This book should be mandatory reading for everyone who uses the internet. Anyone who cares about data privacy is already well aware of Cory Doctorow. He is now immensely famous for coining ‘enshittification’, a term that has increasing currency in the contemporary discussion of tech. This is a slim volume focused on social media networks and ‘Big Tech’. Much of what I read here about platforms and their algorithms and monopolies reminded me a lot of Cloud Empires by Vili Lehdonvirta, a fantastic primer that goes more in-depth on this issue from an economics and markets angle of internet platforms.

What Doctorow does here is more of an autopsy, an analysis of how we have gotten here with these platforms and what we can potentially do. The book’s focus on interoperability was also something I vaguely recalled from Cloud Empires, but Doctorow gives it a proper breakdown here. There is also a history, of course, because any good explanation will contain some sort of history or record of the steps that got us here. Both of these aspects were incredibly informative and insightful, and I appreciate that he is willing to dive into this issue from different methodologies—not just economy, but the legal and political backbones as well.

Doctorow’s writing style is concise and engaging while also being decisive. It is hard to resist the flow of his arguments, and of course I am biased, but I don’t see how anyone could. Of course, tech giants may feel differently. Interoperability would absolutely destroy their bottom line, their profit margins, etc. Perhaps their only hope is that while Doctorow’s solutions are powerful, it is hard to imagine how we could begin to implement them to scale. The internet is vast, and yet much of internet traffic is directed to the same handful of websites. Many people are not concerned in their daily life, even while bemoaning how much Twitter/Facebook/Instagram sucks.

This book is a great primer I would recommend to anyone who has an iota of concern for how the modern internet has become what it is today. We have a fantastic advocate and writer in Cory Doctorow, and my only regret here is that too few people will read this book or even concern themselves with the ideas therein. If you’re reading a review for this, just go read this already! I read this from my local library for the great price of free, though Cory Doctorow also has a great online writing platform at Pluralistic. We must hold Big Tech accountable and remind ourselves why the internet is one of the species’s best creations, rather than its worst.