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Cory Doctorow wears many hats: digital activist, science-fiction author, journalist, and more. He has also written many books, both fiction and non-fiction, runs the Pluralistic blog, is a visiting professor, and is an advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); his Chokepoint Capitalism co-author, Rebecca Giblin, gave a 2023 keynote in Australia that we covered. Doctorow gave a rousing keynote on the state of the "enshitternet"—today's internet—to kick off the recently held PyCon US 2025 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
He began by noting that he is known for coining the term
"enshittification" about the decay of tech platforms, so attendees were
probably expecting to hear about that; instead, he wanted to start by
talking about nursing. A recent
study described how nurses are increasingly getting work through one of
three main apps that "bill themselves out as 'Uber for nursing'
".
The nurses never know what they will be paid per hour prior to accepting a
shift and the three companies act as a cartel in order to "play all
kinds of games with the way that labor is priced
".
In particular, the
companies purchase financial information from a data broker before offering
a nurse a shift; if the nurse is carrying a lot of credit-card debt,
especially if some of that is delinquent, the amount offered is
reduced. "Because, the more desperate you are, the less you'll accept to
come into work and do that grunt work of caring for the sick, the elderly,
and the dying.
" That is horrific on many levels, he said, but "it
is emblematic of 'enshittification'
", which is one of the reasons he
highlighted it.
Platform decay
Enshittification is a three-stage process; he used Google to
illustrate the idea. At first, Google minimized ads and maximized spending
on engineering to produce a great search engine; while it was doing that,
however, it was buying its way to dominance. "They bribed every service,
every product
that had a search box to make sure that that was a Google search box.
"
No matter which browser, phone carrier, or operating system you were using,
Google ensured that you were using its search by default; by the early
2020s, it was spending the equivalent of buying a Twitter every 18 months
to do so, he said. That is the first stage of the process: when the
provider is being good to its users, but is finding ways to lock them in.
![[Cory Doctorow]](https://static.lwn.net/images/2025/pycon-doctorow-sm.png "Cory Doctorow")
The second phase occurs once the company recognizes that it has users
locked in, so it will be difficult for them to switch away, and it shifts
to making things worse for its users in order to enrich its business
customers. For Google, those are the publishers and advertisers. A
growing portion of the search results page is shifted over to ads
"marked off with ever-subtler, ever-smaller, ever-grayer labels
distinguishing them from the organic search results
". While the
platform is getting better for business customers—at the expense of the
users—those customers are also getting locked in.
Phase three of enshittification is when the value of the platform is
clawed back until all that is left is kind of a "homeopathic residue—the
least value needed to keep both business customers and end users locked to
the platform
". We have gained a view into this process from the three
monopoly cases that Google has lost over the last 18 months. In 2019, the
company had 90% of the world's search traffic and its users were loyal;
"everyone who searched on Google, searched everything on Google
".
But that meant that Google's search growth had plateaued, so how was the
company going to be able to grow? It could "raise a billion humans to
adulthood and make them Google customers, which is Google Classroom, but that's a
slow process
". From the internal memos that came to light from the
court cases, we can see what the company chose to do, he said: "they
made search worse
".
The accuracy of the search results was reduced, which meant that users
needed to do two or three queries to the get the results they would have
seen on the first page. That increased the number of ads that could be
shown, which is obviously bad for searchers, but the company was also
attacking its business customers at the same time. For example, "Google entered into
an illegal, collusive arrangement with Meta, called Jedi Blue
" that
"gamed the advertising market
" so that publishers got paid less and
advertisers had to pay more, he said.
So that's how we have ended up at the Google of today, where the top of the
search results page is "a mountain of AI slop
", followed by five
paid results "marked with the word 'Ad' in eight point, 90%
gray-on-white type
", ending with "ten spammy SEO [search-engine
optimization] links from someone else who's figured out how to game
Google
". The amazing thing is "that we are still using Google
because we're locked into it
". It is a perfect example of the result
of the "tragedy in three acts
" that is enshittification.
Twiddling
The underlying technical means that allows this enshittification is
something he calls "twiddling". Because the companies run their apps on
computers, they can change a nearly infinite number of knobs to potentially
alter "the prices, the cost, the search rankings, the
recommendations
" each time the platform is visited. Going back to the
nursing example, "that's just twiddling, it's something you can only do
with computers
".
Legal scholar Veena Dubal coined the term "algorithmic
wage discrimination" to describe this kind of twiddling for the "gig
economy", which is "a major locus for enshittification
"; the nursing
apps, Uber, and others are examples of that economy. "Gig work is that
place where your shitty boss is a shitty app and you're not allowed to call
yourself an employee.
"
Uber invented a particular form of algorithmic wage discrimination; if its
drivers are picky about which rides they accept, Uber will slowly raise the
rates to entice those drivers—until they start accepting rides. Once a
driver does accept a ride, "the wage starts to push down and down at
random intervals in increments that are too small for human beings to
readily notice
". It is not really "boiling the frog
", Doctorow
said, so much as it is "slowly poaching it
".
As anyone with a technical background knows, "any task that is simple,
but time-consuming is a prime candidate for automation
". This
kind of "wage theft
" would be tedious and expensive to do by hand,
but it is trivial to play these games using computers. This kind of thing
is not just bad for nurses, he said, its bad for those who are using their
services.
Do you really think that paying nurses based on how desperate they are, at a rate calculated to increase their desperation so that they'll accept ever-lower wages, is going to result in us getting the best care when we see a nurse? Do you really want your catheter inserted by a nurse on food stamps who drove an Uber until midnight the night before and skipped breakfast this morning so that they could pay the rent?
Paying and products
It is misguided to say "if you're not paying for the product, you're the
product
", because it makes it seem like we are complicit in sustaining
surveillance
capitalism—and we are not. The thinking goes that if we were only
willing to start paying for things, "we could restore capitalism to its
functional non-surveillance state and companies would treat us better
because we'd be customers and not products
". That thinking elevates
companies like Apple as "virtuous alternatives
" because the company
charges money and not attention, so it can focus on improving the
experience for its customers.
There is a small sliver of truth there, he said; Apple rolled out a feature
on its phones that allowed users to opt-out of third-party
surveillance—notably Facebook tracking. 96% of users opted out, he said;
the other 4% "were either drunk or Facebook employees or drunk Facebook
employees
".
So that makes it seem like Apple will not treat its customers as products,
but at the same time it added the opt-out, the company secretly started gathering
exactly the same information for its "own surveillance
advertising network
". There was no notice given to users and no way to
opt out of that surveillance; when journalists discovered it and published
their findings, Apple "lied about it
". The "$1000 Apple
distraction rectangle in your pocket is something you paid for
", but
that does not stop Apple from "treating you like the product
".
It is not just end users that Apple treats like products; the app vendors
are also treated that way with 30% fees for payment processing in the App
Store. That's what is happening with gig-app nurses: "the nurses are the
product, the patients are the product, the hospitals are the product—in
enshittification, the product is anyone you can productize
".
While it is tempting to blame tech, Doctorow said, these companies did not
start out enshittified. He recounted the "magic
" when Google debuted;
"you could ask
Jeeves questions for a thousand years and still not get an answer as
crisp, as useful, as helpful as the answer you would get by typing a few
vague keywords
" into Google. Those companies spent decades producing
great products, which is why people switched to Google, bought iPhones, and
joined their friends on Facebook. They were all born digital, thus could
have enshittified at any time, "but they didn't, until they did, and
then they did it all at once
".
He believes that changes to the policy environment is what has led to
enshittification, not changes in technology. These changes to the rules of
the game were "undertaken in living memory by named parties who were
warned at the time of the likely outcomes
"—and did it anyway.
Those people are now extremely rich and respected; they have "faced no
consequences, no accountability for their role in ushering in the
Enshittocene
". We have created a perfect breeding ground for the worst
practices in our society, which allowed them to thrive and dominate
decision-making for companies and governments "leading to a vast
enshittening of everything
".
That is a dismal outlook, he said, but there is a bit of good news hidden
in there. This change did not come about because of a new kind of evil
person or the weight of history, but rather because of specific policy
choices that were made—and can be unmade. We can consign the enshitternet
to the scrap heap as
simply "a transitional state from the old good internet that we used to
have and the new good internet that we could have
".
All companies want to maximize profits and the equation to do so is simple:
charge as much as you can, pay suppliers and workers as little as you can,
and spend the smallest amount possible on quality and safety. The
theoretically "perfect" company that charges infinity and spends nothing
fails because no one wants to work for it—or buy anything from it. That
shows that there are external constraints that tend to tamp down the
"impulse to charge infinity and deliver nothing
".
Four constraints
In technology, there are four constraints that help make companies better; they help push back against the impulse to enshittify. The first is markets; businesses that charge more and deliver less lose customers, all else being equal. This is the bedrock idea behind capitalism and it is also the basis of antitrust law, but the rules on antitrust have changed since the Sherman Antitrust Act was enacted in 1890. More than forty years ago, during the Reagan administration in the US, the interpretation of what it means to be a monopoly was changed, not just in US, but also with its major trading partners in the UK, EU, and Asia.
Under this interpretation, monopolies are assumed to be efficient; if
Google has 90% of the market, it means that it deserves to be there because
no one can possibly do search any better. No competitor has arisen because
there is no room to improve on what Google is doing. This pro-monopoly
stance did exactly what might be expected, he said, it gave us more
monopolies: "in pharma, in beer, in glass bottles, vitamin C, athletic
shoes, microchips, cars, mattresses, eyeglasses, and, of course,
professional wrestling
", he said to laughter.
Markets do not constrain technology firms because those firms do not compete
with their rivals—they simply buy their rivals instead. That is confirmed
by a memo from Mark Zuckerberg—"a man who puts all of his dumbest ideas
in writing
"—who wrote: "It is better to buy than to compete
".
Even though that anti-competitive behavior came to light before Facebook
was allowed to buy Instagram in order to ensure that users switching would
still be part of Facebook the platform, the Obama administration
permitted the sale. Every government over the past 40 years, of all political stripes, has treated monopolies as efficient,
Doctorow said.
Regulation is also a constraint, unless the regulators have already been
captured by the industry they are supposed to oversee. There are several
examples of regulatory
capture in the nursing saga, but the most egregious is that anyone in
the US can obtain financial information on anyone else in the country,
simply by contacting a data broker. "This is because the US congress
has not passed a new consumer privacy law since 1988.
" The Video
Privacy Protection Act was aimed at stopping video-store clerks from
telling newspapers what VHS video titles were purchased or rented, but no
protections have been added since then.
The reason congress has not addressed privacy legislation "since Die
Hard was in its first run in theaters
" is neither a coincidence
nor an oversight, he said. It is "expensively purchased inaction
"
by an industry that has "monetized the abuse of human rights at
unimaginable scale
". The coalition in favor of freezing privacy law
keeps growing because there are so many ways to "transmute the
systematic invasion of our privacy into cash
".
Tech companies are not being constrained by either markets or governments,
but there are two other factors that could serve to tamp down "the
reproduction of sociopathic, enshittifying monsters
" within these
companies. The first is interoperability; in the non-digital world, it is
a lot of work to, say, ensure that any light bulb can be used with any
light socket.
In the digital world, all of our programs run on the same
"Turing-complete, universal Von Neumann machine
", so a program that
breaks interoperability can be undone with a program that restores it.
Every ten-foot fence can be surmounted with an 11-foot ladder; if HP writes
a program to ensure that third-party ink cannot be used with its printers, someone
can write a program to undo that restriction.
DoorDash workers generally make their money on tips, but the app hides the
amount of the tip until the driver commits to taking the delivery. A
company called Para wrote a program that looked inside the JSON that was
exchanged to find the tip, which it then displayed before the driver
had to commit. DoorDash shut down the Para app, "because in America,
apps like Para are illegal
". The 1998 Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) signed by Bill Clinton "makes it a
felony to 'bypass an access control for a copyrighted work'
". So even
just reverse-engineering the DoorDash app is a potential felony, which is
why companies are so desperate to move their users to apps instead of web
sites. "An app is just a web site that we have wrapped in a correct
DRM [digital
rights management] to make it a felony to protect your privacy while
you use it
", he said to widespread applause.
At the behest of the US trade representative, Europe and Canada have also
enacted DMCA-like laws. This happened despite experts warning the leaders
of those countries that "laws that banned tampering with digital locks
would let American tech giants corner digital markets in their
countries
". The laws were a gift to monopolists and allowed companies
like HP to continually raise the price of ink until it "has become the
most expensive substance you, as a civilian, can buy without a permit
";
printing a shopping list uses "colored water that costs more than the
semen of a Kentucky-Derby-winning
stallion
".
The final constraint, which did hold back platform decay for quite some
time, is labor. Tech workers have historically been respected and
well-paid, without unions. The power of tech workers did not come from
solidarity, but from scarcity, Doctorow said. The minute bosses ordered
tech workers to enshittify the product they were loyally working on,
perhaps missing various important social and family events to
ship it on time, those workers could say no—perhaps in a much more coarse
way. Tech workers could simply walk across the street "and have a new
job by the end of the day
" if the boss persisted.
So labor held off enshittification after competition, regulation, and interoperability were all systematically undermined and did so for quite some time—until the mass tech layoffs. There have been half a million tech workers laid off since 2023, more are announced regularly, sometimes in conjunction with raises for executive salaries and bonuses. Now, workers cannot turn their bosses down because there are ten others out there just waiting to take their job.
Reversing course
Until we fix the environment we find ourselves in, the contagion will
spread to other companies, he said. The good news is that after 40 years
of antitrust decline, there has been a lot of worldwide antitrust activity
and it is coming from all over the political spectrum. The EU, UK,
Australia, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, "and China, yes,
China
" have passed new antitrust laws and launched enforcement actions.
The countries often collaborate, so a UK study on Apple's 30%
payment-processing fee was used by the EU to fine the company for billions
of euros and ban Apple's payment monopoly; those cases then found their way
to Japan and South Korea where Apple was further punished.
"There are no billionaires funding the project to make billionaires
obsolete
", Doctorow said, so the antitrust work has come from and been
funded by
grassroots efforts.
Europe and Canada have passed strong right-to-repair legislation, but those
efforts "have been hamstrung by the anti-circumvention laws
" (like
the DMCA). Those laws can only be used if there are no locks to get
around, but the manufacturers ensure that every car, tractor, appliance,
medical implant, and hospital medical device has locks to prevent repair.
That raises the question of why these countries don't repeal their versions
of the DMCA.
The answer is tariffs, it seems. The US trade representative has long
threatened countries with tariffs if they did not have such a law on their
books. "Happy 'Liberation Day' everyone
", he said with a smile,
which resulted in laughter, cheering, and applause. The response of most
countries when faced with the US tariffs (or threats thereof) has been to
impose retaliatory tariffs, making US products more expensive for their
citizens, which is a weird way to punish Americans. "It's like punching
yourself in the face really hard and hoping someone else says 'ouch'.
"
What would be better is for the countries to break the monopolies of the US
tech giants by making it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak, and modify
American products and services. Let companies jailbreak Teslas and deliver
all of the features that ship in the cars, but are disabled by software,
for one price; that is a much better way to hurt Elon Musk, rather than by
expressing outrage at his Nazi salutes, since he loves the
attention. "Kick him in the dongle.
"
Or, let
a Canadian company set up an App Store that only charges 3% for payment
processing, which will give any content producer an immediate 25% raise, so
publishers will flock to it. The same could be done for car and tractor
diagnostic devices and more.
"Any country in the world has it right now in their power to become a
tech-export powerhouse.
"
Doing so would directly attack the tech giants in their most profitable
lines of business: "it takes the revenues
from those rip-off scams globally from hundreds of billions of dollars to
zero overnight
". And "that is how you win a trade war
", he said
to more applause.
He finished with a veritable laundry list of all of the ills facing the
world today (the "omni-shambolic poly-crisis
"), both on and off the
internet, and noted that the tech giants
would willingly "trade a habitable planet and human rights for a 3% tax
cut
". But it did not have to be this way, "the enshitternet was not
inevitable
" and was, in fact, the product of policy choices made by
known people in the last few decades. "They chose enshittification; we
warned them what would come of it and we don't have to be eternal prisoners
of the catastrophic policy blunders of clueless lawmakers of old.
"
There once was an "old good internet
", Doctorow said, but it was
too difficult for non-technical people to connect up to; web 2.0 changed
that, making it easy for everyone to get online, but that led directly into
hard-to-escape walled gardens. A new good internet is possible and needed; "we can
build it with all of the technological self-determination of the old good
internet and the ease of web 2.0
". It can be a place to come together
and organize in order to "resist and survive climate collapse, fascism,
genocide, and authoritarianism
". He concluded: "we can build it and
we must
".
His speech was well-received and was met with a standing ovation. Some of his harshest rhetoric (much of which was toned down here) may not have been popular with everyone, perhaps especially the PyCon sponsors who were named and shamed in the keynote, but it did seem to resonate within the crowd of attendees. Doctorow's perspective is always interesting—and he certainly pulls no punches.
A YouTube video of the talk is available.
[I would like to thank LWN's travel sponsor, the Linux Foundation, for supporting my travel to Pittsburgh for PyCon.]
| Index entries for this article | |
|---|---|
| Conference | PyCon/2025 |