The World Has Moved On  🔗 **Source:** [The World Has Moved On](https://share.snipd.com/episode/16e7a156-08ca-4865-8e53-9edf7aedcbe2) ## Highlights - **Flea Market Clown Painting Found At Rose Bowl** - Cory Doctorow recounts visiting the Rose Bowl flea market and finding an apocalyptic clown oil painting. - He mentions posting the painting to his Flickr feed and plans to hang it at home. Transcript: Cory Doctorow It is Sunday and I'm at my desk in Los Angeles. Not a thing that happens very often. Almost didn't happen today because we went to the Rose Bowl flea market this morning and spent quite a long time there because it was a particularly good day. Including a genuinely apocalyptic clown oil painting with a clown looming over a kind of blazing cityscape. It's really something. It's in my Flickr feed. You got to have a look. ([Time 0:00:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c330965f-8ee7-437f-a097-0dd1be1b42c6)) - **Doctorow's Book Editing Sprint And Release Schedule** - Cory shares his editing sprint: finishing copy edits on his geopolitics book and starting structural edits the next day. - He notes the graphic novels schedule and aims to submit the second draft to his editor soon. Transcript: Cory Doctorow So today is the day that I finish the copy edits on my next book. Well, not my next book. The book after my next book. Well, not that either. The book after the book that I've got coming out, The Reverse Centaur, is the graphic novel of Unshittification, which will be January. And the book after that is the graphic novel of Unauthorized Bread, which is April. But the book after that, August 2027, is my geopolitics book, The Post-American Internet. And today is the day I finish copy edits on that. Tomorrow, I start the big structural edits. I think it's probably about two days worth of those. And then I will have that second draft into my editor. ([Time 0:02:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/93c4cb2c-7686-4a03-a631-c6b2aedad44e)) - **The World Has Moved On As A Metaphor For Systemic Decay** - The Dark Tower's phrase "the world has moved on" captures a one-way decay where repair and renewal fail. - Cory Doctorow links this to modern systemic collapse: machines stop working, congenital defects rise, and entropy wins as beams fail. Transcript: Cory Doctorow The world has moved on. Douglas Adams wrote, anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things. I think about this quote whenever I get angry at the technology around me. When I rail against the great in shittening, am I simply committing the sin of nostalgia? Nostalgia is a toxic impulse. Jay Hodgman. I am, after all, old. I've written before how conservatives yearning for simpler times is really just a wish to be a child again. The reason time seems simpler during your childhood is that you were a child, and if your parents did their job, they shielded you from a lot of the complexity of their adulthood so you Could enjoy your childhood. That's where the National Customer Rage Survey comes in. It's been surveying a panel of 1,000 representative consumers every three years for a decade, continuing a research project that started in 1976. The survey measures respondents' attitudes towards the businesses they deal with, and as of 2025, it's fair to say customers are pissed. We're experiencing more problems with the products and services we use. Those problems are more severe. They make us angrier and they produce lingering stress. More and more, we are seeking revenge on the businesses that piss us off. So it's not just me, an old man yelling at the cloud. The world is getting shittier. The latest customer rage survey inspired The Guardian's Heather Timmons to launch a new investigative series looking at how fucked up everything is. Her inaugural installment is very good, and it's drawn a massive reader response. I spoke with Timmons this week about the series. She told me she's been deluged with emails from readers who feel that the world is different now, and many of them cite my work on inshittification. Timmons wanted to know what advice I had for her readers. I told her that I don't think you can solve this as a consumer because this isn't a market problem. It's a political problem, and shopping isn't politics. Later, Timmons forwarded one of those reader emails to me. It gave an eloquent and evocative account of just how rancid the vibe is these days. The writer said that when they and their spouse encounter this rot, they cite Stephen King's Dark Tower novels, quoting the oft-repeated phrase from that series, the world has moved On. At this point, I should warn you that the following contains some Dark Tower spoilers, so if you're planning to read a decades-old but very good dystopian Western science fiction crossover Series, and if spoilers bug you, this might not be the essay for you. So, spoiler alert. Still with me? Okay, then. In the Dark Tower novels, we crisscross a fallen world in which decay is all around us. The buildings are rotten. The machines have stopped working, and no one knows how to fix them. Babies and livestock alike are frequently born with deadly congenital defects. Much of the world has fallen into wasteland, cracked and barren. An army of wreckers, led by the demagogue John Farson, who styles himself the good man, are slowly but surely conquering the land, laying waste to those few remaining outposts of civilization, And conscripting the young men in those conquered lands to march on their neighbors. It wasn't always this way. There a time when the world was defined by hope and virtue and light, when the machines were fixed and the crops were harvested. Life wasn't golden. There were still squabbles and sorrows and even wars. But life was good. Then the world moved on. For reasons no one truly understands, the normal push-pull of decay and renewal turned into a one-way irreversible process in which everything that crumbled or snapped or burned Up couldn't be repaired or replaced or recovered. Our mysterious ability to beat back the second law of thermodynamics, an absurdity we probably should have always treated as an aberration, has collapsed. ([Time 0:04:18](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ad009d1e-4e3f-406e-8554-3eb824b0d329)) - **Antitrust Was The Beam That Checked Corporate Wreckers** - Antitrust enforcement acted as the Beams that kept corporate wreckers in check by preventing firms from becoming unregulable. - Doctorow argues neoliberal attacks on antitrust removed that core constraint, enabling unchecked platform autocrats. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Because, as I've written many times, there were always in shittifiers who would have plundered your data and money and treated you with naked contempt. There were always in-shitifiers, but those in-shitifiers faced external forces that checked their wrecker's urge. They were held in check by competition and regulation and workers' sense of fairness and duty, and by the threat of new products and services that might pop up to correct the defects They deliberately introduced into their products by in shittifying them. And the foundation, the dark tower upon which all the beams converged, was antitrust enforcement, grounded in the idea that we could not afford to let any company, not a good company Or a bad company, get so large that it could no longer be regulated, lest its executives become autocrats of trade. The same ([Time 0:11:58](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1dc85e5a-73ab-43c4-baa7-99e1c016f02e)) - **Neoliberal Ideology Shattered Multiple Beams Of Accountability** - The same ideological forces that weakened antitrust also eroded accountability across institutions, elevating elites who feel rules don't apply to them. - Doctorow names unitary executive, Project 2025, and elite impunity as mechanisms that enabled this capture. Transcript: Cory Doctorow These are the people who gave us the unitary executive and Project 2025, and the collapse of accountability that has allowed the worst people to commit the gravest sins they could imagine And still reap vast fortunes. These beam breakers wanted kings, and they got them. I collect definitions of conservatism, and one of my favorite comes from Corey Robbins' book, The Reactionary Mind. Robbins asks how it is that we could call so many disparate, irreconcilable ideologies, various ethno-nationalisms, imperialism, financialism, patriarchy, Christian nationalism, Libertarianism, white supremacy, and so on, conservative. What binds all these views together? Robin's answer? The foundation that all these otherwise disparate views share is that some people are born to rule, while others are born to be ruled over. When these lesser people are elevated to positions of power, their inferiority creates a system of misrule by which we all suffer. The best outcome for everyone is for all of us to know our place and defer to our social betters. That's why conservatives are obsessed with affirmative action, DEI, and any form of anti-racism. For them, the discriminatory outcomes we see in the world are natural, reflecting the inborn defects in the people at the bottom of the social order. That's why, after every plane crash, every collision between a cargo ship and a bridge, every spectacular corporate bankruptcy, conservatives rush to uncover the race, gender, Religion, and sexual orientation of the captain, the pilot, or the CEO. If the person who oversaw the catastrophe has anything remotely resembling a marginalized identity, then this is loudly trumpeted as confirmation that diversity hires promoted Above their station are ruining our society and wrecking our bridges. Naturally, if the person in charge was a wealthy, well-born straight white guy, that's just proof that shit happens. It definitely doesn't prove that white straight as a class should be removed from positions of power. For conservatives, virtue is whatever people who are born to rule desire. Hence Frank Wilhoyt's definition of conservatism. Exactly one proposition to wit, there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. It's not a crime if the president does it. It's also not a crime if your boss does it, or if a monopolist does it, or if ICE does it. It's not a crime if the IDF do it, or if the Epstein class do it. Taxes are for the little people. The attack on antitrust law was part of the attack on the rule of law, the campaign to put everyone back in their place. It's a piece of the effort to establish a new hereditary aristocracy, and every hereditary aristocracy requires hereditary serfs. That would be us. The ideology of economism, which says that market outcomes are the only way to govern a society, cashes out to the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. If we interfere with mergers or labor practices or commercial conduct, we distort the market, which is literally going against nature. Why Trump dismantled the consumer protection agencies, the antitrust agencies, the labor protection agencies, the environmental protection agencies. ([Time 0:13:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/14ae2702-13fe-4fe0-baa6-b5da04836c51)) - **AI Made Bureaucracy More Punishing Through Vibe Coded Forms** - Digital forms and automation shifted paperwork burdens asymmetrically onto citizens while reducing institutional processing costs. - Doctorow calls this 'democratized bureaucracy' and notes AI/vibe coding multiplies form proliferation and friction. Transcript: Cory Doctorow When analog bureaucracies impose paperwork costs on us, they also impose paperwork costs on themselves, because processing and filing those forms requires substantial effort, Even if filling in those forms requires even more effort from us. When it comes to virtual paperwork, the asymmetry is even more pronounced. Sure, it takes some admin to set up an online form and write the scripts to process its outputs, but that's a one-off. The form giver can perform very little admin and still impose a giant repeated admin burden on the rest of us. AI has only made this worse. Now, thanks to vibe coding, everyone can produce a form and its associated processing and analytics backends with prompts, which creates a grave moral hazard. The kinds of activities that I used to fill in a single short form to accomplish now requires 10 lengthy forms created by different people in the same organization, all asking for variations On the same information. Through AI, we have democratized bureaucracy. It's Kafka as a service. What's more, when you're dealing with a monopoly, you have no choice but to complete whatever paperwork they throw at you. ([Time 0:19:45](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ec6bfd62-fe69-4038-ab20-ca35695d451c)) - **Firing Workers Incinerates The Knowledge That Keeps Things Working** - Understaffing and replacing skilled workers with bots destroys process knowledge, creating broken machines and unfixable systems. - Doctorow links mass firing and contractorization to incinerated institutional know-how and worse service. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Understaffing is a form of inshittification, one that shifts value from shoppers to owners and shifts consequences from owners to workers. This is how we end up with broken machines that no one can fix. Firing workers and replacing them with chatbots or contractors means incinerating their process knowledge, the precious and co-ate, unrecorded understanding that keeps everything Working. This is how companies that make products we love suddenly decide to wreck those products. When the only consequences for shitty products is angry customers with nowhere to go and no one to vent their rage upon except workers who have no labor rights and can't afford to quit, Why not do a mafia bust out for every business? ([Time 0:22:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1eb60a19-cc51-4069-a256-cd46f586fd8b)) - **Do Politics Not Shopping To Reverse Inshittification** - Shopping won't restore systemic checks; political action is required to rebuild the beams. - Doctorow urges joining digital rights groups, unions, local politics, and party organizing to rebuild regulation and accountability. Transcript: Cory Doctorow To restore the beams and beat back entropy again, we need a better system, not more virtuous individuals. If you feel as I do that the world has moved on, then to wrench it back, you will have to join a polity. Support activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital rights group I've been at for the past 25 years. Join a union. If there's no union at your job site, start a union. If you work in tech, you start this process by talking to techsolidarity.org and the Tech Workers Coalition. In the UK, get in touch with the United Tech and Allied Workers. Get involved in party politics. Find a political party whose local organization supports your values, even if the national version of that party sucks, and then work with your fellow grassroots activists to drag Or replace the party leaders. Get involved in local politics. If there's one thing Moms for Liberty has taught us, it's that unregarded, seemingly unimportant local offices have enormous potential to change facts on the ground for the people Where you live. Those changes don't have to be changes for the worst. Doing politics is hard. Hell, after all, is other people. It would be great if we could make change by changing ourselves but that's not how any of this works the world has moved on and you can't save it but together we can restore the beams and Beat back entropy hell is other people but only because other people are so great, but it's so hard to figure out how to work together. ([Time 0:23:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b7e2576c-e55d-4822-bd83-6f65a81214ee)) - **Join Unions And Local Politics To Rebuild Institutional Power** - Act locally and join organizations to effect change rather than waiting for national leaders. - Doctorow suggests supporting groups like EFF, forming or joining unions, and engaging with local party branches to shift power. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Support activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital rights group I've been at for the past 25 years. Join a union. If there's no union at your job site, start a union. If you work in tech, you start this process by talking to techsolidarity.org and the Tech Workers Coalition. In the UK, get in touch with the United Tech and Allied Workers. Get involved in party politics. Find a political party whose local organization supports your values, even if the national version of that party sucks, and then work with your fellow grassroots activists to drag Or replace the party leaders. ([Time 0:23:45](https://share.snipd.com/snip/df58b5b5-c14f-4c98-8b82-6ec2a5fea7f5))