Cory Doctorow DESTROYS Enshitification  ## Metadata - Author: [[QAA Podcast]] - Full Title: Cory Doctorow DESTROYS Enshitification - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/ee4af87c-5005-4cbb-9dc7-bb1e2159ca8c ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Why Platforms Rot Into Dominance** - Platforms become dominant by mediating groups and then exploiting that position to extract value. - Doctorow calls this multi-step decay 'enshitification' and shows it explains many platform failures. Transcript: Jake Rockatansky One of the big concepts that you are known for recently that has kind of taken off and become a kind of standard talking point, I think, when big tech comes up is in shittification. So like, besides the existence of our podcast, what is in shittification? Cory Doctorow Well, you mentioned I've been working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation for a long time. I'm actually like in my 24th year now. So it's more than half my working life. So literally for like this entire millennium, I've been running around trying to get people to care about these very abstract technical policy questions that eventually become really Concrete, right? Like, you know, when all your shit is leaked onto the internet, and then, you know, someone swats you or whatever, suddenly, it's very important to understand these technical policy Questions. But you kind of want people to engage with them before they're concrete, because that's like when everything's on fire and uh for all that time i've been coming up with colorful metaphors And funny words and all kinds of other stuff and one day i just started swearing and it turns out that people really like a minor license to vulgarity and so i took this big set of ideas about Why platforms are all going bad and i called it in shittification and gave lots of people an opportunity to swear. ([Time 0:04:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/23ff6336-5f1a-4a3e-8ffd-d756c50c6703)) - **The Three-Stage Pattern Of Decay** - Enshitification follows a three-stage arc: delight users, lock them, then repurpose them for extractive business customers. - This pattern explains why platforms first look great and later become hostile to users and partners. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Not every platform in shitifies this way, but it's the platonic ideal. In stage one, they're good to their end users, and they find a way to lock the end users in. So I'll use Facebook as an example, right? Facebook opened up to the general public in 2006. Before that, you needed a.edu address. You had to be an American college kid to use it. And Mark Zuckerberg, he had a pitch, right? He was like, hey, kids, I know you already have a social media account on MySpace. But has it occurred to you that MySpace is owned by an evil, crapulent, senescent Australian billionaire named Rupert Murdoch, who spies on you with every hour that God sends? If you come to Facebook, all I ask of you is that you tell me who matters to you in this world. And I'll show you the things that they post and nothing else. And I'll never spy on you, which was the initial Facebook pitch. Jake Rockatansky I don't know if you remember this i do remember this but can we break away for one second to just get your take on the conspiracy theory that facebook was let's say that mark was a useful Cory Doctorow Person for the kind of you know dod to yeah launch something like this i don't think that's the case i mean Facebook was originally created so Zuck and his pals could non-consensually Rate the fuckability of their fellow undergrads at Harvard, right? And- Exactly. I mean, that is literally the original Facebook. And I think that what Zuckerberg did was he filled a Facebook-shaped hole, which is to say he built a social media network that was not significantly better, not significantly worse Than, you know, MySpace or Friendster or Six Degrees or any of the ones that came before. And the difference was that he figured out how to lock the door behind people because all those other platforms, they were like leaky buckets. They were roach motels or not roach motels, rather. They're the opposite of roach motel. You could check in and you could check out. Facebook was a roach motel. And so he did a bunch of things. We're kind of skipping ahead here, but he did a bunch of things like buy competitors. So at one point you had Instagram becoming really popular with Facebook users who were finding that the collective action problem of deciding to leave and the switching costs of going Away and leaving your friends could be born because Facebook was so bad and Instagram was so good. And so he offered a with 12 employees a billion ([Time 0:07:35](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d7f42471-f1ec-4e99-8b1b-293cff19b86d)) - **Facebook's Early Promise And Lock-In** - Doctorow recounts Facebook's early pitch: show you posts from people who matter and 'never spy' on you. - He contrasts that initial promise with later lock-in tactics that made Facebook a 'roach motel'. Transcript: Cory Doctorow So I'll use Facebook as an example, right? Facebook opened up to the general public in 2006. Before that, you needed a.edu address. You had to be an American college kid to use it. And Mark Zuckerberg, he had a pitch, right? He was like, hey, kids, I know you already have a social media account on MySpace. But has it occurred to you that MySpace is owned by an evil, crapulent, senescent Australian billionaire named Rupert Murdoch, who spies on you with every hour that God sends? If you come to Facebook, all I ask of you is that you tell me who matters to you in this world. And I'll show you the things that they post and nothing else. And I'll never spy on you, which was the initial Facebook pitch. Jake Rockatansky I don't know if you remember this i do remember this but can we break away for one second to just get your take on the conspiracy theory that facebook was let's say that mark was a useful Cory Doctorow Person for the kind of you know dod to yeah launch something like this i don't think that's the case i mean Facebook was originally created so Zuck and his pals could non-consensually Rate the fuckability of their fellow undergrads at Harvard, right? And- Exactly. I mean, that is literally the original Facebook. And I think that what Zuckerberg did was he filled a Facebook-shaped hole, which is to say he built a social media network that was not significantly better, not significantly worse Than, you know, MySpace or Friendster or Six Degrees or any of the ones that came before. And the difference was that he figured out how to lock the door behind people because all those other platforms, they were like leaky buckets. They were roach motels or not roach motels, rather. They're the opposite of roach motel. You could check in and you could check out. Facebook was a roach motel. And so he did a bunch of things. ([Time 0:07:42](https://share.snipd.com/snip/812bc0e0-2c4f-467a-9d40-1c23b713287e)) - **Buying Competitors To Close The Door** - Doctorow tells how Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion to remove a rival and prevent user exit. - He cites Zuckerberg's email admitting the acquisition aimed to reduce competition and lock users in. Transcript: Cory Doctorow So at one point you had Instagram becoming really popular with Facebook users who were finding that the collective action problem of deciding to leave and the switching costs of going Away and leaving your friends could be born because Facebook was so bad and Instagram was so good. And so he offered a with 12 employees a billion dollars, which like small potatoes by today's standards. But back then it was an unheard of acquisition. So much so that his CFO sent him an email and said, like, why are you giving these clowns a billion dollars? And Zuckerberg is very famously nocturnal. If you've read Careless People, the amazing Sarah Wynne Williams book. Now so sarah winne williams was the first international head of facebook the person who did international relations who's this very idealistic kiwi former foreign service person Who basically demanded that they give her a job because she believed in the transformative power of facebook and she's actually enjoined now from speaking in public about it because She violated her non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreement we're going to be on stage together at the Barbican on the 15th on this tour. And I'm kind of noodling with the idea that she's going to stand completely stock still with a blank face. And I'm going to tell everyone how good her book is and call frequent attention to the fact that she is in no way communicating anything about her book and not violating her court order. But anyway, in this book, there's this incredible story about the fact that Zuckerberg wouldn't take a meeting before two in the afternoon, I believe. And so he's been trying to get the president of Colombia to make Facebook basics the kind of national internet. So you can get Facebook and its approved services for free. Everything else costs money. Facebook becomes synonymous. And this has been like the major priority of Facebook for like two years. And Colombia is finally bit and they're willing to do it. And it's in the middle of the peace settlement with the FARC and the end of a 50-year civil war. And so they're going to announce it, but they're going to announce it at noon. And Mark Zuckerberg won't get out of bed for it. And they're like, but the thing that's happening at two is the signing of the peace agreement with FARC. And so we can't delay that because it's the end of our civil war for 50 years. And Zuckerberg showed up at two and was like, all right, we can do it now. Absolute king, you know? He's like a reverse Biden. Yeah, exactly. So Zuckerberg's CFO sends him this email and Zuckerberg sends him an email back because like this is a guy who just puts every terrible idea he has in writing. And he sends him an email back at 2.30 in the morning and it's like, well, Bob, you want to know why we're giving these guys a billion dollars? People like Instagram more than they like Facebook. And so if we can reduce the competition by buying them, they won't have anywhere to go. ([Time 0:09:19](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0ee0dbb9-3b01-4a16-b05a-c3f4e4e9e5dc)) - **Platforms Squeeze Everyone, Not Just Users** - Platforms don't just favor advertisers; they end up squeezing everyone including advertisers and publishers. - Doctorow notes platforms turn audiences and content creators into commodity suppliers to extract rents. Transcript: Cory Doctorow And so in this case, you know, right at the start, it was publishers and advertisers. So they go to the publishers and they say, hey, do you remember we told these rubes we were only going to show them the things they asked to see? We were totally lying, obviously. If you put excerpts of your content, we'll like cram it in their eyeballs and you'll get a traffic funnel, put a link to your website, you can make money off of it. They go to the advertisers and say, hey, you know, we told these rubes we weren't going to spy on them. Also lying, clearly spying on them from asshole to appetite. Give us just tiny dollars and we will target ads with exquisite fidelity to exactly the people you want to see. And by the way, that whole building over there, that's just like ad fraud engineers. We just pay those guys to make sure that when you give us a dollar to show someone an ad, it gets shown to that person and it's not just disappearing in a fraud hole. So publishers and advertisers pile in and they get locked to the platform and they get locked to the platform because of not seller power, right? When you have a monopoly that like you have to buy your stuff from, but because of buyer power, what's called monopsony. And buyer power is actually much easier to establish because businesses generally do not have a lot of leeway. And so if there's a big customer, right, if there's a customer that's like 20% of your business and they say, oh, as of tomorrow, we're not giving you any money, you're in really serious Trouble. And so that business can really jerk you around. And so the publishers and the advertisers, they get really locked to Facebook because Facebook is now controlling an audience that they've become dependent on. And so Facebook then starts to turn the screws on them. They're making things worse for them. And this is where like a lot of critiques like Zuboff and surveillance capitalism go wrong because they're like, oh, Facebook made things bad for users to make things good for advertisers Because they love advertisers. And if you're not paying for the product, you're the product. But actually, Facebook hates the advertisers too and the publishers. You know, even if you're paying for the product, you are the product. They're going to screw you if they can screw you, right? If you can be productized, you're the product. So advertising fidelity goes way down. ([Time 0:13:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/951a253f-baac-4f7b-b5dd-f8f51fda77e9)) - **Sell Digital Works Without DRM If You Can** - Avoid giving exclusive DRM-controlled distribution rights to dominant platforms when possible. - Doctorow funded a DRM-free audiobook via Kickstarter so buyers truly own their copy and can move it freely. Transcript: Cory Doctorow So audio is controlled by one company, Audible. It's a division of Amazon. They have a 90% market share. Amazon did not found Audible. Like most tech companies, Amazon is not an inventing things company. It's a buying things company. And these predatory acquisitions allow it to sew up markets and to create switching costs and so on. Amazon has a an ironclad policy for Audible, the 90% market share audiobook market, that if you sell on Audible, you have to agree to lock up your audiobooks with something called digital Rights management, which you know, the gamers in the audience will know about and anyone who's into tech will know about. But it's a kind of encryption that locks the media to the platform. So you can't take your audiobooks with you somewhere else. And, you know, that wouldn't be a big problem under normal circumstances because, like, technology is really flexible. You know, someone builds a 10-foot pile of shit, someone else makes an 11-foot ladder. You just convert those files and run them somewhere else. Except that in 1998, Bill Clinton signed a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. And section 1201 of the DMCA establishes a new felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for breaking digital rights management. Which means that if I let Amazon sell you an audiobook of mine, and then later Amazon starts mistreating me, and I want to go somewhere else and I want you to follow me. So I give you a tool so you can convert the library of books that you bought of mine and follow me to a rival platform. I commit a felony and can go to prison for five years. Jake Rockatansky Have you considered for your book tour, getting like a piece of duct tape and putting it over your mouth and calling it like the censored tour? They're not letting him speak. I like that. I like that. Too dangerous for Jeff Bezos. Cory Doctorow Half the people he hates, he makes piss in bottles. The other half, he refuses to sell their audiobooks. That's, yeah, both exactly the same level of pain in the individual. So it turns out, you know, publishers don't want the rights to audiobooks that they can't sell on Audible because that's 90% of the market. And like 90 of what's left is apple which also does mandatory drm 90 of what's left after that is audiobooks.com which also has mandatory drm and so i just retain those rights and so i go Into a studio and i record the books uh sometimes i get other people to record them will wheaton's recorded a ton of my fiction he's a really good audiobook narrator and a neighbor of mine Here in LA. But for this one, I definitely was going to record it on my own. So I went to studio with my director, Gabrielle Dequeer. I recorded it. My editor edited it. And I will sell it in all the places you can buy audiobooks that aren't Apple, Audible, and audiobooks.com. Basically, everything that starts with a B or another letter further down from there all the way to Z, but not A. And the problem is that no one's going to buy them there because they are a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the market all put together. And so these Kickstarters that I do to pre-sell the audiobook are how I make the whole thing viable. It's not cheap to pay people union scale and what they're worth to do this work and to rent studios and so on. And so that Kickstarter is running right now. You can pre-order the ebook and the audio book. They're delivered without DRM, but also uniquely without license agreements. They're not licensed deals, they're sales. You own the ebook and the audio book the way you own the print book, but you can also buy on the Kickstarter. And I have fulfillment partners in the UK and Europe and Canada and the US, so they'll ship them all over the world. But the ebook and the audiobook, you can like give them away, you can lend them, you can sell them. ([Time 0:19:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/55821efa-2287-419f-8e3a-9234889faccd)) - **Conspiracy Is A Misdiagnosis Of Systems** - Conspiratorial thinking often individualizes systemic problems by blaming villains instead of structures. - Doctorow argues this cognitive failure obscures the real causes like monopolies and institutional power. Transcript: Jake Rockatansky So there's this quote by you, conspiratorialism is a cognitive failure that occurs when you blame systemic problems on individuals. Could you elaborate on that? Yeah. Cory Doctorow So I know you folks are fans of Nomi Klein's Doppelganger. I love that book. And there's a bit in that book where she revives a 19th century saying that anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools. And I think this is a very profound observation, because if you observe that the finance sector has a parasitic relationship with the productive economy, and that because it is able To kind of leverage what should be a fairly kind of utilitarian role of allocating capital into a kind of market structuring role of controlling and structuring the economy, it gains Political power that it can use to enhance its financial power and then its political power and so on. You observe all of this and you say the problem is that the bankers are Jewish. Then you have ascribed individual moral failings to what is a systemic problem, right? You asked me before about Mark Zuckerberg and whether he was an op. I don't think Mark Zuckerberg was an op. I think there was a Mark Zuckerberg shaped hole in the economy because we were allowing monopolization. And in the same way, I don't think that who the bankers are matters. ([Time 0:24:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/58dfa0c9-b345-4ec9-9ec2-2ede86430f3c)) - **Neoliberalism Promotes Individual Blame** - Neoliberal ideology shifted explanations from systemic to individual causes to keep weak people disempowered. - Doctorow ties this individualization to the political project of undermining collective action and institutions. Transcript: Cory Doctorow I think that, you know, the neoliberal revolution was all about moving away from societal explanations to individual ones. And I think that there's like an instrumental reason that that was valuable to people who wanted to get rich at everyone else's expense, which is that if you say you are only an individual And there's no room for a systemic action or collective action, then you make weak people stay weak. Because the only way weak people can defeat strong people is by working together in institutions. And so when Margaret Thatcher stands up and says there is no such thing as society, right? What she's saying is the only way that you can get a better wage is to individually go into your boss's office and smooth talk them until they give you a raise. And if your boss doesn't give you a raise at the end of that, you don't deserve the raise. And that the thing you absolutely can't do is have you and all of your colleagues walk off the job and stop anyone going into the factory until your boss gives you all a raise. Because if that were the case, then there would be such a thing as society. But I also think that the ideological work, so that's like the material work it does. And I'm a materialist. I think that like things, things that produce material benefits for a certain segment of society get spread by that segment of society. ([Time 0:31:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7ffb23a9-85aa-4ec6-ba4b-33f1712d9ce2)) - **Drivers Misunderstand Algorithmic Wage Gaps** - Vina Dubel's ethnography shows Uber drivers are algorithmically priced and misled about wages. - Drivers often blame themselves instead of pooling data collectively to expose platform discrimination. Transcript: Cory Doctorow She coined this term algorithmic wage discrimination. She did this ethnography of Uber drivers. So Uber does this thing where they, I call it twiddling, where they adjust the business logic on a per user, per interaction basis. So every price you're quoted, every wage that's quoted to a driver is customized for the situation based on surveillance data and the expectation of what you're willing to pay and what They're willing to take. And the rough heuristic for drivers is that picky drivers get paid more. If you turn down rides, they raise the wage until you start taking the rides. But then when you start taking the rides, they start to tighter the wage down using small random intervals, small random increments. Very hard for the human sensory apparatus to notice this downward trend. And the idea is to trap you in a lower wage where you're jettisoning your other side hustles at the point where the wage is higher. You get stuck in Uber and you get stuck in a lower wage equilibrium. And when Dubel interviewed drivers about this, because they don't really know about this, most of them, they bucket themselves into two groups. There's drivers who call themselves ants who take every ride. And there's drivers who call themselves pickers who are picky. And the ants would watch the pickers on social media, on Reddit forums and whatever, saying like, I just made 300 bucks in one day. And they're looking at the 40 bucks that they've made in that day. And they're like, I am so bad at Uber. I am so bad at Uber. Why am I bad at Uber? That guy's so good at Uber. Did he say something to the passengers that made them give him five stars so that then he got a raise from the algorithm? Like, why am I bad at Uber, right? The only way to find out what's going on, literally, is for these drivers to get together and pool information, right? If they like all show what their wage offers are, and there's a guy called the rideshare guy who took two brothers who drive Uber, one of whom is more occasional, one of whom does it as a Daily hustle. And they sat next to each other with their phones and they watched the same job come into their phones. And you could see that the job is being bid out at half the wage for one of these drivers, the less picky driver. ([Time 0:33:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f5431dd3-1307-4757-abb7-8621e8c6dd70)) - **Shared Diagnosis Can Bridge Political Mirrors** - Naomi Klein's 'mirror world' frames two camps seeing the same problems but offering opposite diagnoses. - Doctorow suggests common ground exists when both sides acknowledge real surveillance and corporate harms. Transcript: Cory Doctorow And they fight the same, broadly the same issues. But because their diagnosis is so wrong, they've observed the same pathology, but their diagnosis is so wrong, that they fall, you know, into traps. So I wrote a column about this called The Swivel-Eyed Loons Have a Point after the 15-minute city demonstration in Oxford, right? Which, like, Oxford's like a, what, 2,000 or 1,000 university city, right? Like, it is a 15-minute city. You cannot bring your Land Rover around Oxford because the streets are, like, wide enough for a donkey cart, right? And you have all these nutjobs out there saying, you know, like, don't put out the license plate cameras to spy on us, to stop us from driving out of our neighborhood. Don't force us to use central bank digital currencies so you can interdict our payments and control our political actions by shutting down our financial activity. Don't, you know, like they have all these demands, right? And I'm looking at these demands and I'm like, they're actually pretty reasonable demands, right? Like the actual reality of automatic license plate recognition cameras is that they are used as a system of unaccountable off the books, mass surveillance, right? And they are used in ways as a system of political control. And, you know, I happen to think a central bank digital currency is okay, but only because all of the demerits of central bank digital currencies are there with Visa, which will just Handle your transaction data to the government if they ask for it. And the only difference between central bank digital currency and Visa is that we would just eliminate this company that has a 3% tax on the entire consumer economy, which, you know, Good riddance and don't let the door hitch in the ass on the way out. But they're right about the dangers of central bank digital currencies, right? So they're right about so much, and yet their overall worldview is so wrong, right? It's like, it's like, there's a, I'm trying to remember how the joke goes, but there's a joke about someone who wants to be safe while they're like riding their bicycle. So they put a condom on because they've heard that, you know, wearing a condom is the key to being safe. And it's like, it is the key to being safe, not while riding a bicycle, right? And like, they're right about this stuff, but they're wrong about it. And on a good day, I'm like, maybe this is our common ground, right? ([Time 0:38:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5cc8b4c8-f722-4c15-9f1b-872d3cf05139)) - **Movements Need Material Explanations** - Attributing movements solely to foreign actors or charlatans misses the material grievances that drive them. - Doctorow highlights the Yellow Vest protests as rooted in real redistribution and anger, not just outside manipulation. Transcript: Julian Feeld And even some of Emmanuel Macron's deputies, the congresspeople in France, they peddled the narrative that it came from Russia. And even in some cases, like actual elected people said that it came from Steve Bannon because they saw that the yellowvest.com, the giletjaune.com website was registered in America Just on that basis. And if we think about that, but also some parts of Russiagate, Blue Anon, and even the Cambridge Analytica story we've covered on this podcast. Would you say there's such a thing as liberal conspiracy theories? And in your mind, how do they differ from the fascistic ones? Cory Doctorow Well, start with the thing that's the same as the fascistic ones, which is that they're locating the source of systemic phenomena in individuals. So, I mean, do I think Steve Bannon like the Gilets Jaunes? Yes. I'm sure I don't listen to his podcast. I'm not Naomi Klein. I'm not like a masochist. But I'm sure on his podcast, he spoke about the gilet jaune in glowing terms. I'm sure that he's networked with some of the people who are key to the movement because those people all know each other and they gather and whatever. You don't think so? They don't know either. He doesn't know any of them? No, no. No. Okay. Well, I wouldn't be surprised in any event, but if it turned out that he did know these people, so what, right? What were the material conditions that caused people to listen to someone as obviously stupid as Steve Bannon? Right? And like, I don't know a ton about French politics, but like, my impression is that the best point that you can say that the gilets jaunes made was they say that there's a climate emergency And they say that the way we're going to deal with the climate emergency is for everyday working people to pay more for petrol and not for, you know, bougies to pay more for their private Jets. And they got a point, right? Like I also would like to have fewer individual vehicles and also fewer internal combustion vehicles on the road. And I suspect that there are people in the movement who have an aesthetic attachment to the idea of driving your own car and having an internal combustion engine. But like, that's not what drove them out into the streets, because they had those feelings before they were in the streets in their yellow vests. You know, the thing that precipitated people in the streets in their yellow vests was this like extremely materially unfair form of upward redistribution of their wealth. And so, you know, even if you think that Steve Bannon is a Svengali who hypnotizes people, it doesn't have much explanatory power because it doesn't explain why he wasn't able to hypnotize Them last year. ([Time 0:44:24](https://share.snipd.com/snip/40fb9be5-de8c-4ea6-9cc5-559635970dd1)) - **The Appeal Of Apocalyptic Fantasies** - Disaster fantasies give participants a heroic identity where their skills matter after collapse. - Billionaire prepper scenarios imagine elites returning from bunkers to rule because others rebuilt civilization for them. Transcript: Jake Rockatansky You know, what are they? Like what, what purpose do they serve for the capos of these movements and what needs do they fulfill for the base? Cory Doctorow So right around the time I started listening to QAA and my path into it was that I went to high school with a guy named Matthew Remsky and Matthew started a podcast called Conspirituality. Jake Rockatansky Of course, yeah, Friends of the Pod. Cory Doctorow And I think that I heard him, like I was during the lockdown and I was like, I wonder what Matthew's up to. And I was like, oh, he's got this great podcast. And then that led me to you guys. And neither you nor Matthew were the one who helped me understand this. It was Brooke Gladstone on the media, who at the sort of peak of 2020 QAnon weirdness and interviewed an anthropologist who had spoken to a bunch of end of the world people and doomsday Preppers. And this anthropologist had concluded that the thing that powered the fantasies of preppers was a fantasy about a world in which they were very important, right? In which their skills, right? Everything collapses and their skills are the only thing that stands between their community and disaster. My favorite example from this anthropologist's work was there was a water chemist who had been stockpiling all kinds of materials. I think he lived in rural Washington or something. Stockpiling all kinds of materials in case Al-Qaeda poisoned the water supply in town. And this anthropologist really pushed him on like, well, why would they do that? What is it about your water supply that would attract Al-Qaeda? And eventually they got him to admit that it would just be really fucking cool if Al-Qaeda poisoned the water supply and this guy, the water chemist, saved everyone's life, right? Like what an awesome thing that would be. And so you get a lot of preppers who are like, I'm good at shooting. So the apocalypse is going to be that there's going to be lots of people I need to shoot, right? That's like a very common one, right? But the really interesting one is billionaires, because what the fuck do we need, you know, financial engineers for after the world collapses? Right. What is there like? What is there like what fallen civilization? Jake Rockatansky Come on, Corey, we need someone to put up against the wall. Cory Doctorow Right. Well, exactly. Like, isn't there someone around here who really understands the tax code? Right. Like, you know, I've got I think I've got dysentery. Can we go ask that guy who was really good at arbitrage what I should do about my dysentery? I need to get a quant to figure out my diarrhea. Yeah. Bring me a quant set. And so, you know, you joke, but that is what they fantasize about. And so when you look at the disaster fantasy of the billionaire prepper, right, the luxury bunker in New Zealand. It is that the lesser people, us, will do some of the work of rebuilding civilization, right? We'll get some of the factories going and whatever. But we are like, we're destined to be ruled over, right? We're like in Plato's Republic, we're like the brown people, right? We're not the gold people. We need philosopher kings. And so their job is to restart civilization hunkering down while we get like the basic stuff started. But once we've got like the substrate necessary to support the philosopher kings, they can emerge from the bunker. They'll have the AR-15s. They'll have the armed guards with the bomb collars. They'll have like thumb drives full of Bitcoin. They'll have bullion. And they'll like assemble like a and build a fortress. And they'll tell us what to do. Because that's what we'll be missing after the apocalypse, is we won't have anyone smart to tell us what to do. And so they need to preserve their special wisdom. It's amazing to consume the literature and also consume the text, right? ([Time 0:55:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ae73084a-195b-4bef-aeb8-92e751b3b2d3)) - **AI Is A Bubble Driven By Labor Narratives** - AI today mixes genuinely useful tools with a speculative investment bubble propped by promises to replace labor. - Doctorow warns the bubble's financial dynamics, not just technical harms, determine AI's societal impact. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Well, first, I have to point out that, you know, because you were the first person to raise AI in this conversation, you owe everyone listening a drink. That is the rule. I don't make the rule. Sounds good. So I literally today finished the manuscript for a short book I wrote over the summer about AI for Macmillan for Forestress and Giroux, called The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI. And it's a book about being a good AI critic, because I don't think AI is great. I think there are some really cool things you can do with some AI tools. I was writing an essay a couple of weeks ago, and I'd heard something on a podcast, and I couldn't remember which one. And so I downloaded Whisper, which is an open source model from OpenAI that transcribes audio. And I just threw 30 hours of the last podcast I'd listened to at it. And my laptop worked for about an hour, the fan didn't even spit up, it was like, no, it didn't break a sweat. And then I had like full text searchability for all the audio I'd heard in the past two weeks. And I found the exact thing I was looking for. That's super cool. But I think that like the thing that AI is first and foremost is a bubble. ([Time 1:00:26](https://share.snipd.com/snip/354960ca-a0b6-4512-a9fe-c2b73b6aa8e1)) - **Regulate The Financial Incentives, Not Just Harms** - Target regulation at the investment narrative, not only specific harmful uses like disinformation. - Doctorow argues banning narrow harms (e.g., election disinfo) won't pop the AI investment bubble driving systemic risk. Transcript: Cory Doctorow There are little election disinfo outfits here and there, and there's troll factories, but it's not like you add up the salary of every professional troll and it doesn't pay for like The electricity bill for the guardhouse at OpenAI. So it's just not like no investor is like, okay, well, this is definitely going to replace a lot of trolls and that's going to produce the return on my capital. That's going to make that, you know, 10X or 100X that I'm looking for out of this money I gave to Sam Altman, right? And so as bad as it may be, and we could argue all day about whether it's bad or good, it's not important to the future of the bubble. If we banned all AI election disinformation tomorrow, it would change the investment picture for AI by nothing, right? ([Time 1:04:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/22507dc1-f915-4788-b520-a24cb9912117)) - **Creators' Work Fuels Models, Not Investors' Returns** - Many AI harms (illustration, disinfo) are economically tiny compared to training costs of major models. - Tech giants exploit creators' labor to build models while seeking rents, not to fairly compensate creators. Transcript: Cory Doctorow And it's really funny because AI illustration is on the one hand quite banal. If you think about illustration as being like a communicative act, right? Like art is communication. It is a way for someone to take something big and numinous in their imagination and put it into your head by first infusing it into some intermediate medium like a book or a song or, you Know, painting or whatever. And hoping that you materialize some facsimile of the emotion that caused them to make that in your own head when you experience it. All that an AI can do is communicate what's in the prompt. So if you write a three-sentence prompt, the entire communicative freight of the work is whatever you put into those three sentences, which for most sentences is not enough to matter, Right? Sometimes it matters, right? There's haiku that are very good. But mostly what you've got is a tiny amount of communicative intent diluted across a million pixels to the extent that like the amount of communication in any part of that image is like Homeopathically undetectable. And so it just makes for shitty art. But even if it were good art, if you add up the salary of every commercial illustrator in the world, you do not get the kombucha budget for the training run on one version of Mid Journey, Right? ([Time 1:05:05](https://share.snipd.com/snip/99f0b4c7-9e29-445b-8e2d-d366ff961b47)) - **Don't Let Copyright Become A Corporate Gate** - Resist creating new copyright rules that hand control over model training to large publishers and studios. - Doctorow suggests stronger enforcement that non-human-generated works lack copyright will protect artists better than extra copyright layers. Transcript: Cory Doctorow And then finally, there's publishing your findings, which is all a model is, right? A model is just a publication in software form of a bunch of statistical insights gleaned from counting relationships between aspects of creative and factual works. And again, I don't think we want to say publishing findings of correlations between aspects of works should be illegal. But even if you think I'm an idiot for saying all of that, you're like, no, no, no, we should give creators a copyright because that's how we'll save their income. You're wrong. Because like Getty Images hates paying photographers. They are not suing Mid Journey because they want to pay photographers. Getty Images doesn't want MidJourney to stop making models that can replace photographers. Getty Images wants to be paid for the training data to make that model. And then they want guardrails on the model so that no one can make competing images that compete with Getty Images images that they're going to make with all of the works. And if we created this new copyright, and we said every creative worker has the right to enjoin people from training works with their model, getting images and the five publishers that Control all the publishing and the four studios that control all the films, and the three labels that control all of music will amend their standard contracts to say to do a deal with Us, you have to hand over your training rights. And then they will charge some model company to make a model of it. And then they will try to fire your ass. So I think there is a way for creative workers to protect their jobs. It doesn't have to do with more copyright. It's actually less copyright because the US Copyright Office, an organization I've been fighting with since the 90s, keeps getting out there and saying the smartest thing anyone's Ever said about AI, which is that algorithms don't get copyrights. Copyright, to use some UN jargon here, copyright in here is at the moment of fixation of a work of human creativity. If a human doesn't make the work, there is no copyright in it. That's why monkey selfies aren't copyrightable. Which means that Getty has to endure the only thing they hate more than paying photographers, which is people taking their photos and not paying them. Their AI generated images can't be copyrighted. Anyone can take them. Anyone can sell them. Anyone can give them away. Anyone can reproduce them. And if that's the case, Getty will pay photographers all day long. ([Time 1:08:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/44f6e406-b9fb-4dd2-9bf5-f21974a084e4)) - **Age Verification Threatens Free Expression** - Age verification measures pose a systemic risk of surveillance and speech control when centralized. - Doctorow warns these rules could concentrate hosting power and let gatekeepers erase creators by compliance cost or refusal. Transcript: Cory Doctorow We're pretty much the grandparents of this stuff. Maybe the Free Software Foundation is a little older than us, but our remit is to try and take the human rights that are important to us in the physical world and make sure that they follow Us to the digital world. And then these days, it's to watch as all of those rights are being eroded in the physical and digital world and think about how the digital world can be used to reclaim them in the physical World as well. I have been with EFF since we were six people and we're now over 100. And we work on so many issues that I actually will read releases from EFF about issues we're working on and be surprised because I didn't know we were on those issues. But the thing that I think has us all very worried now, no matter where we sit in the org, whether we work on privacy or speech or other forms of human rights, is the age verification stuff That is sweeping the world. Because it is setting the stage for everything that we worry about getting much, much worse. On the one hand, we are creating the conditions for mass scale surveillance of people's online habits in a way that makes even today's surveillance dystopia seem like weak tea by comparison. And on the other hand, we are setting up the conditions for punishing people for what they see and for censorship. And then we are also creating circumstances where the compliance costs of hosting speech will be so high and the compliance risks of hosting speech will be so high that only the very Largest firms that are on the one hand going to be able to structure markets for all kinds of other things because they will be in control of our speech and in control of our connections To one another. So they'll be able to decide who hears which podcast and they'll be able to decide, you know, think about it. If there was only like two companies that could be CDNs for podcasts because they could do the work to ensure that they were either age verifying everyone who heard a podcast that there Was nothing in a podcast that required age verification. Well, there's two CDNs and neither of them will do business with you. You don't exist anymore, right? Your podcast just goes away. And that becomes a single throat to choke for regimes that want to exert control. But also, you know, as we saw with Twitter, as wealth gets concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, it is entirely possible for structurally important services to fall into the hands Of individuals who want to use them for ideological purposes. And so we are about to create a lot more structurally important services that will then be within reach of anyone who can acquire them or can suborn them, who could then use them for purposes That are unrelated to all of the things that are bad about age verification. Because age verification is itself very bad, right? Like telling kids that they're not allowed to see hardcore pornography, fine, right? But I'm a parent of a teenager. And the last thing I would have wanted is for that kid to have no access to material about sexuality and about, you know, the world as it really is that would help her understand who she Really was as she was growing up. And I think the kids who really need it are the kids whose parents really do want to keep them away from that stuff. Those are the kids that we really do want to be able to reach with material that will help them understand who they genuinely are as a whole person because their parents want to deny it. And so that's the issue that has got us all very head up. And we are a very international organization now. We have people in Europe and Latin America, and we are fighting this on many fronts, but we're also seeing it pop up on many fronts. This is a very bad idea that's propagating very quickly. ([Time 1:13:35](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d5820aeb-4dac-43ed-a121-205046039a52)) - **Publish With Open Licenses And No Tracking** - Use decentralized, no-tracking channels and creative commons licensing to spread ideas widely. - Doctorow promotes his Pluralistic newsletter as CC-licensed, ad-free, and privacy-respecting distribution. Transcript: Cory Doctorow So I published this newsletter called Pluralistic. It's at pluralistic.net. The name's kind of a joke because for 20 years i was co-owner and the i think the most prolific writer on a group blog called boing boing and then i left boing boing and started a solo project But i called it pluralistic which is kind of funny and pluralistic is open access so it's creative commons license it's cc attribution only so you can commercially reproduce it so that's Been really great if there's stuff you want to you see stuff there you can sell it you can give it away. It's fine with me. Condé Nast has like pulled long features out of it and just published them. I'm really glad to see it. It's an influence op. I want those ideas to spread. And I mirror Pluralistic as a newsletter that is sent out with no tracking, no ads, no anything. I don't get read receipts. The blog itself has no tracking and no ads. And then you can also get it as a feed on various social media platforms. And again, it's all freely shareable. It is really my one of my major outlets for developing all of these ideas. It's where intitification came from. And then I'll say I'm going to be out on tour starting in September. I'm going to be in 24 cities and four countries. And so if I'm in your city, please come and see me. ([Time 1:18:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f39e73ab-884f-4204-8742-b8bcf6ce11d6))