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.
