Cory Doctorow: Enshittification

In November 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe the decay of digital platforms as the owners prioritize profit over the experience of their users. Cory’s argument clearly resonated and helped people realize that enshittification is everywhere, creeping into many of the services that we now rely on—so much so that the American Dialect Society named it its 2023 Word of the Year, and it was cited as an inspiration for the popular dystopic TV series 2025 season of Black Mirror.

Cory Doctorow will discuss his highly anticipated new book Enshittification with public policy expert Vass Bednar, to help us understand why Big Tech is the way it is, and how we can disenshittify the internet.

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, including The Lost Cause, a solarpunk science-fiction novel of hope amidst the climate emergency. His nonfiction book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation is a Big Tech disassembly manual. Other recent books include Red Team Blues, a science fiction crime thriller; Chokepoint Capitalism, nonfiction about monopoly and creative labor markets; the Little Brother series for young adults; In Real Life, a graphic novel; and the picture book Poesy the Monster Slayer. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

Vass Bednar is the Managing Director of the Canadian SHIELD Institute and the co-author of The Big Fix: How Companies Capture Markets and Harm Canadians. Vas was the host of the Globe & Mail podcast Lately, about navigating life in the new economy. She was also the Executive Director of the Master of Public Policy program at McMaster University.

**Please note, this event is online only and will not take place at the library**

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For the third year in a row, BC’s public libraries are hosting a virtual author series to bring new insights and voices to library users in every corner of British Columbia: BC Libraries Present. Public libraries are known as centres of dialogue on many important ideas in their communities. To build upon that role, Public Library InterLINK has brought together many libraries, both big and small, to host these events and provide access to award-winning authors to library users across the province.

For the third season of this series, the topic is upheaval. This year has been marked by tariffs, trade wars, and international conflicts that are destabilizing economies and political systems worldwide. The advent of artificial intelligence is adding to a wave of technological changes that are disrupting the way we work, how we communicate, and our ability to discern truth from propaganda and disinformation.

All events are hosted on the BC Libraries Present Crowdcast channel: crowdcast.io/@bclibraries-present

BC Libraries Present is a project of BC’s public library federations with the generous financial support of the Province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Municipal Affairs.