It’s not work if you love what you do, as they say. It’s also likely not work if you’re driven by a seemingly boundless combination of conviction and creativity. Perhaps that’s how tech critic and author Cory Doctorow has accomplished what he has over the past 25 years. Tens of thousands of blog posts, which he describes as a “a single giant, densely interwoven opus.” Dozens of books, both (science) fiction and non—including last year’s global bestseller Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, which expounded upon the neologism he first coined in 2022. As a people-first technologist, Doctorow has long railed against the dehumanizing effects of a closed, platform-driven internet, and Enshittification’s damning analysis and call to arms rang out in a world that had finally caught up to him.

Now, his latest book again sheds light on predatory tech-industry practices while also illuminating a new way forward. The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, out next week, discusses how we make artificial intelligence a tool without becoming a tool ourselves. In automation theory, he explains, a “centaur” is a person who uses a machine as an assistant. (A computer can make you a centaur. So can a bicycle.) A “reverse centaur” becomes an assistant to a machine. (See: Amazon warehouse workers. Also see: The many authors whose books were used without consent by Anthropic to train Claude.) Like Enshittification, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide is short and chatty and gleefully polemic, and offers a view of a future that reclaims technology’s affordances without corporate compromise; also like Enshittification, it came into focus gradually throughout Doctorow’s daily writing on his blog, pluralistic.net.

“There are lots of interesting, fun, and productive ways to use this technology,” Doctorow writes of AI in the book’s intro. “There is nothing about the technology of AI that determines how it must be used.” It’s easy to fear something that you don’t understand; it’s much harder, and more necessary, to help people understand that something well enough to improve their lives and retain their power in a tech-mediated world. In other words, there’s never been a better time for a new Cory Doctorow book.

— Peter Rubin

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in suburban Toronto (North York). I left home at 17 and moved—first with housemates in downtown Toronto and then to Baja California for a while, because I thought I could write there.

What places feel like home?

I’ve lived in Central America, Mexico, San Francisco, Los Angeles, London, and Toronto. I spent my summers at hippie summer camp in eastern Ontario. All of those places feel like home, to a certain extent.

Other than family members, who or what has shaped you the most?

Networked communications. We got our first networked computer in 1977*, and I was a BBS kid from about 1980 onward. The most important personal, professional, artistic and social connections in my life have been mediated through networks.

* a teletype terminal with an acoustic coupler that held the phone receiver after you dialed into the university’s minicomputer, which lacked a screen and could only output on very long rolls of paper (paper towel my mom snuck home from her kindergarten classroom; I’d print 1,000 feet of computing up one side, another 1,000 feet down the other, then roll it up and give it to my mom to take back to school so the kids could dry their hands on it).

What is your favorite time of day?

Very early in the morning. I’m a 4 a.m. guy, and a hammock guy, and I have a whole suite of electrified undergarments and blankets, as well as a survival suit, that let me sit in my backyard hammock and work from 4 a.m. on, winter and summer.

What are you really good at?

I know they say you can’t multitask, but I can actually, no fooling, multitask. I know that I can, because I lose that ability when I’m severely jet-lagged and then I have this moment like, “Oh, this is what it’s like for other people, and why they can’t carry on a conversation, answer email, listen to music, and cook breakfast at the same time.”

What’s the best gift you’ve ever received?

My wife gave me a steel-cased 1943 wartime Rolex Oyster. It’s about the size of a nickel and it’s got this very plain, very beautiful face. It’s gorgeous. I dropped it while getting searched at a TSA checkpoint and now it’s been in the shop for a year while the watchmaker looks for parts. I miss it.

Describe your favorite meal.

I love to cook for friends in the backyard. I’ll make tri-tips (no marinade, just 2-3 days dry-brining with salt and pepper in the fridge; reverse-sear over lump charcoal) and cook them over “cowboy beans” (red beans, black beans, red onions, jalapenos, capers, mustard powder, cayenne, roast garlic, crushed tomatoes, combine and simmer in the coals and smoke for 5-6 hours, finish under the roasts so they catch the rendered tallow). I fork-prick purple Japanese yams, oil them, and leave them on the grill all afternoon until they’re super soft and nutty and a little sweet, then I split them and drizzle with olive oil, adding flake salt and a habanero/oil dressing. I can cook this while people are showing up and still keep up a nice chat with folks as they arrive, serve drinks, etc., and enjoy a few bourbons while it’s all happening, then serve buffet-style. I can serve for 30 people without breaking a sweat this way.

Sound or silence? (And if sound, what sound?)

Sound. I have 50,000 MP3s that I play on shuffle. But if you took away all my music except Talking Heads and related projects, I’d be OK. If you took away the Talking Heads and left me the David Byrne, I’d still be OK. I’m a machine for turning Talking Heads bootlegs and hammocks into pungent tech criticism.

Where do you do your best thinking?

I swim a mile a day while listening to an audiobook on an underwater MP3 player. I come up with so many column and novel ideas in the pool. I have this mnemonic trick where I come up with ways of remembering all the stuff I think of while swimming: I pick a word that will jog my memory of it, then take the initial from that work and combine it with the other initials, assigning new words to them that form a vivid and absurd picture. So if I remember that I have to get my dry-cleaning (D) and have an idea for taking a bit of Abbie Hoffman’s autobiography for a scene in a novel (A), and think of an essay about billionaire solipsism I want to write for my newsletter (S), I’ll combine those to get D-A-S, and then vividly imagine a Dog in Alaska eating a Sandwich. When I get home and finish showering, I’m able to reverse-engineer the sandwich-eating Alaskan dog to get back to dry-cleaning, Abbie Hoffman, and billionaire solipsism.

What journey—physical, creative, intellectual, or otherwise—has meant the most to you?

Probably my journey into understanding tech policy. I’ve worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a vital nonprofit digital rights group, for nearly 25 years now—as a delegate to standards bodies and UN specialized agencies, as well as a rabble-rouser in the streets and on the internet. Doing this for most of my adult life has given me a very extensive and very eclectic knowledge of the ins and outs (and opportunities) of tech policy.

Where do you like to read?

I love to do everything in my hammock, but I also read a ton on planes. Plus I do an hour in the pool with an audiobook every day.

What’s the last rabbit hole you disappeared into?

Learning about process knowledge—the more important, less valued cousin of intellectual property. Process knowledge is all the stuff that can’t be captured, written down, owned, or sold that goes into making something happen. It’s collectively held by all the workers in all the firms in a supply chain. You can’t record it, so you can’t train a model on it, and without it, everything stops.

Name three publications you enjoy reading these days.

I read The American Prospect religiously. I devour every issue of Jewish Currents as soon as it arrives. 2600 Magazine remains one of the all-time great hangs.

What’s one longread that you can’t stop thinking about?

Ada Palmer’s amazing magnum opus, Inventing the Renaissance. My review here.

What was the last book you read?

I just read John D. MacDonald’s April Evil. No one could orchestrate a heist the way he could. He was a product of his time and the treatment of gender and race are just awful, but the writing and plotting and characterization are amazing. I picked it up at Kayo Books, the best pulp book store in the world, the last time I was in San Francisco.

What piece of nonfiction are you most proud of writing?

The 50,000 blog posts I’ve written in the past 25 years, which amount to a single giant, densely interwoven corpus.

What’s your most reliable way to get creatively unstuck?

I don’t get creatively unstuck. I just write despite the fact that I’m stuck. I learned a long time ago that being “stuck” is really just the unshakable belief that everything you can think of writing is shit, and while that may be true, it might also not be, and the biggest predictor of whether you feel like you’re writing shit isn’t the writing—it’s everything else, bleeding in. I feel like my work is shit when I’m hungry, hung over, jet-lagged, getting my ass kicked in a policy fight, or arguing with my loved ones. I just write anyway, and feel awful and stupid for doing it, but also know that later I will look at that work and probably like it fine.

Who’s a writer you turn to when you need some inspiration?

Inspiration is grossly overrated. I jettisoned it in the previous millennium in favor of habit and discipline.

What words do you overuse?

“Irrespective,” “interoperability,” and “bourbon.”

What’s your favorite guilty pleasure?

I try not to feel guilty about my pleasures.

What superpower would you like to have?

I would like to be able to teleport. 100%. Teleportation.

What animal or nonhuman being do you most identify with?

An ecosystem.

If you have a free solitary hour in your day, what do you typically do?

Tell me more about these “free solitary hours.”

What five items would you place in a time capsule?

Honestly, anything I’d want to show to people in 100 years is so cool I wouldn’t want to part with it.

What does your writing space look like?

I prefer to write in my hammock. I usually write on buses, trains, planes, taxi-cabs, hotel rooms, conference spaces, doctor’s offices, etc. I wrote a novel during a YA tour of Germany, tapping away onstage in front of the high-school kids during the portion of the program when my German translator read aloud. I wrote the last third of my next nonfiction book on an infusion couch at the hematology ward at Kaiser Sunset in LA, getting monoclonal antibodies.

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, and journalist. He is the author of dozens of books, most recently Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It and the novel Picks and Shovels. Other notable books include the solarpunk novels Walkaway and The Lost Cause; the tech policy books The Internet Con and Chokepoint Capitalism; and the internationally bestselling YA series Little Brother.

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