Cory Doctorow on the enshittification of tech work
Doctorow has been an internet activist for a quarter of a century. He has also invented a word that describes the hyper-commodification of online platforms and their ensuing crummy-ness.
Cory Doctorow originally coined the term “enshittification” to explain why digital products kept getting, well, shittier. But the term has taken on a broader meaning, coming to stand for everything that has become exhaustingly, predictably shabby, a total “platform collapse,” as he writes. You can apply this term to so many things: from Google, to a stack of beeping electric scooters on the sidewalk, to the sad commercialization of British soccer, with its infusion of private equity and the inevitable takeover of clubs.
Taking stock of this fiasco is the goal of Doctorow’s book. The Cornell University professor is originally from Toronto, and he approaches his subject like a slightly manic disease detective. His chapter headings start with “The Pathology,” leading up to “The Epidemiology” and ending with, less convincingly, “The Cure.”
Aside from his critiques about the tech world, Doctorow writes solarpunk novels and science fiction, and he speaks, often at great length, without punctuation. Brilliant, un-interrupt-able, and always looking out for the tech worker, he spoke with me on Zoom one recent afternoon. An edited version of our conversation appears below.
Tara McKelvey: You describe an unusual image in your book - cell phones hanging in trees. Can you tell me more about that?
Cory Doctorow: Amazon, like a lot of firms, likes to have its cake and eat it, too. And so one of the ways you can do that in respect of your workforce is by not hiring any of them. You treat them all as contractors. You misclassify them as contractors, and ideally as subcontractors. You kind of want the people who are doing the work to be contractors for someone else who’s contracting with you, which gives you a great deal of plausible deniability.
If a driver runs someone over, or if someone is horribly injured in a warehouse, and they don’t work for you, then you can abstract yourself from any consequences. Yet, if you are powerful enough as a buyer, you can exert great pressure to determine the life circumstances and working conditions of those workers. So, Amazon has a variety of different scams that it uses to deliver parcels. One of them is Amazon Flex. It’s sort of an Uber for parcel delivery. People in their own cars deliver for Amazon. And Amazon - they take over the device that you use to connect to them, so they require all kinds of permissions from your phone to be a flex driver. And among the things they can do is know where you are. Phones are designed so that you cannot override their disclosures. So, if you want your phone to say that you’re somewhere else, your phone will refuse. Not because it can’t run that program, but because the manufacturers won’t let you run that program.
Flex drivers find that they are often shut out of warehouse pickups to do deliveries. And they are operating on a wage that is calculated to be the lowest possible wage to keep them buying gas and paying their insurance. And so, they’re operating on a razor’s edge. Amazon has really squeezed them as hard as they can. So, what some of these drivers have started doing is - they buy a second phone, a burner phone, and they install remote control software on it so they can control it from another phone. And then they hang the burner phone in trees outside of Amazon warehouses. So, as far as Amazon knows, they are outside of the warehouse. There’s a lot of different things happening here. You have Amazon’s market power as an employer. You have the refusal of the technology manufacturers to allow owners of devices to have the veto over how they operate. You have all of these different factors coming together to produce a world where we have this great act of ingenuity here among the workers.
TM: What’s nice about your writing is the way it’s so pro-human - the workers who put the phones on strings. They’re winning.
CD: In another example - in Indonesia, the gig economy is very big, and it’s almost entirely grounded in motorbikes. So it’s not cars, it’s motorbikes, including taxis. And so these motorbike riders - they used to work for a company. Now, they work for an app, and they are misclassified as contractors. They don’t have a place they can go and rest. They don’t have a toilet they can use. They don’t have anywhere they can fix their bikes. So they’re in a much worse shape than they used to be. But they started forming these little informal cooperatives where they would get together to rent out a spot where they could just rest, have a cup of tea, use the facilities, and work on their bike. Do all the things that you need to do if you’re riding a bike around the streets of Jakarta all day. And through these clubhouses, they started to get together the money to hire programmers to modify the apps that their bosses use to send them out on jobs. So, you know, Amazon flex drivers are hanging phones from trees to spoof their location. In Jakarta, they just spoof their location. They just have location-spoofing software on their phones. This is a way that we bargain with our technology. For example, there was an app called Uber Cheat that let UberEats drivers log their mileage and compare it to the mileage that Uber is paying them. And so you can imagine if you were unionizing or if you were negotiating a contract within your employer, one of the things we want to be able to do is go in and say, ‘Look, we’ve got proof that you’ve been stealing our wages. The Uber Cheat actually shows that you’ve underestimated our mileage by 15% over the last year, and that is X million dollars across our workforce.’
TM: You can turn a phrase. I saw that again and again in your book - like the phrase, ‘inkjet grift.’ Your writing has a steampunk sensibility, echoing back to previous labor movements. So, you talk about how an app gives power to the ‘modern black hearted coal boss.’ I’m wondering if you can tell me how you bring these different themes together and why that’s important in your writing.
CD: There is a temptation to blame the bad things happening in our lives on the iron laws of economics or on great forces of history, or the individual moral failings of various tech bosses. And I think that the problem with this is that it kind of lets the real villains off the hook. Because we can trace the changes in our digital and economic environment to specific policy choices that were taken in living memory by named individuals. When you ground these things in historic context - for example, Uber lowering a driver’s wage every time the driver accepts a lower wage for a ride. So every time the driver is offered a ride, they’re offered a lower wage. If they sign on to that lower wage, that becomes the new level, and then they’re offered a lower wage again and again. That’s something that coal bosses would have done in the 19th century, but they didn’t have enough guys in green eyeshades with quill pens working on ledgers to adjust everyone’s pay packet every week. It’s just technically impossible. And so, you know, we do ourselves a disservice when we ascribe to today’s bosses a special kind of ingenuity or a new kind of wickedness, when what they are are mediocrities on par with the mediocrities of history who now find themselves with more powerful tools.
TM: You work like an investigative journalist. You show the facts. You map out timelines, showing that these people weren’t the first ones to do these types of things to their workers. And then also, like you’re building murder boards, showing connections. But do you feel frustrated because there’s so little in terms of prosecution or accountability?
CD: I don’t think lawsuits can restore the rule of law. I think activism can. And then once the activism restores the rule of law, or bolsters the rule of law, then you get space for litigation again.
TM: The law is a go-to force for fixing moral or ethical problems. People say, ‘What does the law say about that?’ But the law is not necessarily ethical. Activism can make people think about issues in a more generous way.
CD: There’s no one tactic that’s better than the other. You know, I’m one of the world’s terrible parallel parkers, and I spent a lot of times time trying to get a couple inches this way and a couple inches that way, and a couple inches and you know, when you run out of space this way, you got to move in a different direction. And so, if you’ve done everything you can with code, and there’s nothing more you can invent to change your situation, maybe you need a law, right? Or maybe you need a campaign, maybe you need a normative campaign. Or maybe you need the people who are using the code you’ve developed so far and just depend on it for their living to start talking about this as a market force, right? So all of these things come together, and there isn’t just one that we should use. It’s like screwdrivers and hammers and saws and all the other tools in the toolbox. They all have a reason for being there.
TM: You talked about this case in Delaware involving Elon Musk, and one of the investors, talking about how they are going to lay people off, uses the term, ‘Sharpen your blades, boys.’
CD: So you know, tech workers used to be the princes of labor, right? There’s a National Bureau of Economic Research study that pegged the average contribution of a Silicon Valley tech worker to their employers’ bottom line at about a million dollars per worker per year. That’s why tech workplaces were whimsical campuses with free kombucha and a ball pit and massages and dry cleaning and daycare and a surgeon who’ll freeze your eggs so you can work through your fertile years. It’s not because bosses like tech workers. It’s because tech workers were really valuable and because they were in short supply. Bosses hated this because tech workers would mouth off to them, and they couldn’t fire them. Tech workers who were maltreated or corralled into doing things that violated their moral senses would quit their jobs and find a job somewhere else. And because this was all happening in California, where the state constitution bans non-compete agreements, there was nothing you could do to stop a worker from walking out the door and going to your direct competitor that afternoon. And so you see this kind of insatiable horniness to tame the tech workforce. I think the AI bubble -- one of the reasons it’s become so potent is because tech bosses just love the idea of firing programmers and replacing them with chatbots.
TM: “Today, there’s mass layoffs-”
CD: Tech workers -- they never really unionized. Tech union density basically can’t even be detected with a microscope. And tech workers had the opportunity to do this back when they had all this scarcity-driven labor power, but because they conceived of themselves as like temporarily embarrassed founders or entrepreneurs in waiting. Not as workers, really. They saw themselves as peers of their bosses. Not employees of their bosses. Mark Zuckerberg and other top tech bosses were doing weekly or monthly town halls with their engineering staff. Like it’s like it’s a stand-up meeting among equals, talking about how the tech should work, and not like it’s your boss, giving you marching orders. The workers didn’t unionize then. And so when tech work supply caught up with demand, you saw mass layoffs. We’ve seen half a million layoffs in the last three years in US tech. And so you see the weakening of the tech labor force--through chat bots, layoffs. This means that tech workers can no longer hold the line on their bosses. Today, Google just fires workers. They fired 12,000 workers in 2023 and then just a few months later they did stock buy-back their first of $70 billion that would have paid those workers wages for 23 years. These weren’t junior coders. They laid off a lot of senior people because they were the most expensive. They were the most entitled. They were the ones who remembered what Google was like when coders had the upper hand. They were the ones who promulgated a culture, a norm, of tech workers telling their bosses, ‘No.’ By getting rid of them, they broke the back of tech-worker solidarity and tech-worker ethics. The idea that tech workers had a responsibility to the future they were building and the users they served and to make sure that they weren’t harming people.
TM: Your book is hopeful because you look for ways that workers are fighting back. It’s inspiring.
CD: I’m not an optimist, but I am quite hopeful. I think the difference is that optimism is the idea that things are just going to get better no matter what we do. It’s a kind of corollary to pessimism. They’re both a form of fatalism. I really believe in human agency, and I really believe that even though we can’t always see a way to get from here to where we want to be, that if we take some material step to improve our conditions, that we will ascend a gradient towards a better world. As we climb up that gradient, new terrain will be revealed to us that wasn’t visible when we were lower down. We may see other ways of making our world better. And I think there are many opportunities for change right now, many reasons for hope.
TM: One of my favorite lines from you is - ‘Write even when the world is chaotic.’ I would change it slightly, so it’s, ‘Write especially when the world is chaotic.’
CD: Yeah, I think that’s right. Writing became the way that I could resolve or make sense of my own emotional turmoil -- that if things were going bad in the world, I could use the page as a way to organize my thoughts about them and create some perspective. And it was very powerful.
TM: Thank you.
Here’s what else we’re reading this weekend (compiled by the Hard Reset team):
Anil Dash with an excellent piece on “The Majority AI View,” summed up as:
Technologies like LLMs have utility, but the absurd way they’ve been over-hyped, the fact they’re being forced on everyone, and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses where they might add value.
Mission Local contextualizes Marc Benioff’s “craven and hollow” calls for Trump to bring the National Guard to San Francisco as being in lock-step with his fellow SF oligarchs and not the “liberal” billionaire he used to enjoy being seen as.
It was good to see someone shared internal conversations to the NYT about Salesforce sales efforts to bring in ICE contracts, clearly their remains some good people in the Salesforce Tower.
Hundreds of (looks like mostly former) Salesforce workers signed a letter to Marc Benioff asking him to retract his comments calling on Trump to send the National Guard to San Francisco.
Following pressure from current and former workers, other billionaires, politicians, comedians, and many others, Benioff ultimately apologized Friday for his comments (conveniently, a day after Dreamforce ended). Perhaps the tech bro authoritarian turn isn’t inevitable.
Wired’s article on the much-deserved derision incurred by Cybertruck owners went viral and led to the incredible meme-ification of the line, “I was married, but I’m not married anymore. Women don’t like the vehicle.”
More Perfect Union was the fastest growing left of center YouTube channel in Q3. They now have 2.2m YouTube subscribers. We recently interviewed the founder, Faiz Shakir, for Hard Reset. Give it a read if you haven’t already.
Brian Merchant in his Blood in the Machine newsletter gives a must-read recap of the flurry of California AI bills and vetoes from Gavin Newsom this week.
A startup CEO claimed one of his engineers was deported by immigration at SFO this weekend.
Over 6,000 tech workers have now signed a change.org petition calling on tech leadership to use their political capital to protect their workers. Relatedly, the Chamber of Commerce (a business lobby group, who are traditionally considered Republican) sued Trump for his new H1B rules. Another rare instance of business taking public stance against Trump.
‘A theory of political speech under the second Trump Presidency’ - a smart write up by Sarah Jeong in The Verge about what the Portland frog tells us about political and internet culture
NVIDIA and Palantir are fighting about China. Palantir CTO, Shyam Shankar, attacked NVIDIA for doing business with China in a WSJ op-ed. Jensen Huang, NVIDIA CEO, argued it doesn’t need to be ‘us for them’, but for Palantir, everything is a war.
Both Republican and Democrats are speaking out about the rise in electricity costs caused by data centers. This is becoming a bigger issue by the week. Michael Thomas, a researcher, is a good follow on X to keep track of the build out.
The Hollywood Reporter has a story about OpenAI using major Hollywood talent’s likeness in their new AI video generator app called Sora. Based on the reporting, it’s clear OpenAI operate in a super shady way. It’s well beyond time for Hollywood to get their act together, and stop getting eaten for breakfast by Silicon Valley.
And finally, a powerful essay by Alvaro Bedoya, former head of the FTC, in the New Republic on what led him to become a populist.
Nice, I like that optimism at the end about an improvement gradient. Thank you for this interview.