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Terence Corcoran: Excrementalism — Cory Doctorow is totally full of it

The author known for creating the word 'enshittification' should stick to science fiction, not economic fiction

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After arriving home late Easter Sunday following a pleasant day socializing and dining with friends and relatives, there was enough time available to indulge in an occupational obsession: catching up on the latest news. On CBC television’s The National, however, it was a slow news night, which forced the flagship show to fill time with excerpts from an eight-month-old interview with radical leftist Cory Doctorow.

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As a few readers may know, Doctorow — a 55-year-old Canadian journalist and science fiction writer — is famous for creating the word “enshittification” to describe the process by which the Big Tech monopolist billionaires are steadily corrupting economic activity by maliciously manipulating markets and prices to the detriment of everyone. His 2025 book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to do About It, will be issued in paperback in September.

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When the book came out last year, the CBC ran a chummy interview with host Ian Hanomansing, who opened with a softball question that allowed Doctorow to start off with one of his usual bits of misleading data and analysis designed to portray the tech billionaires as dinosaurs devouring our lives.

“I am worried,” said Doctorow, “that seven companies make up 30 per cent of the American stock market.” And with that he introduced classic leftist bits of phoney data and commentary to support the pop-economics theory that we live in an economy dominated by corrupt, gouging monopolists.

First of all, the total value of the stock market is not a meaningful base for measuring economic activity, nor is the total market value of the tech giants of much use. Big Tech shares may today be valued at US$20 trillion, or about 30 per cent of the $60-trillion market cap of the S&P 500. But the big number is based on market speculation, not reality. As Doctorow observed, their stock prices could disappear in a tech market crash.

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In terms of economic activity the seven tech firms produced total revenue last year of around $3 trillion, or about 10 per cent of total revenue of all S&P 500 listed firms. As for profits, the estimated $600-billion net income of the techs in 2025 is equal to about four per cent of all corporate profits across the U.S. economy and only about 2.8 per cent of total tech market capitalization.

The point is that Doctorow uses simplistic number grabs and economic manipulations to hype his monopoly message, a tactic he deploys throughout his book. No real data is offered to support economic and commercial claims, nor does he produce any credible research to justify his bonkers leftist economic arguments.

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Speaking about tech billionaires on the CBC, Doctorow said, “the worst people with the worst ideas make the most money.” At Google and Amazon and Meta, the monopolists leave consumers with no choice and no economic freedom. “You’re not going to shop your way out of a monopoly.”

On the victimized socialist left, which is where Doctorow is parked, the definition of competitive capitalism is one word: monopoly. The literal and proper definition of monopoly is “one seller.” For his purposes, Doctorow adopts the ideas of economic theorists who claim that three, four or five corporations combined could achieve “market power” that would be equivalent to that of a single-seller monopoly. He writes in his book, a “monopoly is an economic system in which markets are dominated by powerful sellers,” including “cartels” of three or four corporations that appear to be competing but are in fact monopolists.

One of Doctorow’s leading monopolist examples is Amazon. Every aspect of Jeff Bezos’ massively successful consumer supply system is portrayed as an abuse of consumers and of the corporations whose products are sold via Amazon. One of the opening chapters in his book is excerpted from a Doctorow blog post from 2022: “How monopoly enshittified Amazon: Chokepoint Capitalism ruins everything.” Doctorow’s economic ideas boil down to a core principle: Capitalism equals monopoly equals economic devastation for people.

One of Doctorow’s guiding economists is former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, a leading radical anti-capitalist theorist who has been denouncing market economics for decades and urging the adoption of major state-driven reforms. In his 2023  book, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Varoufakis claims, “Big tech has replaced capitalism’s twin pillars — markets and profit — with its platforms and rents. With every click and scroll, we labour like serfs to increase its power.”

Varoufakis is also a colleague of Canadian radical leftist Naomi Klein, wife of newly-elected NDP Leader Avi Lewis. Klein, Lewis and Doctorow are peas in a Canadian pod that is struggling to replace the world’s economic structure. At the end of his book, Doctorow states the obvious: “A confession: I am no true believer in markets as the best arbiter of how our society should work, who should be in charge of it, and how its productive capacity should be organized. Like other leftists, I am deeply suspicious of capitalism … not least because so many capitalists seem hell-bent on abolishing capitalism and replacing it with feudalism” — as analyzed  by Varoufakis.

A final note: Doctorow’s Enshittification book — a relatively small production with fewer words per page than usual — is available for a relatively high price of $42 on Amazon. So far, though, Doctorow has not accused Amazon of turning his book into an example of Big Tech capitalist exploitation.

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