The descent of Big Tech platforms into exploitative and unethical behavior prompted sci-fi author Cory Doctorow to coin a new term, something like “enfecalization.” Cory explores the idea in his upcoming book, the subtitle of which is “Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.”
• Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, by Cory Doctorow
• Cory’s Kickstarter for the DRM-free audiobook (here’s an hour-long audio sample)
• pluralistic.net, Cory’s site
• Electronic Frontier Alliance, “a grassroots network made up of independent community organizations”
• Cory’s previous Techtonic interviews: September 7, 2020 on “How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism,” and March 6, 2023 on “Chokepoint Capitalism”
• Become unoptimizable (by Cory Doctorow, Aug 20, 2025)
• From Cory's Aug 26, 2025 post:
Like Apple, Google has a track record of selling its users out to oppressive governments. Apple blocked all working privacy tools for its Chinese users at the behest of the Chinese government, while Google secretly planned to release a version of its search engine that would enforce Chinese censorship edicts and help the Chinese government spy on its people: Dragonfly (search engine) - WikipediaGoogle’s CEO Sundar Pichai, personally gave one million dollars to Donald Trump for a seat on the dais at this year’s inauguration (so did Apple CEO Tim Cook). Both men are in a position to help the self-described dictator make good on his promise to spy on and arrest Americans who disagree with his totalitarian edicts.
• From Trump's FCC abandons the future (July 24, 2025), Cory Doctorow on why Musk’s Starlink is a terrible economic choice:
Despite his rhetoric, Musk supports vast public expenditures, but only they are earmarked to his doomed projects so that he can keep trying to make fetch happen, absorbing endless public riches while assuming no public duties.Musk is no Technoking, but he’s a strong contender for Enshittification King: a guy who taps the capital markets and Uncle Sucker for funds he can use to subsidize the initial rollouts of his stupid ideas, in the hopes of becoming so indispensable that he later squeeze both business customers and end users for ever-larger sums to keep the illusion afloat (think of the junk fees he’s piled onto Twitter users and publishers).
The thing is, we know how to roll out ultra-fast, reliable, future-proof internet. All it takes is for public subsidies to come with public duties, like a duty to preference futuristic, high-capacity fiber over gimmicks like satellite “broadband.” This isn’t a leftist plot, either. Just look at this map of community fiber networks, which are most heavily concentrated in red states (because rural communities aren’t gonna get fiber from the private sector, and they skew Republican):
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