Enshittification, Techno-Feudalism, and Failed States#

I’ve been listening to Cory Doctorow talk about enshittification for a while now. As a long-time fan, his fiction and essays have deeply influenced my work as a hacker, writer, and activist. Little Brother shaped how I think about surveillance and resistance. Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town was part of the inspiration co-founding Hive13. His ideas about digital autonomy resonate with me.

Cory Doctorow, is a Canadian, and has clearly lived for a long time in countries with functioning governments. On the podcast he suggests that because big tech is protected by digital locks, a product of the American Digital Millenium Copyright Act, that Canada and the EU have an opportunity to hold firms like Google and Amazon accountable. He advocates for interoperability mandates, so users aren’t forced to abandon their digital communities just to escape enshittified platforms. It’s a very Canadian way to confront the problem.

I’m not Canadian. I’m an American. I live in a country where policy is dictated by billionaires, lobbyists, and corporate donors. There’s no functioning democracy here, this is a corporate oligarchy. Antitrust is a joke. State reform is a myth. Market reform is a fairy tale. The government can’t and won’t stand up to tech monopolies, because the monopolies are also their campaign donors. There is always hope that something will change, but it’s the federal government.

So where does that leave us?

We’re caught in what I call The Signal Trap. If you want to get your message out, you’re stuck using the very platforms you know you should abandon. I know how that feels, this blog, while 100% big tech free, has zero readership. I can sleep smugly at night. I know the right thing is to disengage from ad-driven, corporate-controlled social media. But disengaging is the digital equivalent of living in a cabin in the woods. Writing blogs with no readers makes me feel like the Unabomber.

Doctorow’s vision of users creating hostile tools for a good user experience is close to what I’d call digital mutual sovereignty. Not just compatibility between services, but autonomy and community. Not just defecting from Facebook, but building radically cooperative infrastructure that answer to us, not shareholders.

In a functioning democratic capitalist society, you could vote out corrupt politicians or boycott exploitative corporations. But the US is no longer democratic, capitalist, or even civilized. It’s a corporate feudal state. How are we supposed to survive the refrorm or the ruputure that comes from a shift in corporate power? Canada and the EU may still have the tools to resist Big Tech through state policy. The US doesn’t. Americans have to build something else. And if the Canadians and the Europeans can’t push big tech into playing fairly? Their American friends will have built them an alternative.

So what do Americans do? Wait for revolution? Vote for another “working for change” candidate? Nah, dude. Every time Americans rise up, they get crushed by violent cops, shitty court cases, and corporate owned media. Every promising reformer gets co-opted (Obama), loses (Harris), or gets pushed off the stage (Sanders). The only change that happens is that the Democratic party shifts even further to the right. You might as well write a letter to Santa and ask him for a working government.

So no, we don’t wait. We don’t ask permission. We build new infrastructure, without permission from the state, without investment from capital.

Starting Small, But Starting now#

This is where I introduce what I call radical infrastructure: the idea that we don’t need to win the Internet back, we just need to stop letting it slip through our fingers. Bit by bit, site by site, user by user, we can migrate off these centralized platforms and toward federated, self-hosted, and peer-run alternatives. No, your grandparents are probably not going to leave Facebook, but some of us can, through small, intentional acts. Hosting your own blog. Running a personal cloud server for your family and friends. Sharing files over peer-to-peer networks. Using encrypted communications servers for your group chats. Choosing tools built by people, not shareholders.

Digital mutual sovereignty means reclaiming not just your data or your content, it means reclaiming your relationships, infrastructure, and agency. It’s not being smug about using open source software. It’s not about unplugging from everything and living in the cold and the dark. It’s about building and participating in networks where control flows both ways, where the people who use the system have a stake in how it works—and a say in what it becomes. Sounds fractious, messy, and difficult, right? Welcome back to democracy. That’s why we do it in small steps.

That’s the slow but steady replacement of exploitative systems with cooperative ones.

I used Wordpress for years. I switched from Android to Apple so I could Facetime with my kids. I am far from being an open source purist. This site exists on a server I control. It doesn’t need 10,000 followers to be worth doing. It’s my small step toward digital mutual sovereignty. It’s not flashy. It’s not a revolution. It’s just building tools for your self, your family, your friends, and your communities.

That’s how we escape the trap. It begins with confronting the Signal Trap, but leads to escape from the much bigger trap of doomscrolling while waiting for someone else to fix everything. No one’s coming to fix it.

You all alone in these streets cousin.

So. we don’t wait. We don’t ask permission. We build new infrastructure: without the state, without capital.

Start small. Start now.