Doctorow coined the word in 2022 and it spread fast enough that the American Dialect Society made it word of the year in 2023. This is the long version of the argument. Platforms show up good — cheap, useful, generous — because they’re buying you. Once you’re locked in and your friends and your business and your files are all in there, they turn the screws on you to please the sellers. Then they turn the screws on the sellers. What’s left is a husk that keeps running because leaving costs too much. His real point is that none of this is a law of nature. It happened because antitrust got gutted, because laws made it illegal to build a tool that jailbreaks or interoperates with somebody else’s platform, because tech workers stopped having leverage, and because nobody enforced anything. Choices, made by people with names. So the back half is a wrench list: break them up, force interoperability, kill the laws that criminalize modification, and organize. He writes like he talks, angry and funny and fast.