1280: Cory Doctorow | Why Everything Got Worse and What to Do About It

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Feb 3, 2026

Cory Doctorow, author and digital-rights activist known for writing on tech policy and surveillance capitalism. He explains why platforms decay, how companies raise switching costs and weaponize laws like the DMCA, and how surveillance-enabled pricing crushes workers. Short, sharp takes on Google, Facebook, Amazon, interoperability, and practical ways to push back against platform capture.

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INSIGHT

Policy, Not Users, Drove Platform Decay

Policy choices created the environment that lets platforms degrade over time.
Cory Doctorow argues regulators enabled monopolies that then optimize for extraction, not user value.

ADVICE

Pay For Better Search Results

Try paid alternative search engines like Kagi if you want higher-quality results.
Paying for search can bypass ad-driven, low-quality ranking tricks used by Google.

INSIGHT

Search Was Intentionally Made Worse

Google deliberately degraded search to increase queries and ad impressions.
Internal memos show product and revenue teams fought over making search more or less useful.

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Remember when Facebook was fun and Google actually worked? Cory Doctorow coined a term for what went wrong, and he's here to explain how we fight back.

Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1280

What We Discuss with Cory Doctorow:

"Enshittification" is Cory Doctorow's term for how platforms decay. First they're good to users, then they abuse users to serve business customers, then they abuse everyone to claw back value for themselves. Facebook, Amazon, and Google all followed this playbook — and policy makers let it happen.
"Switching costs" are a deliberate policy choice, not an inevitability. Companies jack up the friction of leaving their platforms through design and lobbying, but regulations like phone number portability prove we can legislate friction down when we choose to.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act criminalizes fixing things you own. Security researchers who expose corporate sabotage — like the Polish train company bricking locomotives to extort customers — face harsher legal consequences than actual pirates.
"Algorithmic wage discrimination" is surveillance capitalism's newest trick. Apps like Uber track how desperate workers are and pay them less accordingly — the more rides you accept, the lower your future offers, turning desperation into a permanent wage ceiling.
You can fight back by supporting interoperability and making strategic choices. Use alternative services (like Kagi for search), follow advocates like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), and remember: every time you demand the right to own what you buy, you're pushing back against enshittification.
And much more...

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