Cory Doctorow – författare

*** Longlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year 2025 ***Misogyny, conspiratorialism, surveillance, manipulation, fraud, and AI slop are drowning the internet. For the monopolists who dominate online - X, TikTok, Amazon, Meta, Apple - this is all part of the playbook. The process is what leading tech critic Cory Doctorow has dubbed 'enshittification'. First, the platform attracts users with some bait, such as free access; then the activity is monetized, bringing in the business customers and degrading the user experience; then, once everyone is trapped and competitors eradicated, the platform wrings out all the value and transfers it to their executives and shareholders.As a result, online public squares have become places of torment, and online retailers are hellish dumpster fires. The virtual gathering places where we once imagined the world's problems might be resolved are now a sewer of hatred and abuse - thoroughly enshittified.Doctorow enumerates the symptoms, lays out the diagnosis, and identifies the best responses to these diseased platforms: the monopolies online must be shattered. Companies too big to fail or to jail - and much too big to care - must be cut down to size. Only an attack on corporate power will permit effective regulation and real privacy. Tech unions must protect the workers who should, in turn, defend us against their bosses' sadism and greed.Praise for The Internet Con:"One of the Internet's most interesting writers." -- Edward Snowden"This 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 Fittest"This 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 Taylor"A 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

As we enter the age of AI, we are in danger of being reduced to what Cory Doctorow dubs the 'reverse centaur'. With that term he conjures a human being conscripted as the assistant to a dominant machine. It could be a driver made to deliver nonstop, all day long; a warehouse worker packing shelves without bathroom or food breaks; or a programmer reviewing impossible amounts of AI-produced code.Don't fall for the hype! The billionaires managing the rise of AI are putting on a command performance for the bosses and investors, not for the ordinary people who might use the products. When this latest tech bubble bursts, will there be something useful for us in the wreckage?In The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, Doctorow examines why we find ourselves in this mess and how we can get out of it. Life after AI should mean the tools work for us, not the other way around.

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.

In a world wrecked by climate change, in a society owned by the ultra-rich, in a city hollowed out by industrial flight, Hubert, Etc, Seth and Natalie have nowhere else to be and nothing better to do. But there is another way. After all, now that anyone can design and print the basic necessities of life – food, clothing, shelter – from a computer, there is little reason to toil within the system. So, like thousands of others in the mid-21st century, the three of them turn their back on the world of rules, jobs, the morning commute and... walkaway. It's a dangerous world out there, the empty lands are lawless, hiding predators – animal and human alike. Still, when the initial pioneer walkaways flourish, the thousands become hundreds of thousands, building what threatens to become a post-scarcity utopia. But then the walkaways discover the one thing the ultra-rich have never been able to buy: how to beat death. And now it's war – a war that will turn the world upside down.

A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEARA call to action for the creative class and labour movement to rally against the power of Big Tech and Big Media.Corporate concentration has breached the stratosphere, as have corporate profits. An ever-expanding constellation of industries are now monopolies (where sellers have excessive power over buyers) or monopsonies (where buyers hold the whip hand over sellers) — or both.Scholar Rebecca Giblin and writer and activist Cory Doctorow argue we’re in a new era of ‘chokepoint capitalism’, with exploitative businesses creating insurmountable barriers to competition that enable them to capture value that should rightfully go to others. All workers are weakened by this, but the problem is especially well illustrated by the plight of creative workers. From Amazon’s use of digital rights management and bundling to radically change the economics of book publishing, to Google and Facebook’s siphoning away of ad revenues from news media, and the Big Three record labels’ use of inordinately long contracts to up their own margins at the cost of artists, chokepoints are everywhere.By analysing book publishing and news, live music and music streaming, screenwriting, radio, and more, Giblin and Doctorow deftly show how powerful corporations construct ‘anti-competitive flywheels’ designed to lock in users and suppliers, make their markets hostile to new entrants, and then force workers and suppliers to accept unfairly low prices.Chokepoint Capitalism is a call to workers of all sectors to unite to help smash these chokepoints and take back the power and profit that’s being heisted away — before it’s too late.

If you want a better future tomorrow, you're going to have to fight for it today. Here are four urgent stories from author and activist Cory Doctorow, four social, technological and economic visions of the world today and its near – all too near – future. 'Unauthorized Bread' is a tale of immigration, toxic economic stratification and a young woman's perilously illegal quest to fix a broken toaster. In 'Model Minority' a superhero finds himself way out his depth when he confronts the corruption of the police and justice system. 'Radicalized' is the story of a desperate husband, a darknet forum and the birth of a violent uprising against the US health care system. The final story, 'The Masque of the Red Death', tracks an uber-wealthy survivalist and his followers as they hole up and attempt to ride out the collapse of society. 'Cory Doctorow is one of our most important science fiction writers' KIM STANLEY ROBINSON.

2024 LOCUS AWARD FINALIST, BEST SF NOVELMoney-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). **In cyber-security, RED TEAM plays attack. BLUE TEAM plays defence.Marty Hench’s career in tech is almost as old as Silicon Valley. He’s the most accomplished forensic accountant in town, an expert on the international money-laundering and shell-company chicanery used by Fortune 500s, divorcing oligarchs, and international drug cartels alike (there’s more crossover than you might imagine).Marty was born to play attack. If there’s a way to get under the walls and bring the castle down, he’s the one to do it. There’s no better financial Red Teamer in the Valley.Now he’s on the trail of a stolen key, one that unlocks an illicit backdoor to billions in crypto. More than reputation and fortune is on the line – Marty’s adversaries are implacable criminal sadists who will spill oceans of blood to get what they want.Finding the stolen key is going to be the least of Marty’s problems: now he has to save his skin. To do that, he’ll have to play defence. And Marty hates playing the Blue Team.

Anda loves Coarsegold Online. The massively-multiplayer role playing game is a place where she can be a leader, a fighter, and a hero. But things become a lot more complicated when Anda befriends a gold farmer - a poor Chinese kid whose job is to collect valuable objects and sell them to other players for real money. This behaviour is strictly against the rules in Coarsegold, but Anda soon comes to realize that questions of right and wrong are a lot less straightforward when a real person's real livelihood is at stake. From acclaimed teen author and digerati mogul Cory Doctorow and rising star cartoonist Jen Wang, In Real Life is a sensitive, thoughtful look at adolescence, gaming, poverty, and culture clash.

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.

The ultimate tale of teen rebellion – one seventeen-year-old against the surveillance state.Big Brother is watching you. Who’s watching back?Marcus is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works – and how to work the system. Smart, fast and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison, where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days.When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state, where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.

A provocative and exhilarating tale of teen rebellion against global corporations from the New York Times bestselling author of Little Brother.Not far in the future…In the twenty-first century, it's not just capital that's globalized: labour is too. Workers in special economic zones are trapped in lives of poverty with no trade unions to represent their rights. But a group of teenagers from across the world are set to fight this injustice using the most surprising of tools – their online video games.In Industrial South China Matthew and his friends labour day and night as gold-farmers, amassing virtual wealth that's sold on to rich Western players, while in the slums of Mumbai 'General Robotwallah' Mala marshalls her team of online thugs on behalf of the local gang-boss, who in turn works for the game-owners. They're all being exploited, as their friend Wei-Dong, all the way over in LA, knows, but can do little about.Until they begin to realize that their similarities outweigh their differences, and agree to work together to claim their rights to fair working conditions. Under the noses of the ruling elites in China and the rest of Asia, they fight their bosses, the owners of the games and rich speculators, outsmarting them all with their gaming skills. But soon the battle will spill over from the virtual world to the real one, leaving Mala, Matthew and even Wei-Dong fighting not just for their rights, but for their lives…

The prophetic debut novel from the visionary author fo LITTLE BROTHER, now published for the first time in the UK.Jules is a young man barely a century old. He’s lived long enough to see the cure for death and the end of scarcity, to learn ten languages and compose three symphonies … and to realize his boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World.Disney World! The greatest artistic achievement of the long-ago twentieth century. Now overseen by a network of ‘ad hocs’ who keep the classic attractions running as they always have, enhanced with only the smallest high-tech touches.But the ad hocs are under attack. A new group has taken over the Hall of Presidents and is replacing its venerable audioanimatronics with new, immersive direct-to-brain interfaces that give guests the illusion of being Washington, Lincoln and all the others. For Jules, this is an attack on the artistic purity of Disney World itself.Worse: it appears that this new group has had Jules killed. This upsets him. (It’s only his fourth death and revival after all.) Now it’s war.

Now published for the first time in the UK, the second visionary novel from the acclaimed author of LITTLE BROTHER.Art is an up-and-coming interface designer, working on the management of data flow along the Massachusetts Turnpike. He’s doing the best work of his career and can guarantee that the system will be, without question, the most counterintuitive, user-hostile piece of software ever pushed forth into the world.Why? Because Art is an industrial saboteur. He may live in London and work for an EU telecommunications mega-corp, but Art’s real home is the Eastern Standard Tribe.Instant wireless communication puts everyone in touch with everyone else, twenty-four hours a day. But one thing hasn’t changed: the need for sleep. The world is slowly splintering into tribes held together by a common time zone, less than family and more than nations. Art is working to humiliate the Greenwich Mean Tribe to the benefit of his own people. But in a world without boundaries, nothing can be taken for granted – not happiness, not money, certainly not love.Which might explain why Art finds himself stranded on the roof of an insane asylum outside Boston, debating whether to push a pencil into his brain…

A brilliantly funny and bizarre novel from the visionary author of LITTLE BROTHER, now published for the first time in the UK.Alan is a middle-aged entrepreneur who has devoted himself to fixing up a house in a bohemian neighbourhood of Toronto. This naturally brings him into contact with the house full of students and layabouts next door, including a young woman who, in a moment of stress, reveals to him that she has wings – wings, moreover, which grow back after each attempt to cut them off.Alan understands. He himself has a secret or two. His father is a mountain, his mother a washing machine, and among his brothers are a set of Russian nesting dolls.Now two of the three nesting dolls, Edward and Frederick are on his doorstep – well on their way to starvation because their innermost member, George, has vanished. It appears that yet another brother, Davey, whom Alan and his other siblings killed years ago, may have returned … bent on revenge.Under such circumstances it seems only reasonable for Alan to involve himself with a visionary scheme to blanket Toronto with free wireless Internet connectivity, a conspiracy spearheaded by a brilliant technopunk who builds miracles of hardware from parts scavenged from the city’s dumpsters.But Alan’s past won’t leave him alone – and Davey is only one of the powers gunning for him and his friends.

The ultimate tale of teen rebellion – one seventeen-year-old against the surveillance state.Big Brother is watching you. Who’s watching back?Marcus is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works – and how to work the system. Smart, fast and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison, where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days.When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state, where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.

What does the future look like? A brilliantly entertaining and original novel about the end of the economy from the visionary author of Little Brother.Perry and Lester invent things. All sorts of things. Seashell robots that make toast, Boogie Woogie Elmo dolls that drive cars. They also invent an entirely new economic system. ''New Work'' is a New Deal for the technological era. Soon barefoot bankers are criss-crossing the nation, microinvesting in high-tech communal start-ups like Perry and Lester''s. Together they transform a country, and journalist Suzanne Church is there to document it.But a new economic system requires a whole new belief system – and there are plenty of non-believers out there. The New Work bust puts the dot.com-bomb to shame and soon Perry and Lester are out of funds and out of business. Down but not out, they go back to what they do best – making stuff. But when a rogue Disney executive grows jealous of their once more soaring popularity and convinces the police that their amazing 3-D printers are being used to run off AK-47s, things get very dark very quickly…This brilliantly entertaining and original novel from the visionary author of Little Brother fizzes with bold ideas about the future and how our lives will look as part of it. But at its heart are three characters, Perry, Lester and Suzanne, on an unforgettable journey that will bring them together only to break them apart as they each try to discover how to live meaningfully in an ever-changing world filled with both beauty and horror – where some things really are immutable…

The prophetic debut novel from the visionary author fo LITTLE BROTHER, now published for the first time in the UK.Jules is a young man barely a century old. He’s lived long enough to see the cure for death and the end of scarcity, to learn ten languages and compose three symphonies … and to realize his boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World.Disney World! The greatest artistic achievement of the long-ago twentieth century. Now overseen by a network of ‘ad hocs’ who keep the classic attractions running as they always have, enhanced with only the smallest high-tech touches.But the ad hocs are under attack. A new group has taken over the Hall of Presidents and is replacing its venerable audioanimatronics with new, immersive direct-to-brain interfaces that give guests the illusion of being Washington, Lincoln and all the others. For Jules, this is an attack on the artistic purity of Disney World itself.Worse: it appears that this new group has had Jules killed. This upsets him. (It’s only his fourth death and revival after all.) Now it’s war.

Now published for the first time in the UK, the second visionary novel from the acclaimed author of LITTLE BROTHER.Art is an up-and-coming interface designer, working on the management of data flow along the Massachusetts Turnpike. He’s doing the best work of his career and can guarantee that the system will be, without question, the most counterintuitive, user-hostile piece of software ever pushed forth into the world.Why? Because Art is an industrial saboteur. He may live in London and work for an EU telecommunications mega-corp, but Art’s real home is the Eastern Standard Tribe.Instant wireless communication puts everyone in touch with everyone else, twenty-four hours a day. But one thing hasn’t changed: the need for sleep. The world is slowly splintering into tribes held together by a common time zone, less than family and more than nations. Art is working to humiliate the Greenwich Mean Tribe to the benefit of his own people. But in a world without boundaries, nothing can be taken for granted – not happiness, not money, certainly not love.Which might explain why Art finds himself stranded on the roof of an insane asylum outside Boston, debating whether to push a pencil into his brain…

A brilliantly funny and bizarre novel from the visionary author of LITTLE BROTHER, now published for the first time in the UK.Alan is a middle-aged entrepreneur who has devoted himself to fixing up a house in a bohemian neighbourhood of Toronto. This naturally brings him into contact with the house full of students and layabouts next door, including a young woman who, in a moment of stress, reveals to him that she has wings – wings, moreover, which grow back after each attempt to cut them off.Alan understands. He himself has a secret or two. His father is a mountain, his mother a washing machine, and among his brothers are a set of Russian nesting dolls.Now two of the three nesting dolls, Edward and Frederick are on his doorstep – well on their way to starvation because their innermost member, George, has vanished. It appears that yet another brother, Davey, whom Alan and his other siblings killed years ago, may have returned … bent on revenge.Under such circumstances it seems only reasonable for Alan to involve himself with a visionary scheme to blanket Toronto with free wireless Internet connectivity, a conspiracy spearheaded by a brilliant technopunk who builds miracles of hardware from parts scavenged from the city’s dumpsters.But Alan’s past won’t leave him alone – and Davey is only one of the powers gunning for him and his friends.

A provocative and exhilarating tale of teen rebellion against global corporations from the New York Times bestselling author of Little Brother – a call to arms for a new generation.Not far in the future…In the twenty-first century, it''s not just capital that''s globalized: labour is too. Workers in special economic zones are trapped in lives of poverty with no trade unions to represent their rights. But a group of teenagers from across the world are set to fight this injustice using the most surprising of tools – their online video games.In Industrial South China Matthew and his friends labour day and night as gold-farmers, amassing virtual wealth that''s sold on to rich Western players, while in the slums of Mumbai ''General Robotwallah'' Mala marshalls her team of online thugs on behalf of the local gang-boss, who in turn works for the game-owners. They''re all being exploited, as their friend Wei-Dong, all the way over in LA, knows, but can do little about.Until they begin to realize that their similarities outweigh their differences, and agree to work together to claim their rights to fair working conditions. Under the noses of the ruling elites in China and the rest of Asia, they fight their bosses, the owners of the games and rich speculators, outsmarting them all with their unbeatable gaming skills. But soon the battle will spill over from the virtual world to the real one, leaving Mala, Matthew and even Wei-Dong fighting not just for their rights, but for their lives…

Winner of the 2026 Locus Award for NonfictionEnshittification: It's not just you-the internet sucks now. It's been enshittified. That was no accident, and it's not gonna fix itself. Here's how we'll disenshittify it so we can have a new, good internet. We are all living through the Enshittocene-the Great Enshittening-a time in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are being turned into giant piles of shit. It's frustrating. Demoralizing. Even terrifying. The once-glorious internet has degenerated into "e;platforms"e; that rose to dominance because they delivered convenient and delightful services efficiently and reliably. But once we were locked in to those services, the tech bosses turned on us, relying on our dependency to keep us using the services even as they got worse and worse. The platform bosses did the same to the companies that had flocked to their services to sell stuff to us. Once we were all locked in-businesses and users-the tech companies stripped out all utility, save the bare minimum needed to stave off total collapse.In Enshittification, Cory Doctorow shows us where it comes from: not the iron laws of economics, or the great forces of history, but specific policy choices made by powerful people who ignored every warning about the consequences of those choices. These are choices that can be undone. Enshittification is a Big Tech disassembly manual, a road map for the seizure of the means of computation. It is a diagnosis, and it is a cure.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERNational Indie Bestseller"e;[Doctorow] resembles the great rock critics of an earlier era, a high-tech Greil Marcus or even a Lester Bangs."e; -Stephen Marche, The New York Times Book ReviewA short, provocative guide to what's good, bad, and stupid about AI and the discourse around AI, by the author of Enshittification. In modern tech parlance, a centaur is a person who is able to use technology to be a better, more productive version of themself. A reverse centaur is a person who is forced by technology to work at an inhuman 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.The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI is not another anti-AI screed. Cory Doctorow uses AI in his work every day. As a creative person, he has no moral or dogmatic issue with AI-he thinks the technology is useful, even exciting, and full of potential. And yet.AI has arrived surrounded by unprecedented hype driven by a tech industry desperate to maintain its unprecedented valuation based on its own promises of endless financial growth. Despite the fact that almost all of AI's real-world implementations have proved underwhelming, AI is projected 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 "e;value,"e; 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.For Doctorow, it is imperative to see through that hype to the real story, to understand the technology not just for what it does, but for who it does it to and who it does it for. From that point of view, the story of AI is indeed dramatic and unprecedented, having generated an investment bubble so big that it endangers the entire world economy. 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 "e;after"e; AI in which the tools work for us, not the other way around.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Anyone can run a blog (an online journal). From personal diaries to political commentary and technology observations, bloggers are making their voices heard around the world. Essential Blogging helps you select the right blogging software for your needs and show how to get your blog up and running. You'll learn the ingredients of a successful blog, and then get detailed installation, configuration and operation instructions for the leading blogging software: Blogger, Radio Userland, Movable Type, and Blosxom. After showing you how to acquire, set-up, and run these leading software packages, Essential Blogging takes you through the more advanced features, so that by the time you finish, you'll be up and blogging with the best of them.Essential Blogging covers: * the important components of a blog and a blog post * installing and configuring the tools * a survey of desktop blogging clients * advice and experience from real-world bloggers * hosted blogging with Blogger and Blogger Pro * desktop blogging with Radio Userland * server blogging with Movable Type * posting, editing, and deleting blog entries * adding pictures to blog entries * syndicating your stories with RSS * consuming RSS feeds with Radio Userland * customizing the appearance of your blog with templates * managing and customizing archives of blog entries * adding comments to your blog * self-hosting your blog vs using a blog-hosting service * going under the hood with the Blosxom blogging system Written by prominent bloggers and authors of blogging tools, Essential Blogging is a no-nonsense guide to the technology of blogging.