With a career spanning nearly four decades, Cory Doctorow has penned an impressive body of work: 15 novels, four graphic novels, dozens of short stories, six nonfiction books, and thousands of essays and blog posts.
Despite this extensive bibliography, the award-winning science fiction author and seasoned internet activist is primarily recognized today for a single, impactful word: Enshittification.
Doctorow, 54, brought this term into the mainstream through essays in 2022 and 2023. It describes the gradual deterioration of online platforms as their corporate owners increasingly prioritize profit over user experience. While the word itself is playful, Doctorow frames the phenomenon as a distinct, almost scientific progression, akin to a disease.
Since its popularization, ‘Enshittification’ has evolved beyond merely expressing frustration with platforms like Facebook (which long ago ceased being an effective way to connect with friends) or Google (whose search results are now often cluttered with SEO spam). The concept has been widely applied to various aspects of digital life, from video games and television to even broader societal issues like American democracy itself.
“It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. It’s even terrifying,” Doctorow declared in a 2024 speech.
This Tuesday marks the release of “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It,” Doctorow’s comprehensive book that expands on his earlier essays. It features compelling case studies (including Uber, Twitter, and Photoshop) and outlines his proposed solutions, advocating for the breakup and more robust regulation of major tech companies.
However, given Doctorow’s characteristic prolificacy on the subject, one might wonder: why dedicate an entire book to it?
During a conversation over an avocado malted and poached eggs at a Lower Manhattan diner, Doctorow drew a nerdy parallel, courtesy of Nintendo’s “Legend of Zelda” game series, to clarify his approach.
“The books are kind of like the save game point in a long ‘Zelda’ game,” Doctorow explained. “The articles are like the individual missions, but the books are where I crystallize everything up to that point.”
And if one were to distill such a prolific writing life into a single word, this one certainly wouldn’t be a bad choice.
“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,” commented Kim Stanley Robinson, the esteemed science fiction author and a close friend of Doctorow’s.
Doctorow arrived at the diner equipped with custom-printed poop emoji stickers, a design prominently featured on his new book’s cover. He had previously endeared himself to the owners by offering a tip: their seltzer machine could be adapted to accommodate a larger carbon dioxide tank, eliminating the need for frequent replacements of smaller, proprietary canisters.
A consistent theme permeates Doctorow’s fiction and nonfiction: technology’s dual potential as a tool for human empowerment and creativity, or as a mechanism for repression and control wielded by states or large corporations. In his philosophy, tinkering, customization, and individuality are virtues, while conformity, consolidation, and passive consumption are detrimental—even when discussing something as seemingly trivial 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 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—and only worsens with each Netflix price hike and algorithmically served AI slop video on Instagram—it’s because the balance has tipped too far towards the latter. Like any activist, Doctorow aims to convince the public that this trajectory is not inevitable. And unlike many who spend countless hours on the very platforms he critiques, he vividly recalls a time when the digital landscape was fundamentally different.
‘Paradise Lost’
Born to two Marxist schoolteachers, Doctorow grew up in Toronto in a home steeped in computing. In the 1970s, his father, then a graduate student at the University of Toronto, brought home a Teletype terminal. His mother, a kindergarten teacher, would borrow paper towels from her school to feed the machine, later returning the used, code-covered sheets for her students to wipe their hands.
At the alternative elementary school Doctorow attended, students from kindergarten through eighth grade shared a single classroom, encouraged to pursue their individual interests. For Doctorow, these passions 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, who would later become a legal scholar and antitrust advocate, serving 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,” Wu recalled in an interview. “We saw them in the most optimistic possible terms.”
Wu described Doctorow as a schoolboy leader, albeit one with a temperamental side who had little patience for incompetence, qualities that occasionally led to clashes with older students. Yet, these formative years of home computing—long before today’s polished, monetized digital interfaces—represented for both Doctorow and Wu a sanctuary and a kind of idyllic, pre-fall existence.
“The ‘Paradise Lost’ motive is big with Cory and with me too,” Wu affirmed.
As an adolescent, Doctorow organized protests against the Persian Gulf War and spent a year in Mexico, where he crafted stories on a Sears word processor. Unsurprisingly, he found conventional college computer programming curricula tedious and abandoned several attempts at higher education.
After working in a science fiction bookstore, coding for the innovative CD-ROM company Voyager, and developing a media start-up, Doctorow joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in 2002. There, he immersed himself in the battle against digital rights management (DRM)—a term widely associated, in the Napster era, with efforts to prevent consumers from copying and distributing digital media.
“He’s an an idea machine,” Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the EFF, said of 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 had purchased it was anathema to the internet activists of Doctorow’s time.
Doctorow participated in striking publicity stunts, including a parody of the “Mickey Mouse Club” theme song that satirized Disney’s aggressive stance on 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 intricate good-government initiatives, such as generating near real-time transcripts of World Intellectual Property Organization meetings.
Concurrently with his copyright battles, Doctorow’s writing career flourished. In 2001, he became an editor at Boing Boing, a blog that quickly became one of the world’s most popular, known for its eclectic mix of ephemera, tech news, retrofuturist aesthetics, and left-leaning commentary.
In 2008, he published “Little Brother,” a novel about four Bay Area teenagers who harness technology to resist an oppressive Department of Homeland Security. The book became a New York Times best seller and a finalist for the prestigious Hugo Award. (Consistent with his ethos, Doctorow 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 complementary expressions of the same core technological concerns. He speaks with rapid-fire confidence, a faint Canadian accent, conveying the impression of someone who has refined his arguments over years of writing and has anticipated every possible counterpoint.
“You can see his mind working when you’re talking to him,” observed 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, Forbes named Doctorow number 10 on its list of the top 25 “web celebs.” (Gossip blogger Perez Hilton held the top spot.)
From this prominent position, Doctorow observed a significant shift in the public’s relationship with computing, one marked by increased mediation and passivity. That same year, he vehemently criticized Apple’s new iPad as wasteful, infantilizing, and simplistic, and subsequently left Facebook over privacy concerns.
For years, he predicted Facebook’s eventual downfall: through the Cambridge Analytica scandal, through reports of ad fraud, through its erratic shifts in video strategy and news engagement, and through younger generations increasingly favoring Instagram and TikTok.
Then, in the fall of 2023, Doctorow formally presented his theory.
‘Trapped in their carcasses’
Here’s the distilled version of his theory.
First, a platform initially thrives by serving its users well. This could manifest as Facebook effectively connecting you with friends, or Amazon offering a vast, reliable marketplace for goods.
Next, once the platform achieves critical mass and becomes indispensable due to a lack of viable alternatives, it begins to exploit its users to attract and retain businesses. This might look like Facebook leveraging user personal data for advertisers, or Google prioritizing paid advertisements over organic search results.
Finally, when those business customers also become dependent on the dominant platform, the platform exerts further pressure on them. Examples include ad rates on Facebook skyrocketing amidst allegations of ad fraud, or Amazon sellers being compelled to pay Amazon to secure prominent placement on Prime search results.
Ultimately, according to Doctorow, only the shareholders of these massive platforms truly benefit.
“All our tech businesses are turning awful,” Doctorow asserts in his book. “And they’re not dying. We remain trapped in their carcasses, unable to escape.”
Doctorow reveals that he manages his anxiety about the current state of affairs through writing—an unsurprising revelation—and by indulging in “too much brown liquor,” which he enjoys at a custom-built “pirate” bar in the backyard of his Burbank, California, home, shared with his wife. (His daughter is currently attending college.)
This period, which he describes as one of “extreme fecundity” even for him, has necessitated such unwinding. It’s partly fueled by the growing intellectual momentum of a group of influential thinkers who share his commitment to dismantling large tech firms.
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, who chairs the Federal Trade Commission in the Biden Administration.
She is a declared admirer of Doctorow.
“He’s making real intellectual contributions in presenting a framework for how to think about what we experience as consumers,” Khan noted 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 F.T.C. saw impactful lawsuits against numerous tech giants, and the second Trump Administration sometimes adopted aggressive rhetoric towards Big Tech, a recent settlement with Amazon suggests that the effort to curb the industry’s power might face limitations.
Ultimately, Doctorow asserts that he isn’t overly concerned with precise definitions. He acknowledges that his infamous word has permeated the broader culture, taking on a meaning more expansive than his original academic framing. And, fittingly for a long-standing opponent of overzealous copyright enforcement, Doctorow embraces the concept of the remix.
As he aptly states in his new book, “I am giving you explicit permission to use this word in a loose sense.”