Seizing the means of computation:
a better internet is run by and for the people who use it

In this year’s Marshall McLuhan Lecture, Cory Doctorow explores the evolution of the internet and the history of its current condition. The enshittification of the internet transformed the wild and woolly web into five giant websites filled with copies of text from the other four. This was not inevitable: it was the foreseeable result of policy choices made in living memory by nameable individuals. According to Doctorow, these choices can and must be unwound through a three-pronged technical, social, and economic attack that fosters interoperability – the power of internet users to unilaterally adapt the technology they rely on to serve them – rather than monopolist shareholders.

Cory Doctorow will be joined in conversation by Frederike Kaltheuner and moderator Helen Starr, who will explore the intricacies of the internet’s evolution together.

The annual lecture is a collaboration between the Embassy of Canada in Berlin and transmediale festival and opens this year's festival week on 29 January at the Embassy. Throughout the last years, the lecture series hosted speakers like Svitlana Matviyenko, Phanuel Antwi, and Jody Berland.