Enshittification and “Breaking Kings” (with Cory Doctorow at Web Summit)

In this live interview recorded in November at Web Summit 2025 in Lisbon, Cory Doctorow returns to Revolution.Social to talk about building alternatives to “enshittified” digital platforms. 

"Apps are websites that are illegal to protect your privacy while you use them," Cory explains. "The reason companies are so horny to get you to use their apps is because they can't be modified in that way. No one's ever installed an ad blocker for an app." 

Cory and Rabble also discuss how Europe could export jailbreaking tools as industrial policy, why other countries should respond to American tariffs with a targeted strike against the tech industry, and why tech workers should have unionized when they had leverage.

Chapters:

00:00:00 Introduction 00:03:06 Anticircumvention Laws & GDPR 00:06:54 Apple and Google's DRM Controls 00:09:14 Chokepoint Capitalism and the EuroStack 00:11:10 Adversarial Interoperability 00:14:09 Printer Ink vs. Stallion Semen 00:15:38 The AI Bubble Will Pop 00:18:48 Tech Bosses Aren't Afraid of Their Workers

Read Cory’s new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It https://bookshop.org/p/books/enshittification-why-everything-suddenly-got-worse-and-what-to-do-about-it-cory-doctorow/d3f8483b158906ce

Follow Rabble on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rabble.nz

Follow the podcast: https://episodes.fm/1824528874

This episode was produced and edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm, and executive produced by Alice Chan from Flock Marketing.

To learn more about Rabble’s social media bill of rights, and sign up for our newsletter, visit https://revolution.social/