This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, “There Were Always Enshittifiers,” about the historical context for my latest novel, Picks and Shovels: That’s a very reasonable fear: Floppies were notoriously unreliable, and every smart computer user learned to make frequent backups against the day that your computer presented you with the dread DISK ERROR message. It’s true that the companies making the “copy protection” (in scare quotes because the way you protect your data is by making copies of it) typically had far more resources than the toolsmiths who were defending technology users.