Running Harder, Falling Faster: The Paradox of Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs

AI and digital platforms promise a friction-free future, yet the systems taking shape around us depend on hidden human labor, powerful corporate interests, and business models that demand more and more of those they purport to serve. In Cory Doctorow’s formulation, the defining metaphor may not be the centaur—a human enhanced by a machine—but the “reverse centaur”: a person driven by the force of an an automated system.

Join author and activist Cory Doctorow and Dr. Elizabeth Mynatt, Dean of Northeastern University’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences, for a conversation about the structural, economic, and human stakes of this reversal. Drawing on his work on platform “enshittification” fostered by corporate monopoly, Doctorow asks us to focus not only on what technology does, but whom it is done to, who benefits, and who bears its costs. Mynatt brings a human-centered computing perspective, considering how technologies can instead be designed around human needs, agency, and care.

Together, they will explore a central challenge for AI development and governance: what legal, economic, and design choices can keep technology accountable to the people whose lives it shapes? What would it take to ensure that humans remain its beneficiaries, not its infrastructure?

Copies of Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It and The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It’s Too Late will be available for purchase.