He was the European Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation for many years; he’s on the front lines for digital rights; an essayist, science fiction writer, and one of the most influential voices in the debate on tech monopolies and Big Tech’s overwhelming power. We are talking about Cory Doctorow, Canadian author, who has just published his latest book, about to be released in twelve countries: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It (Verso Books, 2025). He sat down with Renewable Matter to explain his blunt-named theory that concerns us all: the “enshittification”, that is, the progressive, inexorable loss of value, the decline of platforms and beyond.
Let's start with the mechanics of enshittification. How does this process actually unfold?
It's a theory of platform decay. Platforms start out good for users, luring and locking them in. Then they degrade their services to benefit business customers, locking them in as well. Finally, they extract value from both for the sake of shareholders. We have a policy environment rewarding companies for being terrible, in which harvesting value beats sharing it equitably. These policies weren't accidental. They all came from Brussels, Washington, Westminster – from policymakers who warned this would reward the worst companies doing the worst things. This mostly applies to tech because you can change digital rules instantly. Reconfiguring a server is enough for a privacy-respecting platform to become privacy-violating. Users locked in suddenly face a different system than they signed up for. You can't do that as easily with material things. But everything's becoming digital. Taxis through Uber, nurses through apps, grocery shelf tags that raise umbrella prices when it rains. The creeping digitisation of society brings forth the enshittification of it.
Do you see overlap between the enshittification framework and Varoufakis' techno-feudalism thesis? Where do they converge or diverge?
Yanis Varoufakis' theory approaches the same phenomenon from a different angle. In his book, he draws a distinction between money made by producing things and money made by owning things – profits versus rent. Rent has historically been capitalism's enemy. The transition from feudalism to capitalism was the shift from rent to profits, which are always in conflict. The more people who own the factors of production – land, patents, capital – make, the less is left for profit. Varoufakis' thesis is that we've moved from a capitalist to a feudalist economy, not because profitability has vanished, but because conflicts are now more often resolved in favour of rentiers. With the shift to cloud-based digital systems, owning data centres, e-commerce platforms, and patents has become decisive in whether firms rise or fall. Capitalists have always hated capitalism and dreamed of being rentiers. The appeal is clear: you're not exposed to competitive risk. You make money whether or not better competitors exist. If your coffee shop tenant fails because the one across the street sells better, you now own an empty store-front on a street where everyone wants to be. Where enshittification differs here, is that it identifies four specific forces that historically prevented this shift to rents: competition, regulation, labour power, and interoperability. These have all been systematically neutralised.
If rent-seeking has always been attractive to capitalists, what structural changes have made it actually possible for platforms to become this extractive? And how does your framework help us understand these changes more precisely?
Enshittification identifies four forces that historically prevented rent-seeking, all neutralised now. First, competition: over 40 years, neo-liberal theories convinced governments that monopolies were efficient and should be embraced. Second, regulation – which only works under competition. Brussels has been trying to force Apple to open its app stores, but Apple is bigger and simply ignores them. The referee must be more powerful than the players. Third, labour power. Tech workers were scarce and valuable but never unionised. When scarcity ended, bosses fired them – there were half a million lay-offs in three years. Fourth, interoperability. Digital computers made it easy to fix defective products – like printers locked to manufacturer ink. Someone could code a program removing those defects and sell generic ink instead. But 20 years of expanding IP law targeted reverse engineering. The EU's 2001 Copyright Directive bans third-party modifications. Do you own a car designed only for manufacturer mechanics? You can't modify it for independent repair. No parliament voted to give Fiat that control, but the directive does anyway. IP growth, labour destruction, competition collapse, regulation collapse – these created the perfect conditions for enshittification.
Drawing on your European experience with the EFF, where does the EU stand stronger than the US in resisting enshittification, and which are its weak spots?
The European Union has been notably bold in recent years. They recognised the GDPR's failure – member states facilitated violations. Ireland, for instance, permits them, and since tech companies can claim Irish residency, enforcement proved impossible. Rather than retreat, the Commission doubled down with the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act. During Trump's first term and the Biden administration, American hostility toward tech platforms created transatlantic cooperation. That's collapsed by now. Tech companies poured millions into Trump's inauguration committee – essentially creating his personal fund. Each major CEO paid $1 million to sit at the inauguration. They bribed him and continue to. Tim Cook gave Trump a gold trophy; Zuckerberg eliminated Facebook moderators, calling the platform insufficiently masculine. Now, Trump made it clear he won't let the DMA and DSA proceed. It's very hard for the EU to force Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Oracle to follow European law.
But the Commission retains total control over one crucial lever: the Copyright Directive. If innovative students from Ivrea created a device to jailbreak iPhones and install alternative app stores – keeping revenue in Europe rather than California – Apple could shut them down through European courts. But the EU is still the one to decide whether its courts would enforce this. If the Commission changed the directive, Apple would be powerless to reverse it. No company can compel judges to enforce non-existent law. This isn't second-best – it's the most powerful direct force the Commission has to control Apple's conduct. They simply haven't used it yet. I think this is the most important next step.
In your book, you mention Europe's relative youth as a federal union. Given that legislative changes require agreement across all member states, and considering the current fragmentation within the EU, how realistic is it to push through reforms like changing the Copyright Directive?
Many Europeans are cynical about the European project, considering its mobilisation problems. But failures loom large while successes tend to slip by unnoticed. The most important success was the response to Putin. After the Russian gas embargo, Europeans went from 10 years behind on solar to 15 ahead within three years. Five years ago, that Europe would meet its climate commitments appeared impossible. Now they're on track. During emergencies, procedural accommodations collapse. The EU operates as a vetocracy – countless actors can block action, unanimous consent is required. But many veto rights exist as courtesy, not law. When genuine emergency comes up, obstinate positions get overruled. Trump is creating such an emergency. Consider the threats: Microsoft shut down the International Criminal Court's Office 365 accounts after it issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu. Every European government runs on American tech stacks. Microsoft told Germany that even data on German servers isn't safe from US government demands – all post-Snowden guarantees are gone. When Russian looters stole Ukrainian John Deere tractors, the company sent a remote kill signal. Trump could do that to any country. Almost every Italian tractor is vulnerable. Meanwhile, European solar connects to China's cloud. Norwegians discovered China could remotely disable their electric buses. These threats – whether from companies, governments, corrupt insiders, or hackers – are creating a powerful coalition: people concerned about sovereignty, entrepreneurs wanting to raid American tech margins, and digital rights activists. These three blocs can move the EU toward a post-American internet.
There's been a dramatic reorientation of Big Tech toward AI. How do you read this move? What are these companies actually pursuing?
Tech bosses love AI first of all, because when you have 90% market share, growth is hard to demonstrate. You need adjacent sectors. Google launched Google+ claiming they'd become Facebook. Facebook pivoted to video stating they'd replace YouTube. Then cryptocurrency, NFTs, Web3, XR, AR, now AI. These products convince investors the company is still growing rather than already mature. Investors value growing companies far more – Tesla trades enormously higher than Ford despite comparable revenue. If investors decide Tesla stopped growing, its value would collapse by 95%. Tech companies manufacture these growth narratives. But there's something else. Being a billionaire creates solipsism – i.e., the belief the rest of the world doesn't really exist. Musk may call dissenters NPCs, non-player characters (the characters in the background of videogames, ed.), but it’s not quite the reality: when tech bosses give instructions to programmers with irreplaceable skills, programmers can push back. Social media bosses have unpredictable people creating content, arguing, doing things they hope will keep users clicking through ads. All these people aren't controllable. Zuckerberg wants to replace friends with chatbots – a social network with no people. Bezos works warehouse employees so hard they suffer triple the injury rate; drivers urinate in bottles. He wants workers without human needs. Biological necessities are bugs. AI hallucinations – i.e., responses generated with false or misleading information – matter less than absence of complaints. These bosses fantasise about a world without people, where others don't matter. That's what being a billionaire means – believing you're not dependent on anyone. But bosses know: if they go home, the shop stays open. If workers go home, it closes. AI is the attempt to connect their toy steering wheel to the actual car.
Cover: Cory Doctorow