Doctorow Doom: What to Say to the Public When You've Ruined the Internet

Has Cory Doctorow's tireless "enshittification" campaign been the axle of a people's fightback, or just a two-faced diversion from his own starring role in destroying the World Wide Web?...

Vilifying those who dare to assert their legal right, because you get a reward from a corporation you yourself characterise as evil, is not activism. It's the very definition of late stage capitalism. But it's all in a day's work for a Google-funded demagogue like Doctorow.

Imagine, for a moment, that you're some guy who became a successful author of fiction, and Google knocks your door one day and offers you a recurring wad of cash. It's not free money, obviously. Google resides, after all, in the extreme echelons of capitalism. So in return for a proxied salary from Google, you will use your status as an author to promote and campaign for a very specific Google agenda. The grinding down of intellectual property rights, to a point where large technology corporations are free to take any digital commodity they want and exploit it for $billions in profit.

For decades, you'll live the Life of Riley selling the concept of "Free Culture" to the public. Not that it involves much selling. You just repetitively assure the public that if they embrace the concept of corporate-theft-as-a-business-model, everything will be free forever. The public even get rewarded with little digital badges of ego massage and applause for helping said corporations to steal content. How could they resist? You have just about the easiest marketing job in history. What a hero you'll be! The guy who's making consumerism free.

Naturally, you're throwing the WWW's real workers to the lions. The people who invest their lives and their money in making all that stuff your funders are pinching - they lie discarded at the wayside. But they're only a minority, and who in your world of privilege and capitalism ever really gives a shit about minorities, eh? Best of all, because virtually no one knows that Google is lining your wallet to do its dirty work, it looks like you're writing bucketloads of content for free! Oh, this is just perfect. You're the world's first Devil-salaried saint...

...Until Google and all the other extreme capitalists whose interests you've been shilling, decide they no longer want to steal solely from the minority. They now want to steal from everyone. Which leaves you playing to a crowd who are themselves about to be thrown to the lions. And far from being the guy who made consumerism free, you're now, in fact, the guy who made consumerism more expensive. The guy whose elitist, corporate-criminal-serving campaigns killed creativity and replaced it with capitalist bot-spew. The man who, alongside a clutch of fellow propagandists, lobbyists and litigants for the tech elite, ruined the Internet.

What do you do?

Remain on your orator's podium trying to persuade the audience that they'll enjoy being ripped apart by the lions? Of course not. You run into the audience and start performatively booing your own masters before the crowd turn the tables and throw you to the fucking lions!

If you can imagine yourself into that position, you have some idea why, in late 2022 when the AI-pocalypse began, paid Google propagandist Cory Doctorow took one stuck record off the turntable in order to spin another.

Just as he realised that his relentless chant of:

"Immunize content thieves to the law and thou shalt have utopia!"

had reached its sell-by date, he replaced it with a new relentless chant. Namely:

"Oh look - dystopia as far as the eye can see. But it's not because we immunized thieves to the law. No. It's because of, er, long-term surplus management and other shit that just looks inevitable and unpreventable in a capitalist world."

Doctorow gave a name to his explanation for the collapse of the creative Web. He called it "Enshittification". He doesn't claim to have invented the word. Only to have "coined" it. That's because he didn't invent the word. It was doing the rounds on Twitter long before Doctorow swiped it in a bid to save his neck. And interspersed with his expected, repetitive, Google-behested digs at patent law, it's more or less all we've heard from him in the new age of "generative AI". But let's not forget who this man is. Let's revisit his murky past and reveal the capitalist, corporation-serving demagogue behind the fake veneer of public-interest revolutionism.

For anyone who has no idea what I've been talking about up until now, I'll start at the beginning...

BACKGROUND

If you've invested a lot of your time in creating valuable media or text, you'll be painfully aware of Silicon Valley's relentless habit of thieving it.

It would take a complete book to document the raft of methods that the Silicon Valley collective has used to knock off and monetise other people's intellectual property. And that book would, itself, doubtless be permissionlessly appropriated for redistribution by a Surveillance Valley giant. In fact, so aggressive has the Californian content-thieving machine become, that it is no longer merely likely your intellectual property will be pinched, consumed, exploited and devalued by it. It is inevitable.

Over many years, the Surveillance Valley cartel has steadily scaled up its age-old notion of theft as a business model. And a set of irrational legal immunities, coupled with a slow but overwhelming attack on copyright efficacy by the cartel and its henches, have given the Valley's giant bulldozer carte blanche to do that.

Without this ability to steal at industrial scale, Surveillance Valley corporations and nonprofitalists could never have taken control of the Web's most sought-after commodity: high-investment content.

When you try to find a genuinely valuable digital commodity on today's Web, there are two near-certainties. 1) It was given to the world for free by altruists. 2) It's been kidnapped and immiseration-walled by surveillance capitalists.

Doctorow and his "digital rights" cronies want us to think that this is just an inevitable fact of online life. It isn't. The intellectual property laws that the "digital rights" circus persistently fought to suppress, on behalf of surveillance capitalists, would have prevented immiseration-mongers from hijacking the distributed Web.

And it was high-investment content - routinely obtained without the rightsholder's permission - that the cartel used to bait the public away from the distributed Web. Which means that copyright lawlessness, and other forms of corporate lawlessness specific to the cybertech industry, drove the destruction of the distributed Web, and allowed today's omnipotent monopolies to form.

Simply, you cannot farm hotly-sought content at the scale that Surveillance Valley farms it, without an exemption from liability. If you're deliberately farming stolen content, liability limits your growth, because at a certain volume threshold, liability becomes too expensive to manage. Elite cybertech always saw this as the fundamental reason for their legal expemptions to exist.

"BuT wItHoUt LeGaL iMmUnItIeS wE iZ uNaBlE tO aFfOrD tO mOnOpOlIzE yOnDeR iNtErWeBz ThO

It was, of course, the very reason their expemptions should have been denied.

THE REAL ROOT CAUSE OF "ENSHITTIFICATION"

As you'll doubtless know if Cory Doctorow has repetitively trumpeted his "enshittification" theory into your ear more than the statistical average of about 876 times, monopoly is the grand facilitator of the lock-in, which is the precursor to immiseration-as-a-service. But we can extrapolate that further: if corporate lawlessness leads to monopoly, and monopoly facilitates "enshittification", then corporate lawlessness is a route-one path to "enshittification".

And the punchline?

Doctorow - the man who now spends the bulk of his time performatively wailing about "enshittification" on an endless loop - is also the man who has, for decades, served as an aformentioned cartel hench, campaigning to uphold and expand Silicon Valley's right to thieve intellectual property as a business model. That's right; Cory Doctorow has championed corporate lawlessness for over two decades. So, far from being the solution to "enshittification", Doctorow has in fact played a starring role in causing it..

Without the legal immunities and copyright degradation for which Doctorow and Co obsessively fought, LLM-driven "AI" could not have existed. Google and its sidekicks would have been sued off the face of the planet. We would still be getting our information from experts, our art from artists, our jokes from comedians. And we'd be treated immeasurably better by those people than we're treated by the anti-human, surveillance-crazed, hypercapitalist monsters that Doctorow and his copyright-trampling cronies helped to thieve the experts', artists' and comedians' work, and take their place.

The "Enshittification" meme has been described as a "thought-terminating cliche", and that was always the core of its purpose. To terminate thought.

WHAT IS COPYRIGHT?

Many people see copyright as the enemy of freedom - mainly because elite cybertech spent $billions brainwashing them into that belief, so that it could farm zero-cost intellectual property at industrial scale and make many more $billions in the process.

But copyright is really a labour law - like the minimum wage, or mandatory break entitlement. It was introduced to protect workers from being exploited, and their work from being devalued. That, however, is not the only purpose robust copyright law serves. It also prevents the precise outcome we've seen on the WWW. It stops Mafia-style takeovers of the world's creative riches. Stops content being "held hostage". Stops content being harvested at industrial scale to stoke propaganda factories. Setting aside surveillance, strong and properly enforced intellectual property law would have prevented almost everything that's wrong with the modern Web. If IP law had not been ground down to an inconsequence by Doctorow and Co.

Google (whose plan was to become the gatekeeper of all information and knowledge) claimed, via its network of propagandists, that grinding copyright to a pulp was a good thing. The propaganda machine was driven by organisations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), for whom Doctorow has been a senior operative for decades. They told us that tech corporations who used content theft as a business model should be immunised to copyright law, because that would ensure the whole world could access "free knowledge". And they fought, lobbied and litigated to maintain and increase that immunity. For money. From some of the most evil corporations on Earth. With fanatical zeal they staved off political motions that would have made chronically misbehaving tech giants accountable.

Doctorow branded Creative Commons licensors who refused to give up their right to recognition, as "pedantic assholes". Remember that the next time he plays the "I'm on your side" card. He's on the side of the corporate criminals who line his wallet and he always has been.

They gave us an impression that only the creators, who invested time and labour in producing valuable digital commodities, could lose out in this grand scheme of theft-as-a-business-model. And hey, that was their stupid fault for putting nice things on the Internet in the first place. The public at large, we were persuaded, could only gain, because the corporations of Surveillance Valley would give away said valuable material for free.

But of course, almost everything that creators were producing for the Web was ALREADY free.

It did not need to be stolen by Surveillance Valley platforms in order to be accessed by the public without charge.

So all that immunising platforms to copyright law achieved was to progressively transport the riches of the Web from the benevolent creators who gave them, to monopolistic, hypercapitalist thieves.

Result? The public now have to go to shitbag, surveillance-crazed, hypercaptitalist supervillains for their "knowledge", rather than the benevolent creatives, experts and researchers they used to go to in the past.

"Free knowledge" is no longer either free or knowledge. It's gatekept, twisted, recomposited propaganda which you can't even get near until you've allowed a bunch of corporate racketeers to:

Gestapo-probe your identity.
Steal your labour to train robots.
Torture information out of you and sell it to fellow miscreants.
Spam you with scams.
Extort you for some lump of intelligence data that they can flog off to the police for informant dollar.

What else would you expect from a bunch of thieves? Thieves are criminals, and that's what criminals do.

Robust copyright would have prevented this, because without the wherewithal to haul the best of everyone else's content into their own domains, elite cybertech could never have killed the distributed Web.

People say: "Yeah, but creators uploaded their own shit to platforms. That would still have destroyed the distributed Web." But we're taking about a world that's been entirely controlled by legally-immunised thieves for decades. Thieves who have had creators at digital gunpoint.

Everyone knows they're gonna take the content anyway. At least if the creator gives it up willingly, it still carries the creator's name. The creator gets to live. But take away the gun, and there's no need to give up the property at all.

Inversely, the reason no sod posts on their own site anymore is that it's a waste of fucking money buying a domain and hosting, to act as a feeder resource for an industrial content suction pump that is going to plunder it, trash its value, and then bury you. But change the law, and you change the game.

So, far from being the enemy of freedom, copyright protects freedom. It doesn't just protect the rights of creative workers. It protects the public from content monopolists. From single-source propaganda pumps that hold the world's creative riches hostage and use them as bait for human cattle projects.

THE CYBERLIBERTARIAN VIEW

No one knows that better than Doctorow. He's a creative writer, after all. But he is also a career cyberlibertarian. Which means he is paid not to in any way acknowledge that weak or ineffective intellectual property law is to blame for the repugnant state into which the Web, and indeed the wider world, has fallen.

A cyberlibertarian is someone who opposes intellectual property law and seeks to either weaken it to the point of impotence or abolish it altogether. For now, let's codge up an archetype and call him Cyberlib Dude. You've seen him around...

"Pipe down bud, there's no such thing as content theft. FAIR USE and FREE SPEECH entitles me to re-post your entire photographic back catalogue on Twitter, and if you try to stop me it is called CENSORSHIP!!!"

His tough, fist-in-the-air mantra compiles an assortment of propaganda memes which have, over many years, been brainwashed into him by Google. With the help, that is, of a wide raft of paid shills, epitomised by Doctorow, who normally like to describe themselves as "digital rights activists". And Cyberlib Dude lives, with passion, by those propaganda memes. Except in one very specific circumstance...

When the content being stolen is Cyberlib Dude's own work.

Oh yes...

REDDIT LOL

Only since the onset of the AI revolt have we discovered this new facet of cyberlib lore. Last year, Google arranged to hand its Silicon Valley neighbour, Reddit, a sweet $60 million in exchange for permission to turn the "Front Page of the Web"s UGC pool into robot spew™.

The thing is, Cyberlib Dude himself happened to be a prolific Redditor. And he was not best pleased that Google was now going to deliver his wisdom directly to the public, cutting he and his decade-long bid for upvotes and attention out of the reward loop. In fact, said he, this was... wait for it... basically STEALING!

Yay! He said the word! I didn't think it was part of his vocab. I thought that in the land of cyberlib, stealing.html was always a hard redirect to free-speech.php. But it appears I was wrong.

All you need to do is re-route the burglary to Cyberlib Dude's own home, and instantly:

"Zip it pal. If you don't want it nicked, don't put it on the Internet!"

Turns into...

"Boo-hoo, the big bullies never asked permission to steal my shit."

And...

"Boo-hoo, how can this be allowed to happen?"

Welp, it's allowed to happen, Mr Cyberlib Dude, because it's precisely what you chanted for, and gave the EFF literal money to lobby and litigate for, for the past 25 years. What goes around comes around.

To tell the truth, I was only feigning surprise in the dramatisation above. I saw many years ago that forum posters who constantly stole and re-posted photos from elsewhere were prone to this same selective interpretation of intellectual property rights. If you called out their photo theft they'd defend their actions like Clint Eastwood Lite. But they'd cry like tits for weeks on end if you exported as much as one of their precious paragraphs of "advice" to a rival forum. In cyberlib, perspective is everything:

"But this is different. It's MINE!!!"

And whilst Cyberlib Dude is just a stereotype, I can assure you that he represents a totally real phenomenon. Like never before, Web users who have advocated content theft in the sharpest of tongues, are bitterly opposing LLM content appropriation deals such as those made by Reddit and Stack Overflow.

So what happens when you've been conditioned to applaud, aid and abet burglars for two solid decades, and you suddenly discover that your own house is being burgled?...

The above question will inevitably have been reverberating around Cory Doctorow's mind since the AI revolt began. As I mentioned, Doctorow is a leading voice in the "digital rights" circus. And as such, his job - or a major part of it - has been to sell cyberlibertarianism to the world. That's been the case for decades. As a senior EFF operative, Doctorow has for long been funded by Silicon Valley copyright tyrants, and a key imperative in his mission has been to grind down intellectual property rights on behalf of his funders. Paving the way for them to steal with impunity.

Doctorow has accordingly filled the Web with anti-IP rights propaganda on a relentless basis, characterising parties who enforce copyright at scale as "trolls", without context of the organised, industrial scale copyright theft that necessitates such action.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation - the Silicon Valley nonprofitalist for whom Doctorow works - has litigated countless cases against alleged false IP claimants on behalf of the tech elite. I've yet to see the group take up a case on behalf of a victim of copyright infringement. Clearly, this has not been a balanced regime of evaluating rights cases on merit. It's been a one-sided crusade against anyone who threatens Silicon Valley's right to steal.

In moneying the EFF you are funding the ongoing legal defence of obscenely wealthy surveillance capitalists who hate you so much that the only time they'd ever stop pissing on you is if you caught fire. The EFF are an accelerated mirror image of Robin Hood. Con money out of the poor, and give it to the obscenely rich.

The EFF have perpetrated violent intimidation against copyright holders who sought to take measured action against content thieves through the appropriate channel. Acting on behalf of Google, the EFF created a site called Chilling Effects (which is now called Lumen) for the purpose of publicly "exposing" creatives who submitted legitimate DMCA notices.

It was claimed that Chilling Effects was meant to "protect lawful online activity from legal threats". Its true purpose was to intimidate victims of copyright theft into abandoning their rightful recourse, for fear of being dogpiled by a gang of "digital rights" thugs. The EFF prevented the submission of totally legitimate takedown requests by setting up a mechanism to dox the victims of copyright infringement. The victims, that is. Not the perps. Doctorow was party to that and is proud enough of his involvement in the violence to have nostalgically linked back to the launch notice - an unmitigated thieves' charter and violent attack on creators, two decades later.

Doctorow also personally fronted the introduction of the Creative Commons licences - another Google/EFF anti-copyright initiative.

Creative Commons is a scam. From the start its purpose was to con or browbeat creatives into signing away their statutory IP rights, so that Silicon Valley corporations would be free to appropriate and exploit their work forever, without legal challenge.

Later in this post I'll show you evidence that Doctorow sees no distinction between Creative Commons and Public Domain licensing - the latter being a complete resignation of all rights. Contrary to the lie CC creators were sold, Doctorow did not want the licences to contain any remnants of scope for statutory copyright enforcement, and he is clearly livid that such enforcement proved possible. He's also acknowledged that statutory copyright was only at all recoverable in the event of breach because his mates in legal ballsed up the CC licence draft. Creative Commons was intended as a Public Domain tantamount which would trick creators into believing they still owned meaningful rights.

In truth, if you publish on a Creative Commons licence you have completely lost control of your work.

We were assured that this was about liberating knowledge and art. But where are we now? We're in a world where Google automatically censors anything that is not a registered shrine to capitalism. The entire surface of almost any non-advanced, non-commercial Google search is a wall-to-wall assembly of Silicon Valley silos and American corporate propaganda factories... er, sorry - "media sites". Even in England, for specifically British queries. There's virtually nothing on the front page of a Google Search that isn't cash-gagged by at least a million quid in Surveillance Valley funding. Liberating knowledge and art that is definitely not.

END OF THE PARTY

Until the start of the AI revolt, the task of rabble-rousing anti-copyright sentiment was one long party for Doctorow. He was, to the majority, merely selling the concept of something for nothing, as already discussed.

But as we moved into the era of large language models, we saw in a new, clearer-than-clear light, that the "something" we were supposed to be getting was nil but Big Brother's own regurgitation of what we gave it, duly drained of all joy and pumped with capitalist propaganda. And the "nothing" we were supposed to be paying for it was in fact the price of our freedom, basic privacy and fundamental human rights.

Doctorow's epic "enshittification" campaign did duly begin. Immediately after the start of the AI gold rush in 2022.

We can picture the one-man brainstorming session:

So... Yeah... There's like, this thing called... Oh hang on, let's find a nice, obscure word from some pleb on Twitter that I can pretend I invented myself... Right, yeah, so there's this thing called "enshittification", where my funders... sorry, er, I mean "platforms"... abuse their power. And so that I may avoid looking like I caused this, let's airbrush the fact that they only gained too much power in the first place because THEY'RE ABOVE THE FUCKING LAW AND IT'S LITERALLY BEEN MY DAY JOB TO UPHOLD AND EXPAND THAT STATUS FOR DECADES.

Let's instead say the Web is in ruins because... Oh, I dunno... Because long-term surplus management, and tell everyone that... Wait, this is good... Tell everyone that "ToO-bIg-To-GiVe-A-sHiT pLaTfOrMs DiE oF tHeIr OwN aCcOrD" (I mean, they evidently don't, but thick-as-pigshit cyberlib pleb doesn't have the observational skills to spot that). Which means it'll all blow over if everyone sits back and does nothing - which is the precise action my sugardaddies want the public to take... Great, that'll work...

And it did. That's the advantage of having a thick-as-pigshit fanbase.

I've touched on "enshittification" before, and I'm not going to waste any more time on the detail of something that Doctorow himself will eventually tell you even if he has to bang your front door and yell it through the letterbox with a megaphone. But here are some of the things that Doctorow's grand "enshittification" meme achieves for he and his low key funders:

It portrays the collapse of the Web as an inevitable consequence of long-game surplus management, rather than as the completely avoidable logical conclusion of immunising infinitely scaleable enterprise to the law. "Enshittification" assumes that Surveillance Valley platforms necessarily had to become the dependency they became. They didn't. If they hadn't been immunised to the law, liability would have contained them, and with high-investment content still anchored on distributed domains, the public would have continued using the rest of the Web.
It airbrushes "IP theft as a business model" from the component causes of the Web's collapse. And in so doing it conveniently buries the fact that anti-IP law campaigners like Doctorow and the EFF have been a major contributory cause of "enshittification".
It fabricates a diabolical premise in which a cartel of the most powerful corporate authoritarians in the world are going to wither and expire of their own accord. This embeds the notion that society does not need tough new laws to tackle systemic corporate abuse, whilst suggesting that no public activism is required.
It refocuses public disquiet into manageable territory, and, in a more succinct phrase than I managed to summon, it "terminates thought". Every complaint about a tech company now quite literally ends with the word "enshittification", and no more is said or done.

In short, "enshittification" is a masterstroke of circular reasoning in which every glaring contradiction to the EFF's cyberlib Promised Land can be blamed not on the elitist, monopolist-demigod-serving actions of the EFF itself, but on a mere word.

"It's alright guys. It's no one's fault or responsibility. It's just "enshittification" at work. And there's nothing we can do. We must simply kick back and suck it up. The supervillains eventually die. We just have to have patience and faith."

"DIGITAL RIGHTS" RUINED THE INTERNET

"Digital rights" campaigners have ruined the Internet by trampling creators of joy below ground at the king's behest. A king whose special talent is to steal everyone else's joy and make it joyless. All we now see is the king, rationing out his ill-gotten gains in their new, joyless form, and demanding money, monetisable commodities and the relinquishment of our basic rights in return.

Any rights that we, the people, had, have been snatched from our grasp by the "digital rights" circus, giftwrapped, and handed to the king. All hail "digital rights". The rights that only a monarch may possess.

Leaving the metaphors behind, the inevitability of theft and exploitation of work, engineered directly by Doctorow and his fellow cyberlib campaigners, has decimated the willingness of creators to provide their offerings to the world for free. Weak copyright law has concentrated power in the hands of a dangerous oligopoly, which would not, under robust copyright law, have been able to rise above the collective of creatives' own outlets and trad publishers. Simultaneously it's littered the Web with all sorts of negative side effects, such as sharp rises in paywalling and gating, and ballooning use of ableist CAPTCHAs as publishers seek to block scraper bots.

The erosion of copyright law that we've seen at the hand of Doctorow and the "digital rights" circus characteristically promotes closure, restriction and reticence. That's always been the case. We're just able to see it a lot more clearly at the scale and ferocity that the AI gold rush has driven.

At the off, Doctorow's definition of "Enshittification" was prefixed with the phrase: "Here's how platforms die". A core purpose of the meme was to persuade the public that Doctorow's funders (AKA "platforms") are self-extinguishing and thus should not face the legal restraints that they've paid him to campaign against since year dot. Clearly, the idea that Google, Amazon, Facebook et al are going to "die" requires a truly religionesque suspension of real-world observation, but the propaganda mill unquestioningly spun it regardless.

WHO DOCTOROW REALLY IS

People have refused to believe that Doctorow is a mouthpiece for the tech elite because he boo-hisses the tech elite in public, and his boo-hissing has notched up a good couple of gears over the past year or two. Whether the intensification of Doctorow's boo-hissing is because Google no longer rewards him to the extent it previously did, or because Google's public image is now so bad that shilling its message requires warp-level pantomime, I don't know, and don't care.

What matters is that Doctorow's track record is the epitome of demagoguery. As a demagogue you find villains, and you boo and hiss at the villains, and the public trust you, along with any fake reality you choose to present. Doctorow did not have to look farther than his paycheque to find his villains. It's extremely unusual, but he has been able to boo-hiss his own benefactors. They don't give a shit as long as they keep their legal immunities. They're too powerful to give a shit. They don't need you to like them anymore. They only need their shield from the law.

All demagogues wear a mask. But sometimes it slips. Let's take a quick look at what happens when Doctorow's mask slips...

Here, on a typical anti-copyright mission, cyberlib demagogue Doctorow obscenely portrays Creative Commons publishers who seek to uphold the few intellectual property rights they have left, as "pedantic assholes"...

"If you put a CC license on your work, its explicit message is, “I want you to re-use this.” Not “I am a pedantic asshole with a fetish for well-formed attribution strings.” The point of CC is not to teach the world to write attribution strings: it is to facilitate sharing and re-use." - Cory Doctorow

Fairly comical that he thinks sharing and re-use somehow needs "facilitiating" in a world where 100% of content with popular appeal will be stolen. But just look at the way he stigmatises the victims of copyright violation. Pedantic assholes. And remember, he's not just attacking creatives there - he's attacking creatives who have already gone way beyond expectations to offer content which is freely shareable. That was not enough for his Big Tech funders. They wanted the attribution conditions annulled as well.

Notice how, as Doctorow's mask slips, he sweepingly conflates Creative Commons with the unconditional terms of Public Domain licensing, completely negating the point of Creative Commons existing at all. We know Creative Commons has always been bullshit, and that its only purpose was to bait creatives into signing away their copyright for the enrichment of Google. In the above outburst, Doctorow - a paid instigator of CC licensing - confirms it. From the horse's mouth. If it's not about attribution, it's not about recognition. Which means the entire CC marketing campaign was a lie.

Vilifying those who dare to assert their legal right, because you get a reward from a corporation you yourself characterise as evil, is not activism. It's the very definition of late stage capitalism.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

Elite cybertech was built on theft of labour. With LLMs it's still stealing labour. It's just stealing that labour from a vastly bigger pool of people. Society has been scammed into allowing this by a brainwashing machine of epic proportions. A brainwashing machine which has taken over the information superhighway; infiltrated government, further education, universities and schools. It is an evil that knows no bounds, and is now, thanks to the help of Doctorow and Co, too powerful to stop. Mission accomplished.

It is indeed a testament to Doctorow's skill as a con artist, that as the paintings came down and the walls collapsed around him, he could manage to gripe bitterly about the devastation, whilst still persuading art-lovers to support his funders' freedom to demolish art galleries. That really is some level of marketing ability.

"Enshittification" is a masterstroke of circular reasoning in which every glaring contradiction to the EFF's cyberlib Promised Land can be blamed not on the elitist, monopolist-demigod-serving actions of the EFF itself, but on a mere word.

DOCTOROW DOOM

So, the Promised Land that Doctorow and Co have sold to the public for twenty years plus has been revealed, in glorious technicolour, as a toilet full of bot puke.

Doctorow is on the wrong side of history, and it's time for him to apologise for the damage he's inflicted not only upon creatives and their livelihoods, but upon the wider public's quality of life, upon the Web, and upon jobs. Disassociate himself from monopolist-serving, artist-crushing scum like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and become the real activist he clearly has the profile, connections and means to make count.

Until he does, my only call to action is to say:

Stop worshipping this two-faced, monopolist-serving con man and his stuck-record mantra. Stop worshipping the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Stop worshipping the "digital rights" circus. If you don't, hard as this will be for some people to believe, you are straightforwardly worshipping Google. Pay the EFF, pay Google. That's what you're doing. In moneying the EFF you are funding the ongoing legal defence of obscenely wealthy surveillance capitalists who hate you so much that the only time they'd ever stop pissing on you is if you caught fire.

You cannot re-establish the small web if everything it births is kidnapped and stabbed to death by monopolists.

THE FUTURE

As we bring the lessons of the past into 2025, let us recognise that the character who spent decades championing the rights of the demolition squad may not, in fact, be the best person to entrust with the task of halting a demolition.

Then maybe we can all move forward.