Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow has worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation for 24 years. He writes many (more than 30!) books, including books on tech policy, science fiction novels, and books for young readers and small children. He is visiting faculty at the Open University (UK), Cornell, MIT, and the University of North Carolina, and holds honourary doctorates in computer science (Open Universtiy) and laws (York University). He has been inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame and been awarded the Sir Arthur Clarke Imagination in Service to Society Awardee for lifetime achievement and the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity. His latest book is Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to do About It. He keeps a daily(ish) blog at Pluralistic.net.

Events with this speaker

Day 2

13:30

60m

A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet

Trump has staged an unscheduled, midair rapid disassembly of the global system of trade. Ironically, it is this system that prevented all of America's trading partners from disenshittifying their internet: the US trade representative threatened the world with tariffs unless they passed laws that criminalized reverse-engineering and modding. By banning "adversarial interoperability," America handcuffed the world's technologists, banning them from creating the mods, hacks, alt clients, scrapers, and other tools needed to liberate their neighbours from the enshittificatory predations of the ketamine-addled zuckermuskian tyrants of US Big Tech. Well, when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. The Trump tariffs are here, and it's time to pick the locks on the those handcuffs and set the world's hackers loose on Big Tech. Happy Liberation Day, everyone!