Musk and Zuck ‘Use Our Love for Each Other to Hold Us Hostage’

Cory Doctorow always has more to say.

In Part 1 of our chat with the visionary journalist, blogger, sci-fi author and social philosopher, we defined and examined “enshittification” — the British-Canadian activist’s term for the sudden, sharp decline of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. We dug into the issue with retaliatory tariffs, dismissed by Doctorow as “the stuff of 19th-century geopolitics,” and explored an alternative action that focused on Parliament, policy, anti-circumvention laws and open-source technology.

But what can we do by ourselves besides quitting the apps, disconnecting from family and friends, in the process? It’s lonely out there, and it’s hard to make money when nobody knows how to reach you or, worse, who you are. Is there hope for the artist amid the explosion of AI and non-stop enshittification of platforms we used to rely on for building our brand? Doctorow told us what he thinks Mark Carney should do. In the meantime, though, what should we do?

In Part 2, we pivot from macro to micro: the personal impact of platform decay, our nostalgia for the internet of yesterday, the one that once teemed with community and competition, the one from before the bulk of us were kettled and trapped by maleficent apps that used our social ties to bind us to their misanthropic vision.

“One of the reasons that I got stuck on some of the platforms I'm stuck on is because I knew the people who started them, and I trusted them,” said Doctorow.

“You need to have more than just trusting the individuals who run a system. You need to have a system itself that is not enshittogenic — that doesn't encourage enshittification — and that starts with the freedom of movement.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Tyee: A couple months back, I quit Facebook and Twitter for Bluesky. I felt very noble when I left these platforms, and I was hoping to be part of a mass exodus, but the main effect has been to leave me feeling disconnected. These choices are informed by my individual beliefs, so I intend to stick to them, but is there a better way to make a difference as an individual? Because some days, it seems like I ceased to exist and the platform just goes on forever.

Cory Doctorow: The reason I am Canadian is because of my grandmother, who was a child civil defence worker in the Siege of Leningrad, and then got inducted into the Red Army and then got pregnant with my dad. When the war ended, she didn't go back to Leningrad. She kept going west, to a refugee camp in Frankfurt, and came to Canada on a DP boat. She was alone in her family in doing that. The rest of my family are still all in St. Petersburg, and they had a terrible life.

The reason that she left and they didn't is because she was willing to give up everything: contact with her family, all of her worldly goods, everything. There was a 10-year period where she didn't know if her mother was alive or dead. My dad tells a story that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up about the time the phone rang in their kitchen in North York, and my grandmother just started crying and saying, “Mama, Mama, Mama,” because her mother finally found her after a decade. This is an incredible price to pay.

People stay on Facebook, they stay on Twitter, they stay on these other platforms, not because they love the platforms, but because they love the people on the platforms. I think that this is the great tragedy of a platform: people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk know that they can use our love for each other to hold us hostage.

So you, as an individual, you might be like my grandmother. You might be able to leave and you might find a better life somewhere else, but you're going to pay a high price. Ultimately, people in, say, East Germany don't have to make that call anymore, because East Germany is now just Germany. And if you want to try living in Paris, you just get on the train. If you don't like it, you go home again. That kind of open border between platforms will have the same effect that it has in, say, the European Union, or between the provinces in Canada, where if you want to try your hand living in Fort Mac and seeing whether you're fortunate in the oilpatch, you can do that. And if it turns out it doesn't, you can move again.

That’s the possibility in getting rid of Bill C-11 [the 2012 Copyright Modernization Act that Doctorow critiques in Part 1 of this interview]: to restore that freedom of movement to digital citizens.

I had fun reading your blog in preparation for this and feeling nostalgia for the early internet — what you called the “wild and woolly Internet of 20 years ago.” My journalism career started with a blog. I think a lot of my colleagues came up in that post-zine, upstart era where, if you had a good idea, you might be the first one to put it online, and people would see you as a trailblazer, and you could connect with other digital trailblazers and find your voice and your audience. All that is gone now. Is there a chance that we can ever get back to those halcyon days?

John Hodgman says nostalgia is a toxic impulse. With that caveat, I am very nostalgic for the early days of the blogosphere, where we all sort of knew each other online. Sometimes there would be events where we’d get to meet each other. I think it was the first or the second South by Southwest Interactive [that] was the one where it was just all the blogs, and we all met each other. We all hung out with each other.

The cool thing about blogs back then is they were all connected by RSS. So RSS has this directive that you can issue that moves a feed over. So if you move your blog from one platform to another, everyone who follows you on RSS just seamlessly hops to the new place. It's like calling up Telus and telling them that you're switching to Bell or whatever, and your phone number just moves over to the new phone and no one even notices.

We just had a lot of freedom of movement, which meant that you could really experiment. Everyone was experimenting with RSS readers, which are designed to export all of the feeds that you read and just seamlessly import them into any other reader. If someone had a really cool idea for a reader, which is this very powerful technology, and people were really going to town, coming up with cool things, you could just move over to it for a day or a week or forever. And if you didn't like it, you go back in an instant. So again, like getting on a train from Berlin and going to France.

This was what we had going for us back then. And there weren't really gatekeepers, per se. There were blogs like Boing Boing, a blog that I worked on for 19 years. We were very widely read. If we wrote about something it would get a lot of attention. But if we failed to write about something, it didn't mean that it was doomed to obscurity. We had a big megaphone, but we didn't have what, say, Facebook has, which is the power to decide not just whether something might succeed, but whether it was doomed to fail.

That’s, I think, a big change that grew out of the rise of these walled garden social media, and in particular, like the rise of these walled garden social media that was attended by a decline in antitrust scrutiny. These companies were able to buy each other. When something better came along, like Instagram, Facebook just bought Instagram. You could escape Facebook the platform, but you never escape Facebook the company. That kind of lock-in just didn't really exist back then.

The Google founders would give talks where they would say competition is a click away. You could change search engines any minute, which was true, because they hadn’t yet started spending $25 billion a year buying every single search box so that no matter where you searched, you were searching on Google, which means that only an idiot would invest in a Google competitor, because no one will ever see it, because every search box leads to Google.

It’s wild to me that the utopian dream of a unified world that we had in the early internet has come to this. My issue with the idea of enshittification as simply platform decline is it doesn't quite account for the intention of the broligarchs and techno-fascists driving this slow-drip shift into digital slavery or digital feudalism that we're seeing now. Because it's not just decline. These apps have been distorted into something more conducive to social control.

Like, I don't think Elon Musk thinks Twitter has declined. He’s losing money. But he weaponized the platform to enrich and empower himself elsewhere. What can be done to meaningfully address that?

Musk's power comes from the fact that Tesla has a very high price variance ratio. That gives him a stock holding that's very large that he can use to collateralize insanely large loans that he uses to do things like buy Twitter and the American presidency. The high price-to-earnings ratio for Tesla is the expression of a bet by the market that Tesla will have these recurring revenue streams from digital subscriptions and software upgrades.

If you jailbroke Teslas, so Canada exported a tool to every mechanic in the world that any Tesla owner who regretted buying a Tesla didn't want to keep giving money to Elon Musk to drive into the garage, they'd plug it in, and 10 minutes later, they would get all of the software upgrades and subscriptions, and they would never have to pay for them again, and they carry over to the next owner, so now your car is more valuable as a used car — that would destroy the price-to-earnings ratio of Tesla. Tesla would start trading more like Ford. Instead of, like, 47 to one, it’s traded six to one. Elon Musk’s wealth would collapse. He would face margin calls for those gigantic loans he took out. He would be in a lot of trouble.

So Elon Musk’s personal power, it's not the great forces of history that made him powerful. It's not a nebulous thing called finance that made him powerful, or even his numerous personality flaws that made him powerful. There's a specific set of policies in the finance and tech world that gave him the power that he has, along with the gift for bullshitting and whatever.

I think once you move away from kind of quasi-mystical explanations for what's going on and really think about the material circumstances or the material sources of power, that prompts policy responses that actually change the material life of Elon Musk so that he just doesn't have power anymore.

I know better than to ask you to predict the future. I read a great quote where you said, “It's actually pretty demoralizing to imagine a future that can be predicted.” And I love that. I learned that lesson, by the way, when Mike Tyson bit off Evander Holyfield's ear. Remember that? Holyfield claimed that God told him what would happen. He was like, God told me I'm gonna knock out Mike Tyson. And Tyson’s like, is that so? Did God tell you I was gonna bite your ear off? Surprise. Things can unfold differently.

I think it was Tyson that said everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.

Exactly. With that in mind: politicians and people who didn't spend a lot of time online kind of dismissed the wider impacts of, say, GamerGate and 4chan, but now we're seeing those impacts on who's president. So what internet phenomenon today should we be watching for the next big socio-political shakeup?

I don't know that it's just internet. I think that the age of there being just internet phenomena is largely over. These phenomena are now blended into the real world. But I'm really excited and interested in the global rise of antitrust that we're seeing. Without any kind of billionaire, dark money backers. Nevertheless, governments, conservative and progressive all over the world, authoritarian and democratic, are all doing more on antitrust now than they've done for 40 years.

In Canada, our Competition Bureau, in its history, challenged a total of three mergers and successfully challenged a total of zero mergers. But last autumn, we got a really muscular, new antitrust law that gives very sweeping powers to the Competition Bureau. In the U.K., a succession of extremely bad, Conservative governments allowed the Competition and Markets Authority to turn into one of the biggest anti-corporate powerhouses seen in modern history, with a thing called the Digital Markets, with 70 full-time engineers. The largest technical, antitrust unit of any government in the world, that wrote reports that were used to bring successful prosecutions in South Korea, Europe, Japan and elsewhere.

This is all coming out of a genuine grassroots political movement. This is not a thing that rich people want. If you know anything about political science, you know that it's commonplace political science, kind of settled political science, that when the priorities of rich people and everyday people conflict, that the policy always cashes out in favour of rich people. This is pretty much the first time it's gone the other way.

Last question: You're a sci-fi novelist. You do so many other things, but reading your bio, that's where it starts. Honestly, whenever I get too freaked out about the state of the world, I try to remind myself that, like, I write books, that’s who I am, that's what I do, that’s all. But even that little safe space in my mind just seems so besieged lately, between AI and the enshittification of all these once-useful platforms.

What advice do you have for younger writers, emerging writers and artists trying to keep their fires of creativity lit in a world that feels like it's becoming increasingly hostile to them?

Oof.

Yeah.

I’ll start by saying that one thing that every new and emerging artist should be very skeptical of is taking advice from established artists. I know an awful lot about how to break into the field in 1998. I know very little about breaking into the field in 2025. So I will start by saying that my experience of the arts is almost completely disconnected from the experience of the arts that a beginning writer or any other kind of artist is going to be dealing with. I'm not the world's greatest authority on this.

But I will say that the most important way to understand your relationship to the business of the arts is as a worker, and the way workers get power is through solidarity. For example, if you're worried about AI, we have exactly one group of creative workers who successfully resisted AI, and it was the screenwriters union.

One of the things about coming at this from a labour lens instead of a copyright lens is that it makes you understand that the things that your boss wants are probably not the things that are good for you. If you understand this as a class struggle, then you understand that the movie studios’ priorities are not the priorities of the workers who produce the creative material that they sell. While there's some confluence of interest, all things being equal, they would like to pay you less. They would ideally like to pay you nothing.

I was out with the screenwriters on the picket lines. One of the writers said to me, the way that you prompt an AI is the same way a studio executive tries to prompt a showrunner or a writer. You go to them and you say, like, “Make me E.T., but it's about a dog, and there's a car chase in the second act, and a love interest.” You say that to a writer, and the writer calls you a fucking idiot. But you say that to an AI, and it just barfs it up.

I think we should understand, like, one of the reasons our bosses like AI is they love the idea of a writer who isn’t mouthy. A writer who just does what they're told, a writer who's pliable, or a worker who’s pliable. That's the goal here. Copyright does not get you away from that. Copyright is primarily an individual bargaining right. So maybe if you are Stephen King or Steven Spielberg, your copyright is a thing that you can withhold from the studios unless they change their terms for you. But for nearly everyone else, all copyright gets you is something else that they can take away from you when they bargain with you.

Giving more copyright to a creative worker is like giving a bullied kid extra lunch money. There isn't an amount of lunch money that will buy that kid lunch. You're just, in a roundabout way, giving more money to the bullies. If you want to actually get your kids fed, you have to get the bully away from the gates. You have to do something about the structural power.

I think the mistake that artists make over and over again is conceiving of themselves not as workers. It means that they end up in a lot of trouble. If you want someone on the buy side of this to be sympathetic to be in solidarity with, it's not the company, it's the workers at the company. When there's five publishers, it means everyone in editorial has five potential employers. They're in the same situation you're in. And you guys are our class allies against your common class enemy: their boss. And that's the way to really understand this.

I’ll just jump in and say that the dog movie you’re describing is called Bolt. It was released in 2008 and stars John Travolta as a white Swiss shepherd.

I forgot about that movie!

The first in this two-part interview ran yesterday.