Cory Doctorow
Author & Activist
Science-fiction novelist, EFF special advisor, and coiner of “enshittification” who argues the AI boom is a stock-market bubble built on convincing bosses to fire workers — and that the crash will hurt everyone.
In his words
A chatbot can’t do your job, but an AI salesman can absolutely convince your boss to fire you.
AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our civilization.
The most important fact about any technology (including AI) isn’t what it does, but who it does it for and who it does it to.
Biography
Cory Doctorow (born 1971 in Toronto) is a science-fiction novelist, journalist, and digital-rights activist — author of Little Brother, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and The Bezzle, longtime co-editor of Boing Boing, and a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He coined “enshittification,” the American Dialect Society’s 2023 Word of the Year, to describe how platforms decay once they lock users in.
The reverse-centaur thesis
Doctorow developed his AI critique in public through his Pluralistic newsletter, culminating in the December 2025 essay “The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI” and the 2026 book The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). In automation theory a “centaur” is a person assisted by a machine; a “reverse centaur” is a person conscripted to assist a machine. Doctorow argues AI’s real product is the second kind of worker: systems that cannot actually do people’s jobs, sold to executives who fire people anyway.
The AI bubble is exceptionally bad and dangerous.
His economic case is that a huge share of the stock market is tied up in a handful of AI companies with no path to profitability, a mania he says has “teed up an economical catastrophe that will harm hundreds of millions or even billions of people.” Notably, he also lectures other AI critics: he opposes expanding copyright to fight AI training (arguing it would enrich gatekeepers, not artists) and dismisses sci-fi doom scenarios, insisting the fight is material — worker power, antitrust, and popping the bubble.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/cory-doctorow