Cory Doctorow (2024), DEF CON 32, Track 1, Las Vegas (talk; video on the DEFCONConference YouTube channel; author’s text on Pluralistic, 2024-08-17) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EmstuO0Em8
Key takeaways
- Doctorow argues that platform decay (“enshittification”) was not inevitable. It followed from removing four forces that once disciplined tech firms: competition, regulation, interoperability and tech-worker power. Restoring them, especially the legal right to reverse-engineer and interoperate, is how a “new, good internet” gets built.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-041. What follows is what the work says about itself.
The talk opens by asking what happened to the “old, good internet” and describes the enshittification cycle. Platforms are first good to users and lock them in. They then shift value to business customers, and finally claw value back from both. Doctorow names the mechanism “twiddling”: altering a service’s back end to change prices, rankings and terms. He argues that firms were once restrained by competition, regulators strong enough to discipline them, users’ ability to interoperate and modify, and scarce tech workers who could refuse. Antitrust retreat, regulatory capture, IP law and mass layoffs removed each restraint. He closes by asking hackers to fight for interoperability rights and to organise as workers.
Standing in the record
Filed from the survey of 2026-09-25 of work the anthology set aside as out of scope (tier C): 490 seconds of active reading over 1 session in the papers-feed tracker. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-041 is the close reading of 2026-09-25, and it placed the work: Active — The most compact first-person statement of the “four forces” version of the enshittification thesis, worth reading as advocacy with its evidence taken on trust. Its figures and legal claims need their own sources before anything rests on them.
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-041, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: low — The argument is fully captured by the author’s own text of the speech. It is a talk, not a paper, and the owner watched it once (t = 490 s).
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-041 is that reading):
- It is advocacy by its author, not research. The factual claims in it (Amazon ad-revenue and price-premium figures, seller fee shares) are his and would need their own sources before being filed as evidence.
- If the anthology wants a source for the enshittification thesis, Doctorow’s written essays or his book are better filing targets than a talk video.
- The survey’s triage (“drop: a talk”) looks right under the anthology’s scope. Nothing here bears on ML practice.
Access when seeded: The YouTube page returned HTTP 429. oEmbed confirmed the video title (“DEF CON 32 - Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation - Cory Doctorow”) and channel, but I reached no transcript and did not watch the video. I read the full text of the author’s “lightly edited version of my speech crib”, posted on pluralistic.net on 17 Aug 2024 and described there as his DEF CON 32 speech. That text is what the skim is based on, and the delivered talk may differ. The DEF CON 32 speakers page lists the talk for “Saturday at 12:00”, Track 1, 45 min. DEF CON 32 ran 8–11 Aug 2024, so Saturday is 2024-08-10 (inferred from the conference dates). The YouTube upload date is unverified.