Cory Doctorow
speaker
2,525 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 20 Sep
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
Turning Facebook into a cable access TV channel devoted to short-form amateur dramatics created by theater kids is a weird move.
However, unlike your friends, those theater kids will organize their usage of the platform to maximize your engagement with it.
In fact, they will spend every hour that God sends trying to figure out how to get you to spend more time on Facebook.
But those performers are people, and hell is other people.
And these people would like dignified treatment, fair compensation, and other inconveniences that are suboptimal for Zuckerberg's own happiness.
That's why he's so committed to replacing creators with AI slop.
Just as bots might be the key to a coding shop without coders, Zuckerberg hopes that bots will produce a social media service without socializing.
If he can imprison you in a mirror palace of chatbots, he can order them to say the things that they calculate will make you keep scrolling, and he will owe them nothing.
Small wonder, then, that Zuckerberg, Musk, Cook, Nadella, Ellison, Pichai, and other Silicon Valley bosses have allied themselves so closely to Trump's fascist project, and that Trump is so excited about firing bureaucrats and other civil servants and replacing them with chatbots.
For Trump, hell is other people too.
He wants to be a dictator, but a dictator can only dictate the policies he can get other people to carry out.
Put Trump in a gator, plate carrier, and Oakleys and he will blow a hard valve before he can capture a single working class person and put them on a plane to a Salvadoran slave labor camp.
And, as Trump learned in his first term, the permanent civil service is full of people who stubbornly refuse to set aside their sense of ethics and duty in order to shape the world to his preferences.
The broccoli-hair brownshirts from Doge laid waste to the civil service, indiscriminately firing skilled workers who do things that America needs done.
When asked to justify this vandalism, they said that those fired workers were superfluous to requirements because general AI was just around the corner.
The idea of creating and enslaving an artificial god is so attractive to them because it allows them to realize the fascist dream in which every whim of their cult leader is instantaneously translated into action without having to pass through the filter of skilled people who understand how things work.
Hell is other people, but for most of us, other people are only hell because we love them and need them so much, and figuring out how to work together is hard.
Confronted with this fact, most of us commit to figuring out better ways to work with other people.
But for fascists, bosses, and other dictators, the fact that hell is other people makes them yearn for a world without people.
This fantasy permeates every part of their worldview, even their mysticism.
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