Cory Doctorow
- title
- Cory Doctorow
- type
- entity
- summary
- SF author and EFF advisor who writes Pluralistic and coined "enshittification"; central to the anti-monopoly / platform-decay discourse
- tags
- person, author, activist, antitrust
- created
- 2026-07-21
- updated
- 2026-07-21
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, and special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He writes the Pluralistic blog (pluralistic.net), a near-daily mix of linkblogging and long-form argument published under a Creative Commons license and syndicated across several platforms at once.
He coined enshittification, the term for the predictable three-stage decay of platforms — good to users, then abusive to users in favor of business customers, then abusive to business customers to claw value back to the platform. The word spread far past his own writing; it was named a word of the year by the American Dialect Society, and it now shows up across the wiki whenever a platform's decline comes up. Doctorow's larger project is anti-monopoly: he treats platform decay as a symptom of dismantled antitrust enforcement rather than as bad individual behavior, and his prescriptions are consistently structural and collective — regulation, unions, interoperability, competition — rather than consumer advice.
His fiction and nonfiction run on the same themes. Novels and novellas (Walkaway, Attack Surface, the Little Brother books, The Lost Cause) dramatize surveillance, DRM, and the politics of technology; the nonfiction (The Internet Con, Chokepoint Capitalism with Rebecca Giblin) argues the policy case directly. The connecting claim is that the digital world's problems are choices enforced by law and market structure, and can therefore be un-chosen.
Writing here
- lapsarianism-doctorow — June 2026 Pluralistic post arguing that the pervasive sense of decay is structural, not nostalgia: fifty years of dismantled antitrust broke the "beams" (the Dark Tower metaphor) that once checked enshittifiers, and the fix is political, not consumer choice.
His analysis overlaps with edward-zitron's reporting on AI-industry economics (see subprime-ai-crisis) and with marius-rise-of-the-bullshittery on incentive collapse in professional work — Doctorow supplies the antitrust-and-regulation frame those pieces mostly leave implicit.