“If you want to kick Elon Musk in the dongle, aim for his margins”: Cory Doctorow on why the web went bad and how to fix it
The Toronto-born tech writer talks about the unifying theory of awfulness behind his new book, Enshittification
Remember the early days of Facebook, before all the spam? When Uber was cheap and X was Twitter? According to Toronto-born writer Cory Doctorow, it’s not just nostalgia: the internet really has gotten worse. In his new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Doctorow explains how and why Big Tech has made the internet suck for everyone but them. He dubs the phenomenon “enshittification” and announces that we’re living in a craptastic new era: the “enshittocene.” However, Doctorow does see a way out.
Where did your book title come from? And is it just an excuse to say “shit”? For the past 20 years, I’ve been chained to a rock in a salt mine trying to get people to care about tech policy. I first used that word in a very bad-tempered tweet I sent from a cabin in a Puerto Rico forest after trying to get on Tripadvisor via terrible Wi-Fi. Their page would load all the ad trackers first and then time out. I tweeted, “This is the most enshittified website I’ve ever seen. Has anyone on Tripadvisor ever been on a trip?”
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What made you want to write this book? Most writers keep a notebook, but I write blog posts every day instead. Over time, my seemingly unrelated thoughts begin to cross-breed and synthesize, and eventually I get to the point where, like in a long Zelda session, I have to save my game. In my case, that means writing a book.
And what, exactly, is enshittification? It’s an explanation for why and how all the platforms have gone bad. Facebook is the poster child for this. First, a platform is good to its end users. Facebook wanted to steal MySpace’s users, so it promised not to spy on them or sell their data. Once that works, the platform then betrays its users and acts nice to its business customers by giving them users’ data. Then the platform betrays the businesses too: Facebook stopped targeting ads effectively but kept collecting advertisers’ money anyway. The end result is that the platform is really of value only to shareholders, but we all keep using it because that’s where our friends are.
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People might think, Tech isn’t shitty—look at all this cool stuff I can do. What are they missing? Take Google as an example. In 2019, to increase profits, it made its search engine worse by eliminating things like spell checking so people would have to search more than once to find what they were looking for—and therefore view more ads along the way. So Google Search got worse, and no rival replaced it—in part because Google was paying Apple $20 billion a year to make Google Search the default search engine for Safari.
How do we stop enshittification? There used to be things that resisted it: tech workers had bargaining power and believed in making their platforms good, so they pushed back on efforts to degrade them for profit. Competition law in the US collapsed in the 1980s, allowing these huge monopolies to form. And new laws made it illegal to reverse-engineer products and improve upon them. The US strong-armed Canada into adopting similar regulations in 2010 by threatening us with tariffs. The good news is that we can resurrect the fervour that led to competition law in the first place. If we got rid of those new laws, some ex-RIM person could hire a half-dozen Waterloo kids to jailbreak every Tesla in the country, unlocking all their paid software features. That’s way better than getting angry at Elon Musk—he likes the attention. If you want to kick him in the dongle, aim for his margins.
Wouldn’t that amount to stealing other people’s IP? Since time immemorial, people who owned things got to use them. Now, Tesla sells cars with software that limits the amount of battery you can use, and it charges a subscription to unlock the rest. And yet, the driver owns the whole battery—they’re being charged to use their own physical property. It’s like if I sold you a copy of Enshittification but then charged you extra to read the last chapter.
We have our own tech monopolies here in Canada: the companies that provide our internet and telecoms. Have they been enshittified? Yes, but they don’t have to be. Telecoms can’t exist without the public sector—you can’t lay fibre optic cables through Toronto without help from the City of Toronto. One thing we could do is install public fibre optic cables, let the city run its own internet service and let other companies run their own wires too. That way, the telecom giants would be disciplined by competition.
What can regular people do to push back against platform decay? Vote with their wallets? Voting with your wallet is a mug’s game: the people who want you to do that always have a thicker wallet than you. It kind of works when you have truly competitive markets. But look how many grocery stores Galen Weston Jr. owns! Switching from one to the other does nothing. What I think we’re seeing is a surge in anger about the climate emergency and the erosion of democracy. All these movements are really fighting the same enemy, which is the ongoing concentration of wealth.
That phenomenon is even more pronounced in the States than in Canada. I’m surprised you haven’t joined the exodus from the US already. This is where my wife’s job is—she’s a creative technologist at a movie studio—but Toronto remains a significant place in my imagination. I get lost everywhere else. Toronto is the only place in the world where I can stumble out of a bar at 2 a.m. and never take a wrong turn on the way home.
What’s next for you? I have another essay collection coming out and a roundup of fiction stories from my Little Brother series, plus graphic novel adaptations of my novella Unauthorized Bread and Enshittification. Besides that, America is slipping into a fascist dictatorship, so maybe if my wife retires we’ll move back to Canada. As Yogi Berra said, “Prediction is hard, especially about the future.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Anthony Milton is a freelance journalist based in Toronto specializing in long-form magazine writing. He previously worked as an assistant editor at Toronto Life, where he launched the Front Row newsletter. He regularly contributes all sorts of stories to the magazine, including deep dives on sports, business and housing as well as short-form commentary on our ever-changing city, from its obsession with cherry blossoms to its maddening NIMBYism. His work has also appeared in Maclean’s, Ricochet, TVO, the Trillium and more.
