Doctorow's Enshittification and Reverse Centaur go global

Cory Doctorow's two-book run on platform decay and life after AI is turning into a genuinely global export. In his latest Pluralistic post, Doctorow catalogs the last two months for the pair: *Enshittification* won the Locus Award and the word itself has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary, while *The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI* landed on the New York Times bestseller list and was the number one bestselling nonfiction paperback in Canada for more than a month running.

The more interesting map, though, is the translation one. Between them the books are being picked up in Brazil, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Poland, Portugal, Quebec, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey and Ukraine, and each foreign edition is having to coin its own local word for the idea. Spain went with 'Mierdificación,' Poland with 'Gównowacenie,' Hungary with 'A Nagy Elszaródás.' Doctorow himself notes that translation deals are primarily 'pull,' not 'push,' meaning the foreign publisher approaches his publisher rather than the other way around, so the appetite for a name for platform rot is originating in each market rather than being marketed into it.

Why this matters for anyone building AI or platform products: the vocabulary a public uses to describe what is happening to them shapes what regulators, journalists and users will tolerate. Once your local dictionary has a word for algorithmic degradation, the argument that this is just how tech works gets harder to hold. The Reverse Centaur book, framed around life after AI, now has native-language editions coming in more than a dozen markets, which puts the critique into more places than the usual English-language conversation about platform decay reaches.

The honest caveat is that this is Doctorow's own recap on his own blog, so treat the sales and momentum figures as author-reported rather than independently audited. What the post does not give you is any read on how far these ideas have travelled inside firms or regulators, only the commercial signal that publishers in these countries were willing to bet on the vocabulary. That signal is the thing to watch, because a graphic novel adaptation of *Enshittification* is due from FirstSecond in 2027, which is roughly when this stops being a book-market story and starts being a mass-culture one.