This August 2023 Gaslit Nation podcast interview catches Doctorow at the moment of peak enshittification concept circulation — the same month as the enshittification-talk-defcon DEF CON 31 keynote. Gaslit Nation is a politics-focused podcast oriented toward progressive audiences concerned with democracy, authoritarianism, and corporate power, placing this interview in a different register than the tech-community audiences Doctorow typically reaches through venues like DEF CON, Boing Boing, or pluralistic-blog.
The interview covers three interrelated topics: AI and its relationship to platform power, corporate greed as the structural driver of service degradation, and enshittification as the analytical framework connecting them. The AI dimension is particularly useful for the KB: 2023 was the year that generative AI became a mainstream concern, and Doctorow's early analysis of AI through the lens of platform-decay-cycle dynamics — AI as a new vector for lock-in and extraction rather than as a sui generis technological event — represents an extension of the enshittification framework that he developed further in subsequent writings.
The Gaslit Nation context also documents Doctorow's outreach to progressive political audiences beyond the tech world. His argument that enshittification is not a technology story but a political economy story — that the degradation of platforms follows from the same forces (concentrated corporate power, regulatory capture, suppressed competition) driving other forms of democratic and institutional decline — is well suited to a podcast audience focused on those broader political dynamics.
This source provides early evidence of how Doctorow was deploying enshittification across different political and media contexts simultaneously in 2023, building the concept's reach across communities that do not normally intersect with tech-policy discourse.