Enshittification: The Rot at the Heart of Big Tech - Cory Doctorow | #67

Remember when the Internet was a fun place, not where you were hypersurveilled while doomscrolling?

Enshittification. It’s a word that captures what's happened to the Internet—and critically, why. It has taken the world by storm, dubbed the 2023 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society and the 2024 Word of the Year by the Macquarie Dictionary. It’s a delicious word—playfully naughty and piercingly descriptive.

Grab your copy of Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It here!

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Today’s guest is the man behind the word, and he’s something of an expert in crystallizing complex ideas with memorable turns of phrase. What started as a blog post a few years back has become a full-blown book (and a great one, at that, so pick your copy now!). The concept describes the process by which tech products degrade over time—specifically through economic and political pressures and incentive structures—and the book breaks this down in page-turning detail, with case studies that make your stomach turn. If you’ve interacted with tech products at all over the past couple decades, everything about this book will ring painfully true to you.

But all hope is not lost; Cory also outlines how we fight against these enshittificatory processes. It’s truly a must-read, and in the meantime, I hope this conversation is an invitation into this vital body of ideas. So without further ado, please enjoy this illuminating conversation with Cory Doctorow.

BIO: Cory Doctorow is a blogger, journalist, and activist. For more than twenty years, he has worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation on campaigns to safeguard and further our human rights online. He was coeditor of the weblog Boing Boing for nineteen years and now maintains a daily(ish) newsletter at Pluralistic.net. He has written more than thirty books, including nonfiction books, many science fiction novels, collections of short stories and essays, young adult novels, graphic novels, and even a picture book. Born in Toronto, he now lives in Burbank, California. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in laws by York University and an honorary doctorate in computer science by the Open University. He has been inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association Hall of Fame and was awarded the Sir Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society. He holds visiting professorship and research appointments at MIT, the University of North Carolina, Cornell University, and the Open University.

CREDITS: This podcast is produced & edited by Adam Labrie & me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also edited the video version, which is available on YouTube.

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