Cory Doctorow
Coined 'enshittification'; fights for DRM reform, right-to-repair, and interoperability. (Now on Bluesky/Mastodon.)
Cory Doctorow is a science-fiction novelist, activist, and journalist, and a longtime special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He coined and popularized 'enshittification' (the American Dialect Society's 2023 Word of the Year) to describe the decay of digital platforms, and wrote 'The Internet Con' and novels including Little Brother and The Bezzle. He has left X/Twitter; his primary platform is the daily 'Pluralistic' newsletter, cross-posted to Mastodon and Bluesky.
Latest posts
I've left Twitter, but I'm still writing a daily blog. You can read today's post ("Bundestrojaner") at https://t.co/FRXhTcaaVM It's also available on Mastodon at: https://t.co/mZGzoU4HKI And on Bluesky at: https://t.co/sB5sLL7Ol7 https://t.co/sSWNtmI9wL
14d ago · 11 likes
This has sold out across most of the five boroughs, and copies are selling on Ebay for $80. Here's a 4000px+ wide JPEG if you want to run a copy on archival paper and frame it as a commemoration of the day things started to get better: https://t.co/5djW7ADBk7
11mo ago · 12,886 likes
The core of the prepper fantasy: "What if the world ended in the *precise* way that made *me* the most important person?" 1/ https://t.co/aL7DIxfliJ
1y ago · 3,774 likes
"There is nothing special about Elon Musk, Sam Altman, or Mark Zuckerberg. Accepting that requires you to also accept that the world itself is not one that rewards the remarkable, or the brilliant, or the truly incredible, but those who are able to take advantage of
2y ago · 2,691 likes
The strongest case
Users lose their freedom when platforms and manufacturers use law (like anti-circumvention rules) and lock-in to make leaving costly and interoperability illegal, so restoring the right to modify, repair, and connect technology, and breaking up the monopolies that foreclose it, is the practical path to a humane internet.
And against
Critics argue 'enshittification' and his monopoly-centric framing can be too tidy, attributing complex product and market failures to a single villain, and that his preferred remedies (aggressive interoperability mandates, antitrust) may underweight security and unintended-consequence costs.
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On the record: no documented legal record found in a primary source.