Cory Doctorow at home in California this month. Photographed by Emily Shur for the Nerve
Arriving on a warm sunny morning at what I hope is Cory Doctorow’s home, in Burbank in greater Los Angeles, I am relieved to find a Kia Niro parked in the driveway. I’ve been given instructions – I am to go through a side gate into the back garden where I am to find the Canadian-British-American author, blogger, podcaster, tech critic and internet activist writing, as is his habit, in his hammock. Only I don’t know what his house looks like because it’s blurred on Google Street View.
The reason the car reassures me is that his Kia gets panned in his new book, Enshittification. Doctorow captured the zeitgeist when, in 2022, he coined that term and began to use it in essays on his daily blog and newsletter, Pluralistic, to describe the way our once beloved tech platforms and services have got progressively worse in the relentless pursuit of profit.
The book, which Doctorow counts as his seventh major work of non-fiction (altogether he has written more than 30 books, including his science fiction novels), expands his argument, and the American edition sports a large poo emoji on the cover (the British version is more staid).
The Kia comes up because our increasingly networked goods – from cars to baby bassinets – are far from immune from the phenomenon. The car quietly harvests data on its drivers’ habits and Kia demands an annual subscription fee to unlock certain digitally enabled features via an app (which Doctorow refuses to pay). It is extractive and depressing, he writes.
I tiptoe through the gate into the back garden. It is a patio oasis with all manner of outdoor seating, beyond which is a pirate-themed backyard bar (a pandemic project designed by his wife). Doctorow springs to his feet to greet me, hammock swinging in his wake. He looks perfectly at home in neon pink Native shoes and a black skull T-shirt that riffs off the logo of horror-punk band the Misfits. Very LA.
“People are stuck on platforms not because they like them, but because it will cost them too much to leave”
Doctorow struck such a nerve with “enshittification” that it was named word of the year by the American Dialect Society in 2023 and by Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary in 2024. Other dictionaries have since taken it up. Earlier this year, Lyft’s CEO even used it – telling shareholders the ride-hailing platform would resist enshittification. The irony isn’t lost on Doctorow – he regards Lyft and Uber as being about as enshittified as things get – but he’s fine with the term spreading however it will. “I came up with all kinds of ways to talk about this over 20 years,” Doctorow says. “Swearing is what made people excited about it.”
The purpose of the book, which is aimed at “normie” everyday internet users, isn’t just to raise awareness about the tech oligarchy and its monopolistic grip but to ignite a movement for change. If you name an inchoate feeling, and underpin it with a structural analysis so people understand the roots of the problem, from that can erupt the political struggle to make a better internet. One closer to what it was like in the early days, more public park than shopping mall, and which Doctorow deeply misses. “It's not just consciousness-raising, it is coalition-building,” he says.
The book frames enshittification as a disease. The symptoms are ones we probably all recognise: the increasing frustration of looking for the product you actually want on Amazon; the sludge that clogs your Facebook feed; Google search results brimming with ads, promotions and low-quality pages; and Microsoft Windows endlessly steering you into its own services – even when you could have sworn you had already said no.
Doctorow argues the decay follows a recurring pattern: platforms start by offering great service, then degrade it once users are locked in, favouring business customers instead. When those businesses are locked in too, they’re squeezed for profit until all that remains is just enough value to keep everyone stuck – and the platform becomes, well, that poo emoji.
The degradation began, he reckons, in the early 2010s, and happened gradually as tech firms saw what they could get away with, developing to the point where we are now: deep in the “enshittocene” where “zombie platforms” which should have been dead long ago have users and businesses trapped because it will cost them too much in terms of friends, audience or customers to leave. “People love their friends more than they hate Mark Zuckerberg,” explains Doctorow.
The reason for the phenomenon, he explains, is we have allowed the “disciplining forces” that might stop companies from giving in to their enshittifying impulses to become too weak. “The platforms didn't get worse because platform bosses got more evil; they got worse because we let them,” says Doctorow.
Those forces include competition, which generally drives better products, and regulation, which sets the rules and makes sure companies follow them. The main reason that competition is lacking, he explains, is because competition (or antitrust) law has gone largely unenforced. Allowed to flourish as monopolies, the big tech companies have then been able to team up to “capture their regulators”, he argues.
He cites, for example, the recent departure of the chair of the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority after he wasn’t considered pro-business enough: his interim replacement is a former UK Amazon boss. Ireland – home to the European headquarters of many US tech giants – has been widely accused of slow-walking investigations and being too lenient, and has recently appointed a former Meta employee as a top data protection official. The US, Doctorow notes, hasn’t passed a new consumer privacy law since 1988.
The tech industry also formerly had two unique disciplining forces of its own which have been withering away. Rivals could create interoperable tools to counter mischievous actions a firm might take to lock in users – but anti-circumvention laws and tactics have weakened that threat. Also, a skilled tech workforce acted as a defensive wall, with many taking pride in their products and resisting enshittification. But layoffs have eroded that line too.
He points to apps that adjust the pay offered to nurses based on their credit card data, betting that higher debt means more desperation
Other industries face enshittification, yet in tech it’s amplified. The industry “was born as antitrust was dying,” says Doctorow, growing up without the instinct to behave well. Also, it is easy for tech platforms to enshittify because, in digital systems, rules for individual users – prices, pay, and perks – can be “twiddled”. He points to on-demand nursing apps that adjust the pay offered to nurses based on their credit card debt, betting that higher debt means more desperation.
Enshittification isn’t inevitable under capitalism, Doctorow emphasises (though he himself is no true believer in markets, identifying, as he does, as a democratic socialist). It’s a result of the forces that once restrained it falling away. And it matters particularly for tech platforms not because tech itself is important, but because – from social media to email lists – the internet is so foundational to political organising.
Doctorow, 54, was born and grew up in Toronto, Canada. Technology and radical politics came together from an early age. His Trotskyist Jewish parents, of Eastern European descent, were educators and organisers particularly involved in the nuclear disarmament and women’s movements.
When his father – a computer programmer who had retrained as a teacher – brought home an early Apple computer one summer, Doctorow was hooked. “My dad didn’t get to touch it,” he says. Meanwhile, the Toronto public library system turned Doctorow on to science fiction.
Cory Doctorow in his garden in Burbank, California. Photograph: Emily Shur for the Nerve
He bounced between four universities, studying computer science and humanities, but never finished his degree. In 1993, he dropped out for good, taking a programming job in New York at a multimedia company, Voyager. When the CD-Rom market that the company was in collapsed, he pivoted to web development before co-founding a software startup. This was an open-source peer-to-peer search engine called OpenCola which took him to San Francisco, and which achieved minor fame by using an open-source soda recipe as a promotional tool. “I still have some cans,” says Doctorow. When, amid the 2000 dotcom crash, the company’s venture capitalist backers tried to sell it to Microsoft, stripping the founders of their equity, Doctorow quit in protest and the deal later collapsed.
Eyes opened in a new way, he began working as a full-time staff member for the non-profit cyber rights organisation the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). He also began contributing to a pioneering new group blog which would go on to shape online culture – Boing Boing – and publishing his first sci-fi novels.
In 2004, he moved to London, serving originally as the EFF’s European director before transitioning to a role as a special adviser, which he still has today, so he could concentrate on his writing. He met his British wife, and his daughter was born in the UK before his family moved to Los Angeles in 2015. He left Boing Boing in 2020, after nearly two decades and what he estimates is some 50,000 blogposts, though he still retains co-ownership.
“This is not just consciousness-raising, it is coalition-building"
Blogging, Doctorow explains, is like keeping “the world’s most thorough notebook” and seems key to his prolific book output. It’s where he refines book material and builds a searchable record of his ideas. “You have this database of everything you've ever thought and why,” he says. Doing it in public, with readers pushing back, helps him anticipate objections and shore up weak points in his arguments.
Doctorow’s weekly podcast, Craphound, running since the mid-2000s, features updates on his work and readings from his books or essays. It also carries a holiday tradition: an annual interview with his daughter – now 17 and at university – about her year. Whether it continues is uncertain: the 2024 episode closed with them reading the poem Jabberwocky together, after which she declared the tradition “cringe”.
Doctorow says the tech products he uses day-to-day are mostly “the same products as everybody else”. He’s on X – where, he says, Elon Musk once dubbed him an “enemy of humanity” – though he is still calling it Twitter and has a plan to quit. He often buys items on Amazon out of necessity. “Our local merchants that sold a wide variety of products have shuttered and it is not going to help the cause for me to drive two hours to shop across town in Target or Walmart,” he says.
There are a few exceptions. He runs his own email server out of a secure facility in Toronto, records his own audiobooks to avoid the digital rights management practices of Audible, Amazon’s audiobook platform, and has a laptop designed to be repairable by its users. “There are lots of people who are never going to do any of this and that is fine. It is fine that there are intermediaries – I just don't want them to be so powerful that they usurp the relationship between the parties they mediate between,” he says.
If the internet is ailing, Doctorow has his own health struggles too. Later, as we sip cold fizzy water in his backyard bar – where swings serve as seats and the space is crammed with art, tchotchkes and keepsakes – he reveals that he suffers from chronic pain. It is why he spends so much time in the hammock: sitting upright isn’t very comfortable for someone whose biomechanics have been wrecked by arthritis. Double hip replacements haven’t helped – though they do make for quite the souvenir. He points a framed case above the bar containing the head of one of his femurs. “I wanted to make soup stock, but the wife said no,” he jokes.
He has also recently received a cancer diagnosis: early-stage cancer of the lymphatic system, which he describes as “extremely treatable”. He’ll start immunotherapy next year, once the Enshittification book tour wraps up. Later, he sends me a beautifully written blogpost from late 2024 with the details, in which he makes the point that those with privilege who spot gaps in healthcare should advocate to fix them, because doing so benefits everyone. It isn’t hard to see how that maps to the way Doctorow sees his responsibility with the internet.
Doctorow’s cure for the internet’s enshittification isn’t personal choices. “There's not much that an individual can do … personal consumption isn't going to resolve it,” he says. Real change requires collective action, including at the ballot box.
Cory Doctorow at the Re:publica Internet conference in Berlin, 2015. Photo by Britta Pedersen/picture alliance via Getty Images
Competition could return through antitrust, with breaking up companies being the most canonical remedy. New privacy laws, open standards, and unionised tech workers could also push back against enshittification. He imagines “right-to-exit” policies – one click to export your data and followers, with regulators stepping in if platforms resist. Change is already stirring, he notes, especially in antitrust. “We’ve seen more activity in the past four years than in 40,” he says, as governments in the US, EU, and UK have been waking up – maybe because enshittification “can’t get worse”.
David Karpf, an internet scholar at George Washington University believes Doctorow’s framing “captures something about the moment that probably wasn’t true 10 years ago”. People are feeling it viscerally, he adds. “The stories we tell ourselves about the way the internet is going wrong are important because they suggest the types of solutions that we should pursue.”
My Cook’s tour ends in Doctorow’s office, full of books and more memorabilia and knick-knacks. Even if these days he uses the hammock for most of his work, this is where he still does his podcasting.
As I leave, he asks – politely – if he might point out something he’s noticed: my second toe, peeking through my sandals, is slightly longer than my big toe, just like on the Statue of Liberty’s left foot. He’s certain this has a name (I later look it up – it is called a Morton’s toe). It is a small, quirky detail that speaks to Doctorow’s powers of observation, and suddenly I’m looking at my foot differently. And I can’t help but see the parallel. It is easy to dismiss the decay of our platforms as “just how the internet is”, particularly if you never knew the old one. But once named, it becomes impossible not to notice enshittification everywhere and, perhaps, even feel compelled to act. (Though, for the record, I’m fine with my “toe of liberty”.)
Enshittification is published by Verso, £22 (in the UK). Cory Doctorow will be in conversation with Nerve co-founder Carole Cadwalladr on Tuesday 18 November in London. Nerve members get priority booking and details will be emailed in next few days. Sign up for membership here.
Grassroots organisations campaigning for digital rights include the Open Rights Group in the UK and the Electronic Frontier Alliance in the US