Cory Doctorow
speaker
2,525 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 6d 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
And tellingly, the thing they're most excited about is the fact that AI might let them fire programmers and replace them with chatbots.
It may seem odd that the tech bosses who spent the past 20 plus years singing the praises of the talent are now so palpably horny to replace coders with chatbots.
But only if you don't understand the special hell that programmers represent to tech bosses.
Tech workers have historically been in extraordinarily short supply, and tech workers are extraordinarily productive.
A single engineer adds about a million dollars to the bottom line of a big Silicon Valley firm.
Given those two facts, tech workers were always able to credibly threaten that they would walk out the door because there were 10 other bosses waiting at the factory gate, eager to offer them a new job.
For tech bosses, the fact that they needed tech workers much more than tech workers needed them was indeed hell.
Tech bosses needed to pretend to be their workers' peers, wearing hoodies and attending engineering meetings where workers were encouraged to ask impertinent questions about the business's technological direction and commercial strategy.
What a humiliation.
we know how tech bosses would like to treat their workers.
Tim Cook became Apple's CEO after he figured out how to shift Apple production to Chinese contract manufacturers without the company's product plans leaking or its manufacturing quality declining.
All it took to achieve those goals was a working environment so toxic that the factories needed to install suicide nets to catch the workers who'd rather die than spend another day assembling iPhones under the conditions Cook enforced.
Then there's Jeff Bezos.
This year's Met Gala was sponsored by Bezos, and protesters ring the building with bottles of fake urine to highlight the fact that the conditions that Bezos created for his warehouse workers and drivers are so onerous that they don't allow for bathroom breaks.
For a man with a penis-shaped rocket, Bezos is weirdly hostile to the human kidney, or at least other people's kidneys.
Every big tech company has a sweatshop tucked away somewhere.
A small city of traumatized Kenyan content moderators, say, or a high-rise building full of QA people working through the night to find bugs in a blockbuster video game in the hours before it ships.
Any boss who can subject other people to this kind of treatment does not, at some foundational level, truly believe that other people are real.
If you understand other people suffering to be as real as your own, you could never institute a work regime like this.
No wonder Elon Musk calls everyone who disagrees with him a non-player character.
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