I spent last weekend at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at Carriageworks in Sydney, a high-profile collision of writers, thinkers, provocateurs and people who have made a career out of worrying in public. The main festival weekend was 22–23 August, with a line-up that included Peter Singer, Stan Grant and Maria Ressa.
I stayed upstairs at the Glengarry Castle Hotel in Redfern, in a beautiful old room that makes you briefly wonder whether you should stop travelling altogether and move into a pub. It was, fortunately, a staggering distance from Carriageworks: close enough to walk, far enough to feel that I had earned a beer on the way home.
I attended a few sessions, but the standout was Cory Doctorow on Sunday afternoon. His Enshittification event was sold out, which seems entirely appropriate. There is clearly an appetite for someone to explain, with intelligence and vulgarity, why so much of contemporary digital life feels so shit.
Doctorow was one of the original inhabitants of the popular internet: novelist, activist, blogger (Boing Boing co-editor), a bloke whose career stretches back to when the web still seemed like a strange public library rather than a shopping centre run by surveillance companies. I had not followed him closely for a couple of decades, but it was immediately apparent why he remains such an effective public commentator. He is quick, erudite, furious and exceptionally funny.
And yes: enshittification is a very good word. One wishes one had coined it before him. Doctorow’s central proposition is more precise than the word suggests. Enshittification is not merely the observation that platforms become worse. It is a three-stage account of how this happens.
First, a platform is good to its users: it offers convenience, connection, entertainment, and cheapness, while quietly making departure difficult. Then it worsens the user experience to provide more value to business customers. Finally, once users and businesses are mutually locked in, it turns on both groups and extracts value for shareholders.
Facebook is his canonical example. In its earlier life, it offered a simple and compelling promise: come here, find your friends, see what they post, share your own small triumphs and humiliations. The service was useful because your friends were there; your friends were there because you were there. This is the digital equivalent of discovering that every person you know has moved into the same 1990s share house.
Once that social lock-in was established, Facebook could make the platform less useful for ordinary users while making it more attractive to advertisers and publishers. It could surveil people in extraordinary detail, offer advertisers exquisitely targeted access to them, and present publishers with apparently limitless traffic.
Then comes the final act. The platform increases advertising costs, diminishes the reliability of targeting, proliferates advertising fraud, suppresses the posts users asked to see, and makes publishers increasingly dependent on the platform’s own monetisation system. Everyone is stuck; everyone gets a worse deal; shareholders take the surplus.
It is a compelling explanation because it captures a feeling most of us recognise. You open Facebook, Instagram, Google Search, Amazon or LinkedIn and encounter the mild suspicion that the service is now actively working against you. The algorithm has placed an obstacle between you and what you came for, then offered to remove it if you’re prepared to pay.
Doctorow’s achievement is to make this dynamic sound both like political economy and a very bad house party.
A very good performance!
Doctorow delivers this argument with the timing of a seasoned stand-up comic, albeit one who has read the financial literature. He can move from a detailed explanation of market concentration to an aside about the indignity of having advertisements stuffed directly into one’s face. It is entertaining because the jokes do not sit apart from the analysis; they are the analysis, compressed and sharpened.
He has said that a “minor licence to vulgarity” helps bring people to a technical critique of platform economics. The word enshittification is memorable not because it is a swear word but because it names an experience that previously required several paragraphs of dull institutional language to explain.
The audience, mostly ageing Gen Xers, appeared entirely at home with this. There was the familiar recognition of people who remember an internet before death scrolls, apps, logins, algorithmic recommendations and monitoring. We were, in other words, the demographic most likely to remember that finding your friends online did not first require consenting to be monitored.
Doctorow’s broader argument is that this was not inevitable. Enshittification is a result of policy choices, market concentration, weak competition law and a corporate culture that treats public dependence as an opportunity for extraction. People make systems; and a collective can alter them.
The AI reservation
Where I was less persuaded was on AI. Doctorow’s new book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It’s Too Late, is explicitly a critique of AI hype and the power relations embedded in its deployment. Fair enough: there is certainly no shortage of this type of criticism.
But Doctorow’s grasp of AI, at least in the presentation, felt narrower than his understanding of platforms. He sees AI principally through the lens of capitalism: a bubble, an instrument of corporate power, a mechanism for degrading labour. These are real and important dimensions. Yet they are not the whole technology.
AI is seriously good tech. It has already changed how people write, code, translate, search, model, plan, synthesise information and learn. Its effects in higher education are neither reducible to enshitification nor to an executive scheme for eliminating labour. There are genuinely new methods emerging: collaborative drafting, adaptive feedback, synthetic tutors, research assistance, multimodal analysis, and forms of writing that treat prompting, revision and verification as intellectual practices rather than shortcuts.
Doctorow is not obliged to be an enthusiast. Criticism is valuable, particularly when it punctures the self-serving rhetoric of technology companies. But there is a risk in treating AI as merely another chapter in the internet’s long decline. The history of the web has made him alert to capture, and rightly so. It may also make him less interested in what people are doing with new AI tools.
Still, I will read The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI and get back to you. Doctorow has earned that much. He remains one of the rare technology critics who can make structural analysis feel urgent, comprehensible and funny, which is more useful than another articulate cultural critic complaining that everything is shit.
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