Ragebait, sponcon, A.I. slop — the internet of 2026 makes a lot of us nostalgic for the internet of 10 or 15 years ago.
What exactly went wrong here? How did the early promise of the internet get so twisted? And what exactly is wrong here? What kinds of policies could actually make our digital lives meaningfully better?
Cory Doctorow and Tim Wu have two different theories of the case, which I thought would be interesting to put in conversation together. Doctorow is a science fiction writer, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the author of “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.” Wu is a law professor who worked on technology policy in the Biden White House; his latest book is “The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity.”
In this conversation, we discuss their different frameworks, and how they connect to all kinds of issues that plague the modern internet: the feeling that we’re being manipulated; the deranging of our politics; the squeezing of small businesses and creators; the deluge of spam and fraud; the constant surveillance and privacy risks; the quiet rise of algorithmic pricing; and the dehumanization of work. And they lay out the policies that they think would go furthest in making all these different aspects of our digital lives better.
0:00 Intro 2:33 Sworn enemies of our tech overlords 4:14 What feels bad about the internet? 5:46 What do you say to people who think the internet is a good thing? 10:26 Defining Enshittification and Extraction 20:32 The Enshittification of Facebook 27:23 Competition and honor among thieves 32:23 Amazon and extraction 39:31 When does this become a public policy problem? 41:38 Anti-competition vs pro-scale 46:44 The decline of labor practices 1:05:32 G
