Canadian Writers Abroad

Enshittification ( MCD × Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025)) by Cory Doctorow.
Review by Mark Sampson.

It felt somewhat apropos to read Enshittification, author and tech-world commentator Cory Doctorow’s new non-fiction title, shortly after I returned from an eight-day vacation in Berlin. It was a trip my wife and I had planned ourselves — no travel agent and tour guide company required — by relying almost entirely on three resources: a sturdy-spined Lonely Planet guide (purchased, alas, on Amazon), the “Stays” and “Flights” tabs on Expedia.ca, and the public transit function in Google Maps. This latter tool was especially helpful. By the time I realized that Google would literally tell us which end of a Berlin subway train to board to best position ourselves for the station exit we needed at the other end, I felt like I was living in some kind of futuristic utopia. I guess this is what the tech bros mean by frictionless.      

But to read Doctorow’s jeremiad against the state of the current internet, you’d believe that the whole web is going to hell in a handbasket. Doctorow, the author of many books (including the excellent short story collection, Radicalized), is clearly in love with his own cheekily profane neologism. Enshittification has a three-stage trajectory: tech companies spending millions (if not billions) of dollars to “give” us an online service or experience we all love and start using en masse and come to rely on, followed by forging deals with suppliers of that service or experience to gain a monopoly that locks both users and suppliers to the tech company’s platform, followed by a significant decay of the platform’s functionality and features due to that monopoly. We all then accept this decay because it’s too inconvenient to leave.

It’s an engaging theory even in the face of countervailing examples in practice (Google Maps and Expedia being two services that seem to have avoided enshittification). Yet, the fact that Doctorow starts riffing on his own concept before fully arguing his point — he uses terms like “the Enshittocene” and “enshittifactory impulses” less than a quarter of the way into this book — suggests that he thinks we’ve already accepted his premise without seeing the evidence. His case studies all come from the worst players in this space: Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Twitter (now known as X). It’s almost like he sees the “old, good internet” as a cool, obscure band he once loved but has since sold out by becoming too popular. Doctorow comes off as nostalgic for a version of the web that maybe never existed:

For technologists who lived through the transition to the internet and its immediate aftermath, there was a legitimate, widespread, and justifiable sense of excitement. After decades of stultifying monopoly control, the field of networking — that is, of letting people all over the world interact with one another directly —was exploding. If you had a good idea, you could just try it and no AT&T executive in New Jersey could sic the phone cops on you. What a time to be alive!

The problem when examining the “new, bad internet” is that Doctorow has conflated mild inconvenience with the larger, more existential threats and malfeasance that Big Tech poses to humanity. There is, for example, no real mention of artificial intelligence (AI) in Enshittification prior to page 100. There is no real reckoning, for example, with the environmental consequences of widespread AI use. He doesn’t really get into how the proliferating of online disinformation is manipulating our very notion of truth, or how impossible it seems to reverse people’s acceptance of web-propagated lies and conspiracy theories once they believe them.

Instead, Doctorow is more annoyed that he can’t hack his favourite apps and appliances so he can use them the way he wants, including on competitors’ platforms and hardware. I understand his frustration — I too hate that my printer includes software that forces me to use its (and only its) overpriced cartridges — but what he seems to be advocating for is a broader normalization of theft.

The normalization of theft has been a prevailing part of the web since at least Napster, and the problem is not so much technological as it is attitudinal. Doctorow’s beloved “old, good internet” only found its footing once people started to believe that it was okay to just steal stuff online if the technology made it possible to do so, and things like copyright, subscription fees, and royalties were just pesky impediments to the “democratizing” of the web and its “free” flow of information. You don’t have to be a technologist to see how the technology rewired people’s brains to justify a culture of burglary. And once you justify a culture of burglary, it’s pretty easy to draw a straight line from peer-to-peer theft tools like Napster to Amazon selling books at below cost to sink the competition, to Facebook stealing people’s personal data and selling it to advertisers, to AI companies scraping millions of copyrighted books to train their large language models, to students using that AI to pass off term papers they didn’t write as their own work. If everyone’s a crook, then nobody really is.

So, if the whole history of the web — “old, good” and “new, bad” — is predicated on theft, then it’s understandable that Doctorow is piqued that he can’t pick the digital rights management (DRM) lock on an Audible-exclusive audiobook and play it on a platform of his choice. But DRM is just another way of saying copyright. Here in Canada, copyright theft is not only encouraged — it’s codified in legislation: broad fair‑dealing rules, for example, have allowed universities to replace paid licences with their own copying guidelines, an ambiguity that, creators argue, has enabled widespread unpaid use of educational materials and helped hollow out the country’s publishing sector. If we can’t stop even that, what chance do we have against Big Tech? But the problem is attitudinal. Call me idealistic, but I think protections around copyright should be applied uniformly — whether you’re a tech company that made $50 billion last year or an obscure Canadian author like me, who earned less than $5,000 from his writing over the same period. Had we rejected the culture of theft to begin with, maybe tech companies wouldn’t be making $50 billion a year in the first place.

All this makes it sound like I don’t think there’s much value in reading Enshittification, and that’s not true. Doctorow’s insights into the unfair practices of Big Tech are spot on. His own story of trying to get “verified” on a freshly enshittified (crap — there I go, riffing on his term!) Twitter is hilarious. He’s right to praise the Biden administration for being the first to challenge antitrust laws and norms in the US that have led to so much corporate consolidation and oligarchy. He’s also right to point out how odious it is to be charged a monthly or annual subscription fee on software for a piece of technology we’ve purchased and now own — anything from cars and household appliances to the colours available to us in Adobe. Citing Greek economist and politician Yanis Varoufakis, Doctorow calls all this what is it is — technofeudalism:

Varoufakis’s technofeudalism thesis holds that, in the years after the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, tech was transformed from a primarily profit-seeking enterprise to a primarily rent-seeking enterprise. The thing that makes the tech giants powerful is that they control “factors of production” that they rent to actual, productive businesses.

Still, Doctorow’s primary concern is that this hellscape results in crap products and services. This takes me back to where I started this review — with my trip to Berlin. What drew me there was a 20-year obsession with the history and culture of the German Democratic Republic, the totalitarian regime also known as East Germany. Talk about enshittification. The GDR was notorious for creating crappy, unreliable products and services, and it’s not hard to draw parallels between the Stalinist centralization of an economy and technofeudalism. They both have the same root problem: a lack of competition. But to focus on the GDR’s shoddy consumer products or the years-long wait to receive your government-issued car, the “Trabi,” feels beside the point. East Germany was, at its heart, a brutal surveillance state that was obsessed with monitoring, manipulating and controlling people’s very sense of reality and the truth. Big Tech has, without a doubt, gone in that direction, too. And so, while it’s fun to read a whole book that expands upon a cute neologism, it’s also important not to lose sight of what’s really at stake if Big Tech gets its way.

Cory Doctorow was born in Toronto and divides his time between Los Angeles and London, England. His varied work includes two Martin Hench crime thrillers (Picks and Shovels); tech policy books (The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation,and Chokepoint Capitalism); young adult (Little Brother series); and science fiction and fantasy books (The Lost Cause, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town). Doctorow moved to London as director of European Affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) from 2002-2006. In 2009, he was a Scholar in Virtual Residence for the University of Waterloo’s Independent Studies program. In 2015, he left London for California. Radicalized, his collection of four self-contained science-fiction novellas (Tor Books, 2019) was selected for the 2020 Canada Reads. Cory Doctorow was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2020. He was a co-editor of Boing Boing and now posts at Pluralistic.

Further

• Cory Doctorow, The Canadian Encyclopedia and in more detail at Wikipedia.
• Cory Doctorow author page Macmillan Publishing and Tor Publishing.
• Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
• Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
• University of Waterloo Virtual Residence Independent Studies announcement, 2009.
• Pluralistic: Daily Links from Cory Doctorow.
• Doctorow on AI at The Guardian.
• Mark Sampson author page at Now or Never Publishing, at Wolsak & Wynn, and at Dundurn Press.
• Other reviews by Mark Sampson: Free Range Reading and Canadian Writers Abroad.