EP 346 Cory Doctorow on Why the Internet Got Worse and What to Do About It

Jim Rutt Show Podcasts

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Jim talked with Cory Doctorow—prolific sci-fi and nonfiction author, journalist, activist, EFF special adviser, and author of Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It—about how structural forces degraded the internet, and what citizens (not consumers) can actually do about it.

They discussed:

  • The origin of “enshittification”—Cory’s January 2023 blog post, its viral spread, and its naming as Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society
  • Two-sided markets & the persistence of intermediaries
  • Crad Kilodney as a self-publishing illustration, and why platform middlemen survive even when they shouldn’t
  • Monopsony vs. monopoly
  • The real statistics of Amazon’s dominance of book sales
  • The three-stage enshittification life cycle, using Facebook as the case study
  • The brittle equilibrium of late-stage enshittification—the thin line between “I hate this but can’t leave” and mass exodus
  • The metaverse as Facebook’s terminal pivot—Zuckerberg’s “legless, sexless, low-polygon” avatar world stolen from a 25-year-old cyberpunk novel, and why it still served him by forestalling investor sell-offs
  • Zuckerberg as Rich Uncle Pennybags, not Willy Wonka
  • Amazon’s early history & Bezos’s “your margin is my opportunity” mantra
  • Amazon’s junk fees (now 50–60% and rising) and the $80 billion/year advertising payola business
  • The consumer welfare doctrine—Robert Bork’s antitrust theory that monopoly is efficient, and why allowing monopsonies inevitably produces monopolies
  • Jim’s personal experience with the Thomson-West legal publishing merger
  • Tech workers as a structural check on enshittification
  • The convergence enabling enshittification: merger to monopoly → regulatory capture → loss of worker leverage → DMCA blocking entrants → abuse
  • The moral decay of business culture—from “we won’t do profitable things we think are wrong,” to “do whatever’s arguably legal,” to “do whatever’s illegal if the fine is less than the benefit”
  • Google’s $20 billion/year payment to Apple to stay off the search market
  • Why predatory pricing cases went unenforced
  • What citizens (not consumers) can do
  • The death of federal antitrust enforcement and international ripple effects
  • State-level antitrust action as a remaining avenue
  • The right to repair as an easy entry point
  • Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs as a paradoxical opportunity
  • Tech as geopolitical weapon—Microsoft accounts bricked for a Brazilian judge who sentenced Bolsonaro; the ICC chief prosecutor’s accounts shut down after the Netanyahu arrest warrant
  • The vision for open, auditable, sovereign digital public goods to replace the enshittified American Internet—run internationally, controlled locally

… and much more.

Links

Bio

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, and journalist. He is the author of many books, including the forthcoming The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It’s Too Late. Previous works include Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, the subject of this interview; The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, a Big Tech disassembly manual; Red Team Blues, a science fiction crime thriller; Chokepoint Capitalism, nonfiction about monopoly and creative labor markets; the Little Brother series for young adults; In Real Life, a graphic novel; and the picture book Poesy the Monster Slayer. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.