Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

This week on my podcast, I read my final Medium column The internet’s original sin, about the failure of trying to stretch copyright to cover every problem on the internet. Copyright is a regulation. It regulates the supply-chain of the entertainment industry. Copyright matters a lot to me, because I’m in the industry. But unless... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2023/12/17/the-internets-original-sin/" class="more-link" title="Read The Internet’s Original Sin">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

12 years ago, my four-year-old daughter’s nursery school let us know they’d be shutting down for Christmas a day before my wife’s office closed down, so I took the kid into my office in London to do some coloring, play with toys, and, eventually, record a podcast. It was hilarious. In the years since, we’ve... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2023/12/10/daddy-daughter-podcast-2023-edition/" class="more-link" title="Read Daddy-Daughter Podcast, 2023 edition">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I read my Locus Magazine column “Don’t Be Evil,” about the microeconomics and moral injury of enshittification. It’s tempting to think of the Great Enshittening – in which all the inter­net services we enjoyed and came to rely upon became suddenly and irreversibly terrible – as the result of moral... <a href="https://craphound.com/articles/2023/12/03/dont-be-evil/" class="more-link" title="Read Don’t Be Evil">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I read my short story “Moral Hazard,” published last month in MIT Press’s Communications Breakdown, a science fiction anthology edited by Jonathan Strahan. “Moral Hazard” is a story about inequality, fintech, and the problems of “solutionism.” I know exactly where I was the day I decided to give every homeless... <a href="https://craphound.com/stories/2023/11/12/moral-hazard-from-communications-breakdown/" class="more-link" title="Read Moral Hazard (from Communications Breakdown)">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I read the second and final part of my short story, “The Canadian Miracle,” a story set in the world of my forthcoming pre-apocalyptic Green New Deal novel, The Lost Cause, which comes out on November 14. Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping. -Fred... <a href="https://craphound.com/lostcause/2023/11/05/the-canadian-miracle-part-2/" class="more-link" title="Read The Canadian Miracle, Part 2">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I read part one of my short story, “The Canadian Miracle,” a story set in the world of my forthcoming pre-apocalyptic Green New Deal novel, The Lost Cause, which comes out on November 14. Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping. -Fred Rogers, 1986 It’s... <a href="https://craphound.com/lostcause/2023/11/01/the-canadian-miracle-part-1/" class="more-link" title="Read The Canadian Miracle, Part 1">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, “Microincentives and Enshittification” (open access link), about how Google went from being a company whose products were eerily good and whose corporate might was more often on the side of right than wrong, to being a company whose products are locked in a terminal... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2023/10/23/microincentives-and-enshittification/" class="more-link" title="Read Microincentives and Enshittification">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I present the prologue and first chapter of The Lost Cause, my forthcoming solarpunk novel of Green New Deal world threatened by seagoing anarcho-capitalist billionaire wreckers and their white nationalist militia shock-troops. The book comes out on November 14 from Tor/Macmillan (US/Canada) and Head of Zeus/Bloomsbury (UK/Australia/NZ/SA, etc). As with... <a href="https://craphound.com/lostcause/2023/10/12/the-lost-cause-excerpt/" class="more-link" title="Read The Lost Cause (excerpt)">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column. “How To Think About Scraping: In privacy and labor fights, copyright is a clumsy tool at best,” about the real risks (and benefits) of web-scraping, and how to formulate policy responses that preserve those benefits while targeting the harms head-on” Scraping when the scrapee... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2023/09/24/how-to-think-about-scraping/" class="more-link" title="Read How To Think About Scraping">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus column. “Plausible Sentence Generators,” about my surprising, accidental encounter with a chatbot, and what it says about the future of the bullshit wars. When I came back to the tab a couple minutes later, I found that the site had fed my letter to a... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2023/09/17/plausible-sentence-generators/" class="more-link" title="Read Plausible Sentence Generators">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column. “Enshitternet: The old, good internet deserves a new, good internet,” clarifying that our aspiration shouldn’t be to restore the internet’s former glory, but to make a new and glorious internet. The enshitternet wasn’t inevitable. It was the result of specific policy choices: the decision... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2023/08/21/enshitternet-the-old-good-internet-deserves-a-new-good-internet/" class="more-link" title="Read Enshitternet: The old, good internet deserves a new, good internet">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week’s podcast is a special one: the introduction and chapter one of the audio edition of The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation, which Verso will publish on September 5, 2023. I made my own DRM-free audiobook for this, reading it under the direction of the incredible Gabrielle de Cuir at... <a href="https://craphound.com/internetcon/2023/08/01/the-internet-con-how-to-seize-the-means-of-computation-audiobook-outtake/" class="more-link" title="Read The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (audiobook outtake)">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column. “Let the Platforms Burn: The Opposite of Good Fires is Wildfires,” making the case that we should focus more on making it easier for people to leave platforms, rather than making the platforms less terrible places to be. Tech bosses know the only thing... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2023/07/16/let-the-platforms-burn-the-opposite-of-good-fires-is-wildfires/" class="more-link" title="Read Let the Platforms Burn: The Opposite of Good Fires is Wildfires">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column. “Ideas Lying Around,” about archivillain Milton Friedman’s surprisingly good theory of change, and how to apply it to progressive politics. Enter Friedman: to people reeling in crisis, Friedman insisted that the missing oil was somehow the product of unionization, pollution controls, women’s lib, and... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2023/06/11/ideas-lying-around/" class="more-link" title="Read Ideas Lying Around">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I read my lastest Locus column. “The Swivel-Eyed Loons Have a Point,” about the unlikely – but undeniable – common ground I share with the most unhinged far-right conspiracists. The swivel-eyed loons at the anti-15-minute-city protests point out that such a scheme constitutes a form of pervasive location-tracking surveil­lance, and... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2023/05/14/the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point/" class="more-link" title="Read The Swivel-Eyed Loons Have a Point">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I bring you some clips of Wil Wheaton’s recording sessions for the audiobook of Red Team Blues, my next novel, an anti-finance finance thriller starring the 67 year old forensic accountant Martin Hench, who specializes in high-tech scams. I’m currently kickstarting this audiobook, pre-selling audiobooks, ebooks and hardcovers. I have... <a href="https://craphound.com/novels/redteamblues/2023/04/02/red-team-blues-behind-the-scenes-with-wil-wheaton/" class="more-link" title="Read Red Team Blues: Behind the Scenes with Wil Wheaton">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I read a selection from my next novel, Red Team Blues, an anti-finance finance thriller about Marty Hench, a 67 year old hard-charging forensic accountant who’s seen every finance scam that Silicon Valley has come up with over the previous 40 years. Marty’s ready to retire, but an old friend... <a href="https://craphound.com/novels/redteamblues/2023/03/26/red-team-blues/" class="more-link" title="Read Red Team Blues">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk, making the Luddite case against bossware and other jobs where your boss is an app. The rise of gig work produced a massive surge of “craft” workers who toiled on their own premises, most notably the drivers... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2023/03/19/gig-work-is-the-opposite-of-steampunk/" class="more-link" title="Read Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, Twiddler, which further explores my theory of enshittification, and the factors that make it endemic to digital platforms. The early internet promised more than disintermediation — it also promised endless configurability, where users and technologists could install after-market code that altered the functioning of... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2023/02/27/twiddler/" class="more-link" title="Read Twiddler">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I read my Pluralistic blog post, Tiktok’s enshittification, which sets out a kind of master theory of enshittification, illustrated by Tiktok’s platform dynamics. Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2023/02/20/tiktoks-enshittification/" class="more-link" title="Read Tiktok’s enshittification">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus column, “Social Quitting, about the enshittification lifecycle of social media platforms. But as Facebook and Twitter cemented their dominance, they steadily changed their services to capture more and more of the value that their users generated for them. At first, the companies shifted value from... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2023/01/22/social-quitting/" class="more-link" title="Read Social Quitting">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

When my daughter Poesy was four, her nursery school let us know that they were shutting down a day before my wife’s office closed for the holidays, leaving us with a childcare problem. Since I worked for myself, I took the day off and brought her to my office, where we recorded a short podcast,... <a href="https://craphound.com/podcast/2022/12/12/daddy-daughter-podcast-2022-edition/" class="more-link" title="Read Daddy-Daughter Podcast, 2022 Edition">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I read “Sound Money,” my latest column for Medium, which explains why money creation is necessary for a prosperous economy, despite the scaremongering of “inflation hawks.” MP3

This week on my podcast, I read “What is Chokepoint Capitalism?” a recent column for Medium explaining the thesis of my new book with Rebecca Giblin, which explains how creative labor markets got rigged, and how we can unrig them. (Image: Erik B. Anderson, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified) MP3

This week on my podcast, I read “So You’ve Decided to Unfollow Me,” a recent column for Medium describing the joys of writing to attract the audience of people who want to read what you want to write. (Image: Sascha Kohlmann, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified) MP3

This week on my podcast, I read “View a SKU: Let’s Make Amazon Into a Dumb Pipe,” a recent column for Medium discussing how interoperability could flip Amazon’s monopoly power on its head and enable us all to coveniently shop locally. MP3

This week on my podcast, I read “Why none of my books are available on Audible,” a short audiobook I produced to be distributed through Amazon’s ACX platform, explaining how that platform’s sloppy rights verification and mandatory DRM screws over writers. MP3 (Image: Paris 16, CC BY-SA 4.0; Dmitry Baranovskiy, CC BY 4.0; modified)

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, Reasonable Agreement: On the Crapification of Literary Contracts, about the growing trend of standard, non-negotiable contract terms in freelance writing contracts that are outrageous in their unfairness. MP3

This week on my podcast, I read a recent blog post, Monopolists Want to Create Human Inkjet Printers, exploring the way that med-tech mergers are bringing the ghastly inkjet printer business-model to artificial pancreases. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; Björn Heller, CC BY 2.0 (German); modified) MP3

Regulatory Capture: Beyond Revolving Doors and Against Regulatory Nihilism. This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, Regulatory Capture: Beyond Revolving Doors and Against Regulatory Nihilism., about the origins of the theory of regulatory capture, and the all-important, but rarely discussed difference between right and left theories of regulatory capture. MP3

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, Against Cozy Catastrophies, about the how the changeover from universal, state- or employer-provided pensions to market-based pensions like the 401(k) have created an inescapable, slow motion catastrophe, where the only thing worse than being one of the lucky few with retirement savings is being... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2022/06/05/against-cozy-catastrophies/" class="more-link" title="Read Against Cozy Catastrophies">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, Apple’s Cement Overshoes, about the malicious compliance in Apple’s “home repair kits.” (Image: Conall, CC BY 2.0, modified) MP3

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, About those kill-switched Ukrainian tractors, suggesting that what John Deere did to Russian looters, anyone can do to farmers, anywhere. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified) MP3

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, Revenge of the Chickenized Reverse-Centaurs, about the relationship between algorithms, interoperability and worker power. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified) MP3

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, Big Tech Isn’t Stealing News Publishers’ Content, about the calls from the news industry for tech companies to pay licensing fees for quoted news-snippets, and why this both ignores and worsens the real problem: ad-fraud. MP3

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, When Automation Becomes Enforcement, about the debate of interoperability and end-to-end encryption in the EU’s Digital Markets Act, and how that relates to the long-running battle over who’s in charge: you, or your computer? MP3

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, The Best Defense Against Rubber-Hose Cryptanalysis, which explores the contradiction at the heart of Bitcoin advocacy. MP3

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, The Byzantine Premium, which explores the contradiction at the heart of Bitcoin advocacy. (Image: Jakub-gdPL and FAMartin, CC BY-SA 4.0; Delwar Hossain, BD, CC BY 4.0; Jernej Furman, CC BY 2.0; modified) MP3

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, What is “Peak Indifference?” in which I explain my theory of how we change – or fail to change – in the face of wicked problems. (Image: Cameron Strandberg/CC BY 2.0, modified) MP3

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus column, Vertically Challenged, about “how and why to break up Big Tech.” MP3 (Image: Anthony Quintano; CC BY 2.0, modified; Paramount/Star Trek, modified)

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, All (Broadband) Politics Are Local, about the near-miraculous shift in the political will to provide universal fiber to all Americans, and what you can do to spur this process on. MP3

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, We Should Not Endure a King: Antitrust is a political cause, not an economic one, addressed to leftists who are skeptical of antitrust as a market-based solution that implictly accepts markets as the legitimate arbiter of our social relations. MP3

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, The Internet Heist (Part III), the third and final part of a three-part series about the early days of the internet copyright wars, when Hollywood studios came within a whisker of getting a veto over all new digital technology. MP3

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, The Internet Heist (Part II), the second part of a three-part series about the early days of the internet copyright wars, when Hollywood studios came within a whisker of getting a veto over all new digital technology. MP3

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, The Internet Heist (Part I), the first part of a three-part series about the early days of the internet copyright wars, when Hollywood studios came within a whisker of getting a veto over all new digital technology. MP3

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, A Bug in Early Creative Commons Licenses Has Enabled a New Breed of Superpredator about my experience with Pixsy, a new kind of copyright troll that targets Creative Commons users. MP3 Image: Nenad Stojkovic (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hand_on_the_computer_mouse_-_50202556601.jpg CC BY 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus column, Science Fiction is a Luddite Literature about the technological critique the Luddites embodied, the unfair rep they got, and how it applies to today’s tech hellscape. MP3

When my daughter Poesy was four, her nursery school let us know that they were shutting down a day before my wife’s office closed for the holidays, leaving us with a childcare problem. Since I worked for myself, I took the day off and brought her to my office, where we recorded a short podcast,... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2021/12/23/daddy-daughter-podcast-2021-edition/" class="more-link" title="Read Daddy-Daughter Podcast, 2021 Edition">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Medium column, Give Me Slack about the many second (and third, and fourth) chances I got as a kid and a student, and how the educational and work system has put paid to them. MP3