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Cory Doctorow

Headshot of Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of dozens of books, most recently Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It

January 2026

  • two wireframe hands looming over a person working on a computer

    The featured essay
    AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

  • Illustration: Thomas Pullin

    double quotation markTrump may be the beginning of the end for ‘enshittification’ – this is our chance to make tech good again

    Cory Doctorow

November 2025

  • Anonymous Man Uses Smartphone in Bed at Home at Night. Handsome Guy Browsing Social Media, Reading News, Doing Online Shopping Late at Night. Focus on Hand Holding Mobile Phone Covering Face

    Today in Focus
    ‘Enshittification’: how we got the internet no one asked for – podcast

    Tech critic Cory Doctorow explains why for so many the internet – from Amazon to Google to Instagram – seems to be getting worse
    Podcast24:28

October 2025

  • Illustration of Amazon boxes with the arrows making a sad face

    Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish?

    Sick of scrolling through junk results, AI-generated ads and links to lookalike products? The author and activist behind the term ‘enshittification’ explains what’s gone wrong with the internet – and what we can do about it

February 2022

  • ‘After years of slowing US growth, Facebook just experienced its first-ever US shrinkage, which precipitated a $230bn stock crash, the largest in global corporate history.’

    double quotation markI’ve been waiting 15 years for Facebook to die. I’m more hopeful than ever

    Cory Doctorow
    Facebook is struggling to retain users, fending off regulation, trying to pivot to VR, and paying a massive wage premium to attract the workers it needs to make any of this happen. The company is on the ropes

January 2020

  • Smart cities are studded with sensors that monitor what is going on with their people, vehicles and infrastructure.

    The case for ... cities that aren't dystopian surveillance states

    Imagine your smartphone knew everything about the city – but the city didn’t know anything about you. Wouldn’t that be truly ‘smart’?

May 2017

  • Drone silhouette flying above Dubai

    double quotation markTechnology is making the world more unequal. Only technology can fix this

    Cory Doctorow
    The inequality of badly-run states is boosted by technology – but technology also makes it easier to destabilise them. So: which future will prevail?

September 2016

  • headphones

    double quotation markDRM products are defective by design. Time to tell users what they're buying

    Cory Doctorow in Los Angeles
    The Electronic Frontier Foundation is calling for the labelling of products encumbered with digital rights management. It’s increasingly important as we trust technology with our lives

July 2016

  • US Capitol in Washington

    America's broken digital copyright law is about to be challenged in court

    The Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing the US government over ‘unconstitutional’ use of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

June 2016

  • hand holding credit card and wallet by laptop

    double quotation markDon't buy it? When tech firms get it wrong, that's not enough

    Cory Doctorow in Los Angeles
    With big tech business making regular political and ethical blunders, it is our responsibility to complain – and let them know they must do better

May 2016

  • Ten years is an eternity in ​​web years, and everything can change in a decade.

    double quotation markWhy the future of web browsers belongs to the biggest tech firms

    Cory Doctorow in Los Angeles
    Changes made to browser standards will make it harder for new companies to disrupt the status quo and cement the power of Google and Apple

March 2016

  • Apple FBI hearing in Congress

    double quotation markForget Apple's fight with the FBI – our privacy catastrophe has only just begun

    Cory Doctorow in Los Angeles

    The privacy crisis is a disaster of our own making – and now the tech firms who gathered our data are trying to make money out of privacy

February 2016

  • Children's hands

    double quotation markThe FBI wants a backdoor only it can use – but wanting it doesn’t make it possible

    Cory Doctorow
    Much like climate change denialists, politicians continue to debate encryption – ignoring the consensus of experts that it must not be compromised

January 2016

  • Indian demonstrators

    'Poor internet for poor people': India's activists fight Facebook connection plan

    Ferocious momentum continues to build against social media giant’s bid to take charge of the country’s internet through a program called Free Basics

December 2015

  • Google’s prototype self-driving car at the Google campus in Mountain View, California

    double quotation markThe problem with self-driving cars: who controls the code?

    Cory Doctorow
  • National Security Agency logo

    double quotation mark'I want to join the NSA. What do you think of that?'

    Cory Doctorow

November 2015

  • Many companies start emailing customers without their explicit consent - one brief visit or online purchase is enough. Mailstrom Photograph: Darron Birgenheier/flickr

    Death by spam: lazy email marketing is killing our inboxes

    It took Cory Doctorow 30 days to unsubscribe from 3,000 ‘legitimate’ email lists – the kind of marketing that threatens to overload this critical, federated platform

October 2015

  • The Ashley Madison app displayed on a smartphone

    Why is it so hard to convince people to care about privacy?

    Every week or two, from now on, will see new privacy disasters, each worse than the last

September 2015

  • iOS 9 + ad block: double-whammy

    double quotation markHow to save online advertising

    Cory Doctorow
    The answer isn’t complicated, it’s just hard: find a way for publishers and advertisers to deal with one another directly

August 2015

  • Online privacy

    'Warrant canaries': a subtle hint that your email provider is compromised

    The business of protecting data is getting tougher by the day – but there are ways not to breach the law and still safeguard customer data
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