Tim Wu

I can immediately navigate to something that matches what I'm feeling.

Doing the mini, doing the wordle.

This app is essential.

When was the last year that the internet felt good to you?

I think everybody has different answers to this.

Mine, I think, go fairly far back, maybe to the heyday of blogging, at least before the moment when Twitter and Facebook went algorithmic.

But whatever your answer to it is, I have not found many people who think, 2026, right now, this internet, with all of its anger and its outrage and its AI slop, this is what we were promised.

This is living at the technological peak.

But even if there is this growing consensus that something went wrong with the internet somewhere and that it is driving our society somewhere we don't want it to go, there's not really a consensus of what to do about it.

What to do about these giant platforms increasingly spammed up with ads and sponsored results, boosting content that will keep us hooked and angry, isolating and dividing us and deranging our politics and making a few billionaires ever richer.

held up by an army of low-wage workers in warehouses and on delivery bikes.

Something has gone so wrong.

But what do we do about it?

My guests today have two theories of the case.

Cory Doctorow is a longtime blogger, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a science fiction writer.

His new book is In Shitification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.

Tim Wu worked as a special assistant to President Biden for technology and competition policy.

He's a professor at Columbia Law School and author of influential books on technology, including his latest, The Age of Extraction, How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity, and Shitification and Extraction.

Those are the ideas I wanted to put in play together here and to also think about what solutions they might present.

As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com.