The Manitoba branch of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA-MB) is back with its engaging Big Speaker event, featuring science fiction author, activist and journalist Cory Doctorow!
This event, titled Escaping the Enshittocene: Why Everything is Terrible and What to do About it, takes place on Thursday, May 2, 2024, at 7 p.m. at Knox United Church, 400 Edmonton St. in Winnipeg.
Cory Doctorow is the author of many books, most recently The Lost Cause, a solarpunk science fiction novel of hope amidst the climate emergency. His most recent nonfiction book is The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, a Big Tech disassembly manual. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
Doctorow will touch on why the rapid, precipitous decline of every digital service we depend on isn't a coincidence. It's the result of specific known, policy choices made by specific, named individuals. Enshittification wasn't inevitable: it was the foreseeable outcome of a plan to encourage digital monopoly platforms and turn them loose to extract unimaginable value from both their users and business customers, leaving behind a homeopathic residue of utility to keep us locked in.
This talk will explain what enshittification is, how it works, why it's happening now - and, most importantly, how we can reverse it, by seizing the means of computation and building a new, good internet suitable to serve as the digital nervous system of a connected world confronting environmental collapse, genocide and rising fascism.
For more information and/or to purchase tickets, visit this Eventbrite page.