Review: The 2026 Guelph Lecture On Being

I went to see Cory Doctorow speak a couple weeks ago and had more thoughts than fit in a short post, so here is a long one.

The context

Via https://festival.artseverywhere.ca/event/guelph-lecture-on-being-2026/:

Author, activist, and journalist Cory Doctorow will deliver a keynote titled “Elbows Up: How Canada Can Disenshittify Tech, Reclaim Its Sovereignty, & Launch a New Tech Sector.”

I bought tickets morning-of, when a local tech community member I follow reposted this on Fediverse: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/116532412753621414

The ArtsEverywhere festival in southwestern Ontario contains a full weekend of events, and the biggest event is the Guelph Lecture on Being. The format is that they do a literary reading, a musical performance, and then a keynote speech. They had some tables set up: selling books, promoting nonprofits, etc. In addition to one of Doctorow’s nonfiction books that I haven’t gotten to yet, I picked up a translation being sold by a local small press of a book by a Dutch feminist that analyzes non-monogamy relationship structures as “anti-fragile”, which I look forward to reading.

Who I saw

Indigenous Elder Peter Schuler - opened the event with land acknowledgement and spoke briefly on current events and his hope that we will care for each other in hard times coming ahead. I was surprised by him. I am used to events of this sort in the US either having no land acknowledgement, or having a brief read-out of indigenous acknowledgement and thanks and maybe a gift if there is an elder present. It surprised me that instead of reading a sentence he spoke for at least ten to fifteen minutes and made what I felt to be incisive and political comments on various current events. I have a great deal of respect for anyone who is given a stage and tries to use it to better their world while they have attention and I thought what he said was interesting. I am not sure my beliefs about nature line up with his but I think the outcome we want for society is similar and he made some points I hadn’t considered. As an aside, the live captioning was not very good in my opinion overall but was especially difficult for him when saying non-English words occasionally. It seemed like it was just someone typing into a document, at slower than speaking speed and occasionally missing large chunks of content that changed the meaning when trying to catch up, and it also didn’t seem like the typos matched the patterns of typos I’ve seen at events with live stenography captions. The ASL interpretation seemed OK but I don’t really know enough ASL to know if it was better than the text captioning.

Madhur Anand - a scientist who was doing a reading of excerpts from several of her books of poetry and autobio fiction. I liked her writing. I didn’t expect to, since I don’t necessarily like things that are called “literary”.

Billianne - not really my style of music. She forgot the words to the viral cover that made her famous mid-performance and it was endearing. I don’t think of myself as old in my early 30s but she seemed very young and I still find it odd that there are full adults out there who are 10 years younger than me.

Cory Doctorow - I have been following his recent blog posts with interest. The core of his current argument is that Canada should cancel their trade agreement with the US that prevents reverse engineering, and should build a tech industry coalition around the business model of jailbreaking US tech that is consumer-unfriendly. I read “Enshittification” earlier this year and thought it was fine overall. It landed differently for me in person, possibly because he tailored his information to a Canadian audience (references to cottages, directly comparing Canada’s GDP to the money made by Apple and Google and Meta, etc), possibly partially because of the audience reactions. I know that the US is not popular with Canadians right now. I don’t blame Canadians for that. I am aware that one of the US’s current exports to Canada and the rest of the world is right-wing authoritarianism. At the same time, as a (1) tech worker (2) born and raised in the US, I don’t think of myself as like, part of a colonizing force, even though I know that Meta has been enabling genocide for years, and even though I literally quit my former job at Spotify over how they chose to handle content moderation of hate speech. Doctorow makes the argument that US big tech firms export not only products but also control of the lives of people in other countries. And this time I heard it differently than I have before, for which I am grateful. He spoke for about an hour while a slideshow of enshittification-themed creative-commons-licensed collages that he created flashed distractingly behind him, then took audience questions on slido (I had flashbacks to my former big tech employers doing the same slido Q&A in all hands meetings). It really was the live experience of reading a blog post of his, and he stayed on-message in a PR way with noticeable clarity throughout - “turn US tech’s trillions into Canada’s billions.” I also liked his answer to the last question answered live, which was on the relationship between fascism and enshittification. He very clearly laid out that enshittification makes things worse, and fascists use “things getting worse” to blame immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, people of color, etc, and that we need to break the cycle. I feel a bit like my standards should be higher than they are but at this point I’m still glad every time a beloved author from my childhood comes out in favor of trans rights. Overall I look forward to reading his next book. It’s about AI, and comes out next month, so hopefully if I get to it quick it won’t be too obsolete!