Do you work with machines, or for machines? Cory Doctorow, who coined the term “enshittification,” has a new book that asks exactly that. In The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It's Too Late, he challenges the belief that AI is inevitable, explains why tech boosters are pushing this message, and how it leads to companies that are “too big to fail… too big to jail… too big to care.”
Cory Doctorow and Oz discuss the economics of a bubble, algorithmic wage discrimination, and what you can do to help save your industry from disruption.
Additional Reading:
The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It's Too Late | Verso Books
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Enshittification. It's fun to say, hard to spell, and a useful descriptor of exactly how the internet has gone wrong. Cory Doctorow, the author and activist who coined the term a few years ago, recently published a book on the subject, called Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. He was on Decoder a few weeks ago to explain what happened, and joins The Vergecast this week to help us figure out what to do about it. Can we, as regular people on the internet, help to de-enshittify the place? What responsibility do we have, and what kinds of choices should we be making? Cory has lots of thoughts on whether you can shop your way out of a monopoly, and what it really takes to enact structural change online.
Further reading:
Cory Doctorow on Decoder
Read Cory's book, Enshittification
Cory's last Vergecast appearance
From Pluralistic: How monopoly enshittified Amazon
AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born
FTC files a massive antitrust lawsuit against Amazon
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This is Sarah Jeong, features editor at The Verge. I’m standing in for Nilay for one final Thursday episode here as he settles back into full-time hosting duties. Today, we’ve got a fun one. I’m talking to Cory Doctorow, prolific author, internet activist, and arguably one of the fiercest tech critics writing today.
He has a new book out called Enshittifcation: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. So I sat down with Cory to discuss what enshittification is, why it’s happening, and how we might fight it.
Links:
Enshittification | Macmillan
Why every website you used to love is getting worse | Vox
The age of Enshittification | The New Yorker
Yes, everything online sucks now — but it doesn’t have to | Ars Technica
The enshittification of garage-door openers reveals vast, deadly rot | Cory Doctorow
Mark Zuckerberg emails outline plan to neutralize competitors | The Verge
Google gets to keep Chrome, judge rules in antitrust case | The Verge
How Amazon wins: by steamrolling rivals and partners | WSJ
A new web DRM standard has security researchers worried | The Verge
Netflix, Microsoft & Google just changed how the web works | The Outline
Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder!
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
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This week we’re talking with Cory Doctorow (this episode contains explicit language) about how we can get back to that “new good internet.” Cory’s new book The Internet Con offers a lens to this conversation about disenshittifying the internet through anti-trust laws, limits on corporate tweaking, regulating unconstrained capitalism, and all the ways enshittification is enabled. Cory also shares his experience recording his own audio book under the direction of Gabrielle de Cuir at Skyboat Media, and what’s to come from his next Science Fiction book The Lost Cause.
Join the discussion
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Featuring:
Cory Doctorow – Website, GitHub, Mastodon, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
The Internet Con
libro.fm
The Lost Cause
Cory’s talk at DEF CON 31
Changelog Interviews #535: Examining capitalism’s chokepoints
Skyboat Media
The History of the Standard Oil Company by Ida M. Tarbell
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
This week we’re talking with Cory Doctorow (this episode contains explicit language) about his newest book Chokepoint Capitalism, which he co-autored with Rebecca Giblin. Chokepoint Capitalism is about how big tech and big content have captured creative labor markets and the ways we can win them back. We talk about chokepoints creating chickenized reverse-centaurs, paying for your robot boss (think Uber, Doordash, Amazon Drivers), the chickenization that’s climbing the priviledge gradient from the most blue collar workers to the middle-class. There are chokepoints in open source, AI generative art, interoperability, music, film, and media. To quote Cory, “We’re all fighting the same fight.”
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Featuring:
Cory Doctorow – Website, GitHub, Mastodon, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Buy Cory’s books
Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk
TikTok’s Enshittification
Rural towns and poor urban neighborhoods are being devoured by dollar stores
What is Chokepoint Capitalism?
Revenge of the Chickenized Reverse-Centaurs
Cory on Twitter explaining “chickenization “
Red Team Blues: Another audiobook that Amazon won’t sell
The Memex Method
Changelog Interviews #221: How we got here with Cory Doctorow
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Biden will get a new Chief of Staff, the U.S. Attorney has questions for Amazon, and Elon takes the stand. Over at Netflix: strong subscriber growth, and Reed Hastings is out as Co-CEO. And of course, more layoffs. Then we’re joined by Friend of Pivot Cory Doctorow on his new book, “Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back.”
Cory is on Twitter at @doctorow and you can find his book here.
Send us your questions! Call 855-51-PIVOT or go to nymag.com/pivot.
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Last year I spoke with Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin about their new book, Chokepoint Capitalism. It’s a book about artists and technology and platforms, and how different kinds of distribution and creations tools create chokepoints for different companies to capture value that might otherwise go to artists and creators.. In other words, it’s a lot of Decoder stuff.
As we were prepping this episode, the Decoder team realized it previews a lot of things we’re going to talk about in 2023: antitrust law. Ticketmaster. Spotify and the future of the music industry. Amazon and the book industry. And, of course, being a creator trying to make a living on all these platforms.
This episode is longer than normal, but it was a really great conversation and I'm glad we are sharing it with you.
Links:
What is Mixer, Ninja’s new exclusive streaming home?
Ninja returns to Twitch
This was Sony Music's contract with Spotify
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23311918
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
It was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Director is Eleanor Donovan.
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What’s keeping author, journalist, and activist, Cory Doctorow, from publishing his books on Audible? Plus with both houses of Congress passing the CHIPs Act and an expected approval from President Biden will the US see a renaissance in domestic chip production? And can battery swapping in EVs be a realistic alternative to long recharging times?
Starring Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane, Cory Doctorow, Roger Chang, Joe.
Link to the Show Notes.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Kara, Scott and a handful of Friends of Pivot make some predictions about what 2022 has in store for the Metaverse, China, Apple and more.
In this episode, we hear predictions from Co-Anchor of CNBC’s Squawk Box Andrew Ross Sorkin, LightShed Partners’ Rich Greenfield, Senator Amy Klobuchar, author Cory Doctorow, WSJ Senior Personal Technology Columnist Joanna Stern, NBC News Senior Business correspondent Stephanie Ruhle, NYU Professor Aswath Damodaran, author Sheera Frenkel, and actor George Hahn.
Send us your Listener Mail questions through our site, nymag.com/pivot and use Yappa to leave a video or audio message.
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Cory is a science fiction author, activist, journalist, co-editor of Boing Boing and the author of many books. We talked to Cory about open source, the open web, internet freedom, his involvement with the EFF, where he began his career, the details he’ll be covering in his keynote at OSCON, and his thoughts on open source today and where developers should be focusing their efforts.
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Featuring:
Cory Doctorow – Website, GitHub, Mastodon, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
This episode was produced in partnership with O’Reilly Media and OSCON. Use the code changelog20 to get 20% off your registration.
Cory Doctorow’s craphound.com (Cory’s Literary Works)
Boing Boing
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on GitHub
How you got here: Cory Doctorow’s OSCON London Keynote
Ulysses Pact on Wikipedia
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
