Recorded live at the Fediverse House at SXSW 2025, author, activist and journalist Cory Doctorow breaks down the concept of “enshittification” and explores how we can challenge tech monopolies through interoperability, regulation, and open standards.
Blogger, journalist, author and activist Cory Doctorow can embark on a 10-minute monologue about what’s wrong with tech and still leave you hungering for more of his rapid-fire analysis and biting humor. It’s stunning to be presented with the big picture of the mess we’re in — and how to potentially get out of it.
In this episode of Dot Social, recorded live at the Fediverse House at SXSW 2025, Doctorow unpacks the concept of “enshittification.” It’s a term he coined to show how we got to this place where platforms prioritize business interests over user experience, leading to tragic declines in quality and trust. He talks about how to challenge platform monopolies and the importance of true federation.
Highlights include discussions of:
🔎 You can find Cory at @pluralistic@mamot.fr
✚ You can connect with Mike McCue at @mike@flipboard.social
🌊 Catch the wave! Surf the social web and create your own custom feeds at surf.social, a new beta from the people at Flipboard. https://about.surf.social/
This transcript was generated by AI, which may affect its accuracy. As such, we apologize for any errors in the transcript or confusion in the dialogue.
Welcome to Dot Social, the first podcast to explore the world of decentralized social media.
In this episode host Mike McCue is in conversation with blogger, journalist and activist Cory Doctorow. The two are live on stage at the Fediverse House at SXSW 2025. We hope you enjoy this conversation.
Mike McCue:
I’m so excited because we have the legendary Cory Doctorow in the house.
As you all know, Cory is an amazing writer. He's a he's a he's a builder, he's a thinker. He's like a prophet in a lot of ways.
Cory Doctorow:
A joker, a midnight toker.
Mike McCue:
There you go.
Cory Doctorow:
Free bird!
Mike McCue:
And you know, it's not often in life that you get a chance to like do something over, but the internet needs a do over, and we are at a moment in time where we actually have an opportunity to build a better web as Molly. You heard from Molly yesterday, her fantastic talk. There we are living right now in a moment where we actually get bit of a do over, because we had this really cool thing called the internet and the web, and we've kind of screwed it up in a lot of ways, right?
Cory Doctorow:
Sure, yeah. I mean, I don't think anyone came down off a mountain with two stone tablets and said, Larry, Sergey, stop rotating your log files and start looking for actionable market intelligence, right? We made choices.
Mike McCue:
We did. We made choices, and along the way, that's led to what Cory has talked about as in enshittification. For folks who heard or haven't heard about this one, just talk briefly, just to set the stage.
Cory Doctorow:
Sure, and you know, I can talk about this at enormous length. I have a book coming out about it, so I'll give you a very brief thumbnail sketch. So it's a way of describing how things get worse online, and a sort of prototypical pattern of things being good for end users, but also end users being locked into the platform, which allows the platform to abuse those end users without risking their departure, because it would cost something to them to go. They'll lose their social relationships, they'll lose their data. They'll lose something else. So as they're sort of given more leeway to abuse those users, they can take value away from them and give them to business customers. You can stick ads in and spy on people. You can boost content, stick it in the feeds. You can reduce search quality and replace it with items that don't match the search but which someone will pay to put there. You know, Amazon has this thing they call an ad business. It's just payola. They make $38 billion a year selling the right to put something at the top of a search engine results page that doesn't constitute the best result for your search. On average, the first box on an Amazon search results page cost 29% more than the best deal on Amazon for the thing you search for that top row is 25% more expensive on average, than the best matches on Amazon, and the best match is usually found at least 17 places down. So you have, you know, think making things worse for end users, not because you're a sadist, although maybe some of these people are, or maybe the sadists within the firm get a hearing, because people say, don't say, Well, if we treat the users that way, they'll all leave because, you know, they're not gonna. And so then you make things worse for for and then you bring in business customers, and you know, so far, so normal. I think you have critiques like Shoshana Zuboff’s where she says, if you're not paying for the product or the product, you're not really their priority. Blah, blah, blah. I think that's completely wrong. I think that platforms don't treat you well because you pay for things. I think platforms treat you well because they're afraid of you, and one of the things they might be afraid of is losing your business, right? But if they're not afraid of losing your business, it doesn't matter how much money you give them if you buy a $2 million John Deere tractor and then it breaks, you're expected to fix it yourself, but you still have to have a service call out from a John Deere technician who takes between 24 and 48 hours to show up at your farm and just type in unlock code into the keyboard that activates the part you put in yourself. That is not an ad supported tractor, right? Even if you're paying for the product, you are also the product, if they can get away with treating you as the product. So stage one, good to end users, lock them in. Stage two, make things worse for end users. Bring in business customers, lock them in because they become dependent on those end users. Stage three, take all the value away. Give it to yourself. And you know, we've seen this happen. Facebook starts off saying, we'll never spy on you. We'll only show you the things that we asked to see. Then they say to the advertisers and the publishers, we are totally spying on them, and you can pay us to put things in their feeds, right? And then once the publishers and the advertisers are locked in, they do pivot to video. They downrank links. They make you put more content from your article in before they'll show it to your subscribers, let alone algorithmically promote it, they take all the value for themselves, and you know, at this point, you end up in this very brittle equilibrium where almost all the value has been extracted. The firm tries to leave behind, like the homeopathic residue needed to keep everyone locked in, but not like, one penny more. And then that equilibrium can shatter. Because, like, it turns out, the difference between, Oh, I hate this service, but I can't seem to stop using it, and oh, how much I hate this service. I'm so glad I'm never going to use it again. It's just like one live stream mass shooting, one privacy scandal, one whistleblower. People bolt for the exits when that happens, all these growth stocks with crazy P/E ratios, because the that people think they're going to grow forever, once they start to contract, they have mass selloffs. Facebook posted like, slightly lower than projected. US growth numbers, not a contraction, less growth than projected. In the first quarter of 2022, quarter trillion dollar, 24 hour sell off like, until NVIDIA, it was the largest sell off in world history, right? I mean, you love to see it, but when that happens, the platforms, they do this thing that you and I might call panicking, but which in Silicon Valley we call pivoting. And so Mark Zuckerberg arises from his sarcophagus, and he says, I know that for many years, I have told you that the future consisted of you and everyone you know arguing with their racist uncles using a primitive text interface that I invented so that I could non fuckably, a non non consensually rate how fuckable my fellow Harvard undergraduates are. However, I've had a revelation, from now on, you and everyone you love are going to be a legless, sexless, low polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon character, and I'm going to trap you in a 20 virtual world I stole from a 25 year old dystopian science fiction novel that I call the metaverse, right? And that's when the whole thing turns into a pile of shit. And in enshittification, it's tempting to think of it because it's happening all at once. It's tempting to think of it as a mind virus, right? Like suddenly we let the McKinsey consultants loose, and now everyone acts like an MBA. But there were McKinsey consultants in these companies before, right? The difference is people listen to them, and the reason that the people with the ideas that are sort of sadistic and awful and make the web shitty get listened to is because the decision making apparatus within the firm understands, either explicitly or implicitly, that you can do things that are bad for both business customers and end users without risking their departure, because you have lock in, and that lock in arises from the collapse of competition, right? So we allow firms to buy their immediate and even distant rivals, you know, lock up their whole supply chain, whether that's Amazon buying Audible or Facebook buying Instagram, or all the acquisitions Google made. You know, Google like they're not the Idea Factory, right? Like everything they've made except Search crashed and burned, unless you count Google Photos, which is a success because they put it on the operating system they bought from someone else, which is also like how they got everything else, right? Google Videos crash and burn someone else's video service, YouTube, yeah, they operationalize it. Great. You're good at ops. I like ops a lot. That doesn't make you an innovator. That makes you a really skilled janitor, and we need really skilled janitors, or we will all die of Giardia, but that does not make you an innovator, and so Google has had 25 years of buying other people's ideas and operationalizing them, and 25 years of trying to launch internal initiatives and have succeeded with zero of them, right? They made a Hotmail clone that was pretty successful, I guess, right? But whether it's like Docs or collab or whatever, it's all stuff they bought from someone else. So you have these firms that no longer fear competition. Then they capture their regulators, because then there's 100 companies in the sector, the regulators have a whole bunch of people speaking in different ways about what the optimal regulatory environment is, but like, let them in, breed in a kind of corporate incestuous orgy and emerge with like commercial half-bird jaws, and they will speak with one voice to their regulator and it and they will have a lot of excess capital, because they've divided up the market like the Pope dividing up the new world. They're not competing with each other, as Peter Thiel says, competition is for losers, and so they have a lot of money to spend on getting their regulatory priorities through. So whether that is the fact that the US has an updated privacy law since 1988 when we made it illegal to tell anyone which VHS cassette you rented at the video store, the last technological threat Congress has bothered to address as a privacy matter, or it's the UK, where the top tech competition regulator was just fired and replaced with the former head of Amazon UK, you see regulatory capture emerging like night follows from day, when you have corporate corporate concentration and corporate concentration and regulatory capture it's not just about ignoring the law or stopping laws from getting passed. It's also about getting the government to use the law to shut down the market entrance. So we have this thicket of IP laws, like an anti circumvention law that makes it illegal to jailbreak anything. So if you buy an iPhone and you don't want to use Apple Store, anyone who gives you a tool to let you use someone else's store on that iPhone commits a felony under Section 1201, of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. So if you're like developing for the web, you have to worry, because it's an open platform that anyone can modify, that someone will install an ad blocker because your ads got too obnoxious. And one thing we know about people install ad blockers is they don't uninstall them, so your revenue from that user goes to zero forever. But once you've got an app which has a DRM wrapper, which is against the law to remove, then you can just YOLO right as much invasive, disgusting ads as you want, because it doesn't matter if someone types in the search engine. How do I block ads on this app? Because the answer is always going to be, can't. And so an app is just like a website skimmed in the right kind of IP to make it a crime to protect your privacy while you use it, and so you don't have to fear interoperability as a consequence of enshittifying. And finally, you don't have to worry about your workers anymore. It used to be tech workers were in really high demand. They weren't unionized, but they could always tell their boss to fuck off and get a job across the street after a half million tech layoffs in the last two years, it's not going to happen anymore. Like, one of the reasons tech boss is really like AI is it's a it lets them think about replacing lippy programmers who tell them that they don't know what they're talking about with appliance chatbot that just says, you know, yes, boss, right away, boss, because that is, you know, every Google manager's dream is to not have town halls where your programmers tell you you're stupid, right? And so, like, chat bots will never do that to you. And so now we just have this collapse of discipline, right? It's not that worse people are running these companies. It's that the bad people in the companies and the bad ideas of the people in the companies can now be executed without consequence, without people bolting for the exits, and as a result, the whole internet is getting worse. You know, it's weird that I, a leftist, have to tell free market people that incentives matter. That is their entire thing. But they have somehow forgotten that if you create a set of incentives that allows firms to corner the market and abuse their users, that they will likely corner the market and abuse their users. You know, to quote Charlie Munger, right, my arch nemesis here, show me the incentive, and I'll show you the outcome.
Mike McCue:
So welcome to the world of enshittification. Unreal, right? And this is this. That's just the tip of the iceberg. How fucked are we exactly then, and is there a way out of this?
Cory Doctorow:
So Stein's Law from finance, says anything that can't go on forever eventually stops, and we are living through a Stein's Law kind of moment here. We have reached some boundary conditions of enshittification, like one of the things that allowed tech bosses to screw their workers and tame them and stop them from telling them that they're stupid when they want to enshittify the things that you know you missed your mother's funeral to ship to deadline was the fact that they're not unionized. Well, we have the highest approval for unions, the highest desire to unionize, and the most money in Union coffers to run organizing efforts of any time in living their brief right now in the US. There are some other structural impediments, like dismantling the National Labor Relations Board, but the National Labor Relations Board has the is downstream of unions, right? We didn't get unions because we passed the National Labor Relations Act. It was illegal to be in a union, and yet so many people joined unions that they had to pass the National Labor Relations Act. Thinking that you can dismantle the NLRB and then get rid of unions is like thinking that you can steal all the baubles from the Who's down in Whoville, and you won't get Christmas, right? Christmas is what's in the Whoville is in the Who's heart, right? It's not, it's not the baubles. The baubles arise because of what's in their heart.
Audience member:
Vote union!
Cory Doctorow:
So we've got unions on the upswing now. Countries all over the world have prohibited circumvention, right for jailbreaking, because that was the condition of trading with America without tariffs. So I don't know if you've heard tariffs are back, right? And if you're like a Canadian wondering why, every time you make an app and sell it to another Canadian, the dollar they pay, you should round trip through Cupertino and come back 30 cents lighter. The answer is, it's against the law to jailbreak the phone, right? Well, the reason we did that, I'm a Canadian. We're like serial killers. We're everywhere. We just look just like everybody else. The reason we did that in Canada is because we were promised tariff free access to American markets now that we don't have them. YOLO, right? We should be jailbreaking everything Canadian mechanics. So first of all, Canadian software engineers should be making a kit, and then Canadian mechanics, and every mechanic in the world should be using that kit to jailbreak every Tesla and unlock all the subscription features and software upgrades for one price forever, which is how you kick that guy in the dongle. So that is like an opportunity we have now. Circumvention and interoperability are the kind of universal program of global interoperability and circumvention is within our grasp, in a way it hasn't been for 25 years. So that's very exciting.
On the question of competition, you know, we had this like upswing of competition enforcement in the US over the last four or five years under Biden. And it's tempting to think that that was because of Biden's leadership, but I think it's better closer to say that that was because Biden was following. And the reason I say that is because we also saw an upswing of competition enforcement in Canada, Australia, France, Germany, the EU as a whole, Japan, South Korea and China, right whose cyberspace directive prohibits dominant firms from blocking interoperability among new market entrants. So there is a global shift in how we think about corporate power. The law responded to that global shift, but it did not create that global shift, and it's not going away. And Trump's DOJ just filed a brief saying that they agree with Biden's DOJ. The remedy in Google's antitrust conviction should be breaking up Google. So we are having, we are we are looking at far more competition than we have been looking at in years. So there is, like a there is a way for us to catch I'm not saying it's going to happen automatically. I don't think that the future is ordained. I think it's up for grabs. That's why I'm an activist. It's why I get out of bed in the morning. If you could predict the future, there'd be no reason to do anything, right? So the future is up for grabs, and there are more things to grab hold of than there have been, I think in my life as an activist, I'm 53 I started working at EFF 23 years ago. So, you know, this is, this is an extraordinary moment. There's lots to be very sad about. But when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla.
Mike McCue:
So you wrote a really phenomenal, I thought, very helpful piece about RSS and how you use the web now to avoid all the in enshittification. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about that? And for folks who know what I mean, RSS?
Cory Doctorow:
Does anyone not know what RSS is? Don't feel embarrassed. It's cool. If you don't, everyone knows what RSS is. So RSS feeds are like, they're this vestigial amazing thing that's just kind of lurking out there, like, all the CMS is just pump out RSS, just they don't advertise it. You know, sometimes you need to, like, manually put like, slash feed at the end. Or sometimes you can look in the HTML, and it's like hiding in there, but you can access just everything with RSS. Like, Substack sucks. Like, you've got to, like, first of all, speaking as a man who, even after having this cataract fix, still can't read gray on white type, right? Like I can read all of those Substacks just in an RSS reader. I also don't have to give them any telemetry or any any private data in order to read those feeds. So I read everyone's feeds in my RSS reader. I also, you know, in addition to having whatever catch up feeds and and slash Explorer on my Mastodon and whatever, if there's people I really want to follow, rather than monkeying with the user interface and Mastodon, I just add their RSS feeds to my RSS reader, and I see what they post even when I'm not in a Mastodon context. I also do that with Tumblr and Medium, because it doesn't matter which which environment you're in, you can you can follow people that way. You don't see ads, you don't get tracked. You don't have to tolerate the sadism of gray on white type. You don't have to. There's no no pop-up asks you if you want to join a mailing list. There's no video that pops up in auto plays like RSS is like what the web was. And the cool thing about an RSS reader is that you can dump all the feeds you subscribe to as a little text file, an XML file called OPML, and then you can import it into any other RSS reader. So you can go from one RSS reader to another with two clicks. And what that means is, if someone says, Hey, I've got this really cool RSS reader, it's not like someone saying, Hey, I've got this really great, you know, bookkeeping program will you export all of your financials that your accountant makes you keep and import them into the bookkeeping program and see how you like it. And if you don't, then you have to export them all and re import them into the other one, right? Like no one, this is how QuickBooks has a giant monopoly, even though it's a steaming pile of shit, right? Because once you've used it, it's just, it's just too painful to leave. And with RSS, like you can try another RSS reader with all of the feeds you follow in 10 seconds. And then if you don't like it, you can go back to your other RSS reader in 10 seconds. So this is an incredible affordance. And one of the cool things about this is it's built into Mastodon, this affordance that if you're on a Mastodon instance, which is everyone here knows what Mastodon is, if you're on a Mastodon instance, and you joined it because it was like the one that came up when you hit the Mastodon dot social lottery, and they're like this. This one is accepting new users, and so you joined up and you know nothing about them, and then a couple of weeks or a couple of months or a couple of years in, you realize that the people running it are just awful, and you don't want to be on their server anymore. One click exports all the people you follow and all the people who follow you, and one click imports them into any other Mastodon server in the fediverse, and you are back up where you were a few seconds ago. It's like switching from Verizon to T-Mobile, like you don't have to tell your friends you've changed. They don't even know, right? You're just moving from one to another. And not only does that mean that you are free of the bad decisions of the people who are running the service you're relying on but it also means that they know it, right? So back to enshittification and the idea that I can make things worse for you in order to make things better for me, and there's nothing you can do about it. Well, if there's something you can do about it, then the person within the firm who's like, I've got a sadistic idea to make things worse for our users and better for us, that person immediately has to count, has to counter a rival within the firm who says, look at how many users we will lose, right? One click out, one click back in, somewhere else. And so it might stay their hand. It won't necessarily, you're not going to lose money betting against the hubris of tech bros, right? But even if it doesn't say their hand, then you have a remedy. You can immediately departure and depart and set up somewhere else.
Mike McCue:
RSS is fantastic, but you don't have that two way connection with someone, right? Yeah, and that what's one of the things that I think is really, I sometimes talk about ActivityPub as the big sister protocol to RSS. It's, it's a two way, you know, engagement that you have, but and that now allows, now people to be able to decide how they want to do social media, how they want to engage with others, how they want to discover content. But, you know, there's still the risk of enshittification, right? And so when you think about like, how when we now have an opportunity to build a new social media or social web experience in a way that is informed by a lot of the thinking and concerns and issues that we've seen over the past, what's the advice you have for people now that are building this new dimension of the web?
Cory Doctorow:
So in behavioral economics, there's this idea of the Ulysses Pact. It's named after Ulysses, who obviously was a famous hacker. When he was sailing through the sea of the sirens, he didn't want to use the standard protocol to avoid being lured to his death in the sea by their incredible song, which was to stuff your ears with wax, which meant you didn't get to hear the cool song. His idea was I will tie myself to the mast and leave my ears unstopped, because I know in that future moment of weakness, I can be guarded against by my current moment of strength. And we use Ulysses Pacts all the time. You throw away the Oreos when you go on a diet. You throw away all the booze when you get sober. There are lots of things we do, and they don't have to be perfect, right, like we know from the literature that if you are trying to get sober and there's no booze in the house, of course, even if you've got a breathalyzer on your car and you can't start it, you can get an Uber to the liquor store, but just the time that it takes to get there might be enough to have you think I should probably call my sponsor, and if you irrevocably license your source code using a free and open license and accept contributions from the rest of the world. Not only can you not relicense that content unilaterally, but also the time it's going to take for you to do a relicensing where you have to either substitute all that third party code cement or you have to contact those people and get their consent to relicense the code, is a period in which your users, the press, other people, can show up and say, like what you are doing is bad. We dislike you for it. We will leave if you do it. We're forking your code. All these other things that can kind of contribute to an environment in which you do the right thing. And you know that's also if you think about the pressure on founders or decision makers within firms to do something bad, that pressure comes from things like governments, or it comes from things like venture capitalists and having that period in which you have to do something very public and messy to comply with, with something that you know you may be cornered into complying with, just changes the dynamic so that people maybe you don't get asked to mess things up, and if you do, maybe they change their mind, and if they don't, well, then your users have a way out. And so I think of Federation as being a really important kind of Ulysses Pact, if the users can leave, there's just limits on how bad things you can how bad you can make things for them. And historically, we get Federation, or this kind of easy exit in one of two ways. So one is or maybe one of three ways. So one is, you start off idealistic, and either accidentally or on purpose, you take a bunch of decisions that you can't overturn later in your life. And so even when you're in a position that may feel like like a very moral one, like you tempted 150 people who you love to quit their jobs and risk their mortgages and their kids college funds to come work for you, and now your financiers are saying you have to make things materially worse for like, 10% of your users, or you're gonna have to fire all of those people, and your other 90% of users are gonna be out on the street because we're gonna shut down the service. And you might feel in that moment like enshittifying things is actually the moral thing to do, and that you are quite brave to, you know, suffer everyone's disapprobation because you are taking this difficult decision, but you can't, because you made these accidental decisions with your software licensing or whatever you can have do it. So that's one way we get there.
Another way that we get there is by hacking into the system, right? So, like, there came a time when people woke up and they said, you know, this operating system, we all use UNIX? It's owned by, like, a really evil corporation, a monopolist called AT&T. That's a giant military contractor. We fucking hate those guys, but they what they didn't do, right? They didn't do, like, what we sometimes call the Mastodon HOA tactic, right? Which is, which is to, like, just go around and shame people for using UNIX, right? What they did was they made a different UNIX that you could just leave the old UNIX and go to the new one. And we call it GNU Linux, and it is the most popular operating system in the history of the world, right? So this is another thing we used to do. We used to move fast and break things. Not all moving fast and breaking things is bad, like moving fast and breaking billionaires. Things is awesome. Move fast and break kings, right? Is great. So that's the other way we used to do it. And the third way we do it is the government requires it of firms. So the reason you can port from AT&T to Verizon, Verizon to T Mobile, is because it's against the law for them to stop you from doing it right. And so those are like three different modes. None of them are exclusive of the others. They are additive. You can get by with one, but it gets better if you have two, and if you've got all three, it's better still. And we can see around the world, you've got things like the Digital Markets Act, which is mandating APIs. You've got things like the Chinese cyberspace act that bans companies from blocking interoperability, you know, you've got like and then we have these irrevocable paths, right, like software licensing, like ActivityPub, with federation built in that all together sort of constitute a kind of overlapping defense in depth against people's own cupidity, capacity for rationalization and the inability to resist outside pressure.
Mike McCue:
What is your take on how things are going with respect to Mastodon and Bluesky and kind of this new social web? Do you feel like we're are there other things we should be doing that we're not yet?
Cory Doctorow:
I think, you know, Bluesky is obviously done something very admirable in terms of trying to convince people to endure the switching costs of leaving Twitter and come to outside of this, this commercially owned service, and Bluesky has made a lot of hay out of the fact that it is federatable without ever federating. And that is, I think, a danger sign for all of us. Because, again, if you understand enshittification as a response to incentives and not as a moral failing, then you can see how like incentivizing Jay's financiers to fire her and replace her with someone who is more willing to fuck shit up, that incentive acts against Jay's own tenure and her ability to do good work at Bluesky. And so I think it's a matter of urgency that Bluesky find ways to federate. I've been told by Bluesky devs that this is getting closer right now, the key component for federation is a very expensive component, cost millions of dollars to run. Apparently, that is a result of a service guarantee that doesn't need, necessarily need to be in a federated system. Basically the difference between a Bluesky relay that gives you a slightly inaccurate maybe 10 minutes out of date count for, like, how many posts, how many people have, like, replied to a post? And something that is like, absolutely bang on accurate is like the difference between $150 a month and a million dollars a month to run that relay. And so it looks like there's going to be more of that Federation. I hope they do it soon. It seems very exciting.
With Mastodon, you know that there are many pain points that have cropped up, one that I think is being addressed now, and that I think was, in retrospect, a big mistake, was blocking, boosting. So I think if you're going to have a system that does not have algorithmic feeds, the way you discover things on the system is by boosting by the people you follow, boosting things from people you don't follow. And if people boost with, without quoting, without annotating, right? Like you should look at this, because then those boosts are a lot less important, right? And so I know there's like, this kind of preciousness about dunk culture, whatever, but I think that it was, it was, like, just a real, like, own goal, to say we're going to have a system where the only way you'll discover something new is if someone puts it into your timeline, whom you're following, but we're not going to let them tell you why you should click on it. That was just a giant mistake, and my understanding is that's being repaired now. And of course, the thing I'm really interested in, that we should all be interested in is bridges. Because I look, I know some of the people involved in Mastodon, I've been lucky to have met some of them in person here, after corresponding with them for many years. And I know some of the people involved in Bluesky, and I like them a lot too. But I'm not rooting for Bluesky or Mastodon. I'm rooting for internet users, right? Like, I don't give a shit protocol you use. I don't want you trapped in an enshittification trap, right? So we should want there to be a way for people who choose Bluesky to talk to people on mass and for people on Mastodon to talk to people on Bluesky. Like, that's the that's the important thing.
Mike McCue:
That balance, can you talk about that, that 51/49 thing…
Cory Doctorow:
Oh, so one thing you know, Bluesky has a problem structurally, which is that it didn't have federation to start. It wasn't born federated. And now the majority of, even if they spin up federation tomorrow, a very large majority of Bluesky users are going to be on the mothership. And what that means is that, if you're like again, sort of gaming out. Jay Graber’s, investors, right, saying, all right, Jay, you need to do some really terrible things. Or else, if, if she can say, well, we have all these federated servers that are connected to us, and our users will leave and go to those federated servers. The VCs might say, Okay, well, you have to cut off the Federation links to right at the same time, right? Like, if you're going to fire the DJ at this great party and you're worried that people are they're going to leave, then we're also going to make you break up the fire exits at the same time, right? But if like a substantial plurality, right? And you know blockchain grifter speak, right, like 51% of the Bluesky users are not on Bluesky, right, they're somewhere else. They either federated through the fediverse or they're on federated Bluesky servers. The impetus to close Bluesky, right, where you have you make the user choose, do I stay on the mothership, or do I go out to the federated cloud? If every if the majority of people they want to hear from are not locked inside with them, that's a reason for them to leave. And so if we care about the well being of Bluesky users, we should want lots of people whom the Bluesky, who matter to the Bluesky users, to not be on Bluesky because it creates the dynamic where the outside sources of pressure to lock it down have a natural internal counter. And also, if they press ahead, the likely outcome is that people will leave anyways, right? We've seen Twitter, where Twitter can get very, very bad, and people will continue to use it. I continue to use Twitter, right? I'm in the middle of a book tour. I the way that I turn people out for my events and sell my books is because I unwisely spent many years building up a half million followers on Twitter. I do not have Mastodon. If I stopped using Twitter, I would stop selling books to the degree that I do, and I wouldn't get the advances that I get, and I wouldn't be able to write the books that I do and so on. I'm I'm trapped there, right? And so, you know, if all of the people who followed me were also on some other service, and I could easily re-establish myself there, I could leave Twitter tomorrow, but for now, I am, you know, a sharecropper in Musk's farm and and you know, it's my own doing. And in my defense, the people who started Twitter were friends of mine, and I thought that mattered. And what I've come to learn in the years since is that the fact that they're friends of yours isn't enough, because there are lots of ways to rationalize yourself, even if you're a very good person, into doing the wrong thing. And you know, the most impressive thing about Wikipedia, it's a very impressive service, but the most impressive thing is that the guy who started it decided that he shouldn't be in charge of it anymore. That should be controlled by a community, right? And that was amazing. Weirdly, he's like, among all the benevolent dictators for life, he's the one who self identifies as an Objectivist and whose favorite author is Ayn Rand, whereas all of the, all of the, all the self described socialists and leftists who run all the other benevolent dictator for life projects are like, “No, I alone have the vision to continue running.” Very weird.
Mike McCue:
I love the whole “move fast and break kings” thing. Yeah, that is, that is fantastic. You want to take some questions?
Cory Doctorow:
Yeah, sure. And I'll say a good question has one part, not two. It's not more of a comment than a question. And normally I say it's not about AI, but I guess if you must ask about AI, we can answer a question about AI, but think twice. As with blockchain, 99% of all conversations about AI are non-consensual. So the way that this is going to work is you put your hand up, you're going to ask a question that's short and straightforward enough that I can repeat it so that people can we've taken the mics away. So this is another affordance for this kind of thing.
Audience member:
Hi, this is Lori.. Yes, I used to be at EFF. What is EFF’s biggest mandate this year?
Cory Doctorow:
Boy, you know, so EFF is now very large. I don't know how many people were there when you left, but we're over 100 people now. Twelve when you left? Yeah, six when I started, right. So I no longer know all the things we're working on. You know, we were the first people to personally Sue Elon Musk and DOGE. So, you know, like the litigation side of litigation. Thank you. We and our community organizers. So if you are in the US and you want to become part of a community group that's working on these issues, the Electronic Frontier Alliance is a network of dozens and dozens of community groups all across the country that we don't run, but we coordinate. And so those organizers are doing so much right now with police surveillance and resisting street level surveillance demonstration, InfoSec, and personal security, all that stuff. So they're working on a whole lot of stuff. I think the competition brief, which is where I work, is very big right now, because I think the international system, global trade and IP agreements, totally up for grabs. And it's not just IP agreements, the International state dispute settlement system, where if a country passes a law, like Australia passed the law saying cigarettes had to be sold in plain packages, and under ISDS, you had Philip Morris suing to recover all the potential lost profits, plus exemplary damages, punitive damages for Australia daring to pass a law that would undermine its profitability, we can get rid of ISDS too. Honduras is currently being sued for three times its gross national product by the crypto bros who got the dictator who deposed the old, democratically elected president to deed a piece of land where they can run a blockchain city on an island called Roatan to them, and the woman who replaced this dictator and was democratically elected was like, Yeah, we're not doing that. And now they are suing her and her country for three times their gross national product. So this is an opportunity to jettison a lot of the worst aspects of the global system of international trade. And I think that, you know, like, I couldn't tell you which one of those things is more important. And you know, one of the nice things about EFF being as big as it is now is we do walk and chew gum like it's hard because I don't know everything that's going on all the time. We now are big enough that we have to have an annual retreat for like five days just to sync up and find out what everyone's doing. But on the other hand, like I'm always being pleasantly surprised by the things we're doing, because I don't even know about them until they happen.
Audience member:
Yeah, so the US, government and regulatory apparatus being dismantled. I obviously, there's a lot of good things that are we're losing, because there's probably some bad things we're losing too. Yeah. Do you see the opportunities to take advantage of bad regulations, bad government policies that can be..
Cory Doctorow:
Yeah, what bad regulations bad policies are going away? I'm not sure at the like, I can name any off the dome, but I'll tell you, like, in terms of, again, back to the international system trade obligations that bind the US and not our trading partners, that we might want to reconsider. So we signed on to the cyber crime treaty last year. And like, cyber crime is real, ransomware is bad. We should be doing stuff about this. However, the cyber crime treaty creates an affirmative obligation on signatories to give aid to one another in fighting cyber crime, but does not define cyber crime. And so if in your country, insulting the president on the internet is a cyber crime, you can force another signatory to secretly order an online service to divulge the identity of the person who insulted the president and transmit that again with no like hearing, no due process, nothing. So maybe we pull onto the cyber crime treaty.
Audience member:
My question is, is gentrification inevitable? Can we put it off forever, or can we just delay it?
Cory Doctorow:
So isn't enshittification inevitable? Can we put it off forever, or can we just delay it? So I think in enshittification arises. This is kind of my spiel, and enshittification is the result of specific policy choices taken in living memory by named individuals who were warned at the time by experts that this would happen, who did it anyway, got rich and have never faced any consequences. So we knew this would happen. I actually just finished working on sort of I just finished working on a documentary for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation called “Who Killed the Internet?” that some of your speakers were interviewed for Molly White Senate and so on. And part of it is about the history of this law that bans breaking VRM section 12, one of the DMCA, and the architect of that was this loony called Bruce Lehman, who was Bill Clinton's IPs are and and Bruce Lehman was told when he first proposed this, proposed this to Al Gore. When Al Gore was holding the National Information Infrastructure hearings that the information superhighway hearings about like, how we were going to demilitarize and commercialize the internet, he proposed this to Gore. And Gore was like, That's nuts. No, right? And so Bruce Lehman went to the UN, he went to the World Intellectual Property Organization, which has the same relationship to Bad Internet policy that, like Mordor has to evil, right, like just all emanates from there. And 10 years later, 15 years later, he gave a talk. He was on a panel at a law school where he said, we went to WIPO, we went to the UN to do an end run, an end run around Congress, and we got that tape. It's in the documentary, right? So you have this guy who, like, admittedly did this undemocratic thing, and this happened, and no one, he's still alive. He's like, he's he's like a rich lawyer in Florida, in Canada, our version of this law was passed in 2012 the two ministers who did it, James Moore, who was the industry minute, or minister, or maybe the heritage minister, who's the heritage minister, and Tony Clement, who is the Industry Minister. And they consulted him in 2010 so they put up this consultation paper. Should we have a law banning circumvention? 6138 Canadians wrote in and said, Fuck no. 53 respondents said, Yes. James Moore gave a speech to the International Chamber of Commerce in Toronto where he explained that he would discard 6130 No, because they were the quote, babyish views of, quote, radical extremists right. Tony James Moore is a extremely wealthy white shoe lawyer. Tony Clement less less well respected these days, he sent pictures of his penis to what he thought was a 19 year old woman, but turned out to be two blackmailers from Cote d'Ivoire. Had to leave parliament and then subsequently surfaced selling fake PPE during the lockdown. So the you know, the these guys have just never faced any consequences. We don't this does not have to be the case, right? We do not have to make these choices. We could have made different choices. The choice not to enforce antitrust law, which started under Carter and accelerated under Reagan, was continued by every president since, up to, but not including Biden, right? That was a deliberate choice. We did have antitrust enforcement right from 1912 or so when we when we broke up Standard Oil, you know, the Sherman Act was passed in 1890 took like 20 years to really mobilize it against the really big monopolists. And then we had like, 60 years of enforcement, right? And like, again, it's not, it's not a lost art from a fallen civilization. It's not like recovering the secrets of embalming pharaohs, right? Like we know how to do this. In fact, we saw under the Biden administration where the FTC was at a total, like, an absolute fraction of its historic high strength, right? So this very weak, small FPC was able to take these enormous steps, same with the DOJ and the in the antitrust division. So like, I think, the fact that we could do this before that, when we try to do it now, we were pretty successful, means that we can do it again. It's always hard once there are billionaires, right? Like preventing billionaires is easier than fighting billionaires. And you know, when John Sherman passed the Sherman Act, he was the senator behind it. He was Tecumseh Sherman's brother, when he was stumping for the Sherman Act in 1890 he said, If we would not tolerate kings over the necessaries of our life. We should not tolerate industrial autocrats of trade with the ability to fix the price of commodities and decide who can work right, and like we did, tolerate them right, and then we got them right, like we and now we have to deal with them. And it's harder to get rid of a king than it is to prevent one from emerging, but we can do it. We have done it before. We can do it again. You know the neoliberals minds, neoliberalisms minds app, summarized by Margaret Thatcher, there is no alternative, which is a way of saying, like, resistance is futile. And of course, there are alternatives, right? Like again, we didn't imagine it that there was a better internet like, do you think like the people who funded all the startups that we liked were meaner than the people who who funds, who fund them now? No, they were just afraid of losing their money, because if before there was lock in, users left and you went broke right again. Like, it is weird that we have to explain to, like, free market weirdos that incentives matter, but apparently, like, it remains to leftists to do this. I always say, like, you know, we are cursed with object permanence, right? We have to, like, remember that stuff happened because the other no one else does. Other questions? in the back
Audience member:
If there was a sort of breakdown between the era… shiftedd… it feel slike the
way the government is right now, there are just so many incentives for individual members of government to not give a shit.. [[PULL FROM PEERTUBE]]
Cory Doctorow:
So what happened to change the way that we enforce antitrust, and how do we now have these incentives for public officials to side against the public with firms that want to predate upon them. So, you know, like there's lots of political scientists who written about this. You know, Thomas Piketty and capital in the 21st century advances a whole theory that involves looking at 300 years of capital flows and whatever. But you know, I think that what you can understand is that there are parochial preferences of small groups of people in society that cut against the interests of all the people in society. The job of government is to sort of find a way to balance among those different conflicting interests. But when a small group of people have an enormous amount of power, which is like, not entirely synonymous with, but broadly synonymous with an enormous amount of money, then the policies tip in their favor. And so you can look at a bunch of pro oligarchic policies, of which antitrust is one that emerged three as the man who's got a hammer and sees everything as a nail, is that it starts with the decision not to enforce antitrust. That the decision not to enforce antitrust creates the concentrated wealth and corporate power, the cartels that are able to then, you know, basically for trade unions, for billionaires that can, that can get together and demand certain policies that are favorable to them. And so you see the drawdown of other policies that are sort of antitrust adjacent, like there's a policy called the Robertson Patman act. So the Robertson Patman Act prohibits distributors from giving preferential discounts to large customers that aren't tied to the scale of their order. So in other words, if you order a million units and get a 20% discount, then I should be able to get a 20% discount for ordering a million units. So that law was passed because &P came into existence the first grocery chain and put all the mom and pop grocers out of business. Because it wasn't that they were ordering higher quantities per order. It was that across the whole business, they were a more structurally important customer, and so what they did was they demanded unrealistic discounts that were recouped by charging higher premiums to the small firms, which started a death spiral where the retail cost that amp was charging was lower than the wholesale costs that Mom and Pop grocers could buy for, right? So we stopped enforcing that in about 1982 which is also the year that Walmart metastasized, Walmart is like the poster child for enforcement of the Robinson-Patman Act. So these decisions like not to enforce these obscure areas of law, they arise from a certain degree of concentrated wealth already. So these firms have done reasonably well, and then they tip policies in their favor. And, you know, the Reagan Revolution, I think, represents like, what happens when you go from a series of small compromises for the wealthy to the extent that they become so rich that they can now bid for a very large shift. We're living through that again right now, right with the dismantling of a whole bunch of regulations that are very, you know, that are broadly speaking, cut against the parochial interests of a small number of rich people and work towards the public interest. And so some of that is revolving door rules, right? Some of that is like how the confirmation proceedings shake out. You know, I mentioned that Ronald Reagan passed a law in 1988 or signed a law in 1988 1988 that bans telling anyone which VHS cassettes you rented. The legislative history of that law, the Video Privacy Protection Act, is that there was a guy called Robert Bork who was Nixon’s Solicitor General. He's a virulent racist, but he was also the originator of the idea that we shouldn't enforce antitrust law. He wrote a book called “The Antitrust Paradox” and Reagan wanted to put him on the Supreme Court and the rental history. Turns out that, like the best thing you can say about Robert Bork Is he a pretty good taste in movies. So it didn't, it didn't affect them at all. But like, the idea there of the this privacy law, which, broadly, I think privacy laws are good the like, the impetus for this was to protect not just the wealthy and powerful, but the project of the wealthy and powerful to be grown more wealthy and more powerful, right? So you can see how each step is additive, right? How it makes the snowball, you know, roll downhill faster, or, as Jeff Bezos says, it makes the flywheel spin faster. And there are all these opportunities in the system to add more inertia to the flywheel and make it harder to resist oligarchy, and that's how we got to here. But you know what happens if you spin a flywheel fast enough, it shatters, right? And we are like at a point where, there we are closer to the collapse of that system than ever. For one thing, having achieved many of their goals, that COVID is fragmenting as they fight over them, right? And so, you know, there are fracture lines appearing that we can exploit. Rick Perlstein, the historian, wrote Reaganland, Nixonland, the great writer, pointed out that uniquely, he read all of Project 2025 he also read Project 2021, Project 2017 they do these every four years. And so he uniquely knew not just what one bad thing in it was, but that it had many mutually contradictory bad things, and that the anthologists at the Heritage Foundation who were brokering compromises among coalition members and the Trump coalition were faced with coalition members who were so evenly matched, that both of them were able to assist their mutually exclusive, contradictory goals be included. And he said, This is a roadmap to how to fight them, right? This is, this is who hates each other. These are the policies they don't have unity on, right? So it’s worth going back and paying more attention to this. Perlstein did a kind of guy guide to it, reading all 900 pages of project 2025. Will make your cerebral spinal fluid leak out of your nostrils. But, you know, read Perlstein’s summary of it. Are we? We've got a few minutes. Yeah, two more minutes, right? Okay, go ahead.
Audience member:
In 2019, you published Radicalized, a story about someone who radicalized an online community to do vagainst do violence against health insurance companies. I wanted to ask you about like, what do you think about political violence and its legitimacy today?
Cory Doctorow:
Yeah, so I wrote this short story called radicalize. This novella. It was published in 2019 it's about people radicalized underground message board for men whose wives and children are dying of cancer, and specifically who are dying of cancer and being denied care by their insurers, and it was really awaited for me to grapple with my Canadian mystification, having us at how many people angry American men shoot that aren't the people who are hurting them, which Like not saying that they should, just that it's objectively weird, right? That like someone will shoot you for flipping them off in traffic, but they're not going to shoot the insurance executive who dooms your daughter, who you love more than anything in the world, to die a slow, painful death in front of your eyes, right? That's just odd. When you think of when you think about it for 10 seconds, it just gets weird. So I wrote this story about men who get radicalized and go and shoot healthcare executives, and then Luigi Mangione allegedly shot a healthcare executive. And a lot of people wrote to me and asked me what I thought of it. And I was like, Well, you know, it was a thought experiment, it was parable. It was fiction. It wasn't a manual as as like, as William Gibson likes to say, Cyberpunk is a warning, not a manual, right? But you know, you asked about the role political violence plays now. in the story, there's a somewhat tongue in cheek line where one of the characters quotes The Onion saying, violence never solved, unless you count all the things that it solved. And you know, we live in a country that has innumerable memorials to its revolution that named both a state and a city after the guy who was the general in that revolution and engineered a bunch of very famous military victories in which lots of people died, right? And so I think it would be a mistake to exclude violence as a way that change is made. I think that we can't sit here in a country that started with a revolutionary war and say violence never creates change, never creates political change that people are later happy about. And I, you know, a pains to point out here that not everyone was happy with that outcome. And it wasn't just the crown loyalists who moved to Canada who were unhappy with how that worked out. There were a lot of indigenous people who were on both sides of that who weren't happy with how it cashed out. There were a lot of enslaved people who's doing the enslaving doesn't matter so much, you know, like, there's, there's, I'm not saying it's perfect, but I'm saying that political violence, like it's dishonest to say that political violence is never a thing that produces outcomes that that are broadly are preferable to the things that they started with. So what I would say, more than saying, we should, we should eat the rich or whatever, except metaphorically, right? I would say that if you don't want the political instability that attends a belief that political change cannot be achieved through non violent means, then you have to create pathways to change through non violent means that the legitimacy of the state and the willingness of people to color within the lines and obey the rules on their own, which is the only way you can make the rules be obeyed. You cannot hire enough cops like Larry Ellison is wrong. There isn't enough AI to catch everyone who breaks the rules right? The way that you make break the rules is by making the rules legitimate. And the way that you make the rules legitimate is by making people who think the rules are bullshit feel like there's a way to change the rules, and people are unwilling to entertain that, right? If you're not willing to have either rules that everyone likes or a process for changing those rules, then I think political violence is inevitable. And you know, I would prefer not to have that. And so, you know, I'm not, I'm not saying it's never going to happen. I'm not saying those in political violence I wouldn't cheer on. Violence. I wouldn't cheer on, you know, but I'm saying that. And by that, I mean, like, I was I, you know, by all means, like, make Hitler shoot himself in the bunker, right? Like, that's I'm not going to say, well, couldn't we find another way to talk to him, you know? Like, it's fine, right? Like, that is political violence. I'm really happy about, right? But I'm saying that all things being equal, it will be better if I didn't get to that phase. And I don't think it's impossible to imagine that, and I wish that my adversaries were more willing to entertain that possibility, because I think they are setting up a conflict.
Mike McCue:
On that happy note, you know, this is why we're building the social web, because it does enable the infrastructure to create those alternatives that are more about actually communicating with people. And I mentioned yesterday, talking to David in a panel I did last night with him. I have a right wing pen pal every now and then, you know, I'll post something, and he'll like, you know, come at me hard on Bluesky and but, you know what? He tries to be respectful, and I try to be respectful, and that's actually been kind of cool.
Cory Doctorow:
Yeah, I mean, Audrey, who just stepped away, he was the cyber ambassador for Taiwan, but was previously, like their Minister of Innovation, I think was her title. Audrey talks about how they built tools to surface agreement among people who broadly disagree with one another, yeah, and about how, like, she's gone on Laura Loomer and talked about tech policy that Laura Loomer is like that sounds really good to me. And 10s of 1000s of people in the live stream were like that sounds good to me too. I mean, you know the bill to break up ad tech, the America Act, which I just love, that Americans take their most elite political science grads and make them spend two years thinking of cool acronyms. But the America Act to break up ad tech was co-sponsored by Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz, right? Like, there are areas we can we can work together on some of these things.
Mike McCue:
You have a book I want to make sure that you…
Cory Doctorow:
So my new book is called “Picks and Shovels.”
Mike McCue:
It's great.
Cory Doctorow:
It's a techno thriller set in the 1980s about about con artists who sell computers through pyramid schemes and and who defend their con with spectacular acts of violence. It stars this recurring character of mine, Martin Hench, who's a two fisted hard fighting forensic accountant who busts finance scams. So the first two books that you can read them in any order they're meant to be read out of order. The first two books first two books came out of the last two years. They're both bestsellers. Brian Eno and his latest video. You can see him reading one of them at the start of it, which is very cool. The third one is out now. It's called “Picks and Shovels,” and I will be at first light books tonight with it at 7pm you can come too. I will be reading from it, talking about it. I have this which is like this device I found that makes books non returnable. I can demo it for you and and then I'm coming here afterwards. So if you're coming to the 404 party, you can make it to the 404 party afterwards. So tonight, 7pm first light. Books.
Mike McCue:
Awesome. Thank you. Cory, we're so lucky to have you. Thank you.
Well, thanks so much for listening! You can find Cory at craphound.com.
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