How Youth and Educators Can Fight Enshittified Tech

Everything costs more and works worse. The subscription you already pay for now shows you ads. The customer service line is a chatbot that can’t help you and won’t let you leave. Prices go up, quality goes down, and the explanation is that this is just how things work now. Cory Doctorow gave these experiences with technology a name: enshittification.

Enshittification caught on and was named the 2023 word of the year by the American Dialect Society because it helps us understand what is behind our changing experiences with technology. Enshittification unfolds in three stages: platforms first invest heavily to attract users, then squeeze them to please business customers, then squeeze everyone to keep the value for themselves. This analysis reminds us that products don’t rot on their own — their decline is driven by an economic and policy landscape that rewards specific business choices.

Cory is an activist, author, and journalist who imagines how things could be different. He has spent 25 years at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is an author of dozens of books, spanning nonfiction, science fiction, graphic novels, and more. His two most recent books are “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It,” and “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence — Before It’s Too Late.” Cory comes from a family of educators. While not an educator by trade, his YA fiction writing and activism are a uniquely impactful form of youth development and advocacy work. In this Q&A, Cory argues for the tech activism this moment needs — and what all of us, especially young people, stand to gain.

Question: What’s the critical issue?

Cory Doctorow: The story we’re told by tech bosses is not so different from Margaret Thatcher’s: that there is no alternative. If you want to have friends, Mark Zuckerberg has to spy on you. And asking Mark Zuckerberg to let you have friends on the internet without spying on you is like asking him to deliver water that’s not wet.

When you accept this narrative, you let Mark Zuckerberg off the hook — because then his choice to spy on you begins to seem like it’s not a choice, it’s just an intrinsic feature of the technology. But if you understand that the technology and the privacy choices are fully separable, that’s the basis for a better critique and a better way to demand accountability.

Enshittified tech affects all of us, but young people in particular end up as collateral damage. It’s analogous to what the airlines have done: business class seats are the only way that the airlines really make money, so coach becomes a funnel to capture more business class travelers. They make coach as unbearable as possible so that anyone who could possibly upgrade to business does so. In the same way, tech companies increase the ads on the free tier of products not because they get more money from ads, but because they get more conversions to the paid tier when the free tier is almost unusable. And kids are almost by definition ineligible for joining the paid tier. They’re the collateral damage in so many forms of deliberate product worsening.

Question: How should we fight back against enshittified tech?

Cory: We need to seize the means of computation. If there’s a technology that you get benefit out of, but that is exploitative, you should be able to adapt it and modify it. I find it baffling that the response instead so often seems to be: just stop using it.

Whether or not you use Twitter has almost nothing to do with whether Twitter succeeds. But you deprive yourself of a thing that you find fun and useful, and then blame your friends because they’re on the wrong social media network. The reason people are stuck on Twitter is not because they’re idiots, it’s because they love their friends more than they hate Elon Musk, and they can’t solve the collective action problem of leaving.

Policies that ban technology aren’t much better. When it comes to social media age restrictions, for example, age verification is the spider you have to swallow to catch a fly. Once you do an age ban, you have to do age verification. To do age verification, you have to ban VPNs. And once you ban VPNs, you have to ban open source operating systems. It’s a cascade of ever more baroque, fruitless, counterproductive things, because you don’t know how to fix the core problem. But you know that there is a problem, and you know that it only gets worse if you ignore it. So policymakers get desperate, and they fall prey to what Schneier calls the security syllogism: “Something must be done. There! I just did something.”

People are worried about kids being targeted by algorithms, and yet there’s almost no discourse at all about the fact that it’s illegal to put a privacy blocker on your mobile device so that the algorithms can’t find out that you’re a kid. Instead, all of our answers about kids being targeted by algorithms are, well, let’s just have the companies that make those algorithms know more about kids, which is just a bananas way to address these questions. Spying on kids to stop them from being spied on shatters what should be an alliance within the movement.

Question: How should we fight back against enshittified tech?

Cory: It would look like having the right to hack, modify, and fix our own tech again. But when everything that’s not mandatory is prohibited, you can’t see alternatives for a better tech landscape emerge. You look around and figure, well, everyone uses iPads, so iPads must be good. But it’s illegal to modify the iPad, and so we have a vacuum of evidence about what people would do if you let them do it.

The creative parts of TikTok are amazing. The in-device editing tools are super cool. I love the remix-culture of duets. It was amazing to watch my kid learning dance and trick makeup from it. I’m fully willing to believe that you could make all those things without the parts of TikTok that I find gross and manipulative. If it were legal to reverse engineer your phone, you could just have a third-party TikTok app that gave you all the benefits and none of the downsides.

If it was legal to jailbreak your Twitter app so that you could switch to Bluesky but still scrape your Twitter feed, then you could eat your cake and have it too.

Anti-circumvention law is an esoteric area of tech policy that is salient to these questions because it is the law that makes it illegal to reverse engineer and modify technology. Changing it could completely change the technology we have.

Changing privacy laws would be hugely consequential too, and it shouldn’t be so hard. Congress hasn’t updated federal privacy law since 1988. Our last federal consumer privacy law bans video store clerks from disclosing your VHS rentals. Every other form of privacy invasion is legal.

Changing these laws is not reviving the lost praxis of a fallen civilization. No one is asking the Senate to embalm a pharaoh or something. All of this is a choice.

Question: How can the connected learning community get involved?

Cory: Kids and educators can play a role in the kind of activism that we need. One great exercise would be for educators to support a kid who runs up against something that’s offensive in their school’s tech environment — whether that’s web blocking tools or censorware — and do a research project on the firms that are involved and the defects in the technology. Then FOIA the school district’s information about how much they’ve spent on this technology, what the procurement process was, do ethnographies with teachers and students about the ways this interferes with learning, and present it to the school board. It could be so satisfying for kids to run circles around grown-ups: to tell the board that its goals are stupid, that it isn’t achieving them anyway, that the vendor has had eleven breaches and sells the data — and that the district could have hired two teachers instead of buying this garbage.

That’s just one idea for one kid doing one project. But learning how to make a FOIA request is a superpower. Learning how to present at a school board is a superpower. Activism like this taps into a kind of agency that gives me hope. 

I’m sad and angry about a lot of this, most days. But I’m also more hopeful than I’ve been at any point in my career. Each step forward gets you to a new elevation, and reveals terrain you couldn’t see from lower down. Maybe you can’t see your way from A to Z in this fight, but that doesn’t mean the path isn’t there. It means you get to B, then C, then D.