AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue with Part 2 of our discussion with Cory Doctorow, science-fiction author, activist and journalist. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. His new book is just out. It’s titled Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.

Thank you so much, Cory, for staying with us. Now, this became, “enshitification,” the word of the year?

CORY DOCTOROW: Yeah. So, the American Dialect Society made it the word of the year. The Macquarie Dictionary, which is Australia’s national dictionary, made it the word of the year. The New Scientist made “enshittocene,” which is the era of enshittification, its word of the year. And then Webster’s put it in the dictionary.

AMY GOODMAN: So, how do you account for this? And how did you come up with this term?

CORY DOCTOROW: Yeah, so, I work, as you said, for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It’s a digital rights group in the Bay Area, a nonprofit. And I’ve worked for there most of my adult life. I’m in my 24th year there. And I’ve come up with innumerable framing devices, metaphors, similes, parables, to try and get people to care about these technical issues.

And I had been on a holiday, and I tweeted something bad-tempered, where I described Tripadvisor as the most enshittified service I’ve ever seen. And a bunch of people were like, “Haha, that’s a funny word.” And so, a year later, maybe two years later, when I was trying to come up with a word to describe a pattern I was trying to write an article about, I was like, “Oh, that word made people laugh.”

And so, I think what it is is it’s the combination of a detailed and, I think, resonant technical analysis, the handle that you can put on this big, nebulous phenomenon that makes you miserable and angry, but you can never really put your finger on, along with this minor license to profanity. Right? And I think you put the two together — I actually have a friend who’s, you know, a security expert. He said, “Oh, I wish you’d chosen a word that didn’t have a swear word in it. I can’t talk about this in front of NATO generals.” And I was like, “First of all, I’m pretty sure generals have heard this word, or 'shit' at least. And second of all” — 

AMY GOODMAN: Even used it.

CORY DOCTOROW: And even used it. But, “second of all, like, go nuts, dude.” Like, if you can come up with a word that people use — I’ve had any number of them; none of them caught on this way — then, like, you know, more power to you. And I’ll use it, too. But for now, this is the one that stuck.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I want to talk about labor and the digital world. You prefer the term “technofeudalism” — 

CORY DOCTOROW: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — than talking about, for example, monopoly capitalism. Why? And then let’s talk about workers in Uber and on the tech platforms and why they are — how they are regulated.

CORY DOCTOROW: Yeah, so, I got this term “technofeudalism” from the great Yanis Varoufakis, wrote a great book with the same title. And Yanis makes this distinction between profits and rents, which is an important economic distinction. Profits are money you get from doing something. Obviously, it comes from alienating workers from their labor, but it’s from doing something that people value, whereas rents are money you get from owning something that people need to make a profit.

And so, if you are a coffee shop owner, you are making profits, but you’re exposed to the risk of competition. You know, someone opens a better coffee shop across the street and puts you out of business, you’re screwed, but your landlord’s in a great position, because they now own an empty storefront on a street with a really hot coffee shop, and they can raise the rent for the next tenant. So, everyone wants to get out of the profit business and into the rent business, right? Every pirate wants to be an admiral. And so, they’re all chasing these opportunities.

And with tech, they’ve really found these ways to do it. You know, you look at Amazon, and at first blush, it seems like a flea market, right? Ten thousand stall holders all selling their wares. But really, it’s like if you’ve ever been to Main Street, U.S.A. in Disneyland, where it looks like there’s 15 different stores, but they actually all connect to each other, and it’s just one giant store, and you can take something from one and bring it to the cash register in the other. Jeff Bezos decides what is for sale in all those stalls. He decides where it can be shelved. He decides what it costs. He decides who sees it. Right? So, this is not a profit-making enterprise for Jeff Bezos. The 45 to 51 cents he takes out of every dollar that his merchants generate on his platform, that’s a rent that he gets for owning the platform.

Now, rentiers, they have a different relationship to their workforce. And digital platforms, digital tools, have ways to abuse their workforce that were not available historically. So, one of the phenomenon I describe in this book is something called twiddling. It’s when you reach into the platform, and you change the rules, you change the prices, you change the costs, you change the wages, search rankings, recommendations. And you can do it on a per-user, per-interaction basis. And that’s, you know, one way they can charge us more money, right? You go into Walmart. If they’ve got electronic shelf tags, they can double the price of umbrellas the minute it starts raining. But it’s a way that you can really abuse workers.

So, in America, nurses are preferentially hired as contractors, not as staff. This is how hospitals do union avoidance. And historically, if you were hiring a contract nurse, you go to one of several local staffing agencies. But now there’s just four giant apps. They all market themselves as Uber for nursing. And because we have a totally unregulated data brokerage sector in this country — we haven’t had a new consumer privacy law since Reagan signed a law in 1988 that makes it illegal for video store clerks to disclose your VHS rental history. That’s our last consumer privacy law. So, we have no consumer privacy protection. When the nurse signs on for the shift, the app looks up how much credit card debt they’re carrying. And the more credit card debt you carry, the lower the wage you’re offered, because they’re inferring that you are a more economically desperate person and that you’ll work for a lower wage. Uber does something similar, where if you accept a low offer, that’s the new maximum offer, and then they start to push the offer down lower and lower and lower still. So, these are not —

AMY GOODMAN: Wait. Go further into — 

CORY DOCTOROW: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — Uber, because you talk all about it.

CORY DOCTOROW: Sure.

AMY GOODMAN: And also how DMCA ties into that.

CORY DOCTOROW: Yeah. So, Uber, you know, they are a company that achieved lock-in through a very weird mechanism. You know, I talked earlier about how Facebook gets lock-in just by making it hard to leave because you like your friends, but they’re hard to come to an agreement with. Uber did something different, right? They got the Saudi royal family to give money to SoftBank, this giant investment fund that also backed WeWork and now OpenAI. SoftBank gave $31 billion to Uber. Uber lost 41 cents on every dollar it brought in for 13 years. They — 

AMY GOODMAN: Why?

CORY DOCTOROW: In order to undersell every other cab company. And so, they pushed almost all the — it’s not as visible in New York. New York’s a weird bubble. But most places, they drove the cabs out of business. They drove their rival ride-share platforms, except for Lyft, out of business. We had a lost decade in transit investment, because a lot of people in charge of transit were like, “Why would we invest in transit when Ubers are so cheap?” And now you have the prices going way up, and you have the wages being offered to drivers going through the floor, because they have fewer places they can sell their labor, and you have fewer ways to get around town. And so, that’s the Uber story.

Now, there are lots of ways that you could imagine getting out of this, right? There was an app called UberCheats that allowed drivers to track whether they were being paid for the mileage that they were actually driving. But the best of these apps would be apps that actually modified the Uber app so that, for example, all the Uber drivers in a region could agree that they wouldn’t accept an offer below a certain rate. Now, these offers, they come up really fast. You get the offer, and it’s like here’s how much you’re going to get to do this run, and you have to make a split-second decision whether that’s an acceptable wage or not. But with a counter app, you can actually have everyone say, “Oh, well, when it falls below a certain mileage or minute rate, we’re just not going to take the deal.” And that pushes the prevailing wage up for everyone.

Now, this is something you could do if Uber was a website, because the web is an open platform. There’s nothing that stops you from modifying how a browser works. But apps are a closed platform. And as we talked about before, Section 1201 of 1998’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act establishes a felony, $500,000 fine and a five-year prison sentence, for modifying anything that’s designed not to be modified. So, it doesn’t have to be good at not being modified. It just has to have, effectively, like a “no trespassing” sign.

And so, even if you own your phone, which you do — it’s your distraction rectangle — and you want to modify it so that it does something you prefer, if the manufacturer has designed it so that in order to achieve that modification, you have to bypass what the law calls an access control, even though you’re modifying your own device to do something legal, that becomes illegal. So, this is an irresistible temptation to firms to hide all kinds of sins in these devices that we can’t modify.

And we see this with Uber. So, Uber can operate this black box for wage and ride pricing, right? But you also see it in all manner of devices. You know, there’s one company that makes virtually all the ventilators in the world. They’re a company called Medtronic. They acquired all of their direct competitors. Then they did the largest tax inversion in history. They pretend they’re Irish, and all their money floats in a state of untaxable grace somewhere over the Irish Sea. And they use these access controls, these digital locks, to stop you from fixing a ventilator. So, if you take a screen out of one ventilator and put it in another ventilator — so, you’ve got a dead ventilator with a working screen and a working ventilator with a dead screen — you make that swap, the part will not be recognized by the ventilator until a Medtronic technician gives you an unlock code. And historically, what they do is they charge you a couple hundred bucks for a technician to come to your hospital and bless your repair.

During lockdown, that couldn’t happen. During lockdown, we were working our ventilators harder than ever. They were failing at unprecedented rates. And the medical technicians at the hospitals couldn’t fix their ventilators. And making a device to override that is a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine.

This trick, it’s called parts pairing. We see it in phones. We see it in car engines. We see it in tractors. We see it in all kinds of devices. It’s kind of the inkjet business model, where you have to buy the ink from the company, not because it’s the best ink, not because you prefer it, but because the device has been designed to reject generic ink. And modifying the device to take the ink of your choosing becomes a crime. And this is how we end up in a world where the colored water that you use to print your grocery lists is $10,000 a gallon. It’s the most expensive fluid you can buy as a civilian without a permit. It would be cheaper to print it with the semen of a Kentucky Derby-winning stallion. And yet no one can do anything about it without risking these criminal sanctions.

AMY GOODMAN: Has anyone gone to jail over this?

CORY DOCTOROW: Well, there has been some pretty high-profile arrests, and that pretty much scared people off. What you end up with is people at the periphery who do stuff in the shadows, where, you know, if you’re a nerd like me, you can find the jailbreak that lets you install a third-party app store on your phone or whatever. But if you’re just a normie, like in the checkout aisle at the Walmart, there isn’t, like, a dongle you plug into your phone that lets you choose a third-party app store for your iPhone so that you can, you know, install ICEBlock again or do other things that Tim Cook doesn’t like. It’s just never gone mainstream, because you don’t do capital formation with criminal sanctions on the line, right? No one wants to fund that business.

And so, you know, one of the things that I find very exciting right now — I used to be EFF’s European director. I was in 31 countries. I used to travel 27 days a month. I stopped plugging in my fridge, because it cost me 10 bucks a month to keep the ice cubes frozen. And everywhere I went, when I asked people, “Why don’t you repeal this dumb law that you have on your books? I know why the Americans have it. These are all American companies that are screwing their customers doing it. They’re screwing Americans, but they’re screwing your people, too. You don’t have companies that use this law. You are just” —

AMY GOODMAN: You mean DMCA.

CORY DOCTOROW: DMCA, these anti-circumvention laws. And they said, “Oh, well, we passed that law, because the U.S. trade representative said if we didn’t pass a law like this, we were going to have tariffs slapped on our exports to America.” So, you know, this kind of deterrent only works if you don’t use it. If, you know, the U.S. trade representative says, “Do what I say, or I’m going to burn your house down,” and then Donald Trump burns your house down, why would you do what they say? There is so much money on the table for a country that wants to legalize this kind of stuff.

You know, I’m — like all the best Americans, I’m a Canadian. And in Canada, our terrible response to these tariffs has been retaliatory tariffs. We’re making the things we buy from America more expensive for us. It’s a very weird way to punish America, right? Like I say, punching yourself in the face really hard, and hoping the downstairs neighbor says “ouch.” Right?

But what if we just made it legal to jailbreak stuff, modify it, make everything cheaper for Canadians, make it so that if you’re a Canadian independent news outlet that has a subscriber who pays for their subscription through an app, 30 cents of that dollar doesn’t go to Cupertino, California, and land in Tim Cook’s pocket, right? This would be like every media outlet. Imagine if every subscriber, donor to Democracy Now!, everyone who’s in a Patreon for every Democracy Now!-like media outlet in the world, suddenly got a 25% increase in their subscriber base, not by adding more subscribers, but by having the 30% Apple tax repealed. Right?

This is a huge market opportunity for Canada, and everyone in the world would want this. And so this is an export opportunity, too. And you don’t need to legalize it in your country to do it. You just need to have a payment method and an internet connection and then hang the law. You know, Canada needn’t confine itself to exporting, like, reasonably priced pharmaceuticals to our American cousins. We could export the tools of technological liberation to Americans. And not just us. We do not have a monopoly on frustrated engineers who’d like to make things better. Mexico, Ghana, Nigeria, countries in the European Union, everywhere you look, you see technologists, and more every day, because they’re either being deported, or they’re fleeing this country, or they’re being denied visas. And there’s tons of investors who would like to run those businesses, because they’d like to have a business whose success factor is not determined by how many $TRUMP coins they buy, but rather whether people like their products. And so, they are seeking other markets to invest in, too.

I don’t think we’ve ever been closer to a disenshittifying moment, at least on this front, than we are at this point. And, you know, it’s terrible that we had to get Trump to do it. But my friend Joey DeVilla says, “When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla.” And so, this is our opportunity right now.

AMY GOODMAN: You write, Cory Doctorow, “Organized labor has a long history of successfully resisting fascist and cryptofascist regimes. There’s a reason fascists attack unions as soon as they take power.” So, how might technology be reimagined to empower, rather than disempower, workers?

CORY DOCTOROW: So, we see everywhere this rise and rise of algorithmic management. We see it first in blue-collar professions and precaritized professions like gig work. So, that’s the Amazon driver who’s being observed by a camera that dings them if their eyeballs aren’t pointed in the right direction, or punishes them for opening their mouth because you’re not allowed to sing on the job, and, you know, more importantly, sets a punishing quota system, where if you fail to make that quota, then you are really badly affected in your workplace, which is why they’re all peeing in bottles, right? And, you know, that algorithmic management is only possible because workers can’t modify the technology that they use.

So, in Indonesia, the gig economy is dominated by people who ride motorbikes — right? — not driving cars. And those are the taxis. These are the delivery systems and so on. And these bike riders, they set up little clubhouses, like tea shops, where you could go and sit down, use the bathroom, work on your bike, have a break. And these became kind of de facto co-ops. And they started commissioning software from developers to make their apps better.

And it started with things like an app for older riders that made the type bigger, because they couldn’t read the type in the app. And as someone, old eyes, I sympathize. But it turned into things like here’s an app that lets you spoof the GPS location on your phone, because the dispatch app will not let you pick up a passenger at the train station unless you’re in front of the train station when the train comes in. But that is the most dangerous place to be. It’s an absolute nightmare. It’s just like a road fatality waiting to happen. So the drivers park up around the corner, and they just tell the app to tell their bosses.

And they call these “tulul” apps, T-U-Y-U-L. It means “little devil.” So, these little devil apps allow these workers to seize the means of computation — right? — to effectively get immediate relief, rather than relying solely on what we would hope would give them relief, which is a strong labor regulation environment, a union, regulators who care about what they want. While they’re building the union, while they’re putting the gears to their labor regulators, while they’re demanding better labor law, they don’t have to sit around enduring degradations. They can do stuff in the moment that makes their lives better.

And you know what? If your comrades are not facing algorithmic management, algorithmic wage discrimination, if they’re less precarious, if they’re more happy on the job, they don’t become less effective radicals. They become more effective radicals, because they’re not wasting their energy just trying to survive.

And, you know, I have a lot of friends who say, “Oh, this is just capitalism by another name.” But it is not — it’s undeniable that we used to get a better deal from the platforms. And the worst deal that we get from the platforms now, now that they’ve conquered their competitors and their regulators and their workforce, and they’ve criminalized technology that makes their platforms better, that life that is now materially worse for us saps the energy, saps the money, saps the resources that we need to fight the more important fights, to fight fascism and genocide and so on. So, reclaiming these platforms, I think, is key to these broader justice struggles.

You know, I grew up in Toronto, and, like, I spent so many winter nights with a bucket of wheatpaste on a bicycle and a stack of flyers, trying to get people out to protests. And, you know, I hear people who’ve never done that say, “Well, why do we need the internet to build a mass movement?” I’m like, “Brother, get out there on your bicycle with your bucket of wheatpaste, and then tell me, in subzero weather, how much we don’t need the internet to organize a movement, especially when our enemies can use the internet to organize their movement.”

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about Bluesky versus Mastodon versus X.

CORY DOCTOROW: Yeah, so, Bluesky and Mastodon, to varying degrees, both —

AMY GOODMAN: And to explain to — 

CORY DOCTOROW: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — people who are not familiar with all these platforms.

CORY DOCTOROW: Sure, sure, sure. Well, these are new social media platforms. They work a lot like Twitter. You post short messages. People can see them. You can subscribe to people’s feeds. You can get suggestions about whose feed to read or what to read on the platform today. We all know how these things work.

The difference is that, first of all, the software underneath it, it’s free, open-source software, so anyone can modify it. And second of all, to varying degrees, these are both designed to be federated, so like email is federated. If I have an account on Gmail, and you have an account on Outlook, and then someone else has an account on, like, democracynow.org — right? — we can all send each other emails. We don’t all have to be on one server. The servers can all talk to each other. They’re a federation of servers. Same is true with Mastodon. There’s like hundreds of servers, and you can join any one of them, but you can communicate with anyone else.

But there’s this really cool thing about how Mastodon works, which is that if you join a server, and then you’re like, “Actually, I don’t like this server. I think the people that run it are creeps. I think the policies they have about content moderation suck,” you don’t get trapped in this thing where you have to choose between the people you’re connected to on Mastodon and the server you joined in a moment of unwise lack of foresight. You click one little link on Mastodon, and it gives you a little file that has everyone you follow, everyone who follows you, everyone you block, everyone you mute, all the things you need to set up home somewhere else. You go to another server, you click a link, you give them that file, and like that, you are now set up on the other server.

It’s as though you’ve — it’s like when you switch from Verizon to T-Mobile, right? You do a little bit of administrivia, and then you’re just on T-Mobile. Your friends don’t know. Right? It would be very weird to call your friends up and say, “Hey, you wouldn’t believe whose SIM is in my phone now,” right? And so, this means that Verizon and T-Mobile, like, they have to treat you better, because if they treat you badly, you are two clicks away from not being their customer anymore. So this is a very powerful check on the worst impulses of people who run phone companies, who are, frankly, the worst people, right? Historically, like, we remember Lily Tomlin: “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.” They have always been the worst, right? But they can’t treat you badly.

You know, Martin Luther King, he said, “The law can’t stop a man — can’t make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s important.” Right? The fear of losing your business can’t make these companies conceive of you as anything more than like a food source for their, you know, immortal colony organism called limited liability corporation, but it can make them treat you like they think you’re someone who deserves dignity.

So, Mastodon, it has this check on bad behavior. Bluesky, less so. They’re finally, like just now, rolling out the tooling that you need to do this. There’s a rival, or another member of the federation with Bluesky, called BlackSky, that was started by refugees from Black Twitter, who were like, “We know what this looks like when we let other people decide the rules for our community. So we’re going to make our own community with our own rules. We’re still going to talk to everyone else. I mean, what would Black Lives Matter have been if only Black people were allowed to talk about it? But we’re going to do it from a space that’s ours, where we have codetermination of our own rules.”

And both of these are very exciting prospects. It means we’re liberated from the foibles of the people who run it. You know, the woman who’s the CEO of Bluesky has just done a bunch of dumb stuff with content moderation and kind of given in to transphobes. And people are really angry, and I think rightly so. But the point is, you don’t have to be reliant on her good judgment to use Bluesky without being — you know, and she doesn’t have to be the person who has the final determination of how Bluesky works. You can join a different Bluesky server that she has no control over, and talk to all those users who she does have control over, and they can leave and go to your server, too.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, people left X for Bluesky, so angry at Elon Musk.

CORY DOCTOROW: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, you have worked at the Electronic Frontier Foundation for almost a quarter of a century.

CORY DOCTOROW: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: And the EFF is the first organization to have filed a lawsuit that names Elon Musk and DOGE.

CORY DOCTOROW: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: You’re suing over the Privacy Act for the privacy of Americans and federal workers. Talk about the status of this lawsuit, what it’s about.

CORY DOCTOROW: Well, so, the lawsuit is about the unlawful handling of this data. You know, we have these few kind of crumbs of privacy law that create these bright lines of things you can’t do. And I think, historically, we would have assumed that those laws didn’t play a lot of role in your day-to-day life, because you weren’t worried that someday the government would allow some, like, broccoli-haired Brownshirt to come in and just take all of the data the government had collected on you in every single ministry, and then just transfer it to an insecure cloud server or, you know, merge it or leak it or, I don’t know, you know, plunder it for personal gain. That was not a thing. I think most of us were like, “Well, at least we got the privacy law that prevents that,” because most of us assumed that that at least wouldn’t happen. But here we are. It’s finally happened. We finally found a use for our antiquated privacy laws.

I can’t talk much about the status of the lawsuit. A, I’m not an EFF lawyer, but, B, it’s — talking about lawsuits that are in litigation are not my — is not a good thing to do, unless you are the lawyer involved with that litigation and you’re parsing your words very closely. This is a thing I have learned in my decades of work with EFF. But if you want to support that work, we have just released a T-shirt this week that says, “Let’s sue the government.” It’s a banger of a shirt. So, if you go to EFF.org, you can find it there.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about apps like Para and tuyul, which you describe as a bottom-up resistance to enshittification?

CORY DOCTOROW: Yeah, so, we talked about those tuyul apps in Indonesia. Those are the apps that the riders are doing.

Para is an app that was developed for DoorDash riders — DoorDash drivers. So, DoorDash wouldn’t tell the drivers how much money they were going to make from a job. They would say, “Here is your base rate, but the majority of your compensation will come from a tip. And we’re not going to reveal the tip until you accept the job. And if you accept a job and then cancel it, we’re going to, like, down rank you as a driver.” So, you’re basically pulling the arm of a slot machine. And maybe it’s $1.50 drive, and maybe it’s an $11.50 drive, depending on whether there’s a $10 tip lurking inside the app.

Now, DoorDash, not very good at technology, so it turns out that they were actually transmitting the tip to your phone, but the app was designed not to show it to you. So, someone else, these engineers from a company called Para, they made another app that just looked inside the DoorDash offer and was like, “Oh, the tip is 10 bucks,” and they would tell you before you accepted it.

So, DoorDash, they threatened them with lawsuits under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. They called them tortious interferers with contract for violating their terms of service. They threw, like, the entire legal word salad at them. And they hired 40 engineers to fight them. And eventually, between the legal threats and the technological hand-to-hand combat, Para backed away from this app.

But you can see how, you know, in a world where, like, maybe the Department of Labor and the National Labor Relations Board doesn’t want to have your back, that you can have your own back — right? — that you can do something straightaway. It’s — again, I want to stress, it’s not a substitute for unions. It’s not a substitute for the National Labor Relations Board. But one of the things the National Labor Relations Board could do is rule it an unfair labor practice to block these apps. And one of the things a union could do is fund the development of these apps, right?

You know, instead, we get the reverse, right? We get Amazon saying, “OK, well, all of our workers have to communicate using our little chat app, and we’re going to block any message that has words about unions in it, in the chat app. We’re literally going to take away your ability to say the word 'union.'” Right?

So, I can’t stress just how much we live in the worst of all possible worlds, and how much of that is a policy choice, right? This is not the great forces of history. We have not had the iron laws of economics make our technology bad. What we had were policy choices made in living memory by named individuals, who were warned at the time that this was going to be the impact of it. They did it anyway. No one is holding them to account. And, you know, sure, let’s focus on Musk and Zuckerberg to some extent, because obviously these are very bad people. But let’s not forget that they are just people filling a hole in history designed by policymakers who created this enshittogenic environment, and who will be replaced by people who do the same things unless we change that environment.

Policy is not outside of our grasp. It’s just not something you can fix by shopping carefully. And I think, you know, in neoliberal times, we’re like, “Well, why don’t we just change our consumption habits? Why don’t we agonize endlessly about whether we should be on Twitter or Bluesky?” instead of saying, “Why don’t we make it so that people find it really easy to leave Twitter, and every time Elon Musk does something stupid, he loses another 5 million users?”

AMY GOODMAN: So, that would require technologically literate and truly democratic, with a small “D,” policymakers that understand what’s going on and also how to democratize it. Do you see any of that group emerging?

CORY DOCTOROW: I don’t think technological literacy is too much to ask of our lawmakers. I know that, historically, we’ve dunked on them and said, “Oh, look at Ted Stevens: ’It’s a series of tubes.’” But, you know, honestly, like, there aren’t any, like, water chemists or microbiologists in Congress, and yet we manage to have, historically, expert agencies that, with the exception of Indigenous reservations and Flint, gave us potable water. Right? And, you know, they did that by having evidence-based policy and having expert agencies that follow the Administrative Procedure Act, right? It’s not — it’s not like reviving some lost art of a fallen civilization, right? No one’s asking them to figure out how to embalm a pharaoh, right? We’re just asking them to do the thing they do in every other domain, and not be swayed by the parochial interests of a cartel. And one of the — you know, the great impediments to good lawmaking is that when a sector boils down to a few companies, it finds it easy to capture its regulators and get them to ignore the evidence and do the things that are good for the industry at the expense of the public.

In the European Union, we are seeing a lot of movement on this, and in part that’s thanks to Trump. Now, the European Union was always more willing to regulate American tech companies, for the obvious reason that this company is called Microsoft and not Nokia. Right? Now Nokia is a division of Microsoft, but, you know, back when they were just Nokia, they weren’t getting the same stick that, you know, they’re willing to give to, say, Apple or Google.

But, you know, at this point, America has stopped pretending that tech companies are not an arm of the American state. Right? You have the International Criminal Court swearing out a complaint against Benjamin Netanyahu. You have Trump denouncing him, and then you have Microsoft terminating his Outlook account, nuking all of his email, all of his stored documents, his calendar, everything else you need to be the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.

And so, now you have the Europeans going like, “We need to get out of the American tech platforms.” They’re funding this thing called EuroStack, which is, thus far, mostly oriented around cloning these apps that American tech companies make. So, it’s their own version of Office 365, say, or their own version of Google Drive. And that’s good as far as it goes. You do need somewhere to go. But no one who runs a government ministry with a million documents in Outlook is going to copy and paste them one at a time to a EuroStack equivalent. To get there, we’re going to need to have legalization and reverse engineering, so that we can extract our data from these American silos and put them into these other platforms.

AMY GOODMAN: Wait, you have to explain something about the ICC chief prosecutor and what happened to him.

CORY DOCTOROW: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Karim Khan?

CORY DOCTOROW: Yeah, yeah. So, it’s as I said, right? Swears out a complaint. Trump does some jawboning. Microsoft, in what they say is a completely unrelated phenomenon, decides that he’s violated some set of their terms of service. They won’t say which. And he wakes up one day, and he doesn’t have an email account. He doesn’t have his files. He doesn’t have his calendar. And, you know, this is an existential risk.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with the work of Henry Farrell, the political scientist. You know his work? He wrote a very good book with Abraham Newman called Underground Empire, about how there’s all this infrastructure around the world that the U.S. controlled, but which they at least maintain the pretense that they were neutral brokers of. So, you have, like, dollar clearing through the SWIFT system. They’re like, “Oh, this is just plumbing.” You need to buy something in zlotys, and you have pesos. You convert them to dollars, and then you convert the dollars to zlotys. And you do that all through the SWIFT system, and it just becomes part of the global system of commerce. And then, you know, under Biden, you had sanctions, where they said certain people can’t use the SWIFT system anymore. And then, under Trump, you’ve had a doubling down of this. Now you have everyone in the world going, “Well, we do need some form of clearing, right? We need these clearinghouses. But we don’t trust the American system anymore.”

Same with — you know, we got this with Snowden, right? We had all the fiber headends traversing American data centers. So, no matter where your packets were going, they made a round trip through some data center on an American coast, where there was a landing for a fiber line that crossed the ocean. And then, Snowden was like, “By the way, guess what they’re doing with those fiber lines. Right? These are not neutral meeting places for the world’s telecommunications grid. They’re listening posts for the NSA.” And now, you know, you have this kind of parallel sets of infrastructure, fiber going in. And, you know, the —

AMY GOODMAN: And Edward Snowden is in political exile.

CORY DOCTOROW: He is, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Can’t come to this country.

CORY DOCTOROW: And he gave me a lovely blurb for this book.

And you have, in the form of the tech stacks — right? — this idea that your cloud, your email service, you know, that these were honest brokers, that maybe they would kick you off if you were courting child sexual abuse material or if you were planning a terrorist attack, but, you know, if the guy in the White House just decided that he didn’t like the cut of your jib, your enterprise wouldn’t go away.

And, you know, we’ve talked a lot about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and this ability to reach into devices and control them, and the prohibition legally on reaching back into them and seizing control again. You may recall that there was a moment early in the Ukraine-Russia invasion where some Russian looters stole a bunch of John Deere tractors, and they showed up in Chechnya. And you can tell, because the tractors, they’re low-jacked, right? They’ve got GPS trackers, so they know where they are. So, John Deere reached into those tractors and bricked them, so they were rendered permanently inoperable. And a lot of people were like, “Oh, this is really funny. Like, haha, you dumb tractor looters. You know, your tractors will never work again.” But the implication of this is that every John Deere tractor in the world — which is not that far off from every tractor in the world — could be bricked at the insistence of someone who has leverage over the John Deere company. And so, you know, Venezuela, I think, very rightfully worried about dumb Nobel Prize awards and bombings of ships, but they should be just as worried about all the tractors being switched off.

And frankly, this is like, again, an opportunity to get these countries to reconsider their policies. And if they do reconsider those policies, there’s going to be no way to stop this stuff from leaking into the U.S. American farmers are going to be able to fix their tractors as soon as Ukrainian and Venezuelan farmers are able to fix their tractors, because there’s no way you’re going to stop that tooling from leaking over the border. It’s a software download, right? And so, it’s going to be much harder to interdict than, you know, Canadian reasonably priced insulin, say.

AMY GOODMAN: So, as we begin to wrap up — 

CORY DOCTOROW: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — I want to ask what gives you hope. This book just came out, as we’re talking about Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and — most importantly — What to Do About It.

CORY DOCTOROW: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s in its fourth printing already.

CORY DOCTOROW: In 80 hours.

AMY GOODMAN: That shows that people really do care.

CORY DOCTOROW: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: So, where do people have to go at this point?

CORY DOCTOROW: So, you’ve got to be a member of a polity to make this work, right? You’re not going to change this by shopping very carefully, any more than you’re going to stop the climate emergency by, like, really, really taking care of your recycling, right? It doesn’t matter how many bins you sort it into. It’s not going to stop the wildfires. You have to —

AMY GOODMAN: But it’s important you do that.

CORY DOCTOROW: It’s important you do it, but it’s not enough. And, you know, look, if you want to make a consumption choice because there’s someone you like who makes a thing that pleases you, and you want to buy it in the way that keeps the lights on for them, sure, by all means, do it. Don’t kid yourself you’re changing the system. Right? You’re just doing maintenance here. You’re doing some mutual aid, but you’re not changing the system. You change the system in a polity.

There are lots of different polities you can join. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has this national network of local affinity groups organized under something called the Electronic Frontier Alliance. They’re all autonomous grassroots groups. They work on local and state ordinances, everything from right to repair to protecting the privacy of migrants who are being hunted by ICE using their digital footprints, protecting the — 

AMY GOODMAN: What about that de-icing app that was just removed — 

CORY DOCTOROW: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — from the App Store?

CORY DOCTOROW: Well, so, again, it shows you that, like, it’s not enough for a company to say, “Well, we’re going to use our power to keep you safe.” Unless you can take that power back, they’ll also use that power to control your actions. Right? The fortress that they’re using to protect you from the bandits becomes a prison that they use to stop you from defending yourself the minute they decide that your interests and theirs aren’t coterminal. Every Apple user in China discovered this several years ago when they took all the privacy tools out of the App Store, and now you can’t have a communication that the Chinese state can’t wiretap. We’re just learning the same lesson here. It’s not that Tim Cook was sentimental about Americans and didn’t care about Chinese. Just Tim Cook, when he faces pressure, folds like the cheap suit he is — billionaire cheap suit, but still.

So, Electronic Frontier Alliance, we work on things like privacy for abortion seekers, privacy for people being hunted by ICE, limits on facial recognition and cop tech. And these are all run from the bottom up. Our organizers help people share their victories and share tactics, so that victories that occur in one region can be replicated in another. And if you go to EFA.EFF.org, so Electronic Frontier Alliance, Electronic Frontier Foundation dot org, you can find a local affinity group. And if there isn’t one in your neighborhood, our organizers will help you start one.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you, Cory Doctorow, for being with us, science-fiction author, activist, journalist. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He’s been doing that for almost a quarter of a century. And he’s just written a new book. It’s called Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. To see Part 1 of our discussion, go to democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.