Cory Doctorow

speaker

525 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 31 Jul

Cory Doctorow’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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On the Media · F@#$ the AI Overlords · 31 Jul 2026 podcast

And then the same week, they were like, oh, and by the way, we've got this new security tool called Mythos, but it's so dangerous, if we let you see it, you turn to stone.

Oh, also, we're thinking about our IPO now, but that has nothing to do with the fact that we have a profitability that can't be computed using normal mathematics and a tool that's so cool you're not allowed to use it.

I just think that as a civilization, it would be nice if we had enough object permanence to win a game of peekaboo.

There's a great story about the customer service stuff that is especially poignant for me as a Canadian, which is the Air Canada story.

They're our flagship carrier.

A lot of the times, if there's routes, if you want to fly them, it's just Air Canada.

So, you know, this is Lily Tomlin as the AT&T operator on Saturday Night Live.

We're the national flagship airline, right?

So they've had bad customer service for a long time, particularly since the very useless competition regulators in Canada let them buy most of their competitors.

One of the things they did was outsource that customer service to— But now they're not even human.

Yeah.

So the story with Air Canada is this guy, his grandmother dies, and he needs a bereavement fare.

And, you know, most of us don't have to buy bereavement fares, thankfully, and we don't know how it works.

So he does what any of us would do.

He goes and asks the customer service chat on the Air Canada website, how do I get...

a bereavement fare, and they had fired a bunch of their workers, contractors, and replaced them with chatbots, and the chatbot said, I'm sure, that's a great question, and you're smart to ask it.

Also, here's how you get your bereavement fare, just fly full fare, send us the death certificate afterwards, we'll give you the difference.

So he does this, and then he hears back from Air Canada, and they're like,

chatbot was wrong we're really sorry but we're not giving you the refund you had to submit the death certificate before you flew so we went through 10 weeks of customer service hell escalating this through the whole air canada bureaucracy hits like the point where they're like we just can't help you and then he goes to the ombudsman in british columbia and like it's weeks more and finally like here is 700 canadian they were wrong

Well, how many people didn't go that far?

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