Hosted by Faisal al Yafai
Featuring Cory Doctorow
Produced by Finbar Anderson
Listen to and follow The Lede
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Youtube | Podbean
The internet has gotten worse. That’s the argument put forward by bestselling author and tech blogger Cory Doctorow in his new book, “Enshittification,” which he joins Faisal Al Yafai on The Lede to discuss.
Doctorow used to love the internet and the tech world it came from. “ For a lot of us, our journey into tech is that we used computers, and it changed our lives for the better. We found the words to describe who we were. We found the people who mattered to us. We found the ideas that changed our lives. We found our livelihoods. Sometimes we found love. We found the city we wanted to live in. We found all these things through digital technology,” he tells Al Yafai.
“Benevolent dictatorships are fine, so long as the dictator is both benevolent and always right.”
Now, though, as he sets out in his book, technology companies have not only made the user experience in tech worse, but in some cases downright dangerous.
Doctorow highlights the example of Apple removing the app ICE Block, developed to alert U.S. citizens to the presence of immigration and customs officials in the neighborhood, as an instance of big tech having too much power while failing its users. “You can’t run the app that tells you when ICE is in your neighborhood trying to kidnap you,” he says. “So my point is that benevolent dictatorships are fine, so long as the dictator is both benevolent and always right.”
Similarly, Doctorow notes that large tech companies are much more interested in maximizing their profits than in offering reliable hardware to support their own software, noting how Apple pushed back on efforts to pass “right to repair” laws, which would have mandated that Apple products were easily repairable at high street electronics stores. “ Apple led that coalition to make sure that you just didn’t keep your iPhone working. So Apple doesn’t want you to like your iPhone as much as you like your iPhone,” he says.
Doctorow worries that the reward system in place for those running major tech companies is terribly flawed. “The reason they can be as wicked as they are and still run the company is because we have an enshittogenic policy environment. We have an environment that rewards them rather than punishing them for doing it,” he says.
As for current technological trends, Doctorow, like many others in the tech space, is worried about the future of AI, but not for the reasons commonly put forward, which typically suggest AI will become too powerful. “I think we’re going to screw up AI by firing a bunch of people and replacing them with an algorithm that can’t do their job, and then it turns out to be too expensive to keep online, and then we turn those computers off and then we have nothing,” Doctorow suggests.