The Guelph Lecture—On Being 2026
Presented in partnership with The Bookshelf
On Friday, May 8th we hosted a thought provoking and celebratory evening at the 2026 Guelph Lecture—On Being. Our keynote lecture was presented by Cory Doctorow on the “enshittification” of the internet, and how we can collectively respond to the decay of civil discourse caused in part by social-media-driven disinformation, greed, and an increasingly policed internet. Prior to the keynote lecture, poet and novelist Madhur Anand presented a literary reading, and chart-topping musician Billianne performed a set of introspective folk-pop.
Author, activist, and journalist Cory Doctorow delivered a keynote titled “Elbows Up: How Canada Can Disenshittify Tech, Reclaim Its Sovereignty, & Launch a New Tech Sector.” Watch the full lecture below including the Q&A.
Thirteen years ago, the US trade rep bullied us into passing IP laws that ban our tech companies from reverse-engineering, modifying, improving and disenshittifying the tech products they sell to us. America told us that unless we passed these laws, they’d slap us with tariffs.
Welp, here we are: 13 years on, our tech sector is becalmed, RIM and Nortel are distant dreams, US tech giants spy on us with every hour that God sends, they rip off every app maker, performer, seller and news outlet that relies on an app to the tune of 30 cents out of every dollar, they won’t show us the news (not even during wildfires!)…*and* we’ve got tariffs.
Canada, we can do better than retaliatory tariffs. Changing the law means changing the way our technologists relate to US Big Tech. It means raiding the margins of history’s greatest rent seekers, creating a vast consumer surplus and a durable source of industrial advantage for Canada. It beats the heck of out of voluntarily deciding to pay more for the things we buy from America (which is a pretty weird way of punishing Americans).
Watch author Madhur Anand’s full presentation below:
ASL Translation and live transcription was provided at this event
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of dozens of books, most recently Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It (nonfiction); and the novel Picks and Shovels. His next book is The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI (June 2026). Born in Toronto, he lives in Los Angeles and London.
Billianne’s folk-pop oeuvre is a raw examination of growing, longing, and navigating all the relationships that form the building blocks of personhood. Her forthcoming debut album Modes of Transportation will arrive on the heels of a year that has seen nods of approval by Taylor Swift, Oprah and P!nk, performances across American television, widespread support at BBC Radio1, over 100 million global streams, and worldwide touring supporting the likes of KT Tunstall, Julia Jacklin, and Donovan Woods. Her August 2024 single “Crush” broke into the Top 10 at Canadian Top 40 radio and charted for nearly six months. With her timeless voice as a sail propelling her forward, Modes of Transportation is a testament to Billianne’s willingness to see through the vision she has for herself.
Madhur Anand‘s debut book of creative non-fiction This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart (2020) won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction. Her debut collection of poems A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes (2015) was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and named one of 10 all-time “trailblazing” poetry collections by the CBC. Her second collection of poems Parasitic Oscillations (2022) was also a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and named a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book. To Place a Rabbit (2025) is her first novel and was named a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book and one of the Best Canadian Fiction books of 2025 by the CBC.
Cory Doctorow photo: Copyright Julia Galdo and Cody Cloud (JUCO), www.jucophoto.com/, Creative Commons Attribution
Billianne photo: Nadia Doss
Madhur Anand photo: Ian Willms