no longer a great way to connect) or Google (clogged with SEO spam). Lately, “enshittification” has been used to characterize everything from video games and television to the state of American democracy itself.
“It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. It’s even terrifying,” Doctorow declared in a 2024 address.
This Tuesday, Farrar Straus & Giroux will publish “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It,” a comprehensive book expanding on Doctorow’s essays. It includes detailed case studies, such as Uber, Twitter, and Photoshop, along with his solutions, which largely advocate for dismantling major tech monopolies and imposing stronger regulations.
However, considering Doctorow’s characteristic prolificacy on this very topic, one might ask: why a whole book?
During a breakfast of avocado malted and poached eggs at a Lower Manhattan diner, Doctorow offered a nerdy analogy from Nintendo’s “Legend of Zelda” series to clarify his approach.
“Think of the books as save points in a lengthy ‘Zelda’ game,” Doctorow explained. “The articles are individual missions, but the books are where I consolidate all progress and understanding up to that moment.”
If his vast writing career could be distilled into a single word, this one certainly fits the bill.
“While he might seem scattered due to his numerous endeavors, everything he does is part of a unified vision: to foster a more humane, democratic, user-centric, and non-exploitative internet,” commented Kim Stanley Robinson, the renowned science fiction author and a close friend of Doctorow’s.
Doctorow arrived at the diner equipped with custom-printed poop emoji stickers, mirroring the design on his new book’s cover. He had previously endeared himself to the owners by offering a hack for their seltzer maker: modifying it to use a larger, standard carbon dioxide tank instead of expensive, proprietary cartridges.
A consistent thread runs through Doctorow’s fiction and nonfiction: technology’s dual nature as a force for human liberation and creativity, or as a mechanism for state or corporate control. His philosophy champions tinkering, customization, and individuality, while cautioning against conformity, consolidation, and passive consumption – principles that extend even to something as simple as a seltzer machine.
“I am simultaneously extremely excited, hopeful, and energized by the potential of technology to help us thrive,” Doctorow stated. “Yet, I am equally terrified by how detrimental technology could become to that very goal if we mismanage it.”
If the current state of digital platforms feels dire—exacerbated by rising Netflix prices and algorithmically-generated “AI slop” on Instagram—it’s because the balance has tipped too far towards control. Doctorow, ever the activist, aims to persuade the public that this deterioration is not inevitable. Unlike many who passively endure these worsening platforms, he recalls a time when the digital landscape offered genuine freedom and promise.
The Lost Paradise of Early Tech
Born to Marxist schoolteachers, Doctorow’s Toronto childhood was steeped in technology. In the 1970s, his father, a University of Toronto graduate student, brought home a Teletype terminal. His mother, an innovative kindergarten teacher, repurposed paper towels from her classroom to feed the machine, later having her students use the code-covered sheets for hand-wiping.
His alternative elementary school fostered independent learning, with K-8 students sharing a single classroom to pursue their passions. Doctorow’s interests ranged from communism and nuclear disarmament to Dungeons and Dragons, Mad Magazine, and, most notably, an Apple II. On this computer, he spent countless hours coding alongside his friend Tim Wu, who later became a legal scholar and prominent antitrust advocate, serving in the Biden Administration as a special assistant for competition and tech policy.
“For us, these were tools of liberation and personal growth,” Wu recalled in an interview. “We viewed them with the utmost optimism.”
Wu remembered Doctorow as a natural leader in school, albeit one with a quick temper who had little patience for incompetence, traits that occasionally led to clashes with older students. These formative years of home computing, long before the polished, profit-driven interfaces of modern digital platforms, were a sanctuary for both Doctorow and Wu, representing a pristine, prelapsarian ideal.
“The ‘Paradise Lost’ theme deeply resonates with both Cory and myself,” Wu shared.
In his adolescence, Doctorow organized protests against the Persian Gulf War and lived for a year in Mexico, where he wrote stories on a Sears word processor. It’s perhaps unsurprising that his attempts at college were short-lived, as he found the computer programming courses uninspiring.
After working at a science fiction bookstore, coding for the innovative CD-ROM company Voyager, and developing a media startup, Doctorow joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital rights organization, in 2002. There, he passionately campaigned against digital rights management (DRM), a concept widely known in the Napster era for restricting consumers from copying and sharing digital media.
“He’s an idea machine,” remarked Cindy Cohn, Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “He generates more groundbreaking concepts about how technology and humanity should coexist than anyone else.”
For internet activists of Doctorow’s generation, the idea that corporations could retain control over digital information even after a consumer purchased it was utterly anathema.
Doctorow was instrumental in creating eye-catching stunts, including a parody of “The Mickey Mouse Club” theme song that satirized Disney’s aggressive approach to intellectual property. (A memorable lyric: “They sell us stuff/ It’s overpriced/ Then lock it up / And that’s not nice!”) He also engaged in detailed good-government initiatives, providing live transcripts of World Intellectual Property Organization meetings.
Parallel to his copyright battles, Doctorow’s writing career flourished. In 2001, he became an editor at Boing Boing, a blog that quickly rose to global popularity with its blend of eclectic content, tech news, retrofuturist art, and left-leaning commentary.
In 2008, he released “Little Brother,” a novel about four Bay Area teenagers leveraging technology to resist an authoritarian Department of Homeland Security. This book became a New York Times best seller and a Hugo Award finalist. Notably, Doctorow, a vocal advocate for open access, made all his books available for free under a Creative Commons license until 2017, when his publisher intervened.
A self-proclaimed didacticist, Doctorow views his fiction and activism as intertwined expressions of his core technological concerns. He articulates his thoughts rapidly and assuredly, with a hint of a Canadian accent, conveying the image of someone who has meticulously charted every argumentative path over years of intense debate.
“You can literally witness his mind at work during a conversation,” said Rob Beschizza, managing editor of Boing Boing. “His transitions from agreement to skepticism are incredibly stimulating for anyone who appreciates a dynamic intellectual exchange.”
In 2010, Forbes ranked Doctorow number 10 on its list of the top 25 “web celebs,” a list topped by gossip blogger Perez Hilton.
From this influential position, Doctorow observed a shift: the public’s relationship with computing became increasingly mediated and passive. That same year, he denounced Apple’s new iPad as wasteful, infantilizing, and simplistic, and he left Facebook due to growing privacy concerns.
For years, Doctorow has consistently forecasted Facebook’s eventual downfall, citing issues like the Cambridge Analytica scandal, widespread ad fraud, erratic shifts in its video and news strategies, and the migration of younger users to platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
Then, in the autumn of 2023, Doctorow formally introduced his theory.
The Cycle of “Enshittification”: Trapped in Their Carcasses
Here’s a brief overview of his theory:
Initially, platforms are beneficial to their users. Consider Facebook, which once excelled at connecting friends, or Amazon, which established itself as a vast and dependable marketplace.
Once a platform achieves critical mass and user lock-in, with few viable alternatives, it begins to exploit its user base to attract businesses. This manifests as Facebook sharing personal user data with advertisers, or Google favoring paid advertisements over organic search results.
Subsequently, as businesses become reliant on the dominant platform, they too face exploitation. Examples include soaring ad rates on Facebook amidst allegations of ad fraud, or Amazon requiring sellers to pay for Prime placement merely to gain visibility in search results.
Ultimately, Doctorow contends that only the shareholders of these dominant platforms truly benefit.
“All our tech businesses are turning awful,” Doctorow states in his book. “And they’re not dying. We remain trapped in their carcasses, unable to escape.”
Doctorow manages his apprehension about the current technological landscape through his prolific writing—naturally—and by indulging in “too much brown liquor” at a custom-built “pirate” bar in the backyard of his Burbank, California home, shared with his wife. (His daughter is currently in college.)
This period of “extreme fecundity,” even by his standards, has been a necessary outlet. It’s fueled, in part, by the growing intellectual movement of prominent thinkers who echo his concerns about dismantling large tech companies.
A leading figure among the “neo-Brandeisians”—a coalition of politicians, lawyers, and activists drawing inspiration from early 20th-century Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis—is Lina Khan, who chairs the Federal Trade Commission under the Biden Administration.
She is, notably, a fan of Doctorow’s work.
“He offers significant intellectual contributions by providing a framework for understanding our experiences as consumers,” Khan noted in an interview. “I’ve always found him exceptionally clear-sighted, insightful, and adept at synthesizing widespread consumer experiences into an easily digestible form.”
Under Khan’s leadership, the FTC has pursued high-profile lawsuits against numerous tech giants. While the second Trump Administration has also adopted an aggressive stance against Big Tech, a recent settlement involving Amazon suggests that efforts to curb the industry’s power may face significant limitations.
Ultimately, Doctorow is unconcerned with rigid semantic definitions. He acknowledges that his notorious coined word has transcended its original context, now broadly signifying a wider societal malaise. True to his long-standing opposition to stringent copyright enforcement, Doctorow fully embraces the concept of linguistic “remixing.”
As he clearly states in his new book, “I am giving you explicit permission to use this word in a loose sense.”