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 nudged me toward co-founding Hive13. His ideas about digital autonomy resonate—and diverge from my own.

Doctorow, as a Canadian reformer, still believes in the possibility of state intervention. In his recent work, he suggests Canada or the EU could use policy to fight back against Big Tech’s monopolistic abuse. He advocates for interoperability mandates, so users aren’t forced to abandon their digital communities just to escape enshittified platforms. It’s a hopeful, state-driven, and extremely Canadian solution.

I’m not Canadian. I’m an American. I am not a reformer, I am an Abolitionist. 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 joke. State reform is a myth. Market reform is a lie. The government can’t and won’t stand up to tech monopolies, because it brings in campaign contributions. I hope for better—but I no longer believe it’s coming from the state.

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. Posting here—on a blog with no readership—is a case in point. 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, and writing blogs with no readers makes me feel like the Unabomber.

Doctorow’s vision of “guerilla interoperability”—users forcing platforms open through creative misuse—is close to what I’d call digital mutual sovereignty. Not just compatibility between services, but autonomy and interdependence between communities. 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 in that sense. It’s a corporate feudal state. Canada and the EU may still have the tools to resist Big Tech through state policy. The US doesn’t. We 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 by media washed stories. Every promising reformer gets co-opted (Obama), loses (Clinton, Biden), or gets pushed off the stage (Sanders). The only change that happes is the Overton window moves further to the right. You might as well write a letter to Santa and ask him for a decent Internet experience.

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

Starting Small, But Starting now#

This is where I introduce what I call a digital mutual sovereignty: 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 centralized platforms and toward federated, self-hosted, and peer-run alternatives. Not in one mass exodus, but 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 a virtue signal. 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? That’s why we do it in small steps.

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

This blog has no readership. I switched from Android to Apple to Facetime with my kids. That’s fine. This site exists on a server I control. It doesn’t need 10,000 followers to be worth doing. Every self-hosted site, every federated instance, every small group moving off Meta or Google or Amazon—that’s a 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.

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

And we start small but we start now.