# The World Has Moved On (Doctorow on lapsarianism)

[[cory-doctorow|Cory Doctorow]]'s June 2026 Pluralistic post starts with a worry about his own credibility. He's old, and old people always think the world is falling apart — Douglas Adams's line about anything invented after you turn 35 being "against the natural order of things," and John Hodgman's "nostalgia is a toxic impulse." So when Doctorow rails against what he calls the Great Enshittening, is he just an old man yelling at the cloud? His answer is no, and the piece is the argument for why the sense that everything is decaying is real and structural rather than a trick of aging.

## The evidence it isn't nostalgia

The National Customer Rage Survey polls a representative panel of 1,000 people every three years, continuing a research line that began in 1976. As of 2025 the results are unambiguous: people report more problems with the products and services they use, the problems are more severe, they produce more lingering stress, and more respondents want revenge on the businesses that wronged them. That survey prompted Heather Timmons at The Guardian to start an investigative series on how broken everything has gotten, and her inbox filled with readers citing Doctorow's work on [[enshittification]]. Something changed, and a decade of consistent polling captured it — this isn't one aging writer's mood.

## The beams

The load-bearing metaphor comes from Stephen King's *Dark Tower* novels, sent to Doctorow by one of Timmons's readers. In those books the world has "moved on": buildings rot, machines stop and no one can fix them, decay runs one way with no repair or renewal. It wasn't always like that. The reason is that the Crimson King laid siege to "the beams" — ley-lines that push back entropy and make room for care and repair. Attack the beams and the world moves on.

Doctorow maps the beams onto the checks that once restrained enshittifiers. There were always people who would plunder your data and treat you with contempt, but they faced competition, regulation, workers with a sense of fairness and duty, and the threat of new entrants correcting the defects they introduced. The Dark Tower where all the beams converged is antitrust enforcement — the idea that no company should get so large it can no longer be regulated, lest its executives become "autocrats of trade." Remove antitrust and every other check weakens with it.

## The politics

The attack on antitrust, Doctorow argues, was one front in a broader attack on the rule of law. He cites Corey Robin's *The Reactionary Mind* — the thread uniting every strain of conservatism is that some are born to rule and others to be ruled — and Frank Wilhoit's definition: conservatism is "one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." It's not a crime if the president does it, or your boss, or a monopolist, or ICE. The unitary executive and Project 2025 are the same project as gutting antitrust: put everyone back in their place under a new hereditary aristocracy.

David Graeber's *The Utopia of Rules* supplies the mechanism for the paperwork half. Neoliberal deregulation produced the dysfunction we were warned communism would bring — identical stores because of monopoly, no one with enough money because labor protection was dismantled, rulers who commit crimes in the open, absurdly long forms in triplicate. The web made it cheap for authorities to impose asymmetric paperwork; the form-giver does little admin and dumps a large repeated burden on everyone else. AI and vibe coding make it cheaper still. A task that once took one short form now takes ten long ones, each built by a different person in the same organization asking for variations on the same data. Doctorow's phrase: we have "democratized bureaucracy," Kafka-as-a-service. And when the vibe-coded back-end loses your data you get an infinite hold queue or a support bot, because understaffing is itself a form of enshittification — it moves value to owners and consequences to workers. Firing people and replacing them with chatbots incinerates process knowledge, the unrecorded understanding that keeps things working.

## The prescription

There is no consumer advice, on purpose. "You can't shop your way out of a monopoly. Shopping is not politics." The fix is collective: support groups like the EFF, join a union or start one, talk to techsolidarity.org, the Tech Workers Coalition, or United Tech and Allied Workers in the UK, get into party and local politics. The proof it can work is the post-war settlement — the "30 glorious years" that built the welfare state, regulated bosses and polluters, and launched the civil rights movement. You can't save the world alone, but together the beams can be restored.

## Where it fits

This is the political-economy backbone under several pieces the wiki already tracks. [[edward-zitron]]'s [[subprime-ai-crisis]] describes one industry's subsidized-demand collapse; Doctorow supplies the fifty-year story of why the checks that would have caught it were removed first. [[marius-rise-of-the-bullshittery]] names the labor-market version of the same rot — a market that pays for performance over substance — where Doctorow names the missing regulatory beams. The "Kafka-as-a-service" and process-knowledge points connect to [[ai-great-leap-forward]] on institutional knowledge destroyed by corporate AI mandates. The friction-and-good-faith answer in [[build-a-new-internet]] and [[high-friction-commons]] is the small-scale, build-something-new response to the same decay Doctorow diagnoses at the system level — though Doctorow would insist the real remedy is political, not a better forum.