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Cory Doctorow

What Cory Doctorow thinks about design

@cory-doctorow · 15 positions · 0 changes of mind

Science fiction novelist, journalist and activist, a special adviser to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the author of the daily link blog Pluralistic. He coined the word "enshittification" in 2022 to name the way platforms decay, and it was the American Dialect Society's word of the year for 2023.

Everything they publish, on ppll ↗

Cory Doctorow did not write this page.

We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.

6 dated positions, 2023 to 2024, in their own words. Our reading of what Cory Doctorow has said — not written or endorsed by them.

6 positions so far — this page is not yet offered to search engines.

  1. Our readingPeople stay on a platform they have come to dislike because leaving requires everyone they care about to agree to leave at the same time.

    Their wordsIn theory, you could have all just left for somewhere else; in practice, you were hamstrung by the collective action problem.

    ↗My McLuhan lecture on enshittificationpluralistic.net 2nd of 2 in this piece

  2. 6 months earlier

  3. Our readingRanking first in a search has become near enough to being true, which is why search and spam are permanently at war.

    Google

    Their wordsGoogle’s the first — and often the last — place we go to for answers, so snagging top billing in a Google search results page is, approximately speaking, equivalent to being “true.”

    ↗Microincentives and Enshittificationpluralistic.net 1st of 2 in this piece

  4. 5 months earlier

  5. Our readingTechnology bosses are ordinary monopolists rather than evil geniuses, and crediting them with having hacked our dopamine loops flatters them.

    motivation

    Their wordstech barons are ordinary mediocrities, no better and no worse than the monopolists that preceded them, and any differences come down to affordances in technology and regulation, not an especial wicked brilliance.

    ↗Twiddlerpluralistic.net 1st of 4 in this piece

  6. 4 weeks earlier

  7. Our readingA platform hands out free attention to creators only until they are committed to it, and then withdraws it and sells what they built.

    Their wordsTiktok is only going to funnel free attention to the people it wants to entrap until they are entrapped, then it will withdraw that attention and begin to monetize it.

    ↗Tiktok's enshittificationpluralistic.net 2nd of 7 in this piece

  9. Our readingThe end-to-end principle -- that a willing speaker's message reaches the willing listeners who asked for it -- is dead at the service level of today's internet.

    Their wordsThe end-to-end principle is dead at the service level today.

    ↗Tiktok's enshittificationpluralistic.net 4th of 7 in this piece

  11. Our readingPolicy should secure people's freedom to leave a platform while keeping their community, their purchases and their data, rather than try to keep dying platforms alive.

    Their wordsAnd policymakers should focus on freedom of exit – the right to leave a sinking platform while continuing to stay connected to the communities that you left behind, enjoying the media and apps you bought, and preserving the data you created

    ↗Tiktok's enshittificationpluralistic.net 7th of 7 in this piece