“It’s not that these guys are so smart that they’re running circles around Congress. It’s that Congress created the enshittogenic environment and then we got enshittocene.”
– Internet activist and sci-fi writer
Cory Doctorow, tracing the rapid decline of user welfare—
enshittification—back to the 1998
U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The law effectively criminalized reverse engineering, Doctorow explains, paving the way for closed, extractive platforms by limiting choice, interoperability, and privacy.
