Cory Doctorow

speaker

1,791 appearances 17 recordings 12 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 8 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 — 7 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.

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Morning Brew Daily · What is “Enshittification” of Tech Companies? With Author Cory Doctorow · 24 Dec 2025 podcast

And we lock ourselves in through a thing economists call the collective action problem, but you probably know as, you know, you love your friends, but they're a pain in the ass.

So, you know, you got six people in your group chat, they're your best mates, but you can't even agree on like what bar you're going to go to on Friday, much less like when they and all the people that they are on Facebook for are all going to leave Facebook.

So now that he knows that...

He can inflict some pain on you because you love your friends more than you hate him.

He makes things worse for you.

And we get to stage two where he brings in business customers.

So one example would be advertisers.

He goes to the advertisers and he says, do you remember we told these rubes we weren't going to spy on them?

Obviously, that's a lie.

We spy on them with every hour that God sends, and you give us small amounts of money.

We'll target ads with incredible fidelity.

And we're such dedicated craftspeople that we're going to fund a whole building full of anti-fraud engineers, and they're going to do nothing except try and block ad fraud.

So when you give us a dollar to show an ad to a kind of user, we're going to find that user and stuff the ad in their face.

So advertisers pile in, publishers pile in.

They're told, you know, remember we told these suckers we weren't going to show them things they hadn't asked to see.

We will show them your stuff if you put it on Facebook.

Just put up an excerpt and a link and we'll cram it into their eyeballs.

And so they pile in and they get locked in too.

It's very hard to leave once that user base is a significant part of your business.

They become structurally important.

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