Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It

Feb 26, 2025

Dive into the fascinating exploration of 'enshittification' and how it's reshaping the tech landscape. The discussion reveals the troubling consequences of gig economy practices on workers, particularly nurses. It critiques the rise of monopolies and highlights historical shifts in antitrust laws impacting corporate power dynamics. The renewed focus on antitrust enforcement worldwide promises to challenge tech giants. Finally, the podcast emphasizes the importance of labor unions and collective action in fostering social justice amid evolving economic demands.

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Quick takeaways

Inshittification highlights how online platforms degrade user experience by prioritizing profit over quality, impacting consumers negatively.

The manipulation of operational parameters by digital firms leads to algorithmic wage discrimination, particularly affecting vulnerable workers in various sectors.

Achieving a fairer digital landscape necessitates enhanced labor rights and anti-monopoly policies through collective action from workers, consumers, and governments.

Deep dives

Inshittification Explained

Inshittification refers to the decline in quality and user experience of online platforms as they prioritize profits over service. It occurs in three stages: first, a company is beneficial to its users to lock them in; second, it begins to abuse this user base for the benefit of advertisers or other business clients; and third, it extracts most of the value for itself while only leaving minimal benefits for users. An example discussed involves Google, which at first provided high-quality search results but has since filled its search pages with ads and unhelpful links to maximize revenue. This process represents a broader trend where businesses exploit user dependence to monetize their service while reducing overall value and quality.

Intro

2min

Upcoming Events and Reflections on Inshittification

4min

The Gig Economy's Impact on Nursing

14min

Understanding the Socio-political Context of Technology

4min

Unpacking Monopolies: The Rise of Corporate Power

23min

Resurgence of Antitrust Enforcement

8min

Struggles of Labor Unions in a Shifting Landscape

8min

Last night, I traveled to Toronto to deliver the annual Ursula Franklin Lecture at the University of Toronto’s Innis College. The lecture was called “With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It.” It’s the latest major speech in my series of talks on the subject, which started with last year’s McLuhan Lecture in Berlin, and continued with a summer Defcon keynote.

This speech specifically addresses the unique opportunities for disenshittification created by Trump’s rapid unscheduled midair disassembly of the international free trade system. The US used trade deals to force nearly every country in the world to adopt the IP laws that make enshittification possible, and maybe even inevitable. As Trump burns these trade deals to the ground, the rest of the world has an unprecedented opportunity to retaliate against American bullying by getting rid of these laws and producing the tools, devices and services that can protect every tech user (including Americans) from being ripped off by US Big Tech companies.

I’m so grateful for the chance to give this talk. I was hosted for the day by the Centre for Culture and Technology, which was founded by Marshall McLuhan, and is housed in the coach house he used for his office. The talk itself took place in Innis College, named for Harold Innis, who is definitely the thinking person’s Marshall McLuhan. What’s more, I was mentored by Innis’s daughter, Anne Innis Dagg, a radical, brilliant feminist biologist who pretty much invented the field of giraffology.

But with all respect due to Anne and her dad, Ursula Franklin is the thinking person’s Harold Innis. A brilliant scientist, activist and communicator who dedicated her life to the idea that the most important fact about a technology wasn’t what it did, but who it did it for and who it did it to. Getting to work out of McLuhan’s office to present a talk in Innis’s theater that was named after Franklin? Swoon!

Here’s the audio from the talk.

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