Pluralistic: Enshittification, the audiobook (the Kickstarter) (25 Aug 2025)

pluralist
1

Originally published at: Pluralistic: Enshittification, the audiobook (the Kickstarter) (25 Aug 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow



Today's links


An oil painting of Balthazzar's feast. Collaged onto the feast tables are the Enshittification book as an ebook, audiobook, hardcover and film cel, as well as the Canny Valley art book.

Enshittification, the audiobook (the Kickstarter) (permalink)

Audiobooks are hands-down the most enshittified aspect of publishing, which is why I make my own audiobooks and pre-sell them on Kickstarter, which is how I get around the fact that Amazon refuses to carry my audiobooks:

http://disenshittification.org

Enshittification explains the exploitation that changed the internet and our lives. -Edward Snowden

Why are audiobooks so enshittified? Because they have the two essential characteristics for enshittification:

1) They are digital, which means the rules for them can be shifted on a per-customer, per-usage basis; and

2) They are controlled by a monopoly, Amazon, whose Audible division is responsible for 90% of popular audiobook sales.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/07/audible-exclusive/#audiblegate

Amazon refuses to sell any audiobook unless it is first wrapped in the company's proprietary encryption (AKA "Digital Rights Management" or "DRM"). This DRM permanently locks Audible's audiobooks to the apps it approves, because US copyright law makes it a felony to tamper with that DRM. That means that neither the author nor the publisher can authorize you to take your Audible purchases to a rival platform, and if they try, Audible can have them imprisoned for up to five years:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/18/descartes-delenda-est/#self-destruct-sequence-initiated

Cory Doctorow knows what's gone wrong, and he sees a way forward. This is a magnificent book. -James Gleick, author of Chaos and The Information.

Which is why none of my books are for sale on Audible. I'm not gonna submit to conditions that will let Audible take you, my reader, hostage. Not only does that make you vulnerable to whatever evil shit Amazon thinks up (remember a couple years ago, when they experimented with putting ads in the audiobooks you paid for?!), but that also makes me (and every other author) vulnerable, because if you can't leave Audible, neither can we:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

Which is why I do these Kickstarters for my audiobooks! Since 2013, I've either paid narrators (like Wil Wheaton and Amber Benson) to perform my books, or I've gone into Skyboat Media's studios myself, to record under the expert direction of the legendary Gabrielle de Cuir:

https://skyboatmedia.com/

That's what I did this time, recording my forthcoming book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It in early August. Since then, I've been working with my trusty sound engineer John Taylor Williams to polish that recording to perfection. Now, I'm selling that pre-selling that audiobook on a Kickstarter where you can also pre-order the hardcover, ebook, as well as an extremely limited edition art-book collecting the collages I made for my Pluralistic.net newsletter while developing the ideas behind Enshittification:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/enshittification-the-drm-free-audiobook

This is a great book for those of us hoping to make things better for everyone. -Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.

You can listen to a generous, one-hour sample of the entire first section of the book here:

https://archive.org/download/enshittification-sample/Enshittification_Kickstarter_Promo_FMx1.mp3

The audiobooks and ebooks I sell through my Kickstarters are sold without any DRM, and also without any "terms and conditions." You are buying these books, not "licensing" them. That means you can do anything with these books that copyright law allows: sell 'em, give 'em away, lend 'em to a friend. Just don't violate copyright law and we're cool.

This book, Enshittification, synthesizes all the essays, speeches and panels I've done on the subject of platform decay into a single, coherent argument designed to be accessible to everyone, even (especially) your normie friends who know that everything sucks but don't understand why and are paralyzed about what to do about it.

Enshittification will change the way you see the world, and just might change the world itself. Tim Harford, author of The Undercover Economist.

The book's not out until October – it'll be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (US/Canada) and Verso (UK/Commonwealth), but it's already getting fantastic early notices. The Financial Times has already longlisted it for 2025's best business book of the year:

https://www.ft.com/bookaward

It's gotten starred reviews and raves from trades like Kirkus, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly, and we've sold foreign rights in more than a dozen countries, all over the world. There's also a 2026 graphic novel edition (adapted by Koren Shadmi) coming from First Second's 23rd Street Books.

You won't be able to put your finger on it until you have read Enshittification. Then you will now, and more important, you will stand a chance of resisting. -Yanis Varoufakis, author of Technofeudalism.

Just as exciting is the Enshittification documentary, which is currently in pre-production, directed by Emily James (Just Do It), edited by Kurt Engfehr (Fahrenheit 9/11) and produced by Eve Marson (Web of Make Believe: Death, Lies and the Internet). You can pre-purchase tickets to the theatrical run and a DRM-free download here; your early support will help raise the $75,000 we need for principle photography:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/one-time-137256536

We recorded a sizzle reel at the Teardown conference in Portland last spring, and Kurt's edited it into an amazing trailer:

https://vimeo.com/1111178798?share=copy#t=3.009

Cory Doctorow shows us the escape routes, reminding us that the internet's promise isn't lost, it's merely captured. -Audrey Tang, Taiwan's First Digital Minister

The documentary is a road-movie, with a crew following me on tour and interviewing me and other experts on the subject (think Inconvenient Truth, but for platform decay). We've got quite a tour planned: I'll be in Boston (with Randall "XKCD" Munroe); DC (with former CFPB chair Rohit Chopra); New Orleans; Chicago (with Kara Swisher); LA (with The American Prospect's David Dayen); Calgary; San Francisco; Portland; Seattle (with Ed Zitron); Vancouver; Calgary, Montreal, Toronto, New York City (with Lina Khan); Miami; Burbank; Lisbon; London; Hay-on-Wye; and Madison, CT. Other tour dates are still being finalized – more details to follow.

I developed enshittification as a series of posts on Pluralistic.net, my blog/newsletters/social media feed. Each edition of Pluralistic goes out with a graphic, usually a collage I've made from public domain and Creative Commons materials:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/albums/72177720316719208

A mockup of the Canny Valley paperback, collaged into a medieval painting depicting a group of knights milling around a cave mouth, with a castle visible in the distance.

Making these collages has turned into one of my major creative outlets, and dozens of readers have asked if I would ever do a book of them. Then, last year, I got to talking to Creative Commons CEO Anna Tumadóttir about her plans for CC's 25th anniversary and we cooked up a plan to publish a little book of my Pluralistic collages to give to major donors as a premium. Anna needed 400 of these, but my printer gives me a quantity break at 500 copies, so I'm making 100 signed, numbered copies available for backers of this Kickstarter.

We must heed Doctorow's no-bullshit account of how to fight back. -Jathan Sadowski, author of The Mechanic and the Luddite.

The books are gorgeous. Cyberpunk icon and electronic art impresario Bruce Sterling wrote me a wonderful introduction. It's designed by John D. Berry, president of the Association Typographique Internationale, a legend of type and book design:

https://johndberry.com/biographical-note/

For production, I've tapped Pasadena's Typecraft, a 118-year-old printer who ran the book on 100lb Mohawk paper. It's a gorgeous little 4.75" x 6.75" paperback, and this is the only run I plan on doing (though if people like it, I might do future volumes collecting more collages).

Essential to understanding today's digital economy. -Rohit Chopra, former CFPB Chair and FTC Commissioner

One of the things I love about these campaigns is the chance to work with so many wonderful partners. There's Skyboat Media and director Gabrielle de Cuir; editor John Taylor Williams of Wryneck Studios; Emily, Kurt and Eve working on the documentary; John Berry, Bruce Sterling and Typecraft for my art book. I'm also working with some of my favorite booksellers in the world to fulfill print book orders: in LA, I've got Secret Headquarters (the best comics shop in the world!), who'll fulfill US orders as well as worldwide orders for signed books and Canny Valley. For Canadian hardcover orders, I'm working with Winnipeg's McNally-Robinson. For EU orders, I'm once again working with Berlin's magnificent Otherland Books. Orders in the UK will be fulfilled directly by Verso. Working with local shippers means we don't have to fuck around with the Trump tariffs.

Enshittification is the product of my open-access publishing program. I don't charge anything for the essays I publish nearly every day on Pluralistic.net, and I release them under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license, which lets anyone reproduce and adapt them, including commercially. Releasing my work this way means that it gets spread far and wide, which means everything to me, and I'm so glad to see everyone from scrappy progressive news sites to Conde Nast taking my work and reprinting it widely.

A bracing, daringly optimistic plan for how we can free ourselves from the awfulness. -John Hodgman

Readers frequently ask me how they can support my work, whether I have a Patreon or some other way to accept donations. I don't have anything like that. What I have, instead, are these books, which I can't seem to stop writing. The best way to thank me for my work is to buy the books, in any (or every) format. Selling books benefits a whole community of people who are important to my work, including my publishers and agents, and also all the people who work on publishing, fulfillment and production with me. These people don't just work on my projects, of course: they have many partners of their own.

When you buy my books, you help ensure that I'll keep doing what I do – and you help all my partners keep doing what they do. And the best way to support my work is to back it on these Kickstarter campaigns. The extraordinary generosity of my Kickstarter backers since 2020 has made a huge difference to my artistic career and my family's financial stability. If you backed one of those campaigns, I thank you, sincerely. And whether you've backed before, I hope you'll consider backing this one:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/enshittification-the-drm-free-audiobook

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Court: DMCA can’t prohibit third-party repairs https://web.archive.org/web/20050912004536/https://www.corante.com/copyfight/archives/2005/08/24/fed_circuit_smacks_down_bad_dmca_decision_re_independent_repair_techs.php

#20yrsago Chinese government mandating 3-hour caps on MMO playing https://www.gamespot.com/articles/china-govt-steps-up-limits-on-online-gaming/1100-6131845/

#20yrsago ItPlaysQuake: reviews of Quake-ports on odd hardware https://web.archive.org/web/20051122053035/http://www.itplaysquake.com/

#20yrsago DRM != SSL https://memex.craphound.com/2005/08/24/drm-ssl/

#20yrsago FBI stages fake wedding, invites mobsters, arrests gift-bearing guests https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-aug-23-na-gang23-story.html

#20yrsago What the *&^%#!? is an “open source DRM?” https://web.archive.org/web/20050903070248/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/003928.php

#20yrsago Why some “piracy” can increase overall revenues https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2005/08/just_enough_pir.html

#15yrsago Play a digital version of a lost “perception-altering” Freemasonry board-game https:/www.dpoetry.com/fires/

#10yrsago The FBI kept files on author Ray Bradbury: “Definitely slanted against the United States” https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/24/the-fbi-kept-files-on-author-ray-bradbury-definitely-slanted-against-the-united-states/

#10yrsago Car information security is a complete wreck — here’s why https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/23/car-information-security-is-a-complete-wreck-heres-why/

#10yrsaog Sad Puppies, Rabid Puppies lose big at the Hugos https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/016318.html

#5yrsago Quantifying the meritocratic delusion https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/23/visionary-art/#meritocratic-delusion

#5yrsago Chinese sf guidelines https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/24/raise-the-spirits-of-scientists/#taikonaut-futurism

#5yrsago Don't use Bridgefy at protests https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/24/raise-the-spirits-of-scientists/#threat-models

#5yrsago Concretizing "Main St vs Wall St" https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/24/raise-the-spirits-of-scientists/#main-st-wall-st

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

  • "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1019 words yesterday, 422263 words total).

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X