2706 – “Enshittification”: Cory Doctorow on Why Big Tech Sucks, Keeps Getting Worse & What to Do About It (interview 2025)

I am a bit wary of Cory Doctorow‘s abruptly downward curve of “enshittification” since, as Richard Barbrook has been mentioning (at least since 1995), the shit was there since the beginning, altough there is always room for more. By beef is with this “Suddenly” in the title, I am a bood ol’ catastrophist (in paleontological terms) but a gradualist when it is about good or bad or worsening tech. Like the Gilded Age barons, today’s broligarchs are hardened capitalists, fed by public money and always ready to deny that. Claiming newness, “suddenness”, “acceleration,” and urgency has some merit in today’s distraction-addled world, but then we miss the continuities, the relevant dialectics, and historical tensions that coexist and exacerbate all the time. What is not is that much of the techno-optimism is gone, and what is left risks inflating into some huge economic bubble ready to burst.

But as always, who can actually argue against his well-documented examples of why it has been very hard not to see all the current spaces of platform capitalism as a benchmark case for what is wrong with Bit Tech. Not to say he is the only one to look toward or read under such shitty circumstances, but at least he does not peddle the techno-feudalism line everywhere, mentioning that capitalism is over or that. Degrading the user experience, maximizing profits, and treating users as prisoners on their platforms isn’t anything new; it is just that now it is being experienced at all levels and much more acutely because the tech monopolies are well-established. What is bitterly funny is that suddenly, the trouble with deregulation and the need for disciplining is again on the table. Nobody ever tried to discipline the Tech behemoths that are so eager to ass kiss Trump, and in a way, disciplining such uber-rich crazy rich spoiled brats becomes impossible nowadays using democratic institutions. Instead of a Big Green State, in fact, countries have been handing more and more to the private sector with disastrous outcomes. As digital theorist Alexander R. Galloway wrote in an excellent review of David Gollumbia’s cyberlibertarianism, all the signs were there when deregulatory measures, the embrace of non-hierarchical disorder (0ut of Control), and the rhetoric of computer liberation instituted a new order, as robust as the old and maybe even more difficult to budge since it now arrives driverless in the form of uberization.

Goodreads

2570 – Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution Podcast (spotify, podchaser, podbean)

The historical moment known as “The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” that lasted from 1966 to 1976 is today (some argue for a shorter period see Unger). This is a podcast by a historian based in China.

Two things made me want to blog about this. First is the death of celebrated Dutch sinologist Prof. Dr. Stefan Landsberger (1955-2024) who was one of the world’s foremost experts in Chinese propaganda posters and had one of the biggest collections in the world. Please feel free to check the fabulous https://chineseposters.net/ with a collection of 4,850 Chinese propaganda posters. You can browse through a Gallery of 200 highlights. There are 300 theme presentations, and you can search and browse posters, artists and check tags. The gallery with 200 highlights is just amazing. They do not cover just the Cultural Revolution but other key periods such as the  War of Resistance Against Japan (1937-1945) for example.

Stefan Landsberger also contributed to an incredible book (Chinese Propaganda Posters : From Revolution to Modernization, 1995) detailing the traces of the style and content development of the Chinese propaganda poster in the key decade of the reform (late 70s and 80s till early 1990s) and the production of futuristic imagery promising a bright socialist future – from abstract SF-like cityscapes, high-speed bullet trains to space-age imagery.

The last two are particularly telling: the first “Foster a correct spirit, resist the evil spirit, resist corruption, never get involved with it” by designer Jiang Jianzhang (姜建章) and the second “Love the people 1983” Love the people (Ai renmin 爱人民) Publisher: Shanghai renmin meishu chubanshe (上海人民美术出版社) by designer: Xu Wenhua (徐文华). The first depicts a civil servant that refuses to accept liquor (bamboo wine) and cigarettes as gifts (Fuzhi zhengqi, dizhi waiqi, ju fushi, yong buzhan (员工规则-扶造正气, 抗歪风, 拒腐, 永不沾). Combatting corruption becomes a major policy for the Party. Funny enough to compare this with the posters devised by US-Romanian poster bombing guerilla advertising Mindbomb from Cluj in 2000s combatting bribery. Caring for the old becomes essential as the number of elderly people in China is growing (China joining the same trend as developed countries such as Japan, Germany etc.). They are not always cared for by their families or in their village communities anymore. This is becoming a new social problem and even a subject for documentaries and movies.

Secondly, Netflix dropped its adaptation of Liu Cixin’s trilogy, Three Body Problem – with that memorable opening scene with the Chinese physicist martyr of science during the “struggle session” by the Red Guards. This key scene plays during the infamous Cultural Revolution mid 1960s. Cultural Critic and cinematographer Charles Mudede picks up on some of those predictable responses to that scene from the right-wing reactionary international. In the diegesis of the Liu Cixin SF book, this scene somehow explains astrophysicist Ye Wenjie went full antihumanist and pessimistic in regards to the evolution of the human species (spoiler for those who did not read the book: she becomes a traitor facilitating the invasion of the alien Trisolarians). In the recent Michael Bérubé’s book The Ex-human: Science Fiction and the Fate of Our Species, Ye Wenjie perfectly encapsulates this SF of the ex-human, a perspective that reflects and looks back on humanity from a vantage point that questions human triumphalism and hubristic Prometheanism. After witnessing plausibly some of the worst Homo sapiens behaviors during the Cultural Revolution, Ye Wenjie decides to hand over the planet to the Trisolarians.

Now to return back to Mudede’s comments and quotation, I acquiesce that today it is absolutely ridiculous when the Musk-loving right felt absolutely validated after watching the Three-Body Problem opening scene, picking up on the Cultural Revolution to attack their usual targets (especially in the case of the US): a strawmen cultural Marxist, critical theory curriculum and mind-virus (?!) dubbed “woke mind virus”. This has nothing to do with the Cultural Revolution and just tries to equate social justice warriors with red guards, with the racist and xenophobe implication that they are castrating or wrecking the Western Civilisation. In our topsy-turvy world of capitalism, the actual wreckers of civilization – the anti-science and climate emergency denialists love to portray themselves as underdogs and ostracized commonsensical victims. Some of them semi-seriously speaking of revolutionary purges and Tech-Bro victimization (another case of reverse victimization):