Cory Doctorow
speaker
2,714 appearances
9 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 2d ago
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 — 9 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
So if there's a connection between those two projects, is they're both exploring different negative effects of allowing firms to secure and maintain monopolies.
And this is a kind of...
Iron law of economics that if you let companies go long enough, they'll form a monopoly.
It's not the great forces of history.
We just had this policy we adopted 45 years ago called the consumer welfare theory that said that monopolies are efficient and we should encourage their formation.
That's why we have monopolies.
It's not, we didn't get hit by a meteor, right?
We just have monopolies because we wanted monopolies.
And so, you know, and in shitification, we talk about how a firm that's too big to fail becomes too big to jail and then it becomes too big to care.
And so they can lock you in and then squeeze you.
And in this book, I talk about this seeming paradox of the monopoly, which is that when a firm saturates its market, right, when Google has a 90 percent search market share, it can't grow.
right?
Like how do you grow a company with 90% market share?
I mean, you can raise a billion humans to maturity and hope they become your customer.
That's a product called Google Classroom.
And the problem is that it takes like 15 years to pay off and the stock market wants to see growth now.
And not because growth is like an ideological thing.
I think progressives have done ourselves and other people a disservice by repeating this eternal growth is the ideology of a tumor phrase.
It's not an ideological matter, right?
Companies that are growing,
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