Cory Doctorow on Why the Internet Got So Terrible, So Fast, and What to Do About It

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KQED

News, Politics, News Commentary

4.2 • 726 Ratings

🗓️ 20 October 2025

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Cory Doctorow coined a word to describe how what we once loved about the internet, and relied on, has become exploitative, corrosive, and anti-user. And now he’s written a book about it, “Enshittification: Why Everything Got Worse and What to Do About It.” He analyzes how TikTok, Google Search, email, music streaming and other services and platforms – technology that we expect to always improve – have declined so fast. But the tech activist and science fiction writer insists it can be fixed. “This era, the Enshittocene, is the result of specific policy decisions, made by named individuals,” he writes, and those policies can be reversed and the individuals can be held accountable. We talk to him about what’s gone wrong and how we can make a new, good internet. Guests: Cory Doctorow, science fiction writer, technology activist and journalist. Author, "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:00.0	This week on KQED's Bay Curious.
0:03.1	Every neighborhood in San Francisco has got these hidden stairway walks.
0:08.3	It's kind of a cool connection to the past because people have been going up and down these stairways, some of them since the 1800s.
0:14.8	So here I am at the shortest staircase in San Francisco.
0:18.0	It is just one step.
0:19.6	For the sake of journalism, I'm going to walk it.
0:25.1	Find this episode of Bay Curious wherever you get your podcasts.
0:30.9	If you had the smartest Wi-Fi, it'd be Xfinity.
0:35.2	It would boost speeds to the devices that needed them most and to protect you from threats at
0:40.0	home and online.
0:41.8	Xfinity.
0:42.8	Imagine that.
0:44.0	Restrictions apply.
0:46.3	From KQED.
0:49.5	Welcome to Forum.
0:50.6	I'm Alexis Madrigal.
0:51.8	Longtime listeners probably know that I was a technology
0:54.5	journalist before I became your local forum host. And I got into the field in part because I was
1:00.1	entranced by the potential of the internet to connect people up. I had a motley assortment of
1:05.6	friends I made on the web in the 90s, from a microbiology professor at the University of Kansas to a young
1:12.2	psychiatrist in New Orleans to an old ham radio operator near my hometown in rural Washington.
1:19.0	But we can't let nostalgia cloud our vision. The platforms, as they are, have serious problems,
	...

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