Award-winning author and EFF Special Advisor Cory Doctorow discusses 'enshittification,' where platforms treat users like commodities. Topics include the misuse of intellectual property laws, tech sector consolidation, recent antitrust actions, tech workers' rights, and the importance of activism in advocating for a better internet.
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insights INSIGHT
New Good Internet
The old internet offered technological self-determination, but required technical skill.
A good new internet distributes these benefits, like ad blockers, more broadly.
insights INSIGHT
Incentives and Tools
Market incentives influence product decisions, especially when users can easily find workarounds.
The mere existence of tools, like ad blockers, can improve user experience.
The early internet had a lot of “technological self-determination" — you could opt out of things, protect your privacy, control your experience. The problem was that it took a fair amount of technical skill to exercise that self-determination. But what if it didn’t? What if the benefits of online privacy, security, interoperability, and free speech were more evenly distributed among all internet users? This is the future that award-winning author and EFF Special Advisor Cory Doctorow wants us to fight for. His term “enshittification” — a downward spiral in which online platforms trap users and business customers alike, treating them more and more like commodities while providing less and less value — was selected by the American Dialect Society as its 2023 Word of the Year. But, he tells EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley, enshittification analysis also identifies the forces that used to make companies treat us better, helping us find ways to break the cycle and climb toward a better future. In this episode you’ll learn about:
Why “intellectual property” is a misnomer, and how the law has been abused to eliminate protections for society
How the tech sector’s consolidation into a single lobbying voice helped bulldoze the measures that used to check companies’ worst impulses
Why recent antitrust actions provide a glimmer of hope that megacompanies can still be forced to do better for users
Why tech workers’ labor rights are important to the fight for a better internet
How legislative and legal losses can still be opportunities for future change
How to Fix the Internet 