The author and activist discusses his new book, the struggle over technology, and the “enshittification” of social media
As an activist, sci-fi author, journalist, and human rights proponent, Cory Doctorow has produced more than a dozen books highlighting the modern day impacts of technology like social media, smartphones, AI, and beyond. His latest, “Picks & Shovels,” is the third in his Red Team Blues series and works as an origin story for forensic accountant Martin Hench, the protagonist of Doctorow’s sci-fi crime thriller. Published in 2023, Red Team Blues was expanded on in “The Bezzle,” which dropped last year.
Doctorow’s nonfiction work includes “The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation,” “a Big Tech disassembly manual,” and “Chokepoint Capitalism,” which delves into monopoly and creative labor markets. In 2024, the author launched a Kickstarter for an independent audiobook version of Red Team Blues after Audible informed the author that it wouldn’t carry the edition without the inclusion of restrictive Digital Rights Management tech.
As a longtime editor of and co-owner of Boing Boing, Doctorow also spent 19 years writing more than 50,000 blog posts about internet culture until leaving the company in 2020. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, he wrote to ease his anxiety, publishing an astounding nine books in two years. Currently, he blogs and collects interesting dispatches from the media and more on Pluralistic.net.
BINJ spoke with Doctorow this week, ahead of his visit to the Brookline Booksmith on Feb. 14., to chat about his books, the “enshitification” of social media, and what everyday folks can do to push back against techno-oligarchs.
Faith fraudsters selling personal computers
Although the people and circumstances of Red Team Blues are imaginary, Doctorow’s strength lies in disassembling modern technology with a twist, making his stories relatable and that much more impactful. Upon its release in 2023, Matthew Green, a cryptographer and professor at Johns Hopkins University, noted how the technological premise of the series made him “want to scream like a child who just found a severed human finger in his bowl of cornflakes.”
“Picks & Shovels” takes the reader back to the early days of Hench’s career in 1986. After dropping out of MIT, he finds himself in San Francisco, trying to land a job when he is hired by Silicon Valley PC startup Fidelity Computing to investigate a group of disgruntled ex-employees who founded a competing company. Things escalate quickly after Hench realizes he is on the wrong side and ditches the “greasy old guys,” becoming utterly infatuated with the electric atmosphere and potential of their rival, Computing Freedom.
Like in many of his other works, Doctorow tapped into historical events as plot points for his newest story. For example, how the lead character follows a wave of tech talent from Cambridge to California in the late-’70s and early ’80s to avoid non-compete agreements. Speaking to BINJ, Doctorow noted that one in every 18 American workers are currently bound by such a one-sided agreement.
“And so he gets his first job because this is like any bubble, and Martin’s job is working for a weird PC company, run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest, and an Orthodox rabbi,” Doctorow explained. “So it sounds like a joke, but they’re actually a pyramid-selling predatory faith scam. They’re recruiting people within faith groups to sell to other people in those faith groups to commodify their trust relationships, to sell them these third-rate junk PCs that are designed so that you can never get out of their ecosystem. So these guys have even gone and re-sprocketed their printers so that the fan-filled paper that you buy down at the stationery store won’t work. You have to buy their special stationery via the special fan-filled paper.”
Hench quickly figures out that he’s in the wrong camp when he is dispatched to destroy a competitor that turns out to have been founded by three women who had left her faith and the company.
“There’s a Mormon woman who’s quit the LDS over their opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, a nun who’s left her order and become involved with the liberation theology movement in Central America, opposing the dirty wars, and an orthodox woman who’s come out as queer and been kicked out of her family,” the author said. “And they’ve decided as penance for their role that they played in ripping off the people who trusted them that they’re going to start their own PC company that’s going to unlock everything.”
Doctorow added, “Since the first days of computing, there have been people who saw computers as a way to control people and people who saw computers as a way to set people free. And what they don’t realize is that the kind of fraudster who would run a pyramid scheme like that might also be the kind of fraudster who will resort to violence.”
The dramatic tension of technology
Doctorow said he had an epiphany about 15 years ago, watching science fiction movies, that techno thrillers treat technology like an inconvenience. Instead of learning how actual encryption works, writers have “invented a magic kind of encryption that can be done in 15 minutes, but, uh oh, they’ve only got 12 minutes to get in.”
“It turns out that the actual technology itself is an engine of incredible dramatic tension,” he said. “You can tell really exciting stories that turn on these real-world characteristics of technology if you understand it, which, you know, I do. … Working around real-world constraints and capabilities is exciting.”
Currently, Doctorow said, the real world capabilities of tech giants like Meta, Google, Amazon, and Apple are both scary and exciting. For 25 years, he has worked as an activist in digital human rights with the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation. Through that network, he knows many technologists who are committed to their users, their well-being, and human rights, and who care about technology as a force for human liberation.
“But I’ve also met all kinds of people who want to use it for extraction and control,” Doctorow said. “Jeff Bezos doesn’t make his delivery drivers piss in bottles and let his programmers pee whenever they want because he likes his programmers. And you know, watch for pee bottles appearing next to workstations at the technical offices of Amazon.”
Seeking alternatives to dystopia
Doctorow is currently working on a documentary podcast series and radio series for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and recently interviewed Stephen Levy, Newsweek’s former tech correspondent who now works as an editor-at-large for Wired.
“Stephen said that the motif of this moment is that quote from Hemingway, that ‘You go bankrupt slowly at first and then all at once.’ I think a lot of people are experiencing that.”
It’s not all doom. The author added, “We can reverse those policy choices. Technology is not fully cooked. In the beginning of the neoliberal era, in the era of Margaret Thatcher, she was famous for saying this phrase, ‘There is no alternative,’ which is capitalism-ese for ‘Resistance is futile.’ Of course there are alternatives. I think that despair is our worst enemy. People that are angry about technology are actually angry about a kind of monopolism, and a set of policy choices. The same forces that allowed cartels to destroy computing are also the forces that allowed them to raise the price of eggs, the price of gasoline, and to make container ships bigger and bigger until one of them blocked the Suez Canal.”
After years of commenting on and writing about technology, especially social media, Doctorow created the word “enshittification,” something he sees spreading like wildfire throughout the digital media world. “It describes a characteristic pattern where companies are first good to end users, [then] lock those end users in so that they can’t leave when they make things worse to make things better for business customers. … Once those business customers are dependent on those end users, they become locked in as well, and the company withdraws all the value and gives it to itself.”
Doctorow points to Uber subsidizing rides and giving drivers a bump in pay, over and above a normal rate, until it drove all of the taxi companies into oblivion, and cities and towns across the country lowered their public transit investments.
“Now they doubled the price of a ride and halved how much they were paying their drivers,” he said. “Facebook, first showing you just the things you asked to see and promising to protect your privacy. Facebook’s pitch in 2006 was, We’re just like MySpace, except we’ll never spy on you. They didn’t just lie to you about your privacy—they lied to you about what you were going to see, because their pitch was, Tell us who you want to follow, and we’ll just show you what they post. What tech has done is consolidated so there’s no competition.”
Doctorow said the fix, though daunting, is simple. After the US stopped enforcing anti-monopoly laws, we got monopolies.
“When people come to me despairing, furious, and frustrated, I say, You’re right to be. You need to understand that you’re on the same side as all these other people, even if they don’t know that they’re on the same side as you. And that once we’re together, we’re forced to be reckoned with, and here’s your local [Electronic Frontier Alliance] group you can get involved with.”
Watch Cory Doctorow read from “Picks & Shovels” at Brookline Booksmith on Feb. 14, 2024. With Ken Liu. More at craphound.com.