Canadian-British journalist, science-fiction novelist, and activist; longtime co-editor of Boing Boing, former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and — through a daily newsletter (Pluralistic), prolific journalism, and a dozen novels — among the most widely read popular critics of contemporary platform capitalism. Doctorow is not an academic; his contribution is to have translated the academic critiques of platform power (Wu on antitrust, Zuboff on surveillance, Lessig on copyright) into a vernacular that general readers can use, and to have named the core pathology in a word that has since escaped containment.
That word is enshittification, coined by Doctorow in 2022 and named the American Dialect Society's 2023 Word of the Year. It describes the characteristic life-cycle of venture-backed digital platforms: first they are good to users in order to attract them, then they are good to business customers in order to extract users, then they abuse both in order to maximize returns to shareholders. The arc is not a failure of individual platforms but the predictable consequence of the legal and economic environment — weak antitrust, thick IP rights, prohibitions on interoperability and reverse-engineering — that has allowed lock-in to become the primary business strategy of the internet economy. Doctorow's policy remedy is correspondingly specific: restore antitrust, mandate interoperability, narrow the reach of anti-circumvention law, and otherwise restore to users and competitors the right of exit that functioning markets require. His 2023 The Internet Con and 2024 The Bezzle give the argument its fullest popular form.