Review: Who Broke the Internet? – Podcast with Cory Doctorow

🎧 Listen on CBC

The #mainstreaming narrative around power tends to centre on institutions – on policy boards, corporate elitists, and those privileged enough to claw their way up the slippery sides of crumbling hierarchies. But that’s not where most of us live, and more importantly, it’s not where real change and challenge takes root.

Too often, we miss this balance, we “forget” that we have direct power and influence over the grassroots, because we are the grassroots. We are embedded in networks, collectives, and everyday moments of solidarity and resistance. It’s here, in our own spaces, that we can compost the mess into something fertile, resilient alternatives born of shared struggle. By contrast, our power over “them” – the #nastyfew, the policy-makers who ignore us, the corporate class – is minimal unless we shift the frame from the bottom up to acturly included them against their will.

To see a clear and useful example of top-down critique done right – or at least with an honest attempt to redirect power – look to the new #CBC podcast series Who Broke the Internet? Where Doctorow lays out a thesis many of us have known intuitively, the internet, and the #dotcons that grew like weeds across it, were not victims of some inevitable collapse or unstoppable tide of “network effects.” No, it was broken by design. Through deliberate choices, made in plain sight and often against clear warnings. It was policy. It was enclosure. It was centralization. And the ones who did it? Some were the #nastyfew, sure. But many more were #fashernistas chasing the next hype wave, while the #geekproblem stumbled behind them, building systems that locked us in. Now we live under a kind of techno-feudalism – run by the #broocracy, the #geekproblem made “good”, the unwitting nobles of a new authoritarian shift.

Doctorow’s work isn’t just about assigning blame. It’s about dismantling the myth of inevitability. The so-called #enshittification of the internet wasn’t fate, it was a process we can understand, interrupt, and reverse. That clarity offers the possibility of agency. And more than nostalgia, Doctorow attempts and likely sadly likely mostly fails to articulate a future-facing vision of an internet rebuilt to meet the radical demands of our time: from #climatechaos to oligarchy, fascism, and digital colonialism.

Where his work meets more “us” focus is in this core tension – top-down insight and bottom-up action. Doctorow maps the wreckage and names the architects. But it’s up to us to compost what’s left and grow something new. We rebuild with our hands and hearts, in our local contexts, among people who still care. That’s where resilience grows. That’s where the #openweb is rebooted.

More thoughts on grassroots change and challenge paths: http://hamishcampbell.com

Why #Enshittification Misses the Point and Why #Dotcons is the Better Frame

The term #enshittification, coined by Cory Doctorow, is a catchy way to describe the decline of digital platforms as they become exploitative and unusable. While it’s an effective pop term, it ultimately obscures the root causes of the problem.

For the past 20 years, I’ve used #dotcons to describe the same issue, but with a clearer critique of the systemic forces behind it. Unlike #enshittification, which frames the issue as an inevitable decline, #dotcons directly points to deliberate deception and enclosure of the #openweb by corporate interests.

Tech as a confidence trick, for over 30 years, the tech industry has been a confidence trick (see scam) dressed up as progress. The early internet was open, decentralized, and full of promise. But over time, corporate enclosures captured these open paths and turned them into walled gardens.

The dot-com boom (#dotcons) wasn’t about building a better web—it was about monetizing control. Liberal elitists and the public bought into this process, handing over control to Silicon Valley under the illusion that private corporations could be trusted with public digital infrastructure. The result? The death of the #openweb as #dotcons turned the internet into a system of surveillance, advertising, and data extraction.

Now, the same liberals who helped build this mess are using #enshittification to describe it, as if the problem is just an unfortunate trend rather than the predictable outcome of capitalism’s extractive logic. This is why #Enshittification misses the bigger picture, the problem, it shifts focus away from responsibility. It frames tech decline as an inevitable process, rather than a deliberate, profit-driven strategy.

🔹 Profit Motive and Diverging Interests, the core issue isn’t just “enshittification”—it’s the profit motive that drives platforms to exploit people. The interests of people and corporations are fundamentally opposed. People want stable, functional platforms; corporations want maximum profits, which means stripping away user benefits over time.

🔹 Lack of Accountability, by using a vague, abstract term, the real actors behind this decline—tech CEOs, venture capitalists, and #neoliberal policymakers—are let off the hook. The problem isn’t that platforms just get worse on their own; it’s that corporations actively degrade them to extract more profit.

🔹 The Liberal Blindspot. Liberals love talking about how things are bad, but they rarely examine how their own ideologies enabled these failures. It was liberal policies that deregulated Big Tech, liberal tech elitists who built the enclosures, and liberal “innovators” who sold out the #openweb. Now, they lament the decline without addressing why it happened in the first place.

🔹 A Call to Action – #Dotcons as a clearer critique as #dotcons isn’t just a description—it’s a call to action. It’s a critique of the corporate hijacking of the internet and a demand for accountability. Unlike #enshittification, which tells us “things got worse,” #dotcons reminds us who is responsible and why we need radical alternatives.

It’s time for critical thinking, using terms without deeper critique allows liberals to continue avoiding responsibility. If we want a better web, we need to stop pretending that this decline is just some natural cycle.

📌 The real issue is corporate control, profit extraction, and the enclosure of digital commons.
📌 The solution isn’t lamenting decline—it’s fighting back against #dotcons and rebuilding the #openweb.

So, let’s ditch vague buzzwords and focus on the real struggle, taking control from #dotcons tech monopolies and thus breaking the cycle of enclosure. And seriously, liberals, try thinking critically about this for once—without being prats about it.

More on this: 🔗 Enshittification – Wikipedia