Cory Doctorow is a Canadian technology critic and digital-rights activist.Julia Galdo and Cody Cloud/Supplied
Google showing a wall of ads before any real results. Facebook promising to “never spy on you,” before evolving into a mass surveillance apparatus. Amazon’s highest-ranked products buoyed by fake reviews.
If you feel like the websites, apps and platforms that dominate our lives have become increasingly inferior, you’re not alone. Canadian technology critic and digital-rights activist Cory Doctorow has even invented a word for it: enshittification.
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Raincoast Books/Supplied
In his new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Doctorow describes the four-step process that led to this decay – and offers policy-level solutions to build a new, good internet, including stronger antitrust and privacy laws. In Canada specifically, he calls on the federal government to roll back anti-circumvention legislation so that local companies can make goods and services compatible with devices from American tech giants, such as an independent app store for Apple phones.
The Globe and Mail spoke with Doctorow while he was on his book tour in Chicago.
In terms of solutions, the book is focused on policy rather than individual-level changes. How come?
This is not an individual problem and it doesn’t have individual solutions.
If you’re a Canadian who’s like, “Maybe it’s time to leave Facebook and go to Bluesky or Mastodon,” by all means, if that’s what you want to do, do it. It’ll make you happier and probably be better for your mental health. But don’t kid yourself that you’re making a systemic difference by making different consumption choices. That’s like saying, “We’re going to stop the wildfires by recycling very diligently.”
You need systemic interventions, and there are groups that work systemically on this. In Canada, there’s OpenMedia.ca, there’s the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic. We can say no to buying things with public money unless they are modified by Canadian companies to serve Canadian needs.
Take the hours that you spend agonizing about your consumption choices and trying futilely to vote with your wallet – you never win when you vote with your wallet because your wallet isn’t as thick as the people you’re voting against – and think about how you’re going to make a difference as a citizen, not as a consumer.
How do you see the current state of artificial intelligence in the enshittification process?
Julia Galdo and Cody Cloud/Supplied
AI companies are doing a bunch of stuff that’s quite enshittifitory. They’re inserting ads, they’re putting in shopping. They have the formal characteristics that make enshittification really easy because they’re a black box. You can never distinguish between the case where the AI recommended that you do something that’s good for the shareholders but bad for you because it made an error, or because it was programmed to do that.
There’s been a lot of focus on copyrighted data, which I think is probably a mistake. What we should really be worried about is private data. People who have AI therapist chatbots are putting all kinds of private data into AI, and that’s stuff you can’t get by scraping the web.
If you’ve bought into the AI company’s story that, “We have to have unique training data to have a competitive edge over our rivals,” then they’re going to be harvesting this stuff.
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The data privacy implications are so alarming because we saw this happen with the social-media companies already, and yet, it also feels like the issue that’s the hardest to fight.
The problem isn’t that we lack the potential for political will. The problem is that people don’t understand that what they’re angry about is privacy. They think they’re angry about grandma becoming QAnon and they blame Facebook, or they’re angry because their kid is anorexic and they blame Instagram, or they’re angry because the January 6th rioters – or anti-ICE protesters – were rounded up with Google location data.
What they’re all angry about is privacy. We’ve gotten closer to a privacy law every year for the last eight years, and it’s always been bipartisan, and it keeps getting more bipartisan. People are worried about this stuff for good reason, and they’re starting to have a consciousness of the underlying systemic roots.
Are you feeling optimistic then?
I’m definitely not optimistic, but I’m very hopeful. Hope is the belief that if you materially alter your circumstances for the better, you will see ways to continue to do so that you couldn’t see from where you are now. And the step we can take due to the geopolitical changes is the largest step I’ve seen in my career in 25 years.
In 2024, the Trudeau government whipped its caucus to pass a bill that expanded the powers of the Competition Bureau to make it one of the most powerful competition regulators in the world – and increased its budget so that it could use those new powers.
We have seen antitrust surges in the European Union, but also South Korea, Japan and Singapore. Why did Biden feel that he must do antitrust when he was in office? Why did Trump do antitrust in 2019? Some big geopolitical force is happening. This is our moment and we should be seizing it.
This interview has been edited and condensed.