Internet firms must face consequences, says author

PARIS: After 25 years as a blogger, campaigner for digital freedoms and virulent critic of big tech companies, Cory Doctorow is starting to see some green shoots of optimism.

This is a big deal for an author who coined the term “enshittification” to describe the decay of today´s tech platforms. His analysis, which has leapt from his blog and into the mainstream over the past two years, describes how platforms lock in users and advertisers before making their products steadily worse as they transfer all remaining value to their shareholders.

On the phone from Los Angeles, Doctorow — also a prolific science-fiction writer — told AFP that tech companies acted like this because they “lack discipline”. “If you don´t face consequences when you suck, you don´t have to try as hard,” he said.

“And you can do things that are bad for other people and good for you.” This explains why Facebook users´ feeds fill up with junk, Google search is loaded with ads and sponsored content, and why Amazon promotes cheap Chinese-made products no matter what a customer searches for.

But regulators around the world are finally beginning to tackle the monopolists that they have allowed to flourish. “We´re seeing the European Commission and the Federal Trade Commission and many other entities really taking this seriously, in a way that they haven´t for 40 years,” he said.

At the same time, he said users were finally beginning to desert the big platforms — as with the mass exodus from Twitter when Elon Musk took over and rebranded it as X. “There´s a really good chance that simply making them face consequences for being bad will make them better,” he said.

If Doctorow sees reasons to be positive, it comes after 25 years of struggle, working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation “trying to get people to care about tech policy”. His view of the tech industry still has room for dystopia — he can see firms using AI to spread an Uber-style algorithm-controlled pricing of goods to supermarkets and beyond.

And the 53-year-old is clear that what he once memorably termed “enshittification” is still going strong, despite the positive signs. He said he came up with the word after trying to read some reviews on the TripAdvisor website during a visit to the countryside.

“It was effectively unusable,” he said, pointing to the volume of ads and trackers that stopped the site from even loading. “So I tweeted: ´This is so enshittified, has anyone at TripAdvisor ever been on a trip?´ And people kinda chuckled at it.”

He said it inspired him to expand his “one-hit wonder” to a broader critique. “Words that are fun to say only take you so far. And likewise, it´s not enough to have a smart critique… You need both,” he said.

Doctorow, who has lived between Canada, Britain and the United States, also lectures at the UK´s Open University and has published well over 20 novels and non-fiction books. And it was an argument over literature that saw him tussle with billionaire Musk.

The two men are both huge admirers of Scottish science-fiction writer Iain Banks, who died in 2013. Musk´s vision of humanity´s future as a “spacefaring species” with augmented abilities, served by superintelligent machines, is lifted straight from Banks´s fiction. “If you must know, I am a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks,” Musk tweeted in 2018.