Cory Doctorow
speaker
115 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 27 Jul
Cory Doctorow’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
First, a company is good to its end users, then it locks them in, and then it is good to its business customers, who then get locked in, and then it takes all the value for itself, leaving behind a giant pile of shit.
That is enshitification, a tragedy in three acts.
Oh, well, thank you for having me on.
Well, I think that we've heard these claims before.
We heard that cryptocurrency was going to replace all of our transactions, that the metaverse was going to replace the web, that NFTs were going to replace all art.
This kind of claim to declare a fait accompli even before you got started is very powerful rhetorically.
It's a way to exterminate any thought that things might be different before you can even start thinking about it.
And we hear it now from AI people who are desperately trying to explain how they can take a sector that grosses 50 billion American dollars a year and somehow turn it into a profit-making venture, despite the fact that they've spent more than a trillion dollars just this year,
And despite the fact that every generation of it is less profitable than the previous generation, and despite the fact that they're having to replace all of their hardware every two to three years.
Well, the productivity and profit are nowhere to be found in the world.
You have some anecdata from individuals who say, well, I've used AI and made myself far more productive.
But when you actually look at the firms that have deployed AI, what you find is that even with the massive subsidy the AI companies are offering, and the subsidies can't be overstated.
Basically, at this point, AI companies are selling $100 bills at $1 apiece.
And even with that, you're not finding the productivity gains that firms were hoping for.
We keep seeing firms that fire large numbers of workers and then have to try and hire them back.
But even worse was about a month ago when the AI companies were all thinking about their IPOs and they said, well, let's clean up our balance sheets a little and raise the price of these hundred dollar bills to five dollars apiece.
And all of the CEOs, even the ones who've been most enthusiastic about using AI, suddenly turned around and said, wait, your $100 bills were barely worth it at $1 each, but at $5 each, there's just no way we're going to be able to continue to buy these things.
And they suddenly went from saying, you're going to get fired if you don't use AI to you're going to get fired if you keep using AI, at least in the way you've been using it so far.
Yeah, well, the shares in a firm that are growing are worth far more than the shares of a firm that is mature.
And that's because a share is a claim on the future income of a company.
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