In August 2023, Doctorow delivered the opening keynote at DEF CON 31 in Las Vegas, one of the world's largest hacker conferences. The talk — published as enshittification-talk-defcon — presented the enshittification framework to an audience of thousands of security researchers, hackers, and technologists, and was subsequently shared widely enough to reach mainstream media.
The talk synthesized arguments Doctorow had been developing on pluralistic-net over several years, presenting enshittification as a three-stage platform-decay-cycle: platforms are good to users to grow, then they degrade user experience to serve business customers, then they degrade business customer service to extract maximum shareholder value. The framework named something millions of people had experienced — the degradation of Google search, Facebook's news feed, Amazon's product listings, Twitter's timeline — without having a common word for.
The DEF CON setting was strategically appropriate: Doctorow has always argued that the hacker community's technical skills and adversarial mindset are essential to resisting digital-rights-management-critique and building adversarial-interoperability. Speaking to that audience meant reaching people with both the conceptual framework and the technical capacity to act on it.
The talk's viral spread — driven partly by a widely shared transcript and partly by the precision of the "enshittification" term itself — triggered coverage in outlets that would not normally cover tech policy analysis. Within months, the term was being used by politicians, regulators, and mainstream journalists. The macquarie-dictionary named it Word of the Year at enshittification-word-of-the-year-2023.
The talk was closely tied to the publication of the-internet-con, Doctorow's nonfiction argument that interoperability-mandates are the primary remedy for platform decay. The two — talk and book — functioned as complementary interventions: the talk gave people a diagnosis, the book prescribed a treatment.