The Enshittification of Everything

The aim of commercial platform providers is to lock in users and suppliers, eliminate competition, and use the resulting lack of choice to reallocate benefits away from workers and users and towards the platform’s shareholders instead. This is enshittification. In this keynote address, Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow draw upon insights from their new book CHOKEPOINT CAPITALISM to explain how enshittification is harming libraries and their patrons – and what we can do to make things better.   

Professor Rebecca Giblin

Professor of Law / ARC Future Fellow / CREATe Fellow / Director - Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia (IPRIA)

Author Bio

Professor Rebecca Giblin is an ARC Future Fellow at Melbourne Law School, where she works at the intersection of law and culture. She is Director of the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia (IPRIA) and leads the ARC-funded Author’s Interest (authorsinterest.org) and eLending projects, as well as Untapped: the Australian Literary Heritage Project. Her new book Chokepoint Capitalism (with Cory Doctorow, 2022) explores how we can recapture creative labour markets from Big Tech and Big Content to get artists paid. She tweets via @rgibli. Photo credit - Ivanna Oksenyuk

Cory Doctorow

Science Fiction Author, Activist, and Journalist

Author Bio

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, and journalist. His latest book is CHOKEPOINT CAPITALISM (with Rebecca Giblin) nonfiction about creative labor markets and monopoly. His latest novel is ATTACK SURFACE, a standalone adult sequel to LITTLE BROTHER. He is also the author HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, nonfiction about conspiracies and monopolies; and of RADICALIZED and WALKAWAY, science fiction for adults, a YA graphic novel called IN REAL LIFE; and young adult novels like HOMELAND, PIRATE CINEMA and LITTLE BROTHER. His first picture book was POESY THE MONSTER SLAYER (Aug 2020). In 2023/4, Tor Books will publish two more science fiction novels for adults: RED TEAM BLUES and THE LOST CAUSE; and Verso will publish THE INTERNET CON, a nonfiction book about monopoly and radical interoperability. He maintains a daily blog at Pluralistic.net. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is a MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate, is a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Open University, a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of North Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. Photo credit - Jonathan Worth