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
It is characteristic of automation that is driven by capital, but that's the arrangement we come to.
And it's why the most automated warehouses in America, which are Amazon warehouses, have the highest rate of injury.
in America because you're not just being used by the machine, you're being used up by the machine.
And again, it's not new, right?
The Luddites were attuned to this.
The reason that the entrepreneurs who bought the steam mills and the stocking frames were interested in them were not just because they were easy to use.
It was specifically because they were so easy a child could use them.
And the children they were thinking of were Napoleonic war orphans, of which there was an enormous surplus in London, who could be effectively kidnapped to Manchester to 10 years of indenture on the machines.
That's why they had to be so easy a child could use them.
Many of those children died or were maimed.
One of the survivors was a guy called Robert Blinko, who wrote a memoir that was such a bestseller that it inspired Charles Dickens to write Oliver Twist, which is Luddite fanfic.
And you see this as a recurrent motif.
Charlie Chaplin caught in the gears in modern times.
Lucy and Ethel trying to get the chocolates in the chocolate box at the end of the assembly line.
Why is the assembly line running at the edge of human endurance and reflexes?
Because you work the machine to the rate at which the slowest component can go.
and the human is the slowest component, so you work it to the maximum rate that the human can work at.
And that's how systems are often designed, when you couple multiple components in a system together.
And so this is centaurs and reverse centaurs, and it resolves another seeming paradox, which is how is it that you have people who are skilled workers, who are historically reliable narrators of their own experience with their tools,
And some of them are using a tool and they describe it as the most powerful increase in their capability as a skilled worker that they've ever seen.
Showing 1161–1180 of 2,714 · page 59 of 136
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