Enshittification
with Cory Doctorow
Remember when the internet was young and alive, vibrant and accessible and free? Cory Doctorow does, and he knows what’s gone wrong—and he sees a way forward. This is a magnificent book.
Author, activist and journalist Cory Doctorow returns to the Festival stage with Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.
When Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification, he was not just finding another way to say “things are getting worse.” He was making a specific diagnosis about the state of the digital world and how it is affecting all of our lives.
The once-glorious internet was colonized by platforms that made all-but-magical promises to their users—and, at least initially, seemed to deliver on them. But once users were locked in, the platforms turned on them to make their business customers happy. Then the platforms turned to abusing their business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
Doctorow’s argument clearly resonated, so much so that the American Dialect Society named “enshittification” its 2023 Word of the Year, and was cited as an inspiration for the 2025 season of Black Mirror. Now, Doctorow moves the conversation beyond the overwhelming sense of our inevitably enshittified fate. He shows us the specific decisions that led us here, who made them, and—most important—how they can be undone.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.