Today I will share another hero of mine Cory Doctorow, who coined the term Enshittification in 2022. To cherry pick some facts about Cory Doctorow that I find very interesting and aligned with my principles:
- He is a Torontonian
- He is Jewish
- He worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for many years.
- He has been extremely active in the Open Source community for decades
- He is an active proponent of privacy enhancing technologies
- He was a speaker that the Hackers on Planet Earth Conference (HOPE XV)
- He was a Neubla award nominated, Hugo award wining, Canada reads recommended science fiction author before switching to non-fiction
- He is one of the wittiest public speakers I have heard in decades.
To see his incredible sense of humour and sharp wit in action, check him out on YouTube.
I first came across Cory’s journalism in 2022, in the Guardian article “I’ve been waiting 15 years for Facebook to die. I’m more hopeful than ever.
I first came across the term “Enshittification” in a Financial Times article entitled “Enshittification” is coming for absolutely everything.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them
Cory Doctorow
The book
I then read his book, cleverly entitled “Enshittification”, which I highly recommend
We’re living through the Enshittocene, the Great Enshittening, a time in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. Demoralizing. Even terrifying.
Influence on me
Cory has been very influential on my tech decisions and side projects in the past few years, giving me encouragement to move off of ubiquitous platforms like Meta, Google, Amazon and Uber and moving over to much better platforms like Proton‘s universe of privacy preserving products, the Fediverse’s universe of federated open-source social media alternatives, and supporting the Eurostack. As my journey progresses, I hope to move from just migrating to actively contributing to solutions that will reclaim the internet from Big Tech and restore our my faith in the vision of the internet that inspired me for most of my career.