Cory Doctorow is a reluctant prophet, especially when his predictions include murder. In 2019, the writer, blogger and internet activist wrote Radicalized, a short story about an online group who egg each other on to murder healthcare insurance executives, their violence eventually spilling over into general anarchy.
We're speaking a few days following the arrest of Luigi Mangione for the premeditated killing in New York of Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, one of the US's largest healthcare insurance companies. (Mangione has since pleaded not guilty to terrorism and murder charges.)
"Thankfully, it doesn't seem to be a case of art imitating life," says Doctorow, speaking to me via an early morning Zoom. "Mangione's Goodreads account [was made public], and my books aren't on there. I'm generally not happy to find out people don't read me, but in this case, I'm fine with it."
While he feels "enormous sympathy" for Thompson's family, he's surprised similar killings haven't happened before. "In America, you've got this very lax gun control environment in which people shoot others for cutting them up on the highway, yet [until this point] no-one had decided to deal with something like watching your loved one die of a horrible, treatable illness by killing a healthcare executive.
"It feels like we're at the beginning of something and we've reason to be afraid. There's such panic in corporate America [over the killing] because it exposes the fiction of limited liability - that behind these seemingly abstract decisions are real people, getting very wealthy, who bear moral culpability."
Doctorow, a 53-year-old British-Canadian who lives in Los Angeles with his British wife, bobs amiably on my screen against a colourful backdrop of comic books, board games and books stuffed manically onto a shelf. He speaks as he writes: in full paragraphs of articulate prose, salted by vivid and frequent swearing.
Over the past two decades he has established himself as something of the ornery conscience of the internet. In 2022, he coined the term "enshittification" to describe how corporate greed inevitably leads to the internet becoming gradually worse; it was Macquarie Dictionary's 2024 word of the year. And in his blogs, he has been a fierce advocate for online freedom from copyright, digital rights and against the monopolies that dominate the online world.
He has also published more than a dozen works of fiction and non-fiction as well as children's stories and graphic novels. These, too, address similar concerns: climate change, surveillance capitalism and how the early, anarchic promise of the internet has curdled. In fact, he sees no distinctions across his work.
"When confronted with stressful or anxious situations, I write. I process my anxieties on the page - I wrote nine books during lockdown. I make art but I'm also a political activist. So it would be very strange if the art I made didn't reflect those big, numinous, irreducible feelings that are so central to how I frame my view of the world."
Doctorow's books draw on traditional thriller tropes, such as double crosses and femme fatales - but when reading them a working knowledge of Python code and RAM memory is also handy. "My insight was that actual technology [is] a source of plot challenges that are even more exciting than the lazy nonsense writers got away with for decades."
He has recently released technothriller Picks and Shovels - the final part in a trilogy about Marty Hench, a forensic accountant in Silicon Valley. In the first book of the series - 2023's Red Team Blues - we met a grizzled, aching-for-retirement Hench. But, curiously for a capstone novel, Picks and Shovels chronicles the beginning of Hench's story: a gauche kid just out of college, stumbling through his first professional and personal crises in San Francisco's white-hot boom years of the late 1980s.
It's not hard to read it as autobiographical. "My dad was a computer science teacher, and in 1979 Apple sent all the computer science teachers in Ontario home with one of their machines. Being in the minority of people who had computers at that time was very exciting. It was a distinctive way of coming of age."
Picks and Shovels also charts the turbulence of Ronald Reagan's America. Some of the book's most moving passages describe the way AIDS cuts through San Francisco's underground communities, while the book's main antagonists are a cartel of religious leaders who overcharge their parishioners for computer hardware. Set against them is a start-up called Computing Freedom, composed of ex-employees, including a Hispanic migrant, a renegade Mormon and a lesbian Jew, who fight back against their chicanery.
It's a classic thriller setup: the little guys vs corporate skulduggery, yet it also seems to be how Doctorow genuinely sees the world. "Tech moguls" such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, he argues, are "ordinary mediocrities, shriven of constraint and consequence."
Doctorow compares the technology-driven plots of his novels to that of Herman Melville's "major whale nerding-out" in Moby Dick. (Incidentally, one of the books which was listed on Mangione's Goodreads account.) But he doesn't see a similar Ahab-like futility in his quest to harpoon corporate leviathans, like Bezos's Amazon or Musk's X. In fact, he's bullish that the policies he's long advocated for - such as legislation to break up Big Tech monopolies and greater copyright freedom online - are gaining widespread traction.
Unusually for a Left-wing voice, he also sees some hope in the new Trump administration - Vice President JD Vance is outspoken against Big Tech. "If you're playing a game where your path to electoral victory is not taxing anyone for anything," he explains, "but you also need to pay for roads, then one way is to combine culture wars with antitrust actions. So you take on a West Coast 'woke Big-Tech company' and siphon a couple of hundred million dollars off them."
Doctorow is a man who practices what he preaches. Every piece of writing on his blog is available for free, for all, for ever, with no copyright restrictions apart from author credit - a notion known as the Creative Commons License.
As playful and polemic as Doctorow's writing is, it could be dismissed as fodder for the chronically online. Yet, he argues, his prescriptions for a "good internet" have real-world impact. A "sh-t internet" ruled by a cadre of unaccountable tech bros is far from inevitable, he says. Rather, ordinary citizens have agency to shape a better digital future.
"We can make a new good internet, and we have to, because the only way we're going to have a digital nervous system that's fit for purpose is by putting it in the hands of users and not in the hands of a small number of tech firms which act with total impunity." He recently signed a GoFundMe with the mission to "free social media from billionaire control" called "Free our Feeds" -- so far it has only raised $44,000 of its $4m target.
Nonetheless, he's undaunted: "Seize the means of computation! Then, we can create a legacy that we're proud to leave to kids and grandkids."