Cory Doctorow

Human competition is eternal. We thrill to victory, we suffer the agony of defeat. No matter what the future brings, sports will be a part of it. But what forms will these games take? Who will be the spectator, who will play? Will aliens be our opponents or machines? Will physical competition even exist? What rules will we play by? What will be at stake? What rewards will be reaped by the victors? What fates await the defeated? Will the entire universe be our arena or will our world be smaller than today? Visionary authors speculate on what swifter, higher, stronger, and winning will mean in the near and distant future.

Future Washington is a collection of stories by noted science fiction writers from around the world, and the political spectrum, which looks at possible futures for the U.S. capital.

*** Longlist for the FT and Schroder Business Book of the Year 2025 *** ** Named word of the year in US, UK and Australia ** *'Enshittification' will be the most talked about tech book of the year.* "Enshittification" is Doctorow's word to describe the decay of online platforms. It captures the feeling of a world that is ever worsening. Enshittification is not a technical glitch. It is a technique that every platform - from X to TikTok, Amazon to Apple, has adopted. First they lure users onto their platforms, then attract businesses who might profit from this newly formed public, and then finally squeeze both for their own profit. Tech giants lure users in with convenience and then degrade their services over time, draining profit at the cost of user experience. In the meantime our public squares have turned somewhere between the mall and a dumpster fire, that is unfit to deal with the problems of our times. What is to be done? Like a surgeon, Doctorow sets out the symptoms, the diagnosis and the cure to these metastasizing platforms. We need to question the monopolies that dominate so much of our online lives, we must demand regulation and our privacy back, allow for interoperability, and win tech workers' rights.

Whether you want to criticise, kill, or use AI, you have to get through the hype and uncover the real story. Start with labour: in automation theory, a centaur is a person who chooses to use technology to help them do the things that matter to them. A reverse centaur is a person who has been conscripted to serve as a helper for a machine, at an inhuman, machine pace: a driver made to deliver all day long, nonstop; a warehouse worker made to work without food or bathroom breaks; a programmer made to crank out impossible amounts of code. As Doctorow says: it's not enough to ask what the technology does - we have to understand who it's doing it for and who it's doing it to. The intended audience for AI hype isn't the people who are forced to use AI. The AI show is a performance staged for bosses and investors. . Investment bankers claim AI will to be worth more than $16 trillion: a number that only makes sense if AI replaces vast swathes of the wage-earning human workforce. To justify that level of "value," every story about AI must be presented as inevitable, world-changing disruption. Even the tales of the robot apocalypse are a calculated attempt to bolster the fearsome power of AI. Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. When the AI bubble bursts, what will we salvage? Is there something in the wreckage that everyday people will find useful? In The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI - as he so successfully did in Enshittification - Doctorow recounts both how we found ourselves in this dire situation and how we can get through it, to a life "after" AI in which the tools work for us, not the other way around.

New York Times bestselling author Cory Doctorow returns to the world of Red Team Blues to bring us the origin story of Martin Hench and the most powerful new tool for crime ever invented: the personal computer. The year is 1986. The city is San Francisco. Here, Martin Hench will invent the forensic accountant--what a bounty hunter is to people, he is to money--but for now he's an MIT dropout odd-jobbing his way around a city still reeling from the invention of a revolutionary new technology that will change everything about crime forever, one we now take completely for granted. When Marty finds himself hired by Silicon Valley PC startup Fidelity Computing to investigate a group of disgruntled ex-employees who've founded a competitor startup, he quickly realizes he's on the wrong side. Marty ditches the greasy old guys running Fidelity Computing without a second thought, utterly infatuated with the electric atmosphere of Computing Freedom. Located in the heart of the Mission, this group of brilliant young women found themselves exhausted by the predatory business practices of Fidelity Computing and set out to beat them at their own game, making better computers and driving Fidelity Computing out of business. But this optimistic startup, fueled by young love and California-style burritos, has no idea the depth of the evil they're seeking to unroot or the risks they run. In this company-eat-company city, Martin and his friends will be lucky to escape with their lives.

"Enshittification" is Doctorow's word to describe the decay of online platforms, from exciting novelty to everyday essential, to what we have today. "Enshittification" has been word of the year in the UK, USA and Australia. It's been printed in the pages of the *FT* and declaimed from podiums at the EU. As a word, it captures the feeling of a world that is ever worsening. As an idea, it explains why it's getting worse, whose fault that is, and what to do about the misogyny, conspiratorialism, surveillance, manipulation, and fraud that have taken over the internet.Enshittification is not a technical glitch. It is a technique that every platform - from X to TikTok, Amazon to Apple, has adopted. First they lure users onto their platforms, then attract businesses who might profit from this newly formed public, and then finally squeeze both for their own profit. Tech giants lure users in with convenience and then degrade their services over time, draining profit at the cost of user experience. In the meantime our public squares have turned somewhere between the mall and a dumpster fire, that is unfit to deal with the problems of our times.What is to be done? Like a surgeon, Doctorow sets out the symptoms, the diagnosis and the cure to these metastasizing platforms. We need to question the monopolies that dominate so much of our online lives, we must demand regulation and our privacy back, allow for interoperability, and win tech workers' rights.'Enshittification' will be the most talked about tech book - and word - of the year.Praise for The Internet Con:One of the Internet's most interesting writers. -- Edward SnowdenThis book fills me with hope that a radical yet plausible alternative to computational tyranny can be developed and deployed. -- Douglas Rushkoff, author of Survival of the FittestThis book is the instruction manual Big Tech doesn't want you to read. It deconstructs their crummy products, undemocratic business models, rigged legal regimes, and lies. Crack this book and help build something better. -- Astra TaylorA brilliant barn burner of a book. Cory is one of the sharpest tech critics, and he shows with fierce clarity how our computational future could be otherwise. -- Kate Crawford, author of The Atlas of AI

Enshittification: it's not just you--the internet sucks now. Here's why, and here's how we can disenshittify it. We're living through the Enshittocene, the Great Enshittening, a time in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It's frustrating. Demoralizing. Even terrifying. Enshittification identifies the problem and proposes a solution. When Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification, he was not just finding a funner way to say "things are getting worse." He was making a specific diagnosis about the state of the digital world and how it is affecting all of our lives (and not for the better). The once-glorious internet was colonized by platforms that made all-but-magical promises to their users--and, at least initially, seemed to deliver on them. But once users were locked in, the platforms turned on them to make their business customers happy. Then the platforms turned to abusing their business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. In the end, the platforms die. Doctorow's argument clearly resonated. Once named, it became obvious that enshittification is everywhere, so much so that the American Dialect Society named it its 2023 Word of the Year, and was cited as an inspiration for the 2025 season of Black Mirror. Here, now, in Enshittification the book, Doctorow moves the conversation beyond the overwhelming sense of our inevitably enshittified fate. He shows us the specific decisions that led us here, who made them, and--most important--how they can be undone.

THE YEAR IS 1986. THE CITY IS SAN FRANCISCO.Here, Martin Hench will reinvent the forensic accountant for the digital age – what a bounty hunter is to people, he will be to tech money – but for now he’s an MIT dropout odd-jobbing his way around a city still reeling from the invention of a revolutionary new technology that will change everything about crime forever.When Martin is hired by a Silicon Valley startup, Fidelity Computing, to investigate a group of disgruntled ex-employees who’ve founded a competitor, he quickly realises he’s on the wrong side. Martin ditches the greasy old guys running Fidelity Computing without a second thought, utterly infatuated with the electric atmosphere of Computing Freedom. Located in the heart of the Mission, this group of brilliant young women have set out to beat Fidelity Computing at their own game. But they have no idea of the depth of evil they’re seeking to uproot. Or the risks they run.In this company-eat-company city, Martin and his friends will be lucky to escape with their lives.

New York Times bestselling author Cory Doctorow returns to the world of Red Team Blues to bring us the origin story of Martin Hench and the most powerful new tool for crime ever invented: the personal computer. The year is 1986. The city is San Francisco. Here, Martin Hench will invent the forensic accountant--what a bounty hunter is to people, he is to money--but for now he's an MIT dropout odd-jobbing his way around a city still reeling from the invention of a revolutionary new technology that will change everything about crime forever, one we now take completely for granted. When Marty finds himself hired by Silicon Valley PC startup Fidelity Computing to investigate a group of disgruntled ex-employees who've founded a competitor startup, he quickly realizes he's on the wrong side. Marty ditches the greasy old guys running Fidelity Computing without a second thought, utterly infatuated with the electric atmosphere of Computing Freedom. Located in the heart of the Mission, this group of brilliant young women found themselves exhausted by the predatory business practices of Fidelity Computing and set out to beat them at their own game, making better computers and driving Fidelity Computing out of business. But this optimistic startup, fueled by young love and California-style burritos, has no idea the depth of the evil they're seeking to unroot or the risks they run. In this company-eat-company city, Martin and his friends will be lucky to escape with their lives.

Money-laundering, cyber-knavery and shell-company chicanery: Marty Hench is an expert in them all. He's Silicon Valley's most accomplished forensic accountant and well versed in the devious ways of Fortune 500s, divorcing oligarchs, and international drug cartels alike (and there's more crossover than you might imagine).

THE YEAR IS 1986. THE CITY IS SAN FRANCISCO.Here, Martin Hench will reinvent the forensic accountant for the digital age – what a bounty hunter is to people, he will be to tech money – but for now he’s an MIT dropout odd-jobbing his way around a city still reeling from the invention of a revolutionary new technology that will change everything about crime forever.When Martin is hired by a Silicon Valley startup, Fidelity Computing, to investigate a group of disgruntled ex-employees who’ve founded a competitor, he quickly realises he’s on the wrong side. Martin ditches the greasy old guys running Fidelity Computing without a second thought, utterly infatuated with the electric atmosphere of Computing Freedom. Located in the heart of the Mission, this group of brilliant young women have set out to beat Fidelity Computing at their own game. But they have no idea of the depth of evil they’re seeking to uproot. Or the risks they run.In this company-eat-company city, Martin and his friends will be lucky to escape with their lives.

Money-laundering, cyber-knavery and shell-company chicanery: Marty Hench is an expert in them all. He's Silicon Valley's most accomplished forensic accountant and well versed in the devious ways of Fortune 500s, divorcing oligarchs, and international drug cartels alike (and there’s more crossover than you might imagine). Cory Doctorow's hard-charging, read-in-one-sitting, techno take on the classic PI pulp novel. **It's 2006, and Marty Hench is at the top of his game as a self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerrilla war between the people who want to hide money and the people who want to find it. He spends his downtime holidaying on Catalina Island, where scenic, imported bison wander the bluffs and frozen, reheated fast food burgers cost $25. (Wait, what?) When, during one vacation, Marty disrupts a seemingly innocuous scheme, he has no idea he’s kicked off a chain of events that will overtake the next decade of his life. Because he's made his most dangerous mistake yet. He's trespassed into the playgrounds of the ultra-wealthy and identified their latest target: California’s Department of Corrections, who manage the state's prison system. Secure in the knowledge that they’re living behind far too many firewalls to be identified, the tycoons have hundreds of thousands of prisoners at their mercy, and the potential of millions of pounds to make off them. But now, Marty is about to ruin their fun... A seething rebuke of the privatized prison system that delves deeply into the arcane and baroque financial chicanery involved in the 2008 financial crash, The Bezzle is a red-hot follow up to Red Team Blues.

New York Times bestseller Cory Doctorow's The Bezzle is a high stakes thriller where the lives of the hundreds of thousands of inmates in California's prisons are traded like stock shares. The year is 2006. Martin Hench is at the top of his game as a self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerrilla war between people who want to hide money, and people who want to find it. He spends his downtime on Catalina Island, where scenic, imported bison wander the bluffs and frozen, reheated fast food burgers cost 25$. Wait, what? When Marty disrupts a seemingly innocuous scheme during a vacation on Catalina Island, he has no idea he's kicked off a chain of events that will overtake the next decade of his life. Martin has made his most dangerous mistake yet: trespassed into the playgrounds of the ultra-wealthy and spoiled their fun. To them, money is a tool, a game, and a way to keep score, and they've found their newest mark--California's Department of Corrections. Secure in the knowledge that they're living behind far too many firewalls of shell companies and investors ever to be identified, they are interested not in the lives they ruin, but only in how much money they can extract from the government and the hundreds of thousands of prisoners they have at their mercy. A seething rebuke of the privatized prison system that delves deeply into the arcane and baroque financial chicanery involved in the 2008 financial crash, The Bezzle is a sizzling follow-up to Red Team Blues.

When the tech platforms promised a future of "connection," they were lying. They said their "walled gardens" would keep us safe, but those were prison walls.The platforms locked us into their systems and made us easy pickings, ripe for extraction. Twitter, Facebook and other Big Tech platforms are hard to leave by design. They hold hostage the people we love, the communities that matter to us, the audiences and customers we rely on. The impossibility of staying connected to these people after you delete your account has nothing to do with technological limitations: it's a business strategy in service to commodifying your personal life and relationships.We can - we must - dismantle the tech platforms. In The Internet Con, Cory Doctorow explains how to seize the means of computation, by forcing Silicon Valley to do the thing it fears most: interoperate. Interoperability will tear down the walls between technologies, allowing users to leave platforms, remix their media, and reconfigure their devices without corporate permission.Interoperability is the only route to the rapid and enduring annihilation of the platforms. The Internet Con is the disassembly manual we need to take back our internet.

Thirty years from now and the effects of climate change are overwhelming the planet – but so are the global efforts to combat it.For young Americans a generation from now, climate change isn’t controversial, it’s a fact of life.But there are still those Americans who cling to their red trucker caps, their anger, their nostalgia for the golden age of assault rifles. Their ‘alternative’ news sources reassure them their resentment is right and pure and ‘climate change’ is a con.They’re your grandfather, your uncle, your great-aunt. They’re not going anywhere. And they’re armed to the teeth.