Cory Doctorow delivers a startling inversion of the usual tech critique: the very features that make social media addictive are the same ones that will eventually destroy the business models of the giants who built them. While the industry obsesses over artificial intelligence and algorithmic feeds, Doctorow argues that the platforms are actively dismantling their own most valuable asset—the genuine human connections that keep users returning—because those connections don't generate enough ad revenue. This is not just a complaint about bad user experience; it is a structural diagnosis of why the digital economy is heading toward a collapse of its own making.
The Hostage Situation
Doctorow frames the relationship between users and platforms not as a service, but as a captivity. He writes, "The platforms don't 'hack your dopamine loops' — they just take your friends hostage." This distinction is crucial. It shifts the blame from a vague psychological vulnerability to a deliberate corporate strategy. The core of his argument is that Mark Zuckerberg and other executives realized early on that friends are inefficient for profit maximization. As Doctorow notes, "You and your friends have a lot of shared context... typically not by surprising one another."
Because friends rarely argue furiously or consume radically different media, they do not generate the sustained, high-arousal engagement that advertisers crave. The administration of these platforms, in their quest for revenue, decided to replace the non-fungible value of real friendships with a stream of interchangeable content from strangers. Doctorow describes this pivot as "nonconsensually cramming strangers' posts into your eyeballs, in the hopes that you would lose yourself in long, pointless arguments." The irony, he suggests, is that while this strategy initially worked, it has reached a breaking point where the exhaustion of living in a "trollocracy" is driving users away.
Your friends are the platforms' single most important asset. The platforms don't 'hack your dopamine loops' — they just take your friends hostage.
This framing holds up under scrutiny when looking at the recent shift toward short-form video. The industry's pivot to TikTok-style algorithms was a desperate attempt to solve the "friend problem" by outsourcing engagement to "global theater kids." Doctorow observes that "Tiktok found a way to connect you to strangers who don't make you angry," effectively creating a feedback loop where creators are incentivized to perform absurdity rather than foster community. However, this model relies on a fragile ecosystem of human labor that is increasingly resistant to exploitation.
The Rise of the AI Solipsist
The most provocative part of Doctorow's analysis is his prediction that the ultimate endpoint of this logic is the removal of humans entirely. He argues that platform owners, frustrated by the demands of real creators who want fair compensation, are turning to "AI creators" as the perfect solution. "An 'AI creator' is like a 'creator' in that it works to maximize your engagement with the platform... but, unlike a 'creator,' it makes no demands upon the platform and exists solely to serve the platform's shareholders and executives." This is the realization of what he calls the "billionaire solipsist's dream of a world without people."
Here, Doctorow connects the dots between the current trend of AI-generated slop and the historical trajectory of surveillance capitalism. He notes that this strategy is self-defeating because it destroys the very "stickiness" that makes the platforms valuable. As he puts it, "All of which is to say: the platforms are deliberately feeding their most important commercial assets into a shredder, in a fit of pique over your friends' unwillingness to act like chatbots." The argument is reinforced by the concept of fungibility: a feed of AI content is interchangeable, whereas a feed of friends is unique. By prioritizing the former, the platforms are making it trivially easy for users to leave for a rival service.
Critics might note that this analysis assumes users will eventually prioritize their social connections over the convenience of algorithmic entertainment, which may not be the case for all demographics. Yet, the historical context of "Dunbar's number" suggests a hard limit to how many meaningful relationships a human can maintain, implying that the market for "stranger content" is not infinite. Furthermore, the reliance on AI content ignores the potential for regulatory pushback or a cultural backlash against inauthentic media.
The Path to Liberation
Doctorow concludes that the very mechanisms designed to trap users are now the keys to their release. He writes, "So long as you love your friends more than you hate Zuckerberg or Musk, you will remain stuck to their platforms." But as the platforms degrade the quality of those friendships by minimizing their visibility, the threshold for leaving drops. The "Tiktokification" of the internet, once seen as a threat to attention spans, is now the catalyst for breaking the monopoly. By flooding feeds with "ever-more fungible posters: trolls, creators, and chatbots," the platforms are inadvertently proving that their value proposition is hollow.
The platforms are deliberately feeding their most important commercial assets into a shredder, in a fit of pique over your friends' unwillingness to act like chatbots.
This perspective reframes the current chaos in the tech sector not as a failure of execution, but as a successful execution of a flawed philosophy. The executive branch and regulatory bodies have long focused on antitrust and data privacy, but Doctorow suggests the real threat is the internal rot of the business model itself. The shift toward AI-generated content is not just a technological upgrade; it is a surrender of the human element that made the internet useful in the first place.
Bottom Line
Doctorow's strongest insight is the identification of the "friend paradox": the very human connections that built these empires are now viewed as liabilities by their owners, leading to a strategic self-sabotage that could finally break their grip. The argument's vulnerability lies in its optimism about user agency, assuming that the desire for authentic connection will outweigh the inertia of habit and the allure of algorithmic novelty. However, as the platforms continue to replace real people with AI slop, the window for users to walk away and build something better may be closing faster than the industry realizes.