Cory Doctorow
speaker
2,525 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 3d ago
Cory Doctorow’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Think here of the thousands of miles of fiber optic cables that WorldCom buried under the streets of cities all over the world.
podcast-host
Worldcom was a massive, wicked, fraudulent enterprise whose executives lied to the public in order to steal billions from everyday working people, leaving them bankrupted or separated from their retirement savings and doomed to a miserable old age.
podcast-host
For this crime, WorldCom CEO Bernie Evers was sentenced to prison and he died there.
podcast-host
And yet the fiber is still under the ground.
podcast-host
It got there by the most disgusting harmful means imaginable, but treating those cables as morally untouchable doesn't help any of those bankrupt pensioners.
podcast-host
At my home in Los Angeles, I have a two gigabyte symmetrical fiberlink from AT ⁇ T who bought and lit up some of WorldCom's fraudulent pensioner destroying fiber.
podcast-host
I would rather live in a world where I had slower internet and the pensioners still had their money, but that's not an option.
podcast-host
At this point
podcast-host
The fiber is just fiber.
podcast-host
Its use doesn't harm anyone anew, nor would refusing to use it bring any benefit to anyone.
podcast-host
Some people's anger over AI models training data is couched in claims about copyright, not privacy.
podcast-host
The argument goes that by making transient copies of billions of public works and then tabulating the relationships of the elements in them, the AI companies are stealing from creative workers.
podcast-host
I think this represents dangerously misdirected anger.
podcast-host
It's totally legitimate to be angry at a tech executive with billions in investor capital who publicly announces their intention to destroy your livelihood, even more so if they use your own creative output to accomplish this end.
podcast-host
But the bad conduct here lies in the intention and action to destroy your livelihood.
podcast-host
It does not lie in making copies of your work in order to count the words or pixels in them.
podcast-host
Copying and analyzing every public work is how every search engine works.
podcast-host
What's more, this practice wasn't invented by search engines.
podcast-host
Long before the first digital computers, the Oxford English Dictionary examined the entire corpus of publicly available written work to trace the etymology of our language.
podcast-host
Long before Google News, the library where I worked, subscribed to a quarterly hardbound subject index of all the articles published in every general interest English language newspaper and magazine.
podcast-host
Showing 221–240 of 2,525 · page 12 of 127
← Previous
Next →