The great decline of everything online

Lately

That creeping feeling that everything online is getting worse has a name: “enshittification,” a term for the slow degradation of our experience on digital platforms. The enshittification cycle is why you now have to wade through slop to find anything useful on Google, and why your charger is different from your BFF’s.

According to Cory Doctorow, the man who coined the memorable moniker, this digital decay isn’t inevitable. It’s a symptom of corporate under-regulation and monopoly – practices being challenged in courts around the world, like the US Department of Justice’s antitrust suit against Google.

Cory Doctorow is a British-Canadian journalist, blogger and author of Chokepoint Capitalism, as well as speculative fiction works like The Lost Cause and the new novella Spill.

This is Lately. Every week, we take a deep dive into the big, defining trends in business and tech that are reshaping our every day.

Our executive producer is Katrina Onstad. This episode is produced by Jay Cockburn and Andrea Varsany. Our sound designer is Cameron McIver.

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