There’s a new class of public intellectual emerging—the tech pessimist who actually knows how the sausage gets made. They’re not your standard Luddites railing against smartphones; they’re former engineers, economists, and journalists who can offer technical sounding explanations for why your Instagram feed got worse. Frankly, most of the time I find these individuals more bombastic than insightful.Cory Doctorow is different. He is the leader of this new class of commentator while simultaneously being a rigorous thinker about the internet. If you’ve heard of him, you’ve probably heard of the word he invented, “enshittification.” This has become a handwavy term to describe when digital services go bad. Instagram forcing ads down your throat? Enshittification. Amazon being full of junky products? Enshittification. It is a vibe that I, you, and everyone else probably feels.However, enshittification is not just a vibe. It is a specific theory, buttressed by strong claims about anti-trust and consumer rights. This theory has become the go-to framework for understanding platform decay among left-wing regulators, including the former head of the FTC, Lina Khan.In our conversation, Doctorow laid out the three-act tragedy: platforms subsidize users until they’re locked in, then squeeze users to subsidize businesses, then squeeze everyone to pay shareholders. To be transparent, I do not fully subscribe to his framework. Specifically, I’m skeptical that programatic advertising is as ineffective as he claims, and I think he underestimates genuine consumer preferences for convenience over privacy. You’ll hear it in our conversation when I push back on topics like the efficacy of Meta’s ads or why consumers continually choose to consume shitty content.But while I disagree with the totality of his theory, I agree with the underlying emotional feeling. Namely, that the internet can and should be better for people. Consumers should have significantly more rights. Attention economies