"How Silicon Valley Enshittified the Internet"
If you want to know what happened to the tech industry, and why the products and platforms you use every day feel like they’ve gotten meaningfully more terrible, this is the book that explains it.
This is a good episode of Decoder. Calling it an interview is a bit of a stretch, though—Cory Doctorow spends a lot of the episode monologuing. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but his absolutist position on things can be challenging to listen to at length, even for someone like me, who generally agrees with a lot of what he says, particularly around enshittification.
I was reading the comments on the article for the podcast, and someone wrote something mostly unrelated to the topic that nonetheless resonated with me:
I like Cory Doctorow and his writing, but I must say, boingboing.net is a terrible website, full of clickbait articles, ads for scams, and just an embodiment of what has gone wrong with web content.
Man, I used to read Boing Boing daily, and loved it. But it really did lose a lot when Cory, Xeni, and others left.
How Silicon Valley enshittified the internet
Author Cory Doctorow on platform decay and why everything on the internet feels like it’s getting worse.