Session 99: Conversation with Cory: Disenshittification and Libraries

Bezzle, n: The magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

This is one busy person! Cory returns to Libraries in Response with news and a plan! Ways libraries can help push back against what he calls enshittifiction of the internet or might be termed "Battle of the Bezzle."

So what can libraries do against such a powerful force? Tune in to find out!

The Bezzle, being the title of his latest novel. He's currently on book tour but has taken time out to speak with us about how libraries can play an active role in pushing back on what he sees and an insidious trend enabled by misuse of the internet.
The Bezzle, Cory Doctorow (Tor 978-1250865878, $27.99, hc, 240pp) February 2024.

Cory Doctorow: No One Is the Enshittifier of Their Own Story
May 6, 2024
"No one was more surprised than I was when the American Dialect Society named ‘‘enshittification’’ – my dirty little coinage to describe how everything on the internet is (suddenly, simultaneously) getting (much) worse – to be its Word of the Year. But though the news was a surprise, it was a very pleasant one.
My early writings on enshittification focused on its symptoms, the way platforms decay. The progression of the disease looks like this: First, com¬panies are good to their users. Once users are lured in and have been locked down, companies maltreat those users in order to shift value to business customers, the people who pay the platform’s bills. Once those business users are locked in, the platform starts to turn the screws on them, too – extracting more and more of the value generated by end-users and business customers until all that remains in the meanest residue, the least amount of value that can keep everyone locked into the platform."