Talking over Zoom from Los Angeles, Canadian-British journalist and tech activist Cory Doctorow is explaining how power exerts itself. “If Elon Musk was broke, he’d just be another asshole with bad ideas,” he says. Behind him, shelves stacked with books (both fiction and non) also host an array of eclectic objects.

He picks up a mammoth vertebra and a 50-thousand-year-old axe head, a reminder perhaps that tools and backbone are ancient requirements, although he declines such symbolism. “There is something about the material, either ironically or perhaps because so much of my life is digital and takes place in the realm of pure thought, [that] having a space full of stuff is really meaningful to me,” he says, “I love junk.”

Being a materialist helps when you’re “doing technology criticism”, Doctorow says. “It really engages not with an imputed ideology of tech bosses or their morality but where their power comes from.”

His latest book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About it, describes in material terms how the internet, once a utopian vision promising direct business-to-customer transactions, human-to-human connection and maybe even worldwide democracy, degraded into its opposite.

So, what happened? Well, enshittification. Coined by Doctorow, Macquarie Dictionary’s 2024 Word of the Year describes how lax antitrust (regulations that encourage competition by limiting the market power) allowed Big Tech to grow massive and insert itself everywhere as a rent-seeking intermediary. Today we live in the “enshittocene” where a radical act is operating beyond the reaches of Amazon, Google and Facebook. As users of apps like Airbnb, Uber and Netflix, we know in our guts these platforms used to be better and cheaper but are always finding fresh ways to rip us off and sell our data.

“In the book I call it twiddling,” he says, giving the Uber example, once a credible alternative to taxis that promised cheap fares and flexible work. Twiddling means two passengers wanting the same route will get different pricing depending on their data profiles. “It’s unfair to be charged more because they know you got paid today – it’s just unfair.” Drivers too will be offered different fares depending on their calculated desperation.

As life became more digital, enshittification spread from laptops and phones and into everything from exercise bicycles to baby cradles: “So your ability to keep your smart thermostat going in the middle of summer so that your house doesn’t fill up with black mould is contingent on whether you click through the licence agreement when you update.” The stuff you paid money for is now owned from the outside.

He shows me a tiny replica guillotine, the threat metaphorical. Doctorow is also a prolific sci-fi writer. “The job of science fiction is to challenge that ‘inevitabilist’ narrative … to tear apart how that product works and its social arrangements and reconfigure them as a thought experiment with robots throwing buildings at each other in the background to make it all interesting and fun to read.”

His short story Unauthorised Bread, in the Radicalised collection, was a finalist for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation national book award. It tells of a Syrian refugee, housed in a high-rise block where all the appliances are enshittified. The toaster accepts only proprietary bread, sold at a huge mark-up.

The block’s owner, a corporation, goes bankrupt leaving these appliances ‘bricked’. The occupants’ only option is to violate the terms and conditions and jailbreak the appliances, restoring appliances to their original purpose: the toaster now toasts “unauthorised bread”. This story’s success helped it become a real life “organising metaphor for people to frame their understanding of what’s going on and to understand it not as a one-off but a pattern that’s emerged”.

Doctorow shows me a faded 1939 World’s Fair passbook. Its original owner, a stern gentleman, is captured glaring. It is a quaint relic of transatlantic cosmopolitanism. So, what of such sentimentalism?

“Nostalgia is a toxic impulse”, says Doctorow, quoting friend, comedian and actor John Hodgman. It does, however, help people remember a time before the internet was dominated by rent-seeking corporations. Once,tech underwent cycles of creative destruction. Old Big Tech, broken apart by antitrust, would beget new Big Tech. Doctorow explains IBM helped create Microsoft, which then grew until it became a target {for antitrust lawsuits}, which then made space for Google. Now, this process has stalled. Big tech has become gargantuan, consuming competition and smothering regulation.

Doctorow’s explanations are mechanical, each cause isolated, its consequent effect identified. This is the essence of his job, “decomposing the claims of tech bosses into their constituent elements and not falling into the trap that Mark Zuckerberg wants you to fall into, which says the only way you can talk to your friends is to let him spy on you.”

As a privacy advocate for not-for-profit Electronic Frontier Foundation, Doctorow has been in boardrooms as decisions are made that affect billions, by those who don’t understand real-world diversity. In one, the attendees tried to define a typical household with the intent on restricting digital television subscriptions.

“It was the most insane thing I’ve ever sat through,” he says. A subscription could be shared by a villa in France and the luxury SUV ’s seat back video-player parked in another country but a household in a shack in Manila with a daughter working as a nurse in California could not. They were obsessed with how they’d take rights away.”

He swivels his camera to show me a mundane grey box beneath his desk that looks like last century’s e-waste. “That’s a computer from 1993 called ‘Deep Crack’ that was built by my friend John Gilmore, and it could break the NSA cypher in two-and-a-half hours.”

Jailbreaking and hacking are central to resisting global enshittification — yet in much of the world, Australia included, it is highly illegal, leading to prison sentences and immense fines. Such laws exist, Doctorow says, because free trade agreements threaten Australia with tariffs. Given the Trump administration’s arbitrary application of such tariffs, amendments might not be a bad thing.

While Australia is not a big enough to demand direct changes to Big Tech in the way the EU does, Doctorow explains how we could become a reverse-engineering haven, quickly rattling off an example of car diagnostic kits. “Right now, every manufacturer charges about 10,000 [dollars] per model per mechanic per year to diagnose a car engine.” If Queensland University of Technology were to create a generic diagnostic kit by reverse engineering each car and charge mechanics worldwide a cheap rate for use, it would break these monopolies making repairing cheaper both for businesses and customers. What’s more, this could incubate a tech sector in Australia, something politicians have been trying to do here for decades. Now that seems like science fiction.

I spot a framed embroidery behind Doctorow, with three lines spelt printed out: “10 HOME, 20 SWEET, 30 GOTO 10” a BASIC program which would spell HOME SWEET HOME SWEET… to infinity.

Where is home now, I ask, aware he left London in 2015, disappointed with the country’s conservative turn. “That’s a bloody good question in Donald Trump’s America, because I don’t know if we feel good about staying here. On one hand, you don’t want to be the guy who moves his family to the compound in Waco because the end times are coming,” he says. “On the other hand, you don’t want to be the guy who says, ‘oh I’m sure it will all be fine - we can stay here in Vienna – we have a lovely flat.’”

He thinks and then says eventually, “In some ways home is my hard drive because that’s how I’m in touch with everyone and where my whole intellectual history and my whole correspondence lives.”

A hard drive, I realise, is as material as the digital gets.

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