this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
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When did Cory Doctorow stop thinking that Jeff Bezos was cool? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 6 hours ago by cypherpunks@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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Many recent posts of his such as Keir Starmer appoints Jeff Bezos as his “first buddy”: Regulatory capture, right there out in the open make it clear that he isn't a fan of Bezos today, but he was once... as this post Cory Doctorow is wrong about the internet just reminded me, here is the opening of Chapter 2 of his 2008 novel Little Brother:

screenshot of text: Cory Doctorow, Little Brother, Chapter 2,This chapter is dedicated to Amazon.com, the largest Internet bookseller in theworld. Amazon is amazing—a “store” where you can get practically any book everpublished (along with practically everything else, from laptops to cheese-graters),where they’ve elevated recommendations to a high art, where they allow customers todirectly communicate with each other, where they are constantly inventing new andbetter ways of connecting books with readers. Amazon has always treated me likegold—the founder, Jeff Bezos, even posted a reader-review for my first novel!—and Ishop there like crazy (looking at my spreadsheets, it appears that I buy somethingfrom Amazon approximately every six days). Amazon) in the process of reinventingwhat it means to be a bookstore in the twenty-first century and I cantt think of a better group of people to be facing down that thorny set of problems.

Was there some point where he explicitly acknowledged his change of opinion about Bezos and Amazon?

Or was the shift in his public comments on the subject more gradual?

(if i tag @pluralistic@mamot.fr maybe he sees this and can answer himself? Cory, if you do see this, forgive me for linking to one of your haters... personally I am looking forward to reading Enshittification 😄)

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[–] PonyOfWar@pawb.social 26 points 5 hours ago

I don't know about him specifically, but I'd say it's a shift in opinion that many of us went through. 2008 was a very different world. Amazon wasn't quite the evil empire it is today. It was one of the only usable online shops, leagues ahead of almost everything else available.

[–] dontsayaword@piefed.social 12 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Amazon at the beginning (as a bookstore) was pretty universally liked. That was before they became the evil empire of today.

[–] everett@lemmy.ml 4 points 4 hours ago

as a bookstore

That's important context. Every chapter of Little Brother was dedicated to a different bookstore, which is a little different than "Hey Amazon, btw I love you."

[–] thisisbutaname@discuss.tchncs.de 15 points 5 hours ago

It probably has to do with the enshittification of Amazon, at least in part. Note how he praises the recommendation algorithm, while in a talk I recently saw he criticized how that same algorithm now pushes promoted products and Amazon knockoffs over what would be best for the customer.

[–] GlacialTurtle@lemmy.ml 4 points 4 hours ago

The quote from the TNR review is genuinely insane. Validating my intense dislike of Yasha Levine that they genuinely think a license to use the internet is some sort of reasonable response.

I wish there were better critics.