Professors and students fawned over author, activist and journalist Cory Doctorow before his President’s Lecture Series talk at Humber Polytechnic’s Lakeshore campus.
As the star lecturer was speaking with three students before his lecture, a high school teacher, along with a few students, rushed up to him, apologized for the interruption, stood in front of Doctorow with a gaping mouth, before blurting out that he was utterly star-struck, saying he never gets star-struck.
He recovered as best he could by apologizing again for the interruption and saying that he was looking forward to hearing the speech.
A few more professors came up to him and shook hands before finding their seats.
From stage right, Doctorow bounded up to the podium and was greeted with rapturous applause, only to immediately apologize, saying Canada is extremely bad at regulating American tech companies.
He gave some examples, such as when the Canadian government tried to make Facebook pay for news, the popular app just kicked news outlets off its platform, and when it asked Netflix to add CanCon, the platform just refused. He said these companies have market caps greater than Canada’s GDP.
In other words, they have a lot of sway and the ability to do what they want.
He also talked about how the European Union was unable to successfully compel Apple to allow other companies to sell apps in the App Store without a slew of conditions, including Apple's right to delete any app and its data if the consumer has been out of the EU for 21 days.
Part of the failure to regulate stems from the coercive language coming from the Trump administration.
“Trump has made it very clear that if America's tech companies collaborate with his regime, he will go around to other countries and intimidate them into backing off on attempts at regulation,” Doctorow said.
The failed attempts at regulation and regulation in favour of tech companies have contributed to an overall decline in the end-user experience in what Doctorow calls ‘enshitification.’
Enshitification is an app’s decay over time in what Doctorow describes as a three-stage process.
“First, the platforms are good to their end users while they try to find a way to lock those users in, and then once they know that the users can't easily leave the platform, they make things worse for them, in order to make things better for business customers, and once those business customers are locked in, they harvest all the available surpluses from both end users and businesses, and they leave behind a kind of bare, mingy, homeopathic residue of value needed to keep the users locked to the platform,” he said.
“The final ideal stage of a platform is attained, the stage in which the platform is a giant pile of shit," Doctorow said.
It’s one thing to be able to identify, describe a process and give it a name, but Doctorow probed further when he asked: “Why is this happening now?”
He said a common response to the declining quality of platforms like Facebook, Google, or Amazon is consumer self-blame, in which the issue is framed as poor product choices.
"You cannot shop your way out of a monopoly any more than you are going to recycle your way out of a wildfire,” he said.
The appeal to individual consumer action, he said, is not a genuine solution but a strategic distraction that serves those with the most to lose from collective political action.
"The reason billionaires want you to vote with your wallets is that their wallets are so much thicker than yours,” he said. “They are, in every other regard, an irrelevant, infinitesimal minority of the population. In a vote with ballots rather than wallets, billionaires lose every time."
Doctorow didn’t pull any punches when describing some of the tech giant execs, but he didn’t lay all the blame at their feet.
"The problem is not that the wrong person runs Facebook and therefore exercises a total veto over the digital lives of four billion people,” he said. “The problem is that that job exists in the first place. We don't need to perfect Mark Zuckerberg. We need to abolish Mark Zuckerberg."
The real culprits, he said, are the regulators and politicians who made deliberate decisions, often under corporate and political pressure, that locked in the conditions for enshittification.
"It is these people and their terrible, deliberate misconduct that we need to remember, because it is their awful policies that we must overthrow, otherwise the best we can hope for is replacing one monster with another,” he said.
Doctorow zeroed in on one policy in particular that is the main driver of enshitification: the anti-circumvention law. He highlighted that under these laws, it is a criminal offence to modify a device or software in ways the manufacturer did not sanction, even if the device is not their property.
"Anti-circumvention law is a way for legislatures to delegate absolute lawmaking authority to corporations,” he said. “Another way of describing anti-circumvention law is calling it felony contempt of the business model. It is a way for a corporation to threaten you with prison if you use your property in a way they don't want you to."
In Canada, Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act, was enacted in 2012 as Canada’s version of the anti-circumvention law. Doctorow says the Harper government was coerced into pushing forward despite overwhelming opposition to it.
"The U.S. Trade Representative said that unless we had anti-circumvention laws on our books, we would no longer be able to export our goods to America without tariffs,” Doctorow said. “That was the stick the U.S. used to beat every country in the world into adopting a law that allowed American companies to extract the data and finances of people in every country."
Canada went along with this scheme, and ironically, the deal did not protect Canada from American tariffs.
"If someone threatens to burn your house down unless you do as you're told, and you do it, and they burn your house down anyway, you don't have to keep doing what they told you,” he said.
Doctorow said Canada needs to repeal its anti-circumvention law, allowing the freedom to build something new, such as tools, platforms and services that work around the tech giants rather than being controlled by them. He suggested that open-source cloud infrastructure could untangle governments and businesses that currently depend on American corporations.
"We can be the vanguard of a global movement of digital sovereignty grounded in universal, open, transparent software, a commons that every country in the world contributes to and relies upon, something more like science than like technology,” he said.
Doctorow warned that Canada needs to act now, as the window to effect change is closing, with several European countries already moving in that direction. There is an opportunity for incredible benefit if Canada taps into its own resources after making laws that work for Canadians.
"One of those countries will jump at this opportunity to consume the billions in rents stolen by U.S. tech giants and use them as fuel for a single-use rocket booster that launches their tech sector into a stable orbit for decades to come,” he said. “If we sleep on this, we will not get the industrial policy, the chance to launch whole sectors of new business. That will go to someone else."
Ultimately, Doctorow said he wants the internet to be more than a consumer product driven by economics, but as a force to contend with the most pressing issues of our times.
"We need a new, good internet fit for purpose to wire up the human race and human civilization to be our nervous system as we struggle to coordinate the actions we're going to need to take as a species to save ourselves from the climate emergency, fascism and genocide,” he said.
Mesmerized, people in the audience asked questions and got robust answers until time was up, and then Doctorow was swarmed by those wanting his autograph with a selfie.
