Cory Doctorow's Blog

This week on my podcast, I read Not Normal, my latest Locus Magazine column, about the surreal and terrible world we’ve been eased into thanks to anti-circumvention laws.

If you were paying attention in 1998, you could see what was coming. Computers were getting much cheaper, and much smaller. From cars to toast­ers, from speakers to TVs, we were shoveling them into our devices. and an it doesn’t take a lot of expense or engineering to add an “access control” to any of those computers.

That m...

This week on my podcast, I read All laws are local a recent post from my Pluralistic.net blog, about the ephemerality of our seeming eternal verities.

In other words, things that seem eternal and innate to the human condition to you are apt to have been invented ten minutes before you started to notice the world around you and might seem utterly alien to your children. As Douglas Adams put it:

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part...

This week on my podcast, I read “Threads’ margin is the Eurostack’s opportunity,” a recent post from my Pluralistic.net blog, about the tactics that digital sovereignty advocates can deploy to counter Meta’s (further) enshittification of Threads.

The funny thing is, the OG App creators were just following the Facebook playbook. When Facebook opened up to the general public in 2006, it had the problem that everyone who wanted social media already had an account on Myspace, and all of Facebook’...

This week on my podcast, I read “Code is a liability (not an asset),” a recent post from my Pluralistic.net blog, about the bad ideas behind the drive to replace programmers with chatbots.

Code is a liability. Code’s capabilities are assets. The goal of a tech shop is to have code whose capabilities generate more revenue than the costs associated with keeping that code running. For a long time, firms have nurtured a false belief that code costs less to run over time: after an initial shakedow...

This week on my podcast, I play the audio from (Digital) Elbows Up: How Canada Can Become a Nation of Jailbreakers, Reclaim Our Digital Sovereignty, Win the Trade-War, and Disenshittify Our Technology, a speech I delivered on November 27, 2025 at OCADU in Toronto, Canada (video here, transcript here).

I recognize that this is all very abstract, so let me make it concrete. When you buy a printer from HP, it becomes your property. What’s property? Well, let’s use the standard definition that ever...

This week on my podcast, I play the audio from A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, a speech I delivered on December 28, 2025 at 39C3, the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Germany (video here, transcript here).

Trump has staged an unscheduled, midair rapid disassembly of the global system of trade. Ironically, it is this system that prevented all of America’s trading partners from disenshittifying their internet: the US trade representative threatened the world with...

This week on my podcast, I sit down with my daughter Poesy, for our annual Daddy-Daughter Podcast, a tradition we’ve had since she was three (she’s 17 now!). This year, Poe recaps her graduation, her triumphs with her dance team, and her life at college! She offers us a tutorial on playing Egyptian War, and we sing Jingle Bells!

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This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, “Show Me the Incentive, I’ll Show You the Outcome,” about the process by which we ended up with an enshittogenic policy environment:

The whole point of the conservative project is to take away choices, and corral us into “preferences” that we disprefer. Eliminate no-fault divorce, suppress the vote, gerrymander the electoral map, cram a binding arbi­tration clause into every terms of service and a noncompete into every labor co...

This week on my podcast, I’ve got the audio from last week’s Enshittification book-tour event with Ed Zitron and Whitney Betran at the Seattle Public Library (you can watch the video here). I’ve got many more cities to go on the tour – I hope to see you at one (or more) of them!

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This week on my podcast, I’ve got the audio from last week’s Enshittification book-tour event with former FTC Chair Lina Khan at the Brooklyn Public Library (you can watch the video here). lI’ve got 24 more cities to go on the tour – I hope to see you at one (or more) of them!

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