We speak with the acclaimed science fiction author, activist and journalist Cory Doctorow, who has spent decades writing and thinking about the impact of technology on our lives. He coined the term “enshittification” to describe how online platforms degrade the user experience over time in search of profits, though it has been widely adopted to describe a larger sense of decline and decay across society. He discusses his new book Picks and Shovels, Silicon Valley’s big bet on artificial intelligence to discipline its workers, and billionaire Elon Musk’s work in the Trump administration. “The point of this chaotic blitz is to demoralize their opponents,” Doctorow says of Musk’s work through DOGE, which has gutted government agencies and wide swaths of the federal workforce. “In the reality-based world, even if you are worried about government waste, even if you want to make government smaller, you have to acknowledge the empirical fact that payroll accounts for 4% of the federal budget.”