A Powerhouse Writer Found One Word to Change the Debate About Tech
The New York Times Gift Article: “Cory Doctorow’s new book looks to offer comfort, and solutions, to the inescapable feeling that digital platforms have gotten worse.
Over the course of a nearly four-decade career, Cory Doctorow has written 15 novels, four graphic novels, dozens of short stories, six nonfiction books, approximately 60,000 blog posts and thousands of essays.And yet for all the millions of words he’s published, these days the award-winning science fiction author and veteran internet activist is best known for just a single one: Enshittification.
The term, which Doctorow, 54, popularized in essays in 2022and 2023, refers to the way that online platforms become worse to use over time, as the corporations that own them try to make more money. Though the coinage is cheeky, in Doctorow’s telling the phenomenon it describes is a specific, nearly scientific process that progresses according to discrete stages, like a disease.
Since then, the meaning has expanded to encompass a general vibe — a feeling far greater than frustration at Facebook, which long ago ceased being a good way to connect with friends, or Google, whose search is now baggy with SEO spam. Of late, the idea has been employed to describe everything from video games to television to American democracy itself. “It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. It’s even terrifying,” Doctorow said in a 2024 speech.
On Tuesday, Farrar Straus & Giroux will release “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It,” Doctorow’s book-length elaboration on his essays, complete with case studies (Uber, Twitter, Photoshop) and his prescriptions for change, which revolve around breaking up big tech companies and regulating them more robustly.
Still, given the thousands of words Doctorow has already, characteristically, written on the subject, the question arises:
Why write a book at all? Over an avocado malted and poached eggs at a Lower Manhattan diner, Doctorow used a nerdy simile — care of Nintendo’s “Legend of Zelda” series of games — to explain. “The books are kind of like the save game point in a long ‘Zelda’ game,” Doctorow said. “The articles are like the individual missions, but the books are where I crystallize everything up to that point.”
And if it’s possible to crystallize such a prolific writing life into a single word, this one isn’t half bad. “It might look like he’s all over the place because he does so many things, but they are all part of a coherent plan — his push to make a more humane and democratic, user-friendly, non-capitalist, non-exploitative internet,” said Kim Stanley Robinson, the eminent science fiction author and a friend of Doctorow’s…”
