Cory Doctorow's craphound.com: Recent Episodes
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This week on my podcast, I read MLMs are the mirror-world version of community organizing, a recent post from my Pluralistic newsletter.
MLMs prey on the poor and desperate: women, people of color, people in dying small towns and decaying rustbelt cities. It’s not just that these people are desperate – it’s that they only survive through networks of mutual aid. Poor women rely on other poor women to help with child care, marginalized people rely on one another for help with home maintenance, small loans, a place to crash after an eviction, or a place to park the RV you’re living out of.
In other words, people who lack monetary capital must rely on social capital for survival. That’s why MLMs target these people: an MLM is a system for destructively transforming social capital into monetary capital. MLMs exhort their members to mine their social relationships for “leads” and “customers” and to use the language of social solidarity (“women helping women”) to wheedle, guilt, and arm-twist people from your mutual aid network into buying things they don’t need and can’t afford.
But it’s worse, because what MLMs really sell is MLMs. The real purpose of an MLM sales call is to convince the “customer” to become an MLM salesperson, who owes you a share of every sale they make and is incentivized to buy stock they don’t need (from you) in order to make quotas. And of course, their real job is to sign up other salespeople to work under them, and so on.
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Announcing the Picks and Shovels book tour (permalink)My next novel, Picks and Shovels, is officially out in the US and Canada on Feb 17, and I’m about to leave on a 20+ city book-tour, which means there’s a nonzero chance I’ll be in a city near you between now and the end of the spring!
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels
Picks and Shovels is a standalone novel starring Martin Hench – my hard-charging, two-fisted, high-tech forensic accountant – in his very first adventure, in the early 1980s. It’s a story about the Weird PC era, when no one was really certain what shape PCs should be, who should make them, who should buy them, and what they’re for. It features a commercial war between two very different PC companies.
The first one, Fidelity Computing, is a predatory multi-level marketing faith scam, run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest, and an orthodox rabbi. Fidelity recruits people to exploit members of their faith communities by selling them third-rate PCs that are designed as rip-off lock-ins, forcing you to buy special floppies for their drives, special paper for their printers, and to use software that is incompatible with everything else in the world.
The second PC company is Computing Freedom, a rebel alliance of three former Fidelity Computing sales-managers: an orthodox woman who’s been rejected by her family after coming out as queer; a Mormon woman who’s rejected the Church over its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, and a nun who’s quit her order to join the Liberation Theology movement in the struggle for human rights in America’s dirty wars.
In the middle of it all is Martin Hench, coming of age in San Francisco during the PC bubble, going to Dead Kennedys shows, getting radicalized by ACT UP!, and falling in love – all while serving as CFO and consigliere to Computing Freedom, as a trade war turns into a shooting war, and they have to flee for their lives.
The book’s had fantastic early reviews, with endorsements from computer historians like Steven Levy (Hackers), Claire Evans (Broad-Band), John Markoff (What the Doormouse Said) and Dan’l Lewin (CEO of the Computer History Museum). Stephen Fry raved that he “hugely enjoyed” the “note perfect,” “superb” story.
And I’m about to leave on tour! I have nineteen confirmed dates, and two nearly confirmed dates, and there’s more to come! I hope you’ll consider joining me at one of these events. I’ve got a bunch of fantastic conversation partners joining me onstage and online, and the bookstores that are hosting me are some of my favorite indie booksellers in the world.
BOSTON (Feb 14):
Boskone, 4PM, Westin Boston Seaport District
https://schedule.boskone.org/62/
Brookline Booksmith with KEN LIU, 7PM, 279 Harvard Street, Brookline
https://brooklinebooksmith.com/event/2025-02-14/cory-doctorow-ken-liu-picks-and-shovels
VIRTUAL (Feb 15):
YANIS VAROUFAKIS, sponsored by Jacobin and hosted by David Moscrop, 10AM Pacific, 1PM Eastern, 6PM UK, 7PM CET
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkIDep7Z4LM
MENLO PARK (Feb 17):
Kepler’s Books with CHARLIE JANE ANDERS, 7PM, 1010 El Camino Real
https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow
LOS ANGELES (Feb 18):
Diesel Bookstore with WIL WHEATON, 630PM, 225 26th Street, Santa Monica
https://www.dieselbookstore.com/event/Cory-Doctorow-Wil-Wheaton-Author-signing
SEATTLE (Feb 19):
Third Place Books with DAN SAVAGE, 7PM, 17171 Bothell Way Northeast #A101 Lake Forest Park
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-with-dan-savage-picks-and-shovels-a-martin-hench-novel-tickets-1106741957989
TORONTO (Feb 23):
Another Story, 630PM, 315 Roncesvalles Ave
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/picks-shovels-cory-doctorow-tickets-1219803217259
NYC (Feb 26):
The Strand with JOHN HODGMAN, 7PM, 828 Broadway
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-john-hodgman-picks-and-shovels-tickets-1131132841779
PENN STATE (Feb 27):
Kern Auditorium, 7PM, 112 Kern Building
https://www.bellisario.psu.edu/assets/uploads/CoryDoctorow-Poster.pdf
DOYLESTOWN (Mar 1):
Doylestown Bookshop, 12PM, 16 S Main St
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-picks-and-shovels-a-martin-hench-novel-tickets-1146230880419
BALTIMORE (Mar 2):
Red Emma’s, 2PM, 630PM, 3128 Greenmount Ave
https://redemmas.org/events/cory-doctorow-presents-picks-and-shovels/
DC (Mar 4):
Cleveland Park Library with MATT STOLLER, 630PM, 3310 Connecticut Ave NW
https://www.loyaltybookstores.com/picksnshovels
RICHMOND (Mar 5):
Fountain Bookstore with LEE VINSEL, 6PM, 1312 E Cary St
https://fountainbookstore.com/events/1795820250305
AUSTIN (Mar 10):
First Light Books, 7PM, 4300 Speedway/43rd
https://thethirdplace.is/event/cory-doctorow-picks-shovels-1
BURBANK (Mar 13):
Dark Delicacies, 6PM, 822 N. Hollywood Way
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3257/Thu%2C_Mar_13th_6_pm%3A_Pick_%26_Shovel%3A_A_Martin_Hench_Novel_HB.html#/
SAN DIEGO (Mar 24):
Mysterious Galaxy, 7PM, 3555 Rosecrans
https://www.mystgalaxy.com/32425Doctorow
BELFAST (Mar 24) (remote):
Imagine! Festival with ALAN MEBAN, 7PM UK
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-alan-meban-tickets-1106421399189
CHICAGO, Apr 2:
Exile in Bookville with PETER SAGAL, 7PM, 410 S Michigan Ave, 2nd floor
https://exileinbookville.com/events/44853
BLOOMINGTON, Apr 4:
Morgenstern Books, 6PM, 642 N Madison St
https://morgensternbooks.com/event/2025-04-04/author-event-cory-doctorow
PDX, Jun 20 (TBC):
Powell’s Books (date and time to be confirmed)
I’m also finalizing plans for one or two dates in NEW ZEALAND at the end of April, as well as a ATLANTA date, likely on March 26.
I really hope you’ll come out and say hello. I know these are tough times. Hanging out with nice people who care about the same stuff as you is a genuine tonic.
This week on my podcast, I read Canada shouldn’t retaliate with US tariffs, a recent post from my Pluralistic newsletter.
But you know what Canada could make? A Canadian App Store. That’s a store that Canadian software authors could use to sell Canadian apps to Canadian customers, charging, say, the standard payment processing fee of 5% rather than Apple’s 30%. Canada could make app stores for the Android, Playstation and Xbox, too.
There’s no reason that a Canadian app store would have to confine itself to Canadian software authors, either. Canadian app stores could offer 5% commissions on sales to US and global software authors, and provide jailbreaking kits that allows device owners all around the world to install the Canadian app stores where software authors don’t get ripped off by American Big Tech companies.
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This week on my podcast, I’m reading “The Weight of a Feather (The Weight of a Heart),” my short story in Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions, commissioned by J. Michael Straczynski.
Margaret came into my office, breaking my unproductive clicktrance. She looked sheepish. “I got given one of those robots that follows you around,” she said. She took a step, revealing the waist-high reinforced cardboard box. “Want to help unbox?
I stood up and unkinked my spine and hips and shoulders with a sound like wringing out a sheet of bubble-wrap. “Oof.”
“Come on, old fella,” she said. She handed me a box-cutter.
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This week on my podcast, I’m reading “Enshittification isn’t caused by venture capital,” the latest post from my Pluralistic.net blog. It’s about the new “Free Our Feeds” project and why I think the existence of Mastodon doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pay attention to making Bluesky as free as possible.
When tech critics fail to ask why good services turn bad, that failure is just as severe as the failure to ask why people stay when the services rot.
Now, the guy who ran Facebook when it was a great way to form communities and make friends and find old friends is the same guy who who has turned Facebook into a hellscape. There’s very good reason to believe that Mark Zuckerberg was always a creep, and he took investment capital very early on, long before he started fucking up the service. So what gives? Did Zuck get a brain parasite that turned him evil? Did his investors get more demanding in their clamor for dividends?
If that’s what you think, you need to show your working. Again, by all accounts, Zuck was a monster from day one. Zuck’s investors – both the VCs who backed him early and the gigantic institutional funds whose portfolios are stuffed with Meta stock today – are not patient sorts with a reputation for going easy on entrepreneurs who leave money on the table. They’ve demanded every nickel since the start.
What changed? What caused Zuck to enshittify his service? And, even more importantly for those of us who care about the people locked into Facebook’s walled gardens: what stopped him from enshittifying his services in the “good old days?”
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This week on my podcast, I’ve got Wil Wheaton reading the first chapter of the audiobook of Picks and Shovels, the next Martin Hench novel, which is out next month. Please consider supporting my work by pre-ordering the book as a hardcover, DRM-free ebook, or DRM-free audiobook in my Kickstarter!
The year is 1986. The city is San Francisco. Here, Martin Hench will invent the forensic accountant–what a bounty hunter is to people, he is to money–but for now he’s an MIT dropout odd-jobbing his way around a city still reeling from the invention of a revolutionary new technology that will change everything about crime forever, one we now take completely for granted.
When Marty finds himself hired by Silicon Valley PC startup Fidelity Computing to investigate a group of disgruntled ex-employees who’ve founded a competitor startup, he quickly realizes he’s on the wrong side. Marty ditches the greasy old guys running Fidelity Computing without a second thought, utterly infatuated with the electric atmosphere of Computing Freedom. Located in the heart of the Mission, this group of brilliant young women found themselves exhausted by the predatory business practices of Fidelity Computing and set out to beat them at their own game, making better computers and driving Fidelity Computing out of business. But this optimistic startup, fueled by young love and California-style burritos, has no idea the depth of the evil they’re seeking to unroot or the risks they run.
In this company-eat-company city, Martin and his friends will be lucky to escape with their lives.
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This week on my podcast, it’s our annual Daddy-Daughter Podcast, a tradition since 2012! The kid’s sixteen now, a senior in high school and getting ready to head off to university next year, so this may well be the final installment in the series.
Here are the previous year’s installments: 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023.
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This week on my podcast, I read the sixth and final installment of “Spill“, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original. Spill will be reprinted in Allen Kaster’s 2025 Year’s Best SF on Earth.
I didn’t plan to go to Oklahoma, but I went to Oklahoma.
My day job is providing phone tech support to people in offices who use my boss’s customer-relationship management software. In theory, I can do that job from anywhere I can sit quietly on a good Internet connection for a few hours a day while I’m on shift. It’s a good job for an organizer, because it means I can go out in the field and still pay my rent, so long as I can park a rental car outside of a Starbucks, camp on their WiFi, and put on a noise-canceling headset. It’s also good organizer training because most of the people who call me are angry and confused and need to have something difficult and technical explained to them.
My comrades started leaving for Oklahoma the day the Water Protector camp got set up. A lot of them—especially my Indigenous friends—were veterans of the Line 3 Pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and other pipeline fights, and they were plugged right into that network.
The worse things got, the more people I knew in OK. My weekly affinity group meeting normally had twenty people at it. One week there were only ten of us. The next week, three. The next week, we did it on Zoom (ugh) and most of the people on the line were in OK, up on “Facebook Hill,” the one place in the camp with reliable cellular data signals.
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This week on my podcast, I read part five of “Spill“, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original.
I didn’t plan to go to Oklahoma, but I went to Oklahoma.
My day job is providing phone tech support to people in offices who use my boss’s customer-relationship management software. In theory, I can do that job from anywhere I can sit quietly on a good Internet connection for a few hours a day while I’m on shift. It’s a good job for an organizer, because it means I can go out in the field and still pay my rent, so long as I can park a rental car outside of a Starbucks, camp on their WiFi, and put on a noise-canceling headset. It’s also good organizer training because most of the people who call me are angry and confused and need to have something difficult and technical explained to them.
My comrades started leaving for Oklahoma the day the Water Protector camp got set up. A lot of them—especially my Indigenous friends—were veterans of the Line 3 Pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and other pipeline fights, and they were plugged right into that network.
The worse things got, the more people I knew in OK. My weekly affinity group meeting normally had twenty people at it. One week there were only ten of us. The next week, three. The next week, we did it on Zoom (ugh) and most of the people on the line were in OK, up on “Facebook Hill,” the one place in the camp with reliable cellular data signals.
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This week on my podcast, I read part four of “Spill“, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original.
I didn’t plan to go to Oklahoma, but I went to Oklahoma.
My day job is providing phone tech support to people in offices who use my boss’s customer-relationship management software. In theory, I can do that job from anywhere I can sit quietly on a good Internet connection for a few hours a day while I’m on shift. It’s a good job for an organizer, because it means I can go out in the field and still pay my rent, so long as I can park a rental car outside of a Starbucks, camp on their WiFi, and put on a noise-canceling headset. It’s also good organizer training because most of the people who call me are angry and confused and need to have something difficult and technical explained to them.
My comrades started leaving for Oklahoma the day the Water Protector camp got set up. A lot of them—especially my Indigenous friends—were veterans of the Line 3 Pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and other pipeline fights, and they were plugged right into that network.
The worse things got, the more people I knew in OK. My weekly affinity group meeting normally had twenty people at it. One week there were only ten of us. The next week, three. The next week, we did it on Zoom (ugh) and most of the people on the line were in OK, up on “Facebook Hill,” the one place in the camp with reliable cellular data signals.
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This week on my podcast, I read part three of “Spill“, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original.
I didn’t plan to go to Oklahoma, but I went to Oklahoma.
My day job is providing phone tech support to people in offices who use my boss’s customer-relationship management software. In theory, I can do that job from anywhere I can sit quietly on a good Internet connection for a few hours a day while I’m on shift. It’s a good job for an organizer, because it means I can go out in the field and still pay my rent, so long as I can park a rental car outside of a Starbucks, camp on their WiFi, and put on a noise-canceling headset. It’s also good organizer training because most of the people who call me are angry and confused and need to have something difficult and technical explained to them.
My comrades started leaving for Oklahoma the day the Water Protector camp got set up. A lot of them—especially my Indigenous friends—were veterans of the Line 3 Pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and other pipeline fights, and they were plugged right into that network.
The worse things got, the more people I knew in OK. My weekly affinity group meeting normally had twenty people at it. One week there were only ten of us. The next week, three. The next week, we did it on Zoom (ugh) and most of the people on the line were in OK, up on “Facebook Hill,” the one place in the camp with reliable cellular data signals.
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This week on my podcast, I read part two of “Spill“, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original.
I didn’t plan to go to Oklahoma, but I went to Oklahoma.
My day job is providing phone tech support to people in offices who use my boss’s customer-relationship management software. In theory, I can do that job from anywhere I can sit quietly on a good Internet connection for a few hours a day while I’m on shift. It’s a good job for an organizer, because it means I can go out in the field and still pay my rent, so long as I can park a rental car outside of a Starbucks, camp on their WiFi, and put on a noise-canceling headset. It’s also good organizer training because most of the people who call me are angry and confused and need to have something difficult and technical explained to them.
My comrades started leaving for Oklahoma the day the Water Protector camp got set up. A lot of them—especially my Indigenous friends—were veterans of the Line 3 Pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and other pipeline fights, and they were plugged right into that network.
The worse things got, the more people I knew in OK. My weekly affinity group meeting normally had twenty people at it. One week there were only ten of us. The next week, three. The next week, we did it on Zoom (ugh) and most of the people on the line were in OK, up on “Facebook Hill,” the one place in the camp with reliable cellular data signals.
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This week on my podcast, I read part one of “Spill“, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original.
Doctors smoke. Driving instructors text and drive. Dentists eat sugary snacks before bed. And hackers? Well, we’re no better at taking our own advice than anyone else.
Take “There is no security in obscurity”—if a security system only works when your enemies don’t understand it, then your security system doesn’t work.
A couple of years ago, I decided I wanted to move off the cloud. “There’s no such thing as the cloud, there’s only other peoples’ computers.” If you trust Google (or Apple, or, God help you, Amazon to host your stuff, well, let’s just say I don’t think you’ve thought this one through, pal).
I Am Good at Nerd, and managing a server for my own email and file transfers and streaming media didn’t seem that hard. I’d been building PCs since I was fifteen. I even went through a phase where I built my own laptops, so why couldn’t I just build myself a monster-ass PC with stupid amounts of hard drives and RAM and find a data center somewhere that would host it?
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This week on my podcast, I read “Vigilant“, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Nelda Buckman and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original.
Kids hate email.
Dee got my number from his older brother, who got it from Tina, my sister-in-law, who he knew from art school. He texted me just as I was starting to make progress with a gnarly bug in some logging software I was trying to get running for my cloud servers.
My phone went bloop and vibrated a little on the kitchen table, making ripples in my coffee. My mind went instantly blank. I unlocked my phone.
Is this marcus
I almost blocked the number, but dammit, this was supposed to be a private number. I’d just changed it. I wanted to know how it was getting out and whether I needed to change it again.
Who’s this?
Yeah, I punctuate my texts. I’m old.
I need help with some school stuff some spying stuff at school i heard your good at that
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This week on my podcast, I read my latest Pluralistic.net column, “Anti-cheat, gamers, and the Crowdstrike disaster” about the way that gamers were sucked into the coalition to defend trusted computing, and how the Crowdstrike disaster has seen them ejected from the coalition by Microsoft:
As a class, gamers hate digital rights management (DRM), the anti-copying, anti-sharing code that stops gamers from playing older games, selling or giving away games, or just playing games:
https://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/1x7qhs/why_do_you_hate_drm/
Trusted computing promised to supercharge DRM and make it orders of magnitude harder to break – a promise it delivered on. That made gamers a weird partner for the pro-trusted computing coalition.
But coalitions are weird, and coalitions that bring together diverging (and opposing) constituencies are very powerful (if fractious), because one member can speak to lawmakers, companies, nonprofits and groups that would normally have nothing to do with another member.
Gamers may hate DRM, but they hate cheating even more. As a class, gamers have an all-consuming hatred of cheats that overrides all other considerations (which is weird, because the cheats are used by gamers!). One thing trusted computing is pretty good at is detecting cheating. Gamers – or, more often, game servers – can use remote attestation to force each player’s computer to cough up a true account of its configuration, including whether there are any cheats running on the computer that would give the player an edge. By design, owners of computers can’t override trusted computing modules, which means that even if you want to cheat, your computer will still rat you out.
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(Image: Bernt Rostad, Elliott Brown, CC BY 2.0)
This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, “Marshmallow Longtermism” a reflection on how conservatives self-mythologize as the standards-bearers for deferred gratification and making hard trade-offs, but are utterly lacking in these traits when it comes to climate change and inequality.
I’m no fan of Charles Koch, but I agree that his performance at the helm of Koch Industries demonstrated impressive discipline and self-control, and that his enormous economic and political power stems in large part from his ability to resist temptation and reinvest patient money in patient technologies.
But Koch’s foresight is extremely selective. Much of Koch’s fossil-fuel fortune has been spent on funding climate denial and inaction. Koch claims that he sincerely believes that the climate emergency isn’t real or urgent, which is awfully convenient, given the centrality of fossil fuels to Koch’s power and wealth.
The rigor Koch applies to evaluating the technical propositions of new, efficient coal extraction and refining processes disappears when it comes to climate science. If Koch held coal-tech to the same evidentiary standard that he applies to the climate, he never would have bought a single piece of gear.
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(Image: Mark S, CC BY 2.0, modified)
This week on my podcast, I read a recent post from my Pluralistic.net blog/newsletter: “AI’s productivity theater,” about the severe mismatch between the bosses who buy AI to increase their workers’ efficiency, and the utter bafflement of the workers who are expected to use the AI…somehow.
A new research report from the Upwork Research Institute offers a look into the bizarre situation unfolding in workplaces where bosses have been conned into buying AI and now face the challenge of getting it to work as advertised:
https://www.upwork.com/research/ai-enhanced-work-models
The headline findings tell the whole story:
96% of bosses expect that AI will make their workers more productive;
85% of companies are either requiring or strongly encouraging workers to use AI;
49% of workers have no idea how AI is supposed to increase their productivity;
77% of workers say using AI decreases their productivity.
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(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)
This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, Unpersoned>; about the enormous power that we’ve given to tech giants to determine who can participate in modern life, and why the answer to the giants’ failure to wield that power wisely is to take it away, rather than attempting to perfect their use of it.
AT THE END OF MARCH 2024, the romance writer K. Renee discovered that she had been locked out of her Google Docs account, for posting “inappropriate” content in her private files. Renee never got back into her account and never found out what triggered the lockout. She wasn’t alone: as Madeline Ashby recounts in her excellent Wired story on the affair, many romance writers were permanently barred from their own files without explanation or appeal. At the time of the lockout, Renee was in the midst of ten works in progress, totaling over 200,000 words (Renee used Docs to share her work with her early readers for critical feedback).
This is an absolute nightmare scenario for any writer, but it could have been so much worse. In 2021, “Mark,” a stay-at-home dad, sought telemedicine advice for his young son’s urinary tract infection (this was during the acute phase of the covid pandemic, all but the most urgent medical issues were being handled remotely). His son’s pediatrician instructed Mark to take a picture of his son’s penis and upload it using the secure telemedicine app.
Mark did so, but his iPhone was running Google Photos, with auto-synch turned on, so the image was also uploaded to his private Google Photos directory. When it arrived there, Google’s AI scanned the photo and flagged it for child sexual abuse material. Google turned the issue over to the San Francisco Police Department, and furnished the detective assigned to the case with all of Mark’s data — his location history, his email, his photos, his browsing history, and more.
At the same time, Google terminated Mark’s account and deleted all of their own copies of his data. His phone stopped working (he had been using Google Fi for mobile service). His email stopped working (he was a Gmail user). All of his personal records disappeared from his Google Drive. His Google Authenticator, used for two-factor authentication, stopped working. Every photo was deleted from his Google Photos account, including every photo he’d taken of his son since birth.
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This week on my podcast, I read The reason you can’t buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you, a column from one of last week’s editions of my Pluralistic newsletter; it describes a monopoly pattern whereby companies execute a series of mergers to dominate a sector, leaving their IT systems brittle and tangled – and vital to the nation.
Just like with Equifax, the 737 Max disasters tipped Boeing into a string of increasingly grim catastrophes. Each fresh disaster landed with the grim inevitability of your general contractor texting you that he’s just opened up your ceiling and discovered that all your joists had rotted out – and that he won’t be able to deal with that until he deals with the termites he found last week, and that they’ll have to wait until he gets to the cracks in the foundation slab from the week before, and that those will have to wait until he gets to the asbestos he just discovered in the walls.
Drip, drip, drip, as you realize that the most expensive thing you own – which is also the thing you had hoped to shelter for the rest of your life – isn’t even a teardown, it’s just a pure liability. Even if you razed the structure, you couldn’t start over, because the soil is full of PCBs. It’s not a toxic asset, because it’s not an asset. It’s just toxic.
Equifax isn’t just a company: it’s infrastructure. It started out as an engine for racial, political and sexual discrimination, paying snoops to collect gossip from nosy neighbors, which was assembled into vast warehouses full of binders that told bank officers which loan applicants should be denied for being queer, or leftists, or, you know, Black
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This week on my podcast, I read my Microsoft DRM talk, first delivered 20 years and one day ago in Redmond, Washington. It was a viral hit in the nascent blogosphere and became a defining document in the fight against DRM.
Greetings fellow pirates! Arrrrr!
I’m here today to talk to you about copyright, technology and DRM, I work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation on copyright stuff (mostly), and I live in London. I’m not a lawyer — I’m a kind of mouthpiece/activist type, though occasionally they shave me and stuff me into my Bar Mitzvah suit and send me to a standards body or the UN to stir up trouble. I spend about three weeks a month on the road doing completely weird stuff like going to Microsoft to talk about DRM.
I lead a double life: I’m also a science fiction writer. That means I’ve got a dog in this fight, because I’ve been dreaming of making my living from writing since I was 12 years old. Admittedly, my IP-based biz isn’t as big as yours, but I guarantee you that it’s every bit as important to me as yours is to you.
Here’s what I’m here to convince you of:
That DRM systems don’t work
That DRM systems are bad for society
That DRM systems are bad for business
That DRM systems are bad for artists
That DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT
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This week on my podcast, I read Against Lore, a recent piece from my Pluralistic blog/newsletter, about writing and the benefits of nebulously defined backstories.
Warning: the last few minutes of this essay contain spoilers for Furiosa. In the recording, I give lots of warning so you can switch off when they come up.
One of my favorite nuggets of writing advice comes from James D Macdonald. Jim, a Navy vet with an encylopedic knowledge of gun lore, explained to a group of non-gun people how to write guns without getting derided by other gun people: “just add the word ‘modified.'”
As in, “Her modified AR-15 kicked against her shoulder as she squeezed the trigger, but she held it steady on the car door, watching it disintegrate in a spatter of bullet-holes.”
Jim’s big idea was that gun people couldn’t help but chew away at the verisimilitude of your fictional guns, their brains would automatically latch onto them and try to find the errors. But the word “modified” hijacked that impulse and turned it to the writer’s advantage: a gun person’s imagination gnaws at that word “modified,” spinning up the cleverest possible explanation for how the gun in question could behave as depicted.
In other words, the gun person’s impulse to one-up the writer by demonstrating their superior knowledge becomes an impulse to impart that superior knowledge to the writer. “Modified” puts the expert and the bullshitter on the same team, and conscripts the expert into fleshing out the bullshitter’s lies.
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Today for my podcast, I read Wanna Make Big Tech Monopolies Even Worse? Kill Section 230, my EFF Deeplinks Blog post on the competition aspects of sunsetting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act:
In an age of resurgent anti-monopoly activism, small online communities, either standing on their own, or joined in loose “federations,” are the best chance we have to escape Big Tech’s relentless surveillance and clumsy, unaccountable control.
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No One Is the Enshittifier of Their Own Story
Today for my podcast, I read No One Is the Enshittifier of Their Own Story , my latest Locus Magazine column, about the microfoundations of enshittification:
Therein lies the tale. The same people, running the same companies, are all suddenly behaving very differently. They haven’t all suffered a change of heart, a reverse-enscroogening that caused them all to go to bed the kinds of good-natured slobs who made services we love and wake up cruel misers who clawed away all the value we created together.
Rather, these people – leaders of tech companies and the managers and product designers they command – have found themselves in an environment where the constraints that kept them honest have melted away. Whereas before a manager who was tempted to enshittify their offerings had their hand stayed by the fear of some penalty, today, those penalties are greatly reduced or eliminated altogether.
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Today for my podcast, I read Precaratize Bosses, a recent essay from my Pluralistic.net newsletter.
I recorded this on a day when I was home between book-tour stops (I’m out with my new techno crime-thriller, The Bezzle). Catch me this Thursday (May 2) in Winnipeg with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, then in Calgary with Wordfest on May 3, then in Vancouver at Massy Arts om May 4, then in Tartu, Estonia for a series of events with the Prima Vista Literary Festival (May 6-11), and beyond! The canonical link for the schedule is here.
Combine Angelou’s “When someone shows you who they are, believe them” with the truism that in politics, “every accusation is a confession” and you get: “Every time someone accuses you of a vice, they’re showing you who they are and you should believe them.”
Let’s talk about some of those accusations. Remember the moral panic over the CARES Act covid stimulus checks? Hyperventilating mouthpieces for the ruling class were on every cable network, complaining that “no one wants to work anymore.” The barely-submerged subtext was their belief that the only reason people show up for work is that they’re afraid of losing everything – their homes, their kids, the groceries in their fridge.
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Here’s that tour schedule!
2 May, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Winnipeg
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cory-doctorow-tickets-798820071337
3 May, Wordfest, Calgary
https://wordfest.com/2024/event/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2/
4 May, Massy Arts, Vancouver
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/solo-reading-cory-doctorow-the-bezzle-tickets-876989167207
5-11 May: Tartu Prima Vista Literary Festival
https://tartu2024.ee/en/kirjandusfestival/
6-9 Jun: Media Ecology Association keynote, Amherst, NY
https://media-ecology.org/convention
(Image: Vlad Lazarenko, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified)
Today for my podcast, I read Capitalists Hate Capitalism, my latest column from Locus Magazine. It’s a meditation on the difference between feudalism and capitalism, and how to know which one you’re living under.
I recorded this on a day when I was home between book-tour stops (I’m out with my new techno crime-thriller, The Bezzle). Catch me this Wednesday (Apr 17) in Chicago at Anderson’s Books, then in Torino for the Biennale keynote on Apr 21, then in Marin County at Book Passage Corte Madera on Apr 27, then in Winnipeg, Calgary, Vancouver, and beyond! The canonical link for the schedule is here.
Varoufakis’s argument turns on an important distinction between two types of income: profits and rents. These terms have colloquial meanings that are widely understood, but Varoufakis is interested in the precise technical definitions used by economists.
For an economist, ‘‘profit’’ is income obtained by mixing capital – tools, machines, systems – with your employees’ labor. The value created by that labor is then divided between the worker, who draws a wage, and the capitalist, who takes the rest as profit.
‘‘Rent,’’ meanwhile, was income derived from owning something that the capitalist needs in order to realize a profit. In feudal times, hereditary lords owned plots of land that serfs were bound to, and those serfs owed an annual rent to their lords. This wasn’t a great deal for the serfs, but it also needled the nascent capitalist class, who would have very much preferred to have those lands enclosed for sheep grazing. The sheep would produce wool, which could be woven into cloth in the ‘‘dark, Satanic mills’’ of the industrial revolution. The former serfs, turned off their land, could be set to work in those factories.
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Here’s that tour schedule!
17 Apr: Anderson’s Books, Chicago, 19h:
https://www.andersonsbookshop.com/event/cory-doctorow-1
19-21 Apr: Torino Biennale Tecnologia
https://www.turismotorino.org/en/experiences/events/biennale-tecnologia
2 May, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Winnipeg
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cory-doctorow-tickets-798820071337
3 May, Wordfest, Calgary
https://wordfest.com/2024/event/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2/
4 May, Massy Arts, Vancouver
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/solo-reading-cory-doctorow-the-bezzle-tickets-876989167207
5-11 May: Tartu Prima Vista Literary Festival
https://tartu2024.ee/en/kirjandusfestival/
6-9 Jun: Media Ecology Association keynote, Amherst, NY
https://media-ecology.org/convention
(Image: Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0, modified)
I’m about to hit the road again for a series of back-to-back public appearances as I travel with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle. I’ll be in Los Angeles, Boston, Providence, Chicago, Turin, Marin, Winnipeg, Calgary, Vancouver, and Tartu, Estonia!
- Los Angeles: UCLA Institute for Law, Technology and Policy, April 10, 1215PM
https://pages.e2ma.net/pages/1972582/47480 - Boston: Harvard Pound Hall, with Randall “XKCD” Munroe, April 11, 6PM (note: we’ve moved this to a bigger hall – a new block of free tickets were just released!)
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/enshittification - Providence, RI: RISD Debates in AI, April 12
https://involved.risd.edu/event/9777963 - Chicago: Anderson’s Books (Napierville), April 17, 7PM
https://www.andersonsbookshop.com/event/cory-doctorow-1 - Turin, Italy: Torino Biennale Tecnologia, April 21, 6:30PM
https://www.biennaletecnologia.it/evento/come-sfuggire-al-merdocene-e-costruire-un-internet-migliore/ - Marin: Book Passage Corte Madera, April 27, 1PM
https://www.bookpassage.com/event/cory-doctorow-bezzle-martin-hench-novel-corte-madera-store - Winnipeg: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, May 2, 7PM
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cory-doctorow-tickets-798820071337 - Calgary: Wordfest, May 3, 7PM
https://wordfest.com/2024/event/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2/ - Vancouver: Massy Arts, May 4, 6PM
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/solo-reading-cory-doctorow-the-bezzle-tickets-876989167207 - Tartu, Estonia: Prima Vista Literary Festival, May 5-11
https://tartu2024.ee/en/kirjandusfestival/
I hope to see you! Bring friends!
Today for my podcast, I read Subprime gadgets, originally published in my Pluralistic blog:
I recorded this on a day when I was home between book-tour stops (I’m out with my new techno crime-thriller, The Bezzle). Catch me on April 11 in Boston with Randall Munroe, on April 12th in Providence, Rhode Island, then onto Chicago, Torino, Winnipeg, Calgary, Vancouver and beyond! The canonical link for the schedule is here.
The promise of feudal security: “Surrender control over your digital life so that we, the wise, giant corporation, can ensure that you aren’t tricked into catastrophic blunders that expose you to harm”:
https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/
The tech giant is a feudal warlord whose platform is a fortress; move into the fortress and the warlord will defend you against the bandits roaming the lawless land beyond its walls.
That’s the promise, here’s the failure: What happens when the warlord decides to attack you? If a tech giant decides to do something that harms you, the fortress becomes a prison and the thick walls keep you in.
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Here’s that tour schedule!
11 Apr: Harvard Berkman-Klein Center, with Randall Munroe
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/enshittification
12 Apr: RISD Debates in AI, Providence
17 Apr: Anderson’s Books, Chicago, 19h:
https://www.andersonsbookshop.com/event/cory-doctorow-1
19-21 Apr: Torino Biennale Tecnologia
https://www.turismotorino.org/en/experiences/events/biennale-tecnologia
2 May, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Winnipeg
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cory-doctorow-tickets-798820071337
5-11 May: Tartu Prima Vista Literary Festival
https://tartu2024.ee/en/kirjandusfestival/
6-9 Jun: Media Ecology Association keynote, Amherst, NY
https://media-ecology.org/convention
(Image: Oatsy, CC BY 2.0, modified)
At long last, the San Francisco stop of the book tour for my new novel The Bezzle has been finalized: I’ll be at the San Francisco Public Library Main Branch on Wednesday, March 13th, in conversation with Robin Sloan!
The event starts at 6PM with Cooper Quintin from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, talking about the real horrors of the prison-tech industry, which I fictionalize in The Bezzle.
Attentive readers will know that this event was finalized very late in the day, and it’s going to need a little help, given the short timeline. Please consider coming – and be sure to tell your Bay Area friends about the gig!
Wednesday, 3/13/2024
6:00 – 7:30
Koret Auditorium
Main Library
100 Larkin Street
San Francisco, CA 94102
Today for my podcast, I read The majority of censorship is self-censorship, originally published in my Pluralistic blog. It’s a breakdown of Ada Palmer’s excellent Reactor essay about the modern and historical context of censorship.
I recorded this on a day when I was home between book-tour stops (I’m out with my new techno crime-thriller, The Bezzle. Catch me tomorrow (Monday) in Seattle with Neal Stephenson at Third Place Books. Then it’s Powell’s in Portland, and then Tuscon. The canonical link for the schedule is here.
States – even very powerful states – that wish to censor lack the resources to accomplish totalizing censorship of the sort depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four. They can’t go from house to house, searching every nook and cranny for copies of forbidden literature. The only way to kill an idea is to stop people from expressing it in the first place. Convincing people to censor themselves is, “dollar for dollar and man-hour for man-hour, much cheaper and more impactful than anything else a censorious regime can do.”
Ada invokes examples modern and ancient, including from her own area of specialty, the Inquisition and its treatment of Gailileo. The Inquistions didn’t set out to silence Galileo. If that had been its objective, it could have just assassinated him. This was cheap, easy and reliable! Instead, the Inquisition persecuted Galileo, in a very high-profile manner, making him and his ideas far more famous.
But this isn’t some early example of Inquisitorial Streisand Effect. The point of persecuting Galileo was to convince Descartes to self-censor, which he did. He took his manuscript back from the publisher and cut the sections the Inquisition was likely to find offensive. It wasn’t just Descartes: “thousands of other major thinkers of the time wrote differently, spoke differently, chose different projects, and passed different ideas on to the next century because they self-censored after the Galileo trial.”
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Here’s that tour schedule!
26 Feb: Third Place Books, Seattle, 19h, with Neal Stephenson (!!!)
https://www.thirdplacebooks.com/event/cory-doctorow
27 Feb: Powell’s, Portland, 19h:
https://www.powells.com/book/the-bezzle-martin-hench-2-9781250865878/1-2
29 Feb: Changing Hands, Phoenix, 1830h:
https://www.changinghands.com/event/february2024/cory-doctorow
9-10 Mar: Tucson Festival of the Book:
https://tucsonfestivalofbooks.org/?action=display_author&id=15669
13 Mar: San Francisco Public Library, details coming soon!
23 or 24 Mar: Toronto, details coming soon!
25-27 Mar: NYC and DC, details coming soon!
29-31 Mar: Wondercon Anaheim:
https://www.comic-con.org/wc/
11 Apr: Boston, details coming soon!
12 Apr: RISD Debates in AI, Providence, details coming soon!
17 Apr: Anderson’s Books, Chicago, 19h:
https://www.andersonsbookshop.com/event/cory-doctorow-1
19-21 Apr: Torino Biennale Tecnologia
https://www.turismotorino.org/en/experiences/events/biennale-tecnologia
2 May, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Winnipeg
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cory-doctorow-tickets-798820071337
5-11 May: Tartu Prima Vista Literary Festival
https://tartu2024.ee/en/kirjandusfestival/
6-9 Jun: Media Ecology Association keynote, Amherst, NY
https://media-ecology.org/convention
Today for my podcast, I read How I Got Scammed, originally published in my Pluralistic blog. It’s a story of how the attacker has to get lucky once, while the defender has to never make a single mistake.
This is my last podcast before I take off for my next book-tour, for my new novel, The Bezzle. I’m ranging far and wide: LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, Calgary, Phoenix, Portland, Providence, Boston, New York City, Toronto, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Tucson, Chicago, Buffalo, as well as Torino and Tartu.
My first two stops are Weller Bookworks in Salt Lake City on Feb 21 and Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego on Feb 22, followed by LA (with Adam Conover!), Seattle (with Neal Stephenson!), and Portland. The canonical link for the schedule is here.
I wuz robbed.
More specifically, I was tricked by a phone-phisher pretending to be from my bank, and he convinced me to hand over my credit-card number, then did $8,000+ worth of fraud with it before I figured out what happened. And then he tried to do it again, a week later!
Here’s what happened. Over the Christmas holiday, I traveled to New Orleans. The day we landed, I hit a Chase ATM in the French Quarter for some cash, but the machine declined the transaction. Later in the day, we passed a little credit-union’s ATM and I used that one instead (I bank with a one-branch credit union and generally there’s no fee to use another CU’s ATM).
A couple days later, I got a call from my credit union. It was a weekend, during the holiday, and the guy who called was obviously working for my little CU’s after-hours fraud contractor. I’d dealt with these folks before – they service a ton of little credit unions, and generally the call quality isn’t great and the staff will often make mistakes like mispronouncing my credit union’s name.
That’s what happened here – the guy was on a terrible VOIP line and I had to ask him to readjust his mic before I could even understand him. He mispronounced my bank’s name and then asked if I’d attempted to spend $1,000 at an Apple Store in NYC that day. No, I said, and groaned inwardly. What a pain in the ass. Obviously, I’d had my ATM card skimmed – either at the Chase ATM (maybe that was why the transaction failed), or at the other credit union’s ATM (it had been a very cheap looking system).
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(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)
Here’s that tour schedule!
21 Feb: Weller Bookworks, Salt Lake City, 1830h:
https://www.wellerbookworks.com/event/store-cory-doctorow-feb-21-630-pm
22 Feb: Mysterious Galaxy, San Diego, 19h:
https://www.mystgalaxy.com/22224Doctorow
24 Feb: Vroman’s, Pasadena, 17h, with Adam Conover (!!)
https://www.vromansbookstore.com/Cory-Doctorow-discusses-The-Bezzle
26 Feb: Third Place Books, Seattle, 19h, with Neal Stephenson (!!!)
https://www.thirdplacebooks.com/event/cory-doctorow
27 Feb: Powell’s, Portland, 19h:
https://www.powells.com/book/the-bezzle-martin-hench-2-9781250865878/1-2
29 Feb: Changing Hands, Phoenix, 1830h:
https://www.changinghands.com/event/february2024/cory-doctorow
9-10 Mar: Tucson Festival of the Book:
https://tucsonfestivalofbooks.org/?action=display_author&id=15669
13 Mar: San Francisco Public Library, details coming soon!
23 or 24 Mar: Toronto, details coming soon!
25-27 Mar: NYC and DC, details coming soon!
29-31 Mar: Wondercon Anaheim:
https://www.comic-con.org/wc/
11 Apr: Boston, details coming soon!
12 Apr: RISD Debates in AI, Providence, details coming soon!
17 Apr: Anderson’s Books, Chicago, 19h:
https://www.andersonsbookshop.com/event/cory-doctorow-1
19-21 Apr: Torino Biennale Tecnologia
https://www.turismotorino.org/en/experiences/events/biennale-tecnologia
2 May, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Winnipeg
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cory-doctorow-tickets-798820071337
5-11 May: Tartu Prima Vista Literary Festival
https://tartu2024.ee/en/kirjandusfestival/
6-9 Jun: Media Ecology Association keynote, Amherst, NY
https://media-ecology.org/convention
My next novel is The Bezzle, a high-tech ice-cold revenge thriller starring Marty Hench, a two-fisted forensic accountant, as he takes on the sleaziest scams of the first two decades of the 2000s, from hamburger-themed Ponzis to the unbelievably sleazy and evil prison-tech industry:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle
I’m taking Marty on the road! I’ll be visiting eighteen cities between now and June, and I hope you’ll come out and say hello, visit a beloved local bookseller, and maybe get a book (or two)!
21 Feb: Weller Bookworks, Salt Lake City, 1830h:
https://www.wellerbookworks.com/event/store-cory-doctorow-feb-21-630-pm
22 Feb: Mysterious Galaxy, San Diego, 19h:
https://www.mystgalaxy.com/22224Doctorow
24 Feb: Vroman’s, Pasadena, 17h, with Adam Conover (!!)
https://www.vromansbookstore.com/Cory-Doctorow-discusses-The-Bezzle
26 Feb: Third Place Books, Seattle, 19h, with Neal Stephenson (!!!)
https://www.thirdplacebooks.com/event/cory-doctorow
27 Feb: Powell’s, Portland, 19h:
https://www.powells.com/book/the-bezzle-martin-hench-2-9781250865878/1-2
29 Feb: Changing Hands, Phoenix, 1830h:
https://www.changinghands.com/event/february2024/cory-doctorow
9-10 Mar: Tucson Festival of the Book:
https://tucsonfestivalofbooks.org/?action=display_author&id=15669
13 Mar: San Francisco Public Library (with Robin Sloan):
https://sfpl.org/events/2024/03/13/author-cory-doctrow-bezzle
22 Mar: Wendy Michener Memorial Lecture (Toronto):
https://events.yorku.ca/events/wendy-michener-memorial-lecture2024/
24 Mar: Word Books Brooklyn (with Laura Poitras) (NYC):
https://shop.wordbookstores.com/event/word-presents-cory-doctorow
29-31 Mar: Wondercon Anaheim:
https://www.comic-con.org/wc/
10 Apr: UCLA Institute for Law, Technology and Policy, 1215PM (Los Angeles):
https://pages.e2ma.net/pages/1972582/47480
11 Apr: Harvard Berkman-Klein Center, with Randall Munroe
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/enshittification
12 Apr: RISD Debates in AI, Providence
17 Apr: Anderson’s Books, Chicago, 19h:
https://www.andersonsbookshop.com/event/cory-doctorow-1
21 Apr: Torino Biennale Tecnologia
https://www.biennaletecnologia.it/evento/come-sfuggire-al-merdocene-e-costruire-un-internet-migliore/
27 Apr: Book Passage Corte Madera, 1PM (Marin County)
https://www.bookpassage.com/event/cory-doctorow-bezzle-martin-hench-novel-corte-madera-store
2 May, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Winnipeg
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cory-doctorow-tickets-798820071337
3 May, Wordfest, 7PM (Calgary):
https://wordfest.com/2024/event/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2/
4 May, Massy Arts, 6PM (Vancouver)
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/solo-reading-cory-doctorow-the-bezzle-tickets-876989167207
5-11 May: Tartu Prima Vista Literary Festival
https://tartu2024.ee/en/kirjandusfestival/
6-9 Jun: Media Ecology Association keynote, Amherst, NY
https://media-ecology.org/convention
Last week, I traveled to Berlin to give the annual Marshall McLuhan lecture to open the Transmediale festival. I gave the talk to a full house at the Canadian embassy, and the embassy was kind enough to upload their video of the speech. This podcast is a rip of the audio from that Youtube video. I’ve also posted a transcript of the talk.
Last year, I coined the term ‘enshittification,’ to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers, it really hit the zeitgeist. I mean, the American Dialect Society made it their Word of the Year for 2023 (which, I suppose, means that now I’m definitely getting a poop emoji on my tombstone).
So what’s enshittification and why did it catch fire? It’s my theory explaining how the internet was colonized by platforms, and why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, and why it matters – and what we can do about it.
We’re all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit.
It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. It’s even terrifying.
I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the ‘great forces of history,’ and into the material world of specific decisions made by named people – decisions we can reverse and people whose addresses and pitchfork sizes we can learn.
Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It’s not just a way to say ‘things are getting worse’ (though of course, it’s fine with me if you want to use it that way. It’s an English word. We don’t have der Rat für englische Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).
But in case you want to use enshittification in a more precise, technical way, let’s examine how enshittification works.
It’s a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
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This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column. “What kind of bubble is AI?” In it, I ask what will be left behind after the AI bubble bursts:
You’ve got one week left to back the Kickstarter for my next novel, The Bezzle, the followup to Red Team Blues. I’m preselling hardcovers, ebooks, and an audiobook read by Wil Wheaton. Please consider backing it and helping support my work (including this podcast!).
But the most important residue after the bubble popped was the millions of young people who’d been lured into dropping out of university in order to take dotcom jobs where they got all-expenses paid crash courses in HTML, Perl, and Python. This army of technologists was unique in that they were drawn from all sorts of backgrounds – art-school dropouts, humanities dropouts, dropouts from earth science and bioscience programs and other disciplines that had historically been consumers of technology, not producers of it.
This created a weird and often wonderful dynamic in the Bay Area, a brief respite between the go-go days of Bubble 1.0 and Bubble 2.0, a time when the cost of living plummeted in the Bay Area, as did the cost of office space, as did the cost of servers. People started making technology because it served a need, or because it delighted them, or both. Technologists briefly operated without the goad of VCs’ growth-at-all-costs spurs.
The bubble was terrible. VCs and scammers scooped up billions from pension funds and other institutional investors and wasted it on obviously doomed startups. But after all that “irrational exuberance” burned away, the ashes proved a fertile ground for new growth.
Contrast that bubble with, say, cryptocurrency/NFTs, or the complex financial derivatives that led up to the 2008 financial crisis. These crises left behind very little reusable residue. The expensively retrained physicists whom the finance sector taught to generate wildly defective risk-hedging algorithms were not able to apply that knowledge to create successor algorithms that were useful. The fraud of the cryptocurrency bubble was far more pervasive than the fraud in the dotcom bubble, so much so that without the fraud, there’s almost nothing left. A few programmers were trained in Rust, a very secure programming language that is broadly applicable elsewhere. But otherwise, the residue from crypto is a lot of bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.
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This week on my podcast, a preview of Wil Wheaton’s reading on the audiobook of The Bezzle, which I’m preselling through a Kickstarter campaign that I hope you’ll consider backing!
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This week on my podcast, I read my final Medium column
The internet’s original sin, about the failure of trying to stretch copyright to cover every problem on the internet.
Copyright is a regulation. It regulates the supply-chain of the entertainment industry. Copyright matters a lot to me, because I’m in the industry.
But unless you’re in the industry, it shouldn’t matter to you.
It’s fine to require a grasp of copyright among people who write, publish and distribute novels — but it’s bananas to require people who read novels to understand copyright.
And yet, here we are.
The test for whether copyright applies to you — for whether you are part of the entertainment industry’s supply chain — is whether you are making or dealing in copies of creative works. This test was once a very good one.
Back when every book had a printing press in its history, every record a record-pressing plant, every film a film-lab, “making or handling copies of creative works” was a pretty good test to determine whether someone was part of the entertainment industry. Even if it turned out they weren’t, the kind of person who has a record-pressing plant can afford to consult an expert to make sure they’re on the right side of the law.
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12 years ago, my four-year-old daughter’s nursery school let us know they’d be shutting down for Christmas a day before my wife’s office closed down, so I took the kid into my office in London to do some coloring, play with toys, and, eventually, record a podcast. It was hilarious.
In the years since, we’ve done this nine more times (we missed one year, after my podcasting mic got broken during our move to Los Angeles). Now the kid is fifteen (!), learning to drive (!!), and I still managed to get her on the mic for a session to discuss her hobbies, TV shows, online habits, and musical favorites, and once again, we sang a seasonal song!
Here are the previous year’s installments: 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022.
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This week on my podcast, I read my Locus Magazine column “Don’t Be Evil,” about the microeconomics and moral injury of enshittification.
It’s tempting to think of the Great Enshittening – in which all the internet services we enjoyed and came to rely upon became suddenly and irreversibly terrible – as the result of moral decay. That is, it’s tempting to think that the people who gave us the old, good internet did so because they were good people, and the people who enshittified it did so because they are shitty people.
But the services that defined the old, good internet weren’t designed or maintained by individuals; they were created by institutions – mostly for-profit companies, but also non-profits, government and military agencies and academic and research facilities. Institutions are made up of individuals, of course, but the thing that makes an institution institutional is that no one person can direct it. The actions of an institution are the result of its many individual constituent parts, both acting in concert, and acting against one another.
In other words: institutional action is the result of its individuals resolving their conflicts. Institutional action is the net results of wheedling, horse-trading, solidarity, skullduggery, power-moves, trickery, coercion, rational argument, love, spite, ferocity, and indifference among the institution’s members.
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Today is the day that my new novel, The Lost Cause, goes on sale, and I’m hitting the road with it! I hope you can make it out – tell your friends!
Los Angeles: I’ll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library tonight, Monday, November 13 at 1830hPT; there’ll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!
https://www.lapl.org/whats-on/events/author-talk-cory-doctorow
Stratford, Ontario: I’m onstage on November 16 at 19hET with Vass Bednar at the University of Waterloo Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business. I’ll also be doing a talk for middle-schoolers at the Stratford Public Library on November 16 from 1330hET-1430hET.
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cbc-ideas-visionaries-in-conversation-tickets-729692809837
https://www.provocation.ca/upcoming-2023-events-stratford
Concord, NH: I’ll be at Gibson’s Bookstore on Saturday, November 18th at 13hET.
https://www.gibsonsbookstore.com/event/doctorow-lost-cause
Simsbury, CT: I’m at the Simsbury Public Library on November 20 at 19h.
https://simsbury.librarycalendar.com/event/author-visit-cory-doctorow-29257
Toronto, ON: I’m at the Metro Reference Library on November 22, at 19hET, hosted by Vass Bednar.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230907160105/https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/detail.jsp?Entt=RDMEVT495758&R=EVT495758
Toronto, ON: I’m hosting Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, on November 27 at 19hET, at the Metro Reference Library.
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/who-is-watching-big-tech-tickets-707927880347
New York City: I’m at the Strand Bookstore on November 29 at 19hET.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-the-lost-cause-tickets-734958008187
Chapel Hill, NC: I’m at Flyleaf Books on December 5, live with Sarah Taber, at 18hET.
https://www.flyleafbooks.com/doctorow-2023
If you don’t see your city on this list, don’t panic! I’ve got another tour coming in a couple of months, when The Bezzle, sequel to Red Team Blues, comes out in February:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle
This week on my podcast, I read my short story “Moral Hazard,” published last month in MIT Press’s Communications Breakdown, a science fiction anthology edited by Jonathan Strahan. “Moral Hazard” is a story about inequality, fintech, and the problems of “solutionism.”
I know exactly where I was the day I decided to give every homeless person in America their own LLC. I was in the southeast corner of the sprawling homeless camp that had once been Seattle’s Discovery Park on a rare, dry February afternoon. The sun was weak but so welcome. After weeks of sheltering in our tents and squelching through the mud and getting drenched waiting for the portas, we were finally able to break out the folding chairs and enjoy each other’s company.
Mike the Bike had coffee. He always did. Mike knew more ways to make coffee than any fancy barista. He had a master’s in chemical engineering and a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering and when he was high he spent every second of the buzz thinking of new ways to combine heat and water and solids to produce a perfect brew.
I brought trail mix, which I mixed up myself with food-bank supplies and spices I bought from the bulk place for pennies. My secret is cardamom and a little chili powder. I learned that from my Mom.
“Trish,” Mike the Bike said, “I wish I was a corporation.”
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This week on my podcast, I read the second and final part of my short story, “The Canadian Miracle,” a story set in the world of my forthcoming pre-apocalyptic Green New Deal novel, The Lost Cause, which comes out on November 14.
Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping. -Fred Rogers, 1986
It’s a treat to beat your feet on the Mississippi Mud. -Bing Crosby, 1927.
I arrived in Oxford with the first wave of Blue Helmets, choppered in along with our gear, touching down on a hospital roof, both so that our doctors and nurses could get straight to work, and also because it was one of the few buildings left with a helipad and backup generators and its own water filtration.
Humping my bag down the stairs to the waterlogged ground levels was a nightmare, even by Calgary standards. People lay on the stairs, sick and injured, and navigating them without stepping on them was like an endless nightmare of near-falls and weak moans from people too weak to curse me. I met a nurse halfway down and she took my bag from me and set it down on the landing and gave me a warm hug. “Welcome,” she said, and looked deep into my eyes. We were both young and both women but she was Black and American and I was white and Canadian. I came from a country where, for the first time in a hundred years, there was a generation that wasn’t terrified of the future. She came from a country where everybody knew they had no future.
I hugged her back and she told me my lips were cracked and ordered me to drink water and watched me do it. “This lady’s with the Canadians. They came to help,” she said to her patients on the stairs. Some of them smiled and murmured at me. Others just stared at the back of their eyelids, reliving their traumas or tracing the contours of their pain.
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This week on my podcast, I read part one of my short story, “The Canadian Miracle,” a story set in the world of my forthcoming pre-apocalyptic Green New Deal novel, The Lost Cause, which comes out on November 14.
Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping. -Fred Rogers, 1986
It’s a treat to beat your feet on the Mississippi Mud. -Bing Crosby, 1927.
I arrived in Oxford with the first wave of Blue Helmets, choppered in along with our gear, touching down on a hospital roof, both so that our doctors and nurses could get straight to work, and also because it was one of the few buildings left with a helipad and backup generators and its own water filtration.
Humping my bag down the stairs to the waterlogged ground levels was a nightmare, even by Calgary standards. People lay on the stairs, sick and injured, and navigating them without stepping on them was like an endless nightmare of near-falls and weak moans from people too weak to curse me. I met a nurse halfway down and she took my bag from me and set it down on the landing and gave me a warm hug. “Welcome,” she said, and looked deep into my eyes. We were both young and both women but she was Black and American and I was white and Canadian. I came from a country where, for the first time in a hundred years, there was a generation that wasn’t terrified of the future. She came from a country where everybody knew they had no future.
I hugged her back and she told me my lips were cracked and ordered me to drink water and watched me do it. “This lady’s with the Canadians. They came to help,” she said to her patients on the stairs. Some of them smiled and murmured at me. Others just stared at the back of their eyelids, reliving their traumas or tracing the contours of their pain.
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This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, “Microincentives and Enshittification” (open access link), about how Google went from being a company whose products were eerily good and whose corporate might was more often on the side of right than wrong, to being a company whose products are locked in a terminal enshittification spiral and whose lobbying might is firmly on the wrong side of history.
Let’s start with how hard it is to not use Google. Google spends fifty billion dollars per year on deals to be the default search engine for Apple, Samsung, Firefox and elsewhere. Google spends a whole-ass Twitter, every single year, just to make sure you never accidentally try another search engine.
Small wonder there are so few search alternatives — and small wonder that the most promising ones are suffocated for lack of market oxygen.
Google Search is as big as it could possibly be. The sub-ten-percent of the search market that Google doesn’t own isn’t ever going to voluntarily come into the Google fold. Those brave iconoclasts are intimately familiar with Google Search and have had to override one or more defaults in order to get shut of it. They aren’t customers-in-waiting who just need a little more persuading.
That means that Google Search can’t grow by adding new customers. It can only grow by squeezing its existing customers harder.
For Google Search to increase its profits, it must shift value from web publishers, advertisers and/or users to itself.
The only way for Google Search to grow is to make itself worse.
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This week on my podcast, I present the prologue and first chapter of The Lost Cause, my forthcoming solarpunk novel of Green New Deal world threatened by seagoing anarcho-capitalist billionaire wreckers and their white nationalist militia shock-troops. The book comes out on November 14 from Tor/Macmillan (US/Canada) and Head of Zeus/Bloomsbury (UK/Australia/NZ/SA, etc). As with all my books, I’ve had to produce my own audio edition, because Amazon refuses to carry my work in audio form. You can pre-order the DRM-free audio and ebook and the hardcover through my Kickstarter.
If you like my work and have ever wanted to say thank you, this is the best way to do so. These kickstarters don’t just pay my bills, they also provide the financial cushion that lets me produce all the free work I’ve done for decades, including this podcast. What’s more, they help me show other authors and the publishing world that when writers have their readers’ backs, readers will return the favor.
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This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column. “How To Think About Scraping: In privacy and labor fights, copyright is a clumsy tool at best,” about the real risks (and benefits) of web-scraping, and how to formulate policy responses that preserve those benefits while targeting the harms head-on”
Scraping when the scrapee suffers as a result of your scraping is good, actually.
Mario Zechner is an Austrian technologist who used the APIs of large grocery chains to prove that they were colluding to rig prices. Zechner was able to create a corpus of historical price and product data to show how grocers used a raft of deceptive practices to trick people into thinking they were getting a good deal, from shrinkflation to cyclic price changes that were deceptively billed as “discounts.”
At first, Zechner worked alone and in fear of reprisals from the giant corporations whose fraudulent practices — which affected every person in the country — he had revealed.
But eventually, he was able to get the Austrian bureaucrat in charge of enforcing competition rules to publish a report lauding his work. Zechner open-sourced his project and attracted volunteers who started pulling in data from Germany and Slovenia.
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(Image: syvwlch, CC BY 2.0, modified)
This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column. “Enshitternet: The old, good internet deserves a new, good internet,” clarifying that our aspiration shouldn’t be to restore the internet’s former glory, but to make a new and glorious internet. The enshitternet wasn’t inevitable. It was the result of specific policy choices: the decision... more
This week’s podcast is a special one: the introduction and chapter one of the audio edition of The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation, which Verso will publish on September 5, 2023. I made my own DRM-free audiobook for this, reading it under the direction of the incredible Gabrielle de Cuir at... more
This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column. “Let the Platforms Burn: The Opposite of Good Fires is Wildfires,” making the case that we should focus more on making it easier for people to leave platforms, rather than making the platforms less terrible places to be. Tech bosses know the only thing... more
This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column. “Ideas Lying Around,” about archivillain Milton Friedman’s surprisingly good theory of change, and how to apply it to progressive politics. Enter Friedman: to people reeling in crisis, Friedman insisted that the missing oil was somehow the product of unionization, pollution controls, women’s lib, and... more
This week on my podcast, I read my lastest Locus column. “The Swivel-Eyed Loons Have a Point,” about the unlikely – but undeniable – common ground I share with the most unhinged far-right conspiracists.
The swivel-eyed loons at the anti-15-minute-city protests point out that such a scheme constitutes a form of pervasive location-tracking surveillance, and that this surveillance could be leveraged to attack disfavored minorities. They’re not wrong. Just look at London, where a (again, perfectly sensible) system of “congestion charging” and “low-emissions zones” has made serious progress in improving the air quality, reducing traffic, and improving journey times for public transit.
London also uses ALPRs to enforce its traffic restrictions, and pairs this with a massive public/private network of street cameras aimed at pedestrians, backstopped by a public transit system whose Oyster payment cards are virtually impossible to use anonymously.
The thing is, the UK government has a long history of abusing this kind of power. The Metropolitan London police ran a 40-year covert operation to infiltrate, track, and disrupt trade union organizers and activists, from students to Members of Parliament. The Met also colluded with large construction firms to maintain a secret blacklist of union organizers who were denied employment and had their lives ruined.
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Burbank: Apr 26, 6PM, Dark Delicacies
San Francisco: Apr 30, 2PM, San Francisco Public Library (with Annalee Newitz)
PDX/Cedar Hills: May 2, 7PM, Powell’s (with Andy Baio)
Mountain View: May 5, 7PM, Books, Inc (with Mitch Kapor)
Berkeley: May 6/7, Bay Area Book Fair (with Glynn Washington and Wendy Liu)
Vancouver: May 10, 9:50AM, Open Source Summit
Vancouver: May 10, 6:30PM, Heritage Hall (with Sean Cranbury)
Edmonton, May 11, 7PM, Wordfest (with Peter Hemminger)
Gaithersburg, May 20, 3:15PM, Gaithersburg Book Festival
DC, May 22, Public Knowledge Emerging Tech Conference (keynote)
Toronto: May 23, 8PM, WEPFest (with with The Rheostatics’ Dave Bidini, Citizen Lab’s Ron Deibert, and the whistleblower Nancy Olivieri)
Hay-on-Wye: May 27/28, HowTheLightGetsIn
Oxford: May 29, 7PM, Blackwell’s (with Tim Harford)
Nottingham: May 30, 6:30PM, Waterstones (with Christian Reilly)
Manchester: May 31, 6:30PM, Waterstones (with Ian Forrester)
London: Jun 1, 2PM, UCL Peter Kirstein Lecture
Edinburgh: Jun 3, Cymera Festival
London: Jun 5, 7:15PM, British Library (with Baroness Martha Lane Fox)
Berlin: Jun 7, Re:publica keynote (with Rebecca Giblin)
This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column. “How To Make a Child-Safe TikTok: Have you tried not spying on kids,” about the bizarre unwillingness of considering a middle-ground between “unregulated TikTok” and “banning TikTok” – namely, prohibiting TikTok from spying on kids.
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(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; Vxla, CC BY 2.0; modified)
This week on my podcast, I bring you some clips of Wil Wheaton’s recording sessions for the audiobook of Red Team Blues, my next novel, an anti-finance finance thriller starring the 67 year old forensic accountant Martin Hench, who specializes in high-tech scams.
I’m currently kickstarting this audiobook, pre-selling audiobooks, ebooks and hardcovers. I have to self-produce my own audiobooks, because Audible – the monopolist audiobook division of Amazon – refuses to carry DRM-free titles like mine.
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This week on my podcast, I read a selection from my next novel, Red Team Blues, an anti-finance finance thriller about Marty Hench, a 67 year old hard-charging forensic accountant who’s seen every finance scam that Silicon Valley has come up with over the previous 40 years. Marty’s ready to retire, but an old friend pulls him in for one last job, an offer he can’t refuse: recovering the stolen keys to a hidden backdoor in a cryptocurrency system that are worth more than a billion dollars. Recovering the keys turns out to be the easy part: the hard part is surviving the three-way war that is ignited in their wake, between Azerbaijani money-launderers, Mexican narcos, and crooked three-letter agencies.
I’m currently kickstarting a real audiobook of this one, and I’m going into the studio with Wil Wheaton on Monday. If you enjoy my stories, articles and podcasts and want to know how to show your gratitude, please consider backing this kickstarter by pre-ordering an audiobook, ebook, and/or hardcover.
One evening, I got a wild hair and drove all night from San Diego to Menlo Park. Why Menlo Park? It had both a triple-Michelin-star place and a dear old friend both within spitting distance of the Walmart parking lot, where I could park the Unsalted Hash, leaving me free to drink as much as I cared to and still be able to
walk home and crawl into bed.I’d done a job that turned out better than I’d expected—well enough that I was set for the year if I lived carefully. I didn’t want to live carefully. The age for that was long past. I wanted to live it up. There’d be more work. I wanted to celebrate.
Truth be told, I also didn’t want to contemplate the possibility that, at the age of sixty-seven, the new work might stop coming in. Silicon Valley hates old people, but that was okay, because I hated Silicon Valley. Professionally, that is.
Getting close to Bakersfield, I pulled the Unsalted Hash into a rest stop to stretch my legs and check my phone. After a putter around the picnic tables and vending machine, I walked the perimeter of my foolish and ungainly and luxurious tour bus, checking the tires and making sure the cargo compartments were dogged and locked. I climbed back in, checked my sludge levels and decided they were low enough that I could use my own toilet, then, finally, having forced myself to wait, sat on one of the buttery leather chairs and checked my messages.
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This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk, making the Luddite case against bossware and other jobs where your boss is an app.
The rise of gig work produced a massive surge of “craft” workers who toiled on their own premises, most notably the drivers for Uber, Lyft, Doordash and delivery services who worked from their own cars, assured that they were independent businesspeople, able to book the hours and jobs they wanted. If the scenery caught their eye, they could pull over to the side of the road, get out of their cars and touch grass — and no one would even know they did it, much less punish them for it.
The pandemic lockdowns accelerated this process, as bossware made the leap from the low-waged, precarious Black women who were trapped by Arise’s predatory home call-centers to all kinds of white-collar workers who were told they were working from home, but who were really living at work.
Bossware — technology that monitors every click, every keystroke, and the streams from your device’s cameras and microphones — is everywhere today. Even so, blue collar workers have it the worst: they are the chickenized reverse-centaurs, forced to pay for their own working equipment, then minutely monitored, down to their facial expressions, and minutely choreographed, down to their eye-movements, to make sure their bosses are getting every penny’s worth of value out of their bodies.
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This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, Twiddler, which further explores my theory of enshittification, and the factors that make it endemic to digital platforms.
The early internet promised more than disintermediation — it also promised endless configurability, where users and technologists could install after-market code that altered the functioning of the services they relied on, seizing the means of computation to tilt the balance of power to their benefit.
Technology remains intrinsically configurable, of course. The only kind of computer we know how to build is the universal, Turing complete Von Neumann machine, which can run all the software we know how to write.
That’s how we got things like ad-blockers, the largest boycott in world history. The configurability of technology is why things like free and open software are politically important: in a technologically mediated society, control over the functions of the technology you rely on is control over every part of your life — your job, your education, your love life, your political engagement.
While it remains technically possible to reconfigure the technologies that you rely on, doing so is now a legal minefield. “IP” has come to mean “any law that lets a company control the conduct of its competitors, critics or customers,” and that’s why “IP” is always at the heart of maneuvers to block platform users’ attempts to wrestle value away from the platforms.
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(Image: Stephen Drake, CC BY 2.0, modified)
This week on my podcast, I read my Pluralistic blog post, Tiktok’s enshittification, which sets out a kind of master theory of enshittification, illustrated by Tiktok’s platform dynamics.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
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This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus column, “Social Quitting, about the enshittification lifecycle of social media platforms.
But as Facebook and Twitter cemented their dominance, they steadily changed their services to capture more and more of the value that their users generated for them. At first, the companies shifted value from users to advertisers: engaging in more surveillance to enable finer-grained targeting and offering more intrusive forms of advertising that would fetch high prices from advertisers.
This enshittification was made possible by high switching costs. The vast communities who’d been brought in by network effects were so valuable that users couldn’t afford to quit, because that would mean giving up on important personal, professional, commercial, and romantic ties. And just to make sure that users didn’t sneak away, Facebook aggressively litigated against upstarts that made it possible to stay in touch with your friends without using its services. Twitter consistently whittled away at its API support, neutering it in ways that made it harder and harder to leave Twitter without giving up the value it gave you.
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When my daughter Poesy was four, her nursery school let us know that they were shutting down a day before my wife’s office closed for the holidays, leaving us with a childcare problem. Since I worked for myself, I took the day off and brought her to my office, where we recorded a short podcast, singing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (a frankly amazing rendition!).
We’ve done it every year since, except for 2016 when I had mic problems. Now she’s 14, and we’ve just recorded our tenth installment, and as always, it was a highlight of my holiday season. This year, our Christmas carol is back, along with a brief interview about her interests and hobbies, and a summary of a seriously creepy short story she’s writing.
Here’s this year’s recording, and here are the years gone by:
- 2012
- 2013
- 2014
- 2015
- 2017
- 2018
- 2019
- 2020
- 2021
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When Amazon bought Twitch, the story was that the new conglomerate would be more efficient and that would benefit everyone – streamers and audiences. That’s the story we hear about every anticompetitive merger, and it’s always a lie. One major efficiency that the Amazon-Twitch merger was supposed to produce? Lower bandwidth costs. That’s one of... more
This week on my podcast, I read “Sound Money,” my latest column for Medium, which explains why money creation is necessary for a prosperous economy, despite the scaremongering of “inflation hawks.” MP3
This week on my podcast, I read “What is Chokepoint Capitalism?” a recent column for Medium explaining the thesis of my new book with Rebecca Giblin, which explains how creative labor markets got rigged, and how we can unrig them. (Image: Erik B. Anderson, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified) MP3
This week on my podcast, I read “So You’ve Decided to Unfollow Me,” a recent column for Medium describing the joys of writing to attract the audience of people who want to read what you want to write. (Image: Sascha Kohlmann, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified) MP3
This week on my podcast, I read “View a SKU: Let’s Make Amazon Into a Dumb Pipe,” a recent column for Medium discussing how interoperability could flip Amazon’s monopoly power on its head and enable us all to coveniently shop locally. MP3
This week on my podcast, I read “Why none of my books are available on Audible,” a short audiobook I produced to be distributed through Amazon’s ACX platform, explaining how that platform’s sloppy rights verification and mandatory DRM screws over writers. MP3 (Image: Paris 16, CC BY-SA 4.0; Dmitry Baranovskiy, CC BY 4.0; modified)
This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, Reasonable Agreement: On the Crapification of Literary Contracts, about the growing trend of standard, non-negotiable contract terms in freelance writing contracts that are outrageous in their unfairness. MP3
This week on my podcast, I read a recent blog post, Monopolists Want to Create Human Inkjet Printers, exploring the way that med-tech mergers are bringing the ghastly inkjet printer business-model to artificial pancreases. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; Björn Heller, CC BY 2.0 (German); modified) MP3
Regulatory Capture: Beyond Revolving Doors and Against Regulatory Nihilism. This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, Regulatory Capture: Beyond Revolving Doors and Against Regulatory Nihilism., about the origins of the theory of regulatory capture, and the all-important, but rarely discussed difference between right and left theories of regulatory capture. MP3
This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, Against Cozy Catastrophies, about the how the changeover from universal, state- or employer-provided pensions to market-based pensions like the 401(k) have created an inescapable, slow motion catastrophe, where the only thing worse than being one of the lucky few with retirement savings is being... more
This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, Apple’s Cement Overshoes, about the malicious compliance in Apple’s “home repair kits.” (Image: Conall, CC BY 2.0, modified) MP3
This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, About those kill-switched Ukrainian tractors, suggesting that what John Deere did to Russian looters, anyone can do to farmers, anywhere. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified) MP3
This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, Revenge of the Chickenized Reverse-Centaurs, about the relationship between algorithms, interoperability and worker power. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified) MP3
This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, Big Tech Isn’t Stealing News Publishers’ Content, about the calls from the news industry for tech companies to pay licensing fees for quoted news-snippets, and why this both ignores and worsens the real problem: ad-fraud. MP3
This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, When Automation Becomes Enforcement, about the debate of interoperability and end-to-end encryption in the EU’s Digital Markets Act, and how that relates to the long-running battle over who’s in charge: you, or your computer? MP3
This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, The Best Defense Against Rubber-Hose Cryptanalysis, which explores the contradiction at the heart of Bitcoin advocacy. MP3
This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, The Byzantine Premium, which explores the contradiction at the heart of Bitcoin advocacy. (Image: Jakub-gdPL and FAMartin, CC BY-SA 4.0; Delwar Hossain, BD, CC BY 4.0; Jernej Furman, CC BY 2.0; modified) MP3
This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, What is “Peak Indifference?” in which I explain my theory of how we change – or fail to change – in the face of wicked problems. (Image: Cameron Strandberg/CC BY 2.0, modified) MP3
This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus column, Vertically Challenged, about “how and why to break up Big Tech.” MP3 (Image: Anthony Quintano; CC BY 2.0, modified; Paramount/Star Trek, modified)
This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, All (Broadband) Politics Are Local, about the near-miraculous shift in the political will to provide universal fiber to all Americans, and what you can do to spur this process on. MP3
This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, We Should Not Endure a King: Antitrust is a political cause, not an economic one, addressed to leftists who are skeptical of antitrust as a market-based solution that implictly accepts markets as the legitimate arbiter of our social relations. MP3
This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, The Internet Heist (Part III), the third and final part of a three-part series about the early days of the internet copyright wars, when Hollywood studios came within a whisker of getting a veto over all new digital technology. MP3
This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, The Internet Heist (Part II), the second part of a three-part series about the early days of the internet copyright wars, when Hollywood studios came within a whisker of getting a veto over all new digital technology. MP3
This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, The Internet Heist (Part I), the first part of a three-part series about the early days of the internet copyright wars, when Hollywood studios came within a whisker of getting a veto over all new digital technology. MP3
This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, A Bug in Early Creative Commons Licenses Has Enabled a New Breed of Superpredator about my experience with Pixsy, a new kind of copyright troll that targets Creative Commons users. MP3 Image: Nenad Stojkovic (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hand_on_the_computer_mouse_-_50202556601.jpg CC BY 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en
This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus column, Science Fiction is a Luddite Literature about the technological critique the Luddites embodied, the unfair rep they got, and how it applies to today’s tech hellscape. MP3
When my daughter Poesy was four, her nursery school let us know that they were shutting down a day before my wife’s office closed for the holidays, leaving us with a childcare problem. Since I worked for myself, I took the day off and brought her to my office, where we recorded a short podcast,... more
This week on my podcast, I read my latest Medium column, Give Me Slack about the many second (and third, and fourth) chances I got as a kid and a student, and how the educational and work system has put paid to them. MP3
This week on my podcast, I read my latest Medium column, Jam To-Day, about how interoperability is unique among competition remedies in that it does good from day one. (Image: Oleg Sidorenko, CC BY 2.0, modified) MP3
This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus column, The Unimaginable, about science fiction, Thatcherism, and imagining a transition to a post-climate-emergency future. MP3
This week on my podcast, I read my latest Medium column, Against the great forces of history, about what Ada Palmer’s University of Chicago Papal election LARP can teach us about our own future. MP3
This week on my podcast, I read my latest Medium column, Dead Letters, about the spam wars and they way they’ve led to a corporate enclosure of email, making it nearly impossible to run an independent, standalone newsletter. MP3
This week on my podcast, I read my latest Medium column, Hope, Not Optimism, articulating a theory of political change that draws on technology, law, social movements and commercial pressure.
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It’s my book-birthday! Today marks publication of the Tor (US/Canada) paperback edition of ATTACK SURFACE, a standalone adult Little Brother book.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757517/attacksurface
Little Brother and its sequel Homeland were young adult novels that told the tale of Marcus Yallow, a bright young activist in San Francisco who works with his peers to organize resistance to both state- and private-sector surveillance and control.
The books’ impact rippled out farther than I dared dream. I’ve lost track of the number of cryptographers, hackers, activists, cyberlawyers and others who told me that they embarked on their tech careers after reading them.
These readers tell me that reading Little Brother and Homeland inspired them to devote themselves to taking technological control away from powerful corporations and giving it to people, putting them in charge of their own technological destiny.
This has been a source of enormous pride – never moreso than in Citizenfour, Laura Poitras’s documentary, when Edward Snowden grabs his copy of Homeland off his Hong Kong bedside table as he heads for a safe-house.
https://craphound.com/homeland/2014/12/02/when-ed-snowden-met-marcus-yallow/
Despite the growing movement of public interest, ethical technologists, the main current of the tech industry for decades has been an unbroken tendency towards spying, control, and manipulation.
These technological shackles are made by geeks who bear striking similarities to the Little Brother readers who’ve told me the story of their technopolitical awakenings – they share a love of the power of technology and the human connections we make through networks.
Without these people and their scarce expertise – arrived at through passionate exploration of tech – these technologies of control wouldn’t exist. They started from the same place as Marcus Yallow and his fans, but they took a very different path.
Attack Surface is the story of how that happens. Its (anti)hero is Masha Maximow, who appears as Marcus’s frenemy in the first two books – a more talented hacker than Marcus, who bats for the other side.
In Little Brother, Masha is working for the DHS in its project to turn San Francisco into a police state in the wake of a terrorist attack. In Homeland, she’s working on a forward operations base as a private military contractor, spying on jihadi insurgents.
When we meet her again in Attack Surface, Masha is a very highly paid senior technologist for a cyber-arms-dealer that sells spy tools to the most brutal, autocratic dictators in the world – something she’s deeply, self-destructively conflicted about.
When Masha gets caught helping pro-democracy protestors defeat the spyware she herself installed and maintained, she is cashiered and flees back home to San Francisco, where she makes a horrifying discovery.
Tanisha, her childhood best friend, who has devoted her life to racial justice struggles, is being targeted with the same malware that Masha helped inflict on protesters half a world away. For Masha, the war has come home.
That’s what makes this a book for adults, rather than a YA novel – it’s a tale about moral reckonings. It’s a story about being an adult that your younger self would neither recognize, nor approve of. It’s a story about redemption and struggle.
Like the other Little Brother novels, it’s a book whose technopolitics are firmly grounded in real-world technologies, from anti-malware countermeasures for state phone hacking to defeating facial recognition by exploiting machine learning’s deep flaws.
The book’s been out for a year now, and in addition to praise from the trade press and newspapers like the Washington Post, it’s attracted a loyal following of readers, many of whom never read Little Brother or Homeland.
Like the public interest technologists who tell me how Little Brother helped set the course of their lives, these Masha Maximow fans tell me how reading Attack Surface helped change that course – made them confront the compromises they’d made and decide to make a change.
It’s an honor and a privilege to have affected so many lives in this way, and I’m profoundly grateful to the readers who’ve contacted me to tell me about their experience of the book.
And now the paperback is out! A whole new group of readers can discover Masha, Attack Surface, and read about how it’s never too late to reckon with the morality of your past self’s actions.
You may recall that I produced my own audiobook for Attack Surface – something I had to do because Audible – Amazon’s monopoly audiobook company – refuses to carry my work because I won’t put DRM on it.
The audiobook was amazing – read by Buffy’s Amber Benson, who put in a virtuoso performance, and the presales audiobook was the most successful audiobook Kickstarter in crowdfunding history.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/attack-surface-audiobook-for-the-third-little-brother-book/
Like the print novel, the audiobook for Attack Surface has enjoyed a brilliant post-launch afterlife, selling briskly and attracting great reviews.
To celebrate the paperback’s release, I’m offering the Attack Surface audio, along with the audio for Homeland (read by Wil Wheaton) and Little Brother (read by Kirby Heyborne) – normally $70 in all – in a bundle for $30:
https://sowl.co/uqT2G
As with my other releases, my local indie bookstore, Dark Delicacies, is accepting orders for signed copies of the paperback – I’ll even drop by and personalize them for you!
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Cory_Doctorow_-__Attack_Surface_HB_%26_TPB.html#/
If the themes of Attack Surface interest you, I recommend checking out the video and audio archives of the Attack Surface Lectures, a series of eight online panels hosted by indie bookstores and undertaken with a range of stellar guest-speakers, available as video and audio.
“Politics and Protest” with Eva Galperin and Ron Deibert, hosted by The Strand:
https://craphound.com/attacksurface/2020/11/16/the-attack-surface-lectures-politics-and-protest-fixed/
“Cross-Media SF” with Amber Benson and John Rogers, hosted The Brookline Booksmith:
https://craphound.com/attacksurface/2020/11/17/the-attack-surface-lectures-cross-media-sci-fi/
“Race, Surveillance and Tech” with Malkia Cyril and Meredith Whittaker, hosted by Booksmith:
https://craphound.com/attacksurface/2020/11/18/the-attack-surface-lectures-intersectionality-race-surveillance-and-tech-and-its-history/
“Cyberpunk and Post-Cyberpunk” with Bruce Sterling and Christopher Brown, hosted by Andersons:
https://craphound.com/attacksurface/2020/11/19/the-attack-surface-lectures-cyberpunk-and-post-cyberpunk/
“Opsec and Personal Cybersecurity,” with Runa Sandvik and Window Snyder, hosted by Third Place Books:
https://craphound.com/attacksurface/2020/11/23/the-attack-surface-lectures-opsec-and-personal-cyber-security/
“Sci Fi Genre,” with Chuck Wendig and Sarah Gailey, hosted by Fountain Bookstore:
https://craphound.com/attacksurface/2020/11/24/the-attack-surface-lectures-sci-fi-genre/
“Tech in SF,” with Annalee Newitz and Ken Liu, hosted by Interrabang:
https://craphound.com/attacksurface/2020/11/25/the-attack-surface-lectures-tech-in-sf/
I’m eternally grateful to all the people who helped with this book – the editorial team at Tor, the booksellers, my co-panelists, the reviewers and critics, the audiobook team, my Kickstarter backers, and you, my readers. Thank you.
This week on my podcast, I read my latest Medium column, Take It Back,” on the relationship between copyright reversion, bargaining power, and authors’ rights.
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This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus column, Breaking In, on the futility of seeking career advice from established pros who haven’t had to submit over the transom in 20 years, where you should get career advice, and what more established writers can do for writers who are just starting out.
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This week on my podcast, I read a pair of editorials I published on EFF’s Deeplinks blog: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Platforms Want To Be Utilities, Self-Govern Like Empires and Facebook’s Secret War on Switching Costs, both about antitrust and Big Tech.
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This week on my podcast, I read Expectations management, and Disneyland at a stroll, parts five and six of my ongoing Medium series on “amusement parks, crowd control, and load-balancing,” on what we can learn about aggregate demand management and scarcity from the history of queues at Disney theme parks.
Part I: Are We Having Fun Yet?
Part II: Boredom and its discontents
Part III: Now you’ve got two problems
Part IV: Managing aggregate demand
(Image: Evan Wohrman, CC BY-SA)
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This week on my podcast, I read Managing aggregate demand, part four of my ongoing Medium series on “amusement parks, crowd control, and load-balancing,” on what we can learn about aggregate demand management and scarcity from the history of queues at Disney theme parks.
Part I: Are We Having Fun Yet?
Part II: Boredom and its discontents
Part III: Now you’ve got two problems
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This week on my podcast, I read the first three installments in my ongoing Medium series on “amusement parks, crowd control, and load-balancing,” on what we can learn about aggregate demand management and scarcity from the history of queues at Disney theme parks.
Part I: Are We Having Fun Yet?
Part II: Boredom and its discontents
Part III: Now you’ve got two problems
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This week on my podcast, my latest Locus column, Tech Monopolies and the Insufficient Necessity of Interoperability, about the true purpose of fighting monopolies – not competition, nor interoperability, but rather, human freedom.
(Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/99783447@N07/9433864982/, CC BY, modified)
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This week on my podcast, my latest Medium column, Self Publishing, about the consolidation in publishing and what to do about it.
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This week on my podcast, my May 2021 Locus Magazine column, Qualia, about the illusory “fairness” of a politics that turns on “objective” qualities.
Image:
OpenStax Chemistry:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Figure_24_01_03.jpg
CC BY:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en
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