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2025 Ursula Franklin Lecture: Cory Doctorow

Feb 24, 2025 6pm-8:30pm Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Ave, Toronto, ON M5S 1J5 Register

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Science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist Cory Doctorow presents the 2025 Ursula Franklin Lecture:

With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It

“Enshittification swept through the digital world over the past decade, and it has only accelerated since, as everything – grocery stores, nursing agencies, even public schools – became digital services. The more digital something is, the more vulnerable it is to enshittification.

Enshittification isn’t a force of nature. It’s not a historic inevitability. It’s the eminently foreseeable result of specific policy choices made by named individuals in living memory, after these individuals were warned that enshittification would ensue. Enshittification was a choice, not an accident.

The choices that led to enshittification are not graven in stone. They are just that – choices. We can choose otherwise. Indeed, we must, if we are to have an internet that is fit for purpose and can serve as the digital nervous system that we can use to coordinate our survival in a 21st century beset by genocide, ecological collapse, and economic chaos.

What policy choices can we make? What path can get us to those choices? How do we end the enshittocene and build a new, good internet?”

Held each year at Innis College’s Town Hall, the Franklin Lecture features invited scholars who bring the critical study of science, media and politics to bear in their visions of new political futures. This is a collaborative venture cosponsored by the Centre for Culture and Technology, the Centre for the Study of the United States, the Department of Social Justice Education, Innis College’s Writing and Rhetoric Program, and the Knowledge Media Design Institute.

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