Can Cory Doctorow’s book change the technology debate?

Over a career spanning nearly four decades, Cory Doctorow has written 15 novels, four graphic novels, dozens of short stories, six nonfiction books, approximately 60,000 blog posts, and thousands of essays.

And yet, for all the millions of words he’s published, these days the award-winning science fiction author and veteran Internet activist is best known for just one: inslization.

The term, which Doctorow, 54, popularized in essays in 2022 and 2023, refers to the way online platforms become worse to use over time because the companies that own them try to make more money. Although the currency is brazen, in Doctorow’s phenomenon there is a specific, almost scientific process that progresses in discrete stages, like a disease.

Since then, the meaning has broadened to encompass a general mood – a feeling far greater than the frustration of Facebook, which has long ceased to be a good way to connect with friends, or Google, which is now search heavy with SEO spam. In recent times, the idea has been used to describe everything from video games to television to American democracy itself.

“It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. It’s even terrifying,” Doctorow said in a 2024 speech.

On Tuesday, Farrar Straus and Giroux will publish “Enhittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It,” Doctorow’s book-length elaboration on his essays, with case studies (Uber, Twitter, Photoshop) and his prescriptions for change, which revolve around breaking up big tech companies and more robust regulation.

Yet given the thousands of words Doctorow has already, characteristically written on the subject, the question arises: why write a book?