Tech activist Cory Doctorow says the internet's been enshittified. So is it too late to save it?

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Natasha Mitchell (0:37)

Look, not many of us can claim to have coined a new word that takes off. Canadian science fiction author, journalist, technology and creative commons activist, and all-round legend really of early internet culture, Cory Doctorow came up with a real ripper a few years ago.

Lisa Given (0:54)

So we're going to be talking about the enxidicine, enxidification, everything that's enxidified.

It could be a drinking game perhaps. How many times do we say it tonight?

Cory Doctorow (1:03)

I can declench it like a Latin student.

Natasha Mitchell (1:07)

Enxidification, Cory's word for what has happened to the internet in the hands of big tech, hungry to profit. It's also the title of his award-winning book, On the Broken Promise of the Internet. Once that great liberator of unimpeded information and the connector of people everywhere. Cory is the big thinker you'll meet on Big Ideas today with a new book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI.

Hello, I'm Natasha Mitchell and welcome to the show.

Cory Doctorow (1:47)

And you know Amazon, they sell you a package of unlimited video streaming called Prime for your delivery and it's got all these Christmas cartoons in it. And they take them out of the free tier from November to March.

Lisa Given (1:58)

Oh, how evil.

Cory Doctorow (2:00)

And they charge you $3.99 for them.

All inkjet printers are now controlled by a cartel of four companies because we let them buy all their competitors. The coloured water you put in your printer is now the most expensive fluid a civilian can purchase without a government permit. At $10,000 a gallon, it would be cheaper to print your grocery list as the semen of a Kentucky Derby winning stallion.

Natasha Mitchell (2:23)

Yep, the technologies designed to make your life easier, smarter, safer, smoother, are starting to leave many enraged, frustrated, confused, even excluded. So let's head to Ngaam, Melbourne for this Wheeler Centre and RMIT University event for the Now or Never Festival. Cory Doctorow is in conversation with fellow Canadian and Distinguished Professor of Information Sciences at RMIT University, Lisa Given.

And a heads up for sensitive ears, a few swear words ahead, as you might expect.

Lisa Given (2:58)

I wanted to start, and for those of you, many of you may not have read the book. We do have obviously books out the front that you can pick one up a little bit later. But what I loved when I looked at the shape of this book, the way that it's organized, it really first talks about this disease that is insidification. And you say in the opening of the book, the Internet is getting worse fast. The services we rely on that we once loved, they're all turning into piles of shit all at once. Worse, the digital is merging with the physical, which means that the same forces that are wrecking our platforms are also wrecking our homes and our cars, the places where we work and shop. The world is increasingly made up of computers we put our bodies into and computers we put into our bodies. And these computers suck.

This is infuriating, it's frustrating, and depending on how important these services are to you, it's terrifying.

So my question to you is, how did we get here and why is it that we should be terrified?

Cory Doctorow (3:59)

Well, that's the good question, right? How we got here, because I think there's a certain, I don't know, like, lapsarian teleology, like things are getting worse because that is our destiny as a species, the iron laws of economics, or the great forces of history made things terrible. And the great curse of growing old is that you remember how things got this way, like where we were before and how we landed here. If you're lucky, acquire enough object permanence to maybe win a game of peekaboo. And having done this now for 25 years, I remember when policymakers took decisions that had the foreseeable and foreseen outcome of creating the enxitocene, the enxitogenic policy environment where the worst ideas of the worst people would make the most money. And so the thing that I hope to bring with this book is a certain degree of hysterosity and therefore a causal kind of narrative like these policy choices predictably produce this outcome.