Cory Doctorow: “Amazon, Microsoft, and Google act like a cartel that has more power than the UN.”

There's a story that during the mid-19th-century gold rush , those who got rich weren't the 300,000 settlers who traveled from the eastern United States to California, but rather those who sold picks and shovels to search for the precious metal. Today, in today's economy, this fuels the app economy: from Airbnb, Uber, and Booking.com to Google Drive, the business doesn't seem to be generating value, but rather selling the tools for others to do the work.

However, when transposing this story of the pioneers of 1848 to the present day of Silicon Valley there is a bit of a catch: "Today, everyone wants to sell 'digital picks and shovels': not to generate value, but to sell the tools so that others can do it. The theorist Douglas Rushkoff calls this 'going meta ' : not being a taxi driver, but having the license; or better yet, founding the app that connects drivers with passengers. The further you are from productive work, the more insulated you are from risk and that is what the market rewards . That's why there is all the bubble in Silicon Valley but I think that metaphor today is a myth: a narcissistic way of inflating the commercial value of applications."

The review is by Cory Doctorow , a Canadian writer, activist and critic, who published Picks and Shovels in February of this year, the third novel in the saga of Martin Hench, a young man from San Francisco who in 1986 becomes aware of the abuses of a tech company that commits economic crimes and masks them with the technologies of the time.

In her fiction, Hench meets a group of women in technology, systematically excluded from the system, who operate as a technopolitical resistance and become key players in "reverse engineering," one of the most important guiding ideas: dismantling systems, understanding them, and creating alternatives. This is what happened with PCs in the early 1980s, with the clones that were computers compatible with the IBM monopoly, but manufactured by other brands like Compaq and sold at a lower price.

“Before, there was resistance . Today, companies are concentrating and imposing conditions on users. When a large part of the online world depends on a few providers— such as Microsoft Azure, AWS (Amazon), or Google Cloud —these giants act like a cartel: they have international power, even greater than that of the UN, which at least requires consensus among countries. These companies only need to agree among themselves to decide what conditions to impose ,” he explains to this outlet.

Here, everything about his novel, the dominance of Big Tech , the monopoly of the 5 giants (Google, Apple, Facebook -Meta-, Amazon and Microsoft), interoperability as a key concept, the new world order that Trump wants to impose with tariffs and the "enshittification" of the platforms we use every day, in conversation with Clarín.

Cory Doctorow started using the term “enshittification,” which is difficult to translate into Spanish but quite clear in English: how the platforms we use every day have become a “shit” for users. It's an idea the author has explored in his books of the last three years ( The Internet Scam and Strangulation Capitalism ), presented at hacker conferences like DEF CON ( see )—which used the term as its guiding principle last year—and some Argentine authors have even Spanish-ized it as “mierdificación.”

Google's search engine became a sea of ​​advertising, filled with misleading news articles (with titles like "The dollar died" due to a currency fluctuation), Instagram and Facebook were filled with posts from viral influencers to stop showing content from friends, and Microsoft filled Windows with unnecessary AI applications that, rather than helping, annoy and make the computer slower, forcing you to invest more money in a new one.

─What is enshittification and how does it appear in Picos y Palas ?

─I've described enshittification not only as a phenomenon that can be observed from the outside, as a company gets worse (or many companies get worse), but also as a social phenomenon, something that changed in the environment that caused everything to get worse, and, above all, it's a material phenomenon. The book takes place before these intellectual property laws first appeared in the United States. The first law was Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), in 1998, before it became a global legal regime. Something happens in the book: there's a righteous fight against the "enshittification" of these laws.

─There's a group of people who own a computer company, operated by Reverend Sirs, who can shittify what they sell to people. For example, forcing them to use only the ink they sell for their printers. And if the Reverend's company resorts to violence to resolve its problems, it's partly because they can't resort to the courts; intellectual property law hasn't yet been expanded enough to turn a shareholder's preferences into legal obligations on their competitors. This is what has changed most in our era and what "Picks and Shovels" attempts to represent. Before, there was more resistance to these phenomena.

─What changed then between the 1980s, when the book takes place, and the present day?

─Look, it's not that people went to get an MBA, got greedy, and did bad things. There have always been greedy people, but the difference between the time when our devices were good and the services we used [Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, Google, etc.] were generally good, is that now they're getting worse, but this doesn't seem to affect those companies. The difference is that before, there were consequences for shittifying the services provided by big companies, and those consequences have evaporated.

─What kind of consequences?

─Previously, these companies had to worry about regulators or competitors , even their own workers, who were so scarce that if they tried to harm users, they might quit. All of that disappeared, amid mass layoffs, deregulation, and monopolization.

─There are two very powerful ideas in the book that have to do with interoperability and reverse engineering. How do they emerge, and why are they so important?

─Yes, because the other thing companies had to worry about was interoperability. Companies were worried that someone would reverse engineer the product they had enshittified to make it compatible, workable, even if it wasn't the official one. So if you raise the price of the ink in the printer you sell, someone will disassemble your cartridge to see how it works , make an alternative, and sell it: that's reverse engineering to make a product interoperable with another.

─And this appears as a form of resistance in the book. Why is it so important?

─ It's a latent property in all technology . Every device can "talk" to every other device, and every program can be modified by another program, because the only computer we know how to make is something called a complete universal von Neumann machine, and that computer is defined by its ability to run any valid program. That means that wherever there's an enshittifying program, there's an un-enshittifying program.

─For example, Elon Musk changed the way Twitter works so that you no longer see the headlines of news articles when you share a note. Then, someone could write a program that re-posts the headlines (a browser extension, for example). You can think of a thousand examples that show you how anything can be modified, even thinking about cars or tractors that prevent users from repairing them, printers that want you to use the cartridges they make, and so on.

─Do you think it's possible to imagine this whole situation changing, for example, through regulations like the one Bill Gates faced with Internet Explorer in the late 1990s?

─ There's no reason to think that current technology is its final form. It would be odd if, after only 25 years of the internet, we had already arrived at a perfect, immutable model. In fact, before the web, technology was also concentrated. It was antitrust actions that opened the game: against AT&T, which allowed the development of modems; against IBM , which fostered the PC; and against Microsoft, which gave impetus to companies like Google .

─So, what's the problem today that's causing companies to have so much control over users?

─What stands in the way of all this is the law, not the technology. Intellectual property law is the biggest impediment to a world where the technologies we use can be modified to be locally appropriate, to respect our rights, to not violate our privacy, to not steal our wages or everything else we should want for our technological infrastructure.

─How do you think Trump's tariffs could affect the Silicon Valley ecosystem and Big Tech?

─Trump's tariffs will trigger a realignment, even if he changes his mind as he often does. For more than 20 years, the US has pressured countries like Canada, Argentina, and even the European Union to adopt laws prohibiting reverse engineering and protecting companies from the consequences when they harm users. That model could begin to crumble.

─So technology hubs outside the US can gain ground.

─It's a historic opportunity for other countries to imagine a more diverse and distributed technological ecosystem, with common standards, interoperability, and decisions made closer to where people live . If the U.S. no longer offers free trade, why remain tied to intellectual property laws that only benefit Silicon Valley?

─Can all this change? Can the dominance of these large companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple be reversed?

─My friend Mitchell Kapor, who founded Lotus and invented Lotus 1-2-3 and also founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), once said, “Architecture is political,” meaning that the design of an infrastructure highly influences the type of society that will live “on top” of it. Everything we know was made by people who are alive today, so we can ask them how they did it; we don’t have to reinvent anything. It’s just a matter of doing something we did a couple of generations ago, when I was a kid. So, yes: of course we could do it again. In fact, it’s our duty to reverse this enshitification.

"Picks and Shovels" was published in February 2025; it currently has no Spanish edition. Cory Doctorow will release a new book, " Enshittification ," on October 7. He will also launch a project celebrating the 25th anniversary of Creative Commons and is actively working with various countries "to think about new intellectual property laws in this Trump era."