Cory Doctorow: The Writer Who Named How Platforms Rot

I have been reading Cory Doctorow for the better part of twenty years, and for most of that time I misread him. Like a lot of people, I filed him under science fiction — the Canadian-British novelist who gave his books away free online, who wrote about teenagers outwitting surveillance systems. It took me embarrassingly long to notice that the novels and the activism are not two careers running in parallel. They are one argument, told twice. And the argument is much simpler and much more subversive than the coinage he is now famous for: you should be allowed to open the things you own.

That sounds almost quaint. A hobbyist's complaint. It is not. It is, I have come to think, the load-bearing wall under nearly everything else we complain about in technology — the fees, the lock-ins, the ads creeping into products we already paid for, the printer that refuses third-party ink, the tractor a farmer cannot fix in his own field. Pull that wall out and the rest follows. Doctorow has spent his working life pointing at the wall.

Who he actually is

Born in Toronto in 1971 to a family of activists — the sort of household where you were taken on marches before you could vote — he now lives and works between Los Angeles and London. He is a novelist, a journalist, and a digital-rights campaigner, and he has never treated those as separate jobs.

The activism has a paper trail. From 2002 to 2006 he was the European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, working out of London on the policy side of digital civil liberties: fighting broadcast-flag mandates, copy-protection rules, the steady legislative creep that would have baked copy control into consumer hardware. He co-founded the UK's Open Rights Group. He remains a special adviser to the EFF, which means that for more than two decades he has been in the rooms where these rules get written, not just writing about them afterwards.

For nineteen years he was also a co-editor of Boing Boing, which in the 2000s was one of the most-read blogs on the internet and functioned as a kind of daily dispatch from the frontier — gadgets, copyright fights, weird art, court rulings. He left in January 2020 and now writes Pluralistic, a near-daily blog he publishes across several platforms at once precisely so that no single platform can hold his audience hostage. That last detail is not a quirk. It is the thesis, practised.

And yes, he is the man who coined the word for how platforms decay — the term that put him on front pages and eventually became a book of its own. I am deliberately not re-explaining it here, because it deserves its own page and it has one: read enshittification if you want the stages laid out properly. What I want to do is the opposite. I want to talk about the twenty years of work that came before the word, because the word is a symptom he named late, and the disease he had been describing all along is something else.

The lock that is not about copying

Start where he started: digital rights management. DRM is the software lock on a thing — the check that stops your e-book opening in a rival reader, your film playing on the wrong device, your coffee machine accepting a rival's pod.

The standard defence of DRM is piracy. Doctorow's long-running objection is that DRM has never actually stopped a determined copier; a locked file gets cracked within days, and the crack circulates forever. So if it does not stop piracy, what does it do?

It does something far more useful to the company that ships it. Around the world, laws passed in the late 1990s and 2000s — the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention provisions being the model everyone else copied — made it an offence to break a digital lock, independent of whether what you did afterwards was legal. That is the move. Copyright law never gave a manufacturer the power to dictate which ink you buy, which repair shop you use, which app store you install from. But if the manufacturer wraps that decision in a lock, and the law makes breaking the lock an offence, the manufacturer gets that power anyway — smuggled in through the back door, without a legislature ever voting for it.

DRM's real product was never security. It was the ability to convert a company's commercial preferences into something with the force of law.

This is why he has hammered the point for two decades while most people yawned at it. A lock plus a law equals a private legislature. Any business decision a firm can encode in software becomes, effectively, a rule you can be prosecuted for breaking. Security researchers have been threatened for disclosing flaws they found behind such locks. Repair technicians operate in legal grey zones. The general-purpose computer — the machine that will run any program you ask it to, which is the whole reason computers changed the world — gets quietly replaced by an appliance that runs only what its vendor permits. He gave that argument its sharpest airing in a 2011 talk in Berlin on the coming war on general-purpose computation, and the years since have mostly been the argument coming true.

You bought it. You do not own it.

Here is where it lands for ordinary people, and it is the part I find hardest to shake.

Ownership used to be a simple bundle. If you bought a thing, you could use it, modify it, repair it, resell it, lend it, or throw it in a drawer for a decade and use it again. Nobody could reach into your house and change it. That bundle is what made a purchase a purchase.

What Doctorow describes is the systematic unbundling of that. The device sits in your kitchen, but the software that makes it work arrives on terms, and those terms are a licence — revocable, amendable, remote. A feature you paid for can be moved behind a subscription. A book you bought can vanish from your reader. A car's heated seats can be turned into a monthly fee. A console can be updated to remove the option you bought it for. In each case nothing was stolen, because in each case you were never told you owned it. You had permission, and permission was withdrawn.

Once you see this, the modern consumer complaint stops looking like a series of unrelated annoyances and starts looking like a category error. We keep using the language of buying for a transaction that is actually renting. And a renter has no leverage. That absence of leverage is the raw material of everything that follows — the reason a platform can degrade its product and still keep you, the reason it can extract more each year without losing you. It is the same structural story I keep returning to in how technology gets captured: the tool stops answering to the person holding it and starts answering to someone else.

Adversarial interoperability, and why nobody does it any more

His most underrated idea is the constructive one, and it has an ugly name: adversarial interoperability. It means building something that plugs into someone else's dominant product without asking them. Reverse-engineering a file format. Writing a client for a service that has no public API. Making a cartridge, a part, a plug-in, a scraper, a bridge — over the objections of the incumbent.

His point is historical, and it is the part people miss. This is not a fringe tactic. It is how the technology industry was actually built. Compatible parts broke hardware monopolies. Third-party consumables broke pricing. New software read old software's files and let people leave. The example he returns to is Apple reverse-engineering Microsoft Office's formats so that Mac users could open Windows documents without buying anything from Microsoft — an escape hatch built by an upstart, without permission, that made switching survivable.

Every giant of the industry climbed to the top using ladders it has since spent enormous effort pulling up behind it.

The ladder-pulling was done partly with technology — locks, attestation, closed platforms — and partly with law: anti-circumvention rules, aggressive terms-of-service enforcement, patent thickets, contract clauses. The combined effect is that the manoeuvre that once let a small competitor pry open a market is now legally radioactive. You cannot build the escape hatch. So there is no escape hatch, and users stay put no matter how bad it gets.

What I like about this argument is that it is a competition argument in disguise, and it suggests a remedy that does not require breaking anyone up. Much of the debate about breaking up Big Tech is about structure — split the firm, divest the unit. Doctorow's alternative is about exits: force the giants to be pluggable, legalise the tools that let people leave with their data and their contacts intact, and let competition do the work that regulation struggles to do. A monopoly you can walk out of is a much smaller problem than one you cannot.

The fiction is not a side project

He has published a great deal of fiction, and it carries the same freight. His first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, came out in 2003 and he released the full text free under a Creative Commons licence on the same day the print edition shipped — at the time an act of near-heresy in publishing, and the beginning of a long practical experiment in whether giving a book away sells books. The young-adult novel Little Brother and its sequel Homeland put teenagers inside a surveillance state and treat cryptography, key-signing and network security as plot mechanics. Walkaway and The Lost Cause imagine people building working alternatives rather than merely resisting.

The through-line is agency. His protagonists are almost never chosen ones; they are people who understand how a system works well enough to modify it. That is the same person the anti-circumvention laws would prosecute. The novels are, in a real sense, a defence brief for the tinkerer, written in a register that reaches people who would never read a policy paper.

Why the right to tinker is a political right

It would be easy to hear all this as a hobbyist's grievance — that some people want to root their phones and the rest of us do not care. That reading misses it entirely.

A computer you cannot inspect is a computer you cannot trust, and we now carry them against our bodies, put them in our children's rooms, and run our hospitals and farms and elections on them. If only the vendor may look inside, only the vendor decides what counts as a flaw. If only the vendor may modify, only the vendor decides what the device does to you — which data it sends, which behaviour it nudges, which of your choices it forecloses. That is precisely the machinery that makes the attention economy possible: a device optimised against its owner, with the owner legally barred from re-optimising it.

So the right to tinker is not about tinkering. It is a precondition. It is what makes competition possible, because competitors need to be able to build the bridge out. It is what makes security possible, because flaws get fixed when outsiders can find them. It is what makes ownership mean anything at all, because a thing you may not open is a thing you are merely holding. And it is what makes the political demand for better technology credible, because a public that cannot modify its tools can only ever petition the people who can.

That, in the end, is what I take from Doctorow. He is not a pessimist, whatever the vocabulary suggests. He is unusual among critics in that he thinks the rot is a policy outcome rather than a law of nature — that things got worse because specific rules made escape illegal, and that different rules would make it legal again. Naming the decay was the part that went viral. Insisting it is reversible is the part that matters.