Cory Doctorow

Life and career

Cory Efram Doctorow was born in Toronto, on 17 July 1971. He is of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. His paternal grandfather was born in what became Poland and his paternal grandmother was from Leningrad, Russia (St. Petersburg). Both fled Nazi Germany's advance eastward during World War II, and as a result Doctorow's father was born in a displaced persons camp near Baku, Azerbaijan. His grandparents and father migrated to Canada from the Soviet Union. Doctorow's mother's family were Ukrainian-Russian Romanians.

Doctorow is a friend of Columbia law professor Tim Wu, dating back to their time together in elementary school. Doctorow went to summer camp as a young teenager at what he has described as a "hippy summer camp" at Grindstone Island, near Portland, Ontario, that was influential on his intellectual life and development. He quit high school, received his Ontario Academic Credit (high school diploma) from the SEED School in Toronto.

Cory Doctorow has stated both that he is not related to the American novelist E. L. Doctorow, and that he may be a third cousin once removed of the novelist. Thomas Rankin in Guide to Literary Masters & Their Works (2007) describes Doctorow as "a distant cousin of author E.L. Doctorow".

In June 1999, Doctorow co-founded the free software P2P company Opencola with John Henson and Grad Conn, which was sold to the Open Text Corporation of Waterloo, Ontario, in the summer of 2003. The company used a drink called OpenCola as part of its promotional campaign.

Doctorow later relocated to London and worked as European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for four years, helping to establish the Open Rights Group, before leaving the EFF to pursue writing full-time in January 2006; Doctorow remained a Fellow of the EFF for some time after his departure from the EFF Staff. He was named the 2006–2007 Canadian Fulbright Chair for Public Diplomacy at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, sponsored jointly by the Royal Fulbright Commission, the Integrated Media Systems Center, and the University of Southern California (USC) Center on Public Diplomacy. The professorship included a one-year writing and teaching residency at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, United States. He then returned to London, but remained a frequent public speaker on copyright issues.

Other work, activism, and fellowships

Doctorow served as Canadian Regional Director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2000. On 31 October 2005, Doctorow was involved in a controversy concerning digital rights management with Sony-BMG, as told in Wikinomics, a book by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. In 2007, together with Austrian art group monochrom, he initiated the Instant Blitz Copy Fight project, which asks people from all over the world to take flash pictures of copyright warnings in movie theatres.

As a user of the Tor anonymity network for more than a decade during his global travels, Doctorow publicly supports the network; furthermore, Boing Boing operates a "high speed, high-quality exit node." Doctorow was the keynote speaker at the July 2016 Hackers on Planet Earth conference. He also presented on enshittification at the 2024 conference, HOPE XV. In July 2024 Doctorow was appointed by Cornell University to be an A.D. White Professor-at-large for a six-year term.

In 2026, Doctorow endorsed Avi Lewis in that year's federal NDP leadership race.

Fiction

Doctorow began selling fiction when he was 17 years old, and sold several stories, followed by publication of the story "Craphound" in 1998. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Doctorow's first novel, was published in January 2003, and was the first novel released under one of the Creative Commons licences, allowing readers to circulate the electronic edition as long as they neither made money from it nor used it to create derived works. The electronic edition was released simultaneously with the print edition. In February 2004, it was re-released with a different Creative Commons licence that allowed derivative works such as fan fiction, but still prohibited commercial usage. Down and Out... was nominated for a Nebula Award, and won the Locus Award for Best First Novel in 2004. A semi-sequel short story named Truncat was published on Salon.com in August 2003.

His Sunburst Award-winning short-story collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More was published in 2004: "0wnz0red" from this collection was nominated for the 2004 Nebula Award for Best Novelette. His novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, published in June 2005, was chosen to launch the Sci-Fi Channel's book club, Sci-Fi Essentials (now defunct).

Doctorow released the bestselling novel Little Brother in 2008 with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike licence. It was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2009, and won the 2009 Prometheus Award, Sunburst Award, and the 2009 John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His novel Makers was released in October 2009, and was serialised for free on the Tor Books website.

Doctorow released another young adult novel, For the Win, in May 2010. The novel is available free on the author's website as a Creative Commons download, and is also published in traditional paper format by Tor Books. The book is about "greenfarming", and concerns massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Another short-story collection, With a Little Help, was released in printed format on 3 May 2011. It is a project to demonstrate the profitability of Doctorow's method of releasing his books in print and subsequently for free under Creative Commons.

In September 2012, Doctorow released The Rapture of the Nerds, a novel written in collaboration with Charles Stross. In October of the same year, the young adult novel Pirate Cinema was released in October 2012. It won the 2013 Prometheus Award. In February 2013, Doctorow released Homeland, the sequel to his novel Little Brother. It won the 2014 Prometheus Award (Doctorow's third novel to win this award). His novel Walkaway was released in 2017.

Nonfiction and other writings

Doctorow's nonfiction works include his first book, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction (co-written with Karl Schroeder and published in 2000), his contributions to Boing Boing (the blog he co-edited), as well as regular columns in the magazines Popular Science and Make. He is a contributing writer to Wired magazine, and contributes occasionally to other magazines and newspapers such as the New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Globe and Mail, Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, and the Boston Globe.

In 2004, he wrote an essay on Wikipedia included in The Anthology at the End of the Universe, comparing Internet attempts at Hitchhiker's Guide-type resources, including a discussion of the Wikipedia article about himself. Doctorow contributed the foreword to Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (The MIT Press, 2008) edited by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky. He also was a contributing writer to the book Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century.

He popularised the term "metacrap" in a 2001 essay titled "Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia." Some of his nonfiction published between 2001 and 2007 has been collected by Tachyon Publications as Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future. In 2016, he wrote the article Mr. Robot Killed the Hollywood-Hacker (published on MIT Technology Review) as a review of the TV show Mr. Robot and argued for a better portrayal and understanding of technology, computers and their risks and consequences in our modern world.

His essay "You Can't Own Knowledge" is included in the Freesouls book project. He is the originator of Doctorow's Law: "Anytime someone puts a lock on something you own, against your wishes, and doesn't give you the key, they're not doing it for your benefit." Writing in The Guardian in 2022, Doctorow listed the many problems confronting Facebook and suggested that its future would be increasingly fraught.

Opinions

Intellectual property

Doctorow believes that copyright laws should be liberalised to allow for free sharing of all digital media. He has also advocated filesharing. He argues that copyright holders should have a monopoly on selling their own digital media and that copyright laws should not be operative unless someone attempts to sell a product that is under someone else's copyright.

Doctorow is an opponent of digital rights management and claims that it limits the free sharing of digital media and frequently causes problems for legitimate users (including registration problems that lock users out of their own purchases and prevent them from being able to move their media to other devices).

He was a keynote speaker at the 2014 international conference CopyCamp in Warsaw, Poland with the presentation "Information Doesn't Want to Be Free."

Enshittification

In criticising the decay in usefulness of online platforms, Doctorow in 2022 popularised the neologism enshittification, (which he calls enpoopification on public airwaves) which he defines as a degradation of an online environment caused by greed:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

The word gained traction in 2023, when it was used by a variety of sources in reference to several major platforms discontinuing free features to further their monetisation or taking other actions that were seen to degrade functionality. In its annual vote, the American Dialect Society designated enshittification as 2023's Word of the Year.

In November 2024, the Australian Macquarie Dictionary selected it as its word of the year, defining it as follows:

The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.

Doctorow expanded upon the term in a full length book entitled Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It, published in 2025.

Awards

2000 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

2004 Locus Award for Best First Novel for Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

2004 Sunburst Award for A Place So Foreign and Eight More

2006 Locus Award for Best Novelette for "I, Robot"

2007 Locus Award for Best Novelette for "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth"

2007 The Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award

2026 Locus Award for Best Non-fiction for Enshittification

For Little Brother

2009 John W. Campbell Memorial Award

2009 Prometheus Award

2009 Sunburst Award

2009 White Pine Award

2018 Inkpot Award

For Pirate Cinema

2013 Prometheus Award

For Homeland

2014 Prometheus Award

Selected bibliography

In chronological sequence, unless otherwise indicated:

Fiction

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Tor. 2003. ISBN 0-7653-0436-8.

Eastern Standard Tribe. Tor. 2004. ISBN 0-7653-0759-6.

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. Tor. 2005. ISBN 0-7653-1278-6.

Makers. Tor. 2009. ISBN 978-0-7653-1279-2.

For the Win. Tor. 2010. ISBN 978-0-7653-2216-6.

The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow, 2011, ISBN 978-1-6048-6404-5

The Rapture of the Nerds. Tor. September 2012. ISBN 978-0-765-32910-3. (with Charles Stross)

Pirate Cinema. Tor. 2012. ISBN 978-0-7653-2908-0.

Walkaway. Tor. 2017. ISBN 978-0-7653-9276-3.

The Lost Cause. Tor. 2023. ISBN 978-1-0359-0223-1.

Little Brother. Tom Doherty Associates. 2008. ISBN 978-0-7653-1985-2.

Homeland. Tor. 2013. ISBN 978-0-7653-3369-8.

Attack Surface. Head of Zeus. 2020. ISBN 978-1-8389-3996-0.

Red Team Blues. Head of Zeus. 2023. ISBN 978-1-8045-4774-8.

The Bezzle. Tor Books. 2024. ISBN 978-1250865878.

Picks and Shovels. Tor Books. 2025. ISBN 9781250865908.

In Real Life. Illustrated by Jen Wang. First Second. 2014. ISBN 978-1596436589.

Non-fiction

Doctorow, Cory; Schroeder, Karl (2000). The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction. Alpha. ISBN 0028639189.

Doctorow, Cory; et al. (2002). Essential blogging. O'Reilly. ISBN 0596003889.

Doctorow, Cory (1 February 2004). Ebooks : neither E, nor books. Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 5 December 2014. Paper for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, 2004.

— (2005). "Wikipedia : a genuine H2G2, minus the editors". In Yeffeth, Glenn (ed.). The anthology at the end of the universe : leading science fiction authors on Douglas Adams' The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. BenBella. ISBN 9781932100563.

— (2008). Content : selected essays on technology, creativity, copyright, and the future of the future. Tachyon. ISBN 9781892391810.

— (2010). "You can't own knowledge". Freesouls. Retrieved 5 December 2014.

— (January 2010). "Close enough for rock 'n' roll". Locus (588): 29.

— (2011). Context : further selected essays on productivity, creativity, parenting, and politics in the 21st Century. Tachyon. ISBN 9781616960483.

— (2014). Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age. McSweeney's. ISBN 9781940450285.

— (2 September 2017). "Demon-Haunted World". Locus Online.

— (21 January 2021). How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism. Medium Editions. ISBN 9781736205907.

Giblin, Rebecca; Doctorow, Cory (27 September 2022). Chokepoint Capitalism. Beacon Press. ISBN 978-080700706-8.

Anthology

Tesseracts Eleven with Holly Phillips (2007)