Cory Doctorow on “The Internet Con”

19th January 2024

Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter (now X) aren’t what they used to be. Some of those social media platforms have changed beyond recognition, many others have just become harder to use. In 2022, Cory Doctorow put a word to it: ens**tification. Cory joins us to talk about his book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, and what we can do when platforms change. Plus, how the internet can become a better, more rewarding place.

Episode notes

(Photo: Verso Books)

Content warning: This episode contains unbleeped obscenities.

Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter (now X) aren’t what they used to be. If you used just about any social media platform for any extended amount of time, you can probably attest to this. The platform isn’t as fun or as easy to use as it once was. Maybe it’s changed so drastically, it’s barely recognizable.

In 2022, writer Cory Doctorow put a word to it: “ens**tification.” He defined the demise of platforms pretty succinctly in that blog post for Wired:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.

Doctorow tapped into something. The word caught on fast, gettting used more and more. It was eventually named the 2023 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society.
Cory doesn’t frame the process as inevitable or irreversible, though. In fact, he wrote a whole book filled with solution to make the internet a better, more rewarding place. Cory joins us to talk about The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, and what we can do when platforms change.

In this episode...

Senior Producer
Producer
Maximum Fun Producer
Maximum Fun Production Fellow
Video Editor

Guests

  • Cory Doctorow

About the show

Bullseye is a celebration of the best of arts and culture in public radio form. Host Jesse Thorn sifts the wheat from the chaff to bring you in-depth interviews with the most revered and revolutionary minds in our culture.

Bullseye has been featured in Time, The New York Times, GQ and McSweeney’s, which called it “the kind of show people listen to in a more perfect world.” Since April 2013, the show has been distributed by NPR.

If you would like to pitch a guest for Bullseye, please CLICK HERE. You can also follow Bullseye on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. For more about Bullseye and to see a list of stations that carry it, please click here.

Get in touch with the show

People

Senior Producer

Producer

Maximum Fun Producer

Maximum Fun Production Fellow

Video Editor

How to listen

Stream or download episodes directly from our website, or listen via your favorite podcatcher!

Share this show

New? Start here...

Liked Cory Doctorow on “The Internet Con”? Listen to these next...