Why everything suddenly got worse: a conversation with Cory Doctorow
The Google antitrust trial was finally decided this week, and the results aren’t good. Google escaped any significant remedy, leaving it unscathed and emboldened for even more unethical behavior. In the words of Matt Stoller:
this decision isn’t just bad, it’s virtually a statement that crime pays.
Thus the oligarchy cements its dominance, allowing Big Tech CEOs and VCs to enjoy yet more power – as though they were lacking it, or anything else – to the detriment of the rest of us. I say this as a veteran of the tech industry for 30 years: I’ve never witnessed a moment more friendly to megacorporations, or more hostile to users and workers.
Because these companies are hostile to the rest of us. Deception, exploitation, theft, flagrant breaches of common decency – not to mention the law itself – all of these are daily occurrences, hardly noteworthy except in their embodiment of the growing sense of dread one feels when wading through the sludge on the Big Tech platforms.
Google Search has gotten worse recently. Amazon has gotten worse. Facebook, if it was even possible, has gotten worse. AI slop permeates the online experience, with worse to come. All corruption and decay.
Did you want good news? Please let me know where to find it. I don’t see a regulator ready to take on Big Tech. Judges? See above. Congress? Nope. And I won’t even mention the current occupant.
If I sound demoralized, at least I’m not alone. Here’s Alan Jacobs (Aug 28, 2025):
I sometimes ask family and friends: What would the big tech companies have to do, how evil would they have to become, to get The Public to abandon them? And I think the answer is: They can do anything they want and almost no one will turn aside.
“Do anything they want” means, for example, that OpenAI’s chatbot encouraged a suicidal teen not to seek help and is facing no consequences, beyond a lawsuit alleging that harm. Or take Peter Thiel – one of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley – who has scheduled a lecture series to sell-out audiences about the Antichrist. (The actual Antichrist, from the Bible.) When companies virtually get away with murder, when billionaires loudly pronounce their thoughts about the end of time, things feel just a little unhinged. It’s an unstable, dangerous time.
One silver lining is that we have a new and expressive term to describe our moment of decay: “enshittification,” a term coined by Cory Doctorow in a November 2022 blog post.1 As Cory defines it:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
The term has enjoyed wide popularity, including “word of the year” awards and inclusion in dictionaries:
I spoke with Cory Doctorow on Techtonic this week. His upcoming book, titled as you’d expect, has the subtitle Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. Our conversation ranged from examples of Big Tech abusing its constituents to the importance of local action. A recommended listen:
Episode page with links to resources (click “pop-up player” to listen)
You can also stream the show
With that interview, I completed eight years of Techtonic. Next week’s show begins my ninth year on WFMU. I bring this up because a challenging moment like this – seeing Google’s unearned victory in its antitrust suit – makes me wonder where we go from here.
We have to do something – despair gets us nowhere – so here’s my plan:
I’m continuing the radio show, mainly because I enjoy it, but also because I hear occasionally from listeners that it makes a difference to them. See techtonic.fm.
And here at Creative Good I’m still advising teams on how to listen better to their constituents (users, customers, communities) in order to build better products. If you’re on a team that could use help, please reach out.
Also at Creative Good I’m continuing to host our members-only community on the Forum, allowing us to have discussions online, behind a login wall, and thus not subject to AI slop or trolls. I hope you’ll join us.
Until next time, keep choosing the good –
-mark
Mark Hurst, founder, Creative Good
Email: mark@creativegood.com
Podcast/radio show: techtonic.fm
Follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon
The term really gained popularity in this post by Cory in early 2023. Days later I interviewed him on the March 20, 2023 Techtonic, which was one of the earliest mentions of the term. (Though bleeped, of course.) ↩