1280: Cory Doctorow | Why Everything Got Worse and What to Do About It

1280: Cory Doctorow | Why Everything Got Worse and What to Do About It

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional drug trafficker, four star general, or Hollywood filmmaker.

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That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started today. If you've ever looked at the internet and thought, wow, this used to be less awful, congratulations. You have [00:01:00] noticed enshittification.

Today we're discussing why every platform you love eventually turns into a flaming dumpster full of popups, scams, knockoff backpacks from brands that are named like a cat just walked across the keyboard, and a subscription fee just to use the thing you already bought or that you thought you bought, but now I guess it turns out you're renting it. I don't know.

Facebook promised they'd never spy on you, and now spying is their business model. Amazon didn't just win e-commerce. They locked us in, shook down merchants, cloned their products, and raised prices everywhere. So we all pay the Amazon tax whether we shop there or not.

Twitter speed ran itself from town square to scams, porn, and Nazis in record time. Google. They didn't win by being the best search engine. They won by making it a freaking nightmare to even try to use anything else. My guest today is Cory Doctorow, who coined the term enshittification. We're breaking down how this happens, why switching costs keep us trapped, and how tech companies gaslight us into thinking that this is all normal.

And what, if anything, we can actually do about it. Because when your car, your phone, your books, your [00:02:00] software, and your social life all come with terms and conditions written by Satan's interns, something has gone very wrong. Now here's Cory Doctorow. Why is the internet going downhill?

Cory Doctorow: So I think, you know, the Galaxy Brain meme where you've got the, the three different explanations, the one for the little brains, the one for the medium brains.

Yeah. And the big ones. So the little brain answer to this is like, it's yours and my fault. We are, as consumers, the all powerful arbiters of everything that happens in society are consumption choices, determine everything. We did not shop with sufficient care. We used services that were free and didn't think about what pitfalls might be in the future.

I think this is nonsense.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Cory Doctorow: I think the idea that you're going to shop your way out of a monopoly is like the idea that you're going to recycle your way out of the climate emergency. Like I don't care how well people in the Palisades sort of their recycling, like,

Jordan Harbinger: yeah,

Cory Doctorow: that's not going to stop the fires. Right.

Jordan Harbinger: That's a good point.

Cory Doctorow: So then there's a kind of medium explanation, which is that we have these like, um, ketamine-addled zuckermuskian failures that run the world and they're manifestly evil people who have done terrible things. And I [00:03:00] think there's a lot of truth to that there. Terrible people, but I also think that, you know, they're just doing what they're allowed to do.

I mean, look, Mark Zuckerberg presided over Facebook from 2005 to 2012 when it was quite fun to use. Yeah. You know, it's not like he had a stroke and woke up evil.

Jordan Harbinger: That was kind of where I was going with this. Right. Because wasn't he kind of, I mean, look, I, I know him from that movie that everyone saw. Sure.

But it was like, okay, you made a website so people could rate women. Not the super wokes thing to do here in 2026, but also like. Not really like evil, demagogue, oligarch behavior.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: And then also Facebook was like, Hey, MySpace is spying on you. That's such bullshit. We're not going to do that.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah. Yeah. And also they're owned by an evil billionaire who would want to use social media owned by a billionaire.

Jordan Harbinger: Right?

Cory Doctorow: Right. So you have, you know, these guys who are bad guys, but you know, they do evil for the same reason your dog licks its balls because they can. Mm-hmm. And the reason they can is because policymakers who unlike these guys, [00:04:00] draw a paycheck to work for us. Took decisions in living memory that had the foreseeable and foreseen outcome of allowing the worst people to do the worst things they could imagine and make ungodly amounts of money doing it.

They created the enshittogenic policy environment. We warned them at the time they did it anyway. And you know, they and their advisors, you know, the economists who said monopolies are good and efficient. They're today just absolved of all responsibility. You tell an economist, the 40 years you spent briefing for the efficiency of monopolies are the reason that we're all getting screwed today.

And they're like, how can you be so sure my pro monopoly policies are in some way connected to the monopolies that are destroying our lives. It's like we used to not have a rat problem, uh, because we were using rat poison. And then these guys were like, stop using rat poison. And we stopped using rat poison.

Now rats are like eating our faces off and we're like. Why did you make us stop using rat poison? They're like, how do you know this is our fault?

Jordan Harbinger: Right?

Cory Doctorow: Like, maybe this is the time of the rat. Maybe like sunspots have made rats more fecund than in any time in human history, and I [00:05:00] will stipulate the rats did buy the poison factories and shut them down.

But look, we're not using rat poison anymore. That's just economically rational decision making. So I think we have to lay the blame at the feet of people who worked for us, who were warned at the time that their pet theories were going to create this in shite where everything turns to shit who did it anyway.

And who today a lot of these guys are collecting six figure consulting fees and polishing their fake Nobel prizes in economics and being lauded as great figures of history. Like we have to remember that it's them, not just so that we can take it out of their hide, but so that we can make sure that in the future no one like them ever gets their hands near the levers of power.

Jordan Harbinger: From inside right now, it's hard to see how you undo this kind of stuff because it's so powerful. I mean, going back to earlier, Facebook was complaining about, Hey, Tom, this billionaire owns MySpace. I mean, it probably wasn't his anymore. It

Cory Doctorow: was Rupert Murdoch then.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, yeah. But that, yeah, it was Rupert Murdoch.

So that was like, he was rightfully like, Hey, look at this guy's.

Cory Doctorow: Not a good

Jordan Harbinger: guy.

Cory Doctorow: Cracklin, senescent, Australian, immortal, vampire billionaire, spying on you [00:06:00] from asshole to appetite.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes. Yeah. And then instead of going like, well, first of all, they said we would never do that. And then meta was like, but if we did, we'd make so much money.

And now you have meta owning WhatsApp, which you used to talk to your grandma in Ukraine or whatever, or you know, Poland. And that's all going into the data machine to make, well, frankly, the crappiest AI model that exists out there. Mainstream uhhuh, that is ai, but also just spying on you. What, what was your phrase?

From asshole to appetite. Yeah. You're also doing it and it's way where I'm sure Rupert Murdoch and the crew at MySpace looks at what Facebook is doing and they're like, wow, you are the Michael Jordan of what we Sure.

Cory Doctorow: The game we stood. Yeah. The Louis Pasteur of Commercial surveillance. Yes. So I think that there's some truth to that, and I think that what you have to understand is that I don't think Mark Zuckerberg was ever a good guy, as you say, he created Facebook in his dorm room to non consensually rate the ability of undergraduates.

Right. Right. So it's not like he was, put it

Jordan Harbinger: that way,

Cory Doctorow: ever. A good guy. Right. Right. He was disciplined right in service to his own [00:07:00] wellbeing. He understood that if he did bad things to us, bad things would follow for him. And so he was better to us. If you're a physicist, sometimes you try to theorize like a, a world that's kind of abstract for a thought experiment where everything is perfect.

You say, imagine a perfectly spherical cow of uniform density on a frictionless plane, and then you have a little theory about this. Well, if you're an economist, you sometimes say, imagine the perfect business. It pays nothing for its inputs. It charges infinity for its outputs. Now, businesses don't get to actually run like that unless they're academic publishers, in which case that's exactly how they run.

But everyone else has to accept some discipline. If you don't pay people, they won't work for you. If you don't give value, your customers will leave. They are subject to discipline from markets, from competitors, and as you say. We allowed Facebook to buy its competitors. Now, the people who advocated for monopolies as efficient, they didn't say, well, all monopolies, they are good.

They said, it's only good to have a monopoly if you got a monopoly by trying to be excellent [00:08:00] and not by trying to acquire market power. Now, it's very hard to know why a company took some decision, right? You can't like peer into Mark Zuckerberg's psyche and say, did you buy Instagram because you thought it would be good for Facebook and would make Facebook users happier?

Or did you buy Instagram because you thought it would give people your choices, right? Right. So normally it's very hard to tell. However, mark Zuckerberg is a man who's never had a criminal impulse. He didn't immediately commit to writing an email to someone else so that it could be discovered later in some kind of legal proceedings.

So we know that when he bought Instagram, his CFO sent him an email saying like, mark, why are we buying a company with 12 employees for a billion dollars? And he replied, paraphrasing here, but like, Hey, people love. Instagram, they hate Facebook and they leave Facebook and they go to Instagram and they don't come back.

And so if we buy them, we'll recapture those people. They won't be users of Facebook, the platform, but they'll be trapped by Facebook. The company he had previously sent a memo [00:09:00] company-wide that said it is better to buy than to compete. This is about as close as you get to like a memo surfacing that's like, Hey Bob, you know that guy we were thinking about killing.

Just so you know, it's definitely a murder and now that I think about it, I'm. Really seriously premeditating it. And so you have this memo, right? It's in the evidence. Obama's DOJ is looking at it and they're like, nothing to see here. We'll just wave this through. Because every DOJ and every FTC from Reagan until Biden waved through pretty much every merger that came before them because monopolies were efficient.

And so you have Facebook eliminating its competitors. They buy Instagram. They buy WhatsApp. It's not just them. I mean, Tim Cook buys 90 companies a year for Apple. I did

Jordan Harbinger: not know that.

Cory Doctorow: He's bringing home more startups for his shareholders than You're bringing home bags of groceries for your kids.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Cory Doctorow: Right. Uh, Google. What is Google without its acquisitions. 'cause everything they do internally crashes and burns, right? Yeah. Right. They couldn't even make Google video work. They had to buy YouTube. You take away Google's acquisitions and they don't have a video platform, an ad [00:10:00] tech stack. They don't have server management, they don't have document collaboration.

They don't have maps, they don't have satellites. They don't have turn by turn navigation. They don't have any of it.

Jordan Harbinger: Right,

Cory Doctorow: right, right. They have a Hotmail clone. Right. Yeah. Gmail decent, but yeah, that, that they created in-house, right? But everything else they created in-house almost with that exception, crashes and burns.

And so they're not, you know, Willy Wonka's Idea Factory, they're rich Uncle Penny bags. They buy other people's toys and they play with them, right? So these companies, they eliminated the competition. Google pays Apple more than $20 billion a year not to create a search engine.

Jordan Harbinger: I saw that. I thought that was, I always wondered why Apple didn't get into the search game.

'cause I'm like, if anybody has the resources, it's them.

Cory Doctorow: Sure.

Jordan Harbinger: And somebody was like, oh, well, Google's the best at it, which is, you know, not true. Mm-hmm. Um, or at least wasn't true when I asked this question. Maybe it's true now. I I don't think it's true now. I doubt it.

Cory Doctorow: I have recommendations if you're

Jordan Harbinger: interested.

Yeah. I actually, I do later. 'cause I, I, I'm like, what do we use DuckDuckGo? Sure. You know? I don't know. Um, yeah. What do, well, we'll, we'll skip if

Cory Doctorow: you're willing to spend. 10 bucks a [00:11:00] month. There's a company called kgi, K-A-G-I-I don't work for them. Right. I don't have any commercial relationship with them. I sometimes get an email from the CEO saying, thank you for saying nice things about us.

Oh yeah. When you're doing interviews. 'cause I love using them. So my, uh, my editor for my novels, I've written more than 30 books. I write science fiction novels as well as nonfiction. Like Enshittification, my novel editor, I've known since I was a lad, we met on A BBS when I was 17. He's this funny, incredibly smart autodidact.

He dropped out of high school at 14 to hitchhike around the country making science fiction zines. He ended up a vice president of Macmillan.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

Cory Doctorow: He's taught himself everything. And I was, uh, with he and his wife, who's also this brilliant auto died act, uh, Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Teresa Nielsen Hayden at their place in Tucson for a conference.

And we're all just sitting around drinking coffee and looking at our. Screens as we do. And he was like, have you tried CGI yet? And I'm like, tell me about cgi. And he is like, well, do you remember when, you know, used to be that like you could ask Jevs a million questions and never get a straight answer.

Yeah. But you could type a few vague words into Google and it would just give you exactly what you wanted.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes.

Cory Doctorow: [00:12:00] That's what CGI is like. And I'm like, really? And so I tried it. The, I don't know what the deal is now. They used to give you a hundred searches for free and then you have to pay 10 bucks a month.

So I tried it and I was like, oh my God, this is the, this business. And I immediately bought a subscription for my whole family. And then Jase Keebler at four or four Media, which is this great, uh, tech news site. Um, people who used to work for Vice Motherboard got out just ahead of the implosion and started a journalist owned outlet.

They're, they're incredible investigative journalist. He published an an article, an investigative piece about cgi, and he revealed something I had not known, which is that CGI doesn't own its own index. It uses Google's index. Then it rents it, right? If you can pay for API access. I

Jordan Harbinger: see.

Cory Doctorow: And then it resorts the results.

So cgi, a startup with, I don't know how many employees, 10 or something, is able to give you results that are a hundred times better than Google's, which tells you something that

Jordan Harbinger: Google is

Cory Doctorow: doing it on purpose.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes. So we'll skip to that right now because I found this to be kind of [00:13:00] insane. This was one of those where I was like.

Is this true? But it, it makes sense, but it's just, it's so evil. So let's not bring a lead. What do you mean Google's doing this on purpose?

Cory Doctorow: So, yeah. So, uh, the, I know what story you're talking about. This came out of the Google antitrust case. There were two cases that they lost in 2024. Um, one was over search, one was over advertising.

This comes out of the search case, and I'm indebted to Ed Zitron of The Better Offline Podcast and the Where's Your Ed At? Newsletter for the reporting he did on this. So in the memos, the DOJ published that they required Google to give up through discovery. We find out that in 2019, Google hit a wall.

Their search revenue growth had stalled out, and there's a reason for that. They had 90% of the market. You can't grow from 90% of the market, right? You can sure raise a billion humans to maturity and make them your customers. That's a product called Google Classroom. It's going to take a minute to like bear fruit, right?

So in the meantime. They're not posting growth anymore. Wall Street's going to get anxious. What do they do? And we see in the memos this fight between two groups of executives and the champion of one is a guy [00:14:00] called Prabhakar Raghavan. He's an ex McKinsey guy. He's an engineer. He worked at Yahoo where he was in charge of search in the period when they went from a 90% market share to a 0% market share and shut down.

He failed up and got put in charge of Google search revenue. The other guy's, a guy called Ben Gomes and Ben Gomes, OG Googler, he uh, started building their servers back when it was like one computer under a desk. Mm-hmm. He built out the global network of data centers and now he's in charge of search technology.

So he's the search tech czar and Prabhakar Raghavan, Ben Gomes. They have this argument, 'cause Raghavan has got this plan. He says, I know how to goose our search growth. We just make people search more. Right. If we make search worse so that when you search, you don't get the answer you're looking for and you have to type more, it's pretty easy to do.

Right. All you've got to do is like, you turn off the thing where they auto spell check and they say, you know, did you mean Beverly Hills? Not Burverly Hills? Right. Uh, and they turn off the context awareness. So like, say some guy's just thrown a submarine sandwich at an ice goon in Washington, DC uh, and you [00:15:00] search for, uh, submarine sandwich, it puts those results at the top because it knows what's going on in the world.

There's a thing called query stemming where you search for trousers. It also searches for pants. You know, these are just switches you can turn off in the back end of Google. They turn it off and now we're searching two and three times, which means they're getting two or three chances to show us ads.

Right. And you can see in the messages that they're fighting it out and Gomes is like. I gave decades of my life to this company

Jordan Harbinger: to make the search amazing. Right.

Cory Doctorow: To yeah. For technical excellence. Yes. Right? Yes. As are his team. Right. And then you have the Raghavan team who are basically like money talks and bullshit walks.

What are people going to do? Use Bing.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Cory Doctorow: Right. We are bribing Apple $20 billion a year not to make a search engine. We've bought all the shelf space in the store. If you search, uh, irrespective of what mobile carrier you have, what mobile operating system you have, what manufacturer you have, which operating system you're using, which browser you're using.

You're going to be searching with Google. Mm-hmm. So what do we care? If someone makes a better search engine, no one's ever going to find it.

Jordan Harbinger: Right?

Cory Doctorow: Right. What are we spending [00:16:00] $20 billion a year to keep Apple to the search market for if we're not going to capitalize on it?

Jordan Harbinger: Is that $20 billion a year? That's to say, Hey, your default search in Safari That's right.

On every device is Google.

Cory Doctorow: Which per force means that it's not Apple. If Apple had a search engine,

Jordan Harbinger: right,

Cory Doctorow: the default search engine would be Apple.

Jordan Harbinger: So the 20 billion is Apple could make 19 billion a year if they had their own search engine, we're going to pay them 20. So they don't even try.

Cory Doctorow: That's probably the calculus they're both doing.

And I should point out, this is the largest deal that either company does, and it's directly negotiated between the CEOs of both companies.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. So this is like red phone bat phone from

Cory Doctorow: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Tim Cook

Cory Doctorow: to the summit, right? Yeah. Everyone gets together. You, uh, you do, you relax, you hunt some humans.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah,

Cory Doctorow: exactly.

You stroke your, you smoke your white Persian cat,

Jordan Harbinger: right. Drink some baby blood

Cory Doctorow: or something. Yeah. And then, and then you're like, how many zeroes after the two this year? Oh, well, let's make it, uh. 10.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Cory Doctorow: You know? Right. And so I had to do the math. How many zeros after the two and 20 billion?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Wow.

That's great. So they're sitting there going, let's make search crappy so that you have to run it three [00:17:00] times. Yeah. And we'll get to put three sets of ads at the top. And most people aren't going to complain because look, you still have a magic box that searches the entire internet

Cory Doctorow: well, and where else are you going to

Jordan Harbinger: go?

Right? I'm going to Alta Vista, which probably doesn't exist anymore.

Cory Doctorow: You remember on Saturday Night Live and before that on laughing, Lily Tomlin used to do this character called um, Earnestine, the phone operator, and she'd do these fake ads for at and t and they'd always end with her turning to the camera and saying, we don't care.

We don't have to, we're the phone company,

Jordan Harbinger: right?

Cory Doctorow: Yeah, right. This is the problem. It's not just that companies become too big to fail and we bailed them out. Although that's happening, it's not just they become too big to jail, which they are. So Google was convicted of monopoly conduct in this search case, and then the judge was like, your punishment is, I'm not going to punish you.

You can keep paying Apple $20 billion a year. You can keep doing all the things you are convicted for doing because reasons, because you're too big to fail, but they become too big to care. Right. Why would you care? Like if your path to glory is being worse? I mean, look at Boeing, right? Boeing eliminates its [00:18:00] competitors.

They start union busting, they move the manufacturing to, you know, South Carolina. And, uh, the planes start falling out of the sky. And now we're all Boeing to die. But

Jordan Harbinger: yeah,

Cory Doctorow: what are we going to do about it? Right? Fly in an airbus.

Jordan Harbinger: It's funny, I do have a, an app called Flighty, which I love and it shows you what kind of plane you're in.

Oh yeah. And my wife's always like, what kind of plane is this? And I'm like, Airbus something, something, whatever. And she's like, oh good. Thank God.

Cory Doctorow: No. I live under the approach path for Burbank Airport and Southwest flies a 737 max over my roof every 15 minutes.

Jordan Harbinger: Nice.

Cory Doctorow: So

Jordan Harbinger: I'm You're just rolling the dice all

Cory Doctorow: day.

I'm just going to die. Yeah, no, that's how it

Jordan Harbinger: works. It's uh, what's that movie? Donnie Darko where the airplane That's right. Comes and crashes into his room. That's right. Switching costs are a thing. And you write about this in the book. It's funny 'cause I was just thinking about this. One of our sponsors is Mint Mobile, and it's like 15 bucks.

Uh, I swear this isn't a paid thing. It's like 15 bucks a year, month or something. It's really, really cheap. And I was like, Jen, how much are we paying for at and t? And she's like, oh, $400. Sure. And I was like, let's switch. Right? And she's like. But [00:19:00] my dad's on the plan, my brother's on the plan, I'm on the plan.

You're on the plan, your dad's on the plan, your mom's on the plan. We all have to go to the store probably at the same time,

Cory Doctorow: Uhhuh,

Jordan Harbinger: which alone is impossible,

Cory Doctorow: Uhhuh,

Jordan Harbinger: and then sit there for what's going to be four and a half hours of, oh, I don't know why this thing I'm clicking on the screen doesn't work. I mean, it's just, and then the switching costs become $10,000 of my time.

Mm-hmm. As opposed to just like, screw it, pay $400.

Cory Doctorow: I'd be interested to find out exactly how that actually shakes out for you, because there is, uh, there was an order, and this is an example of how regulation can change the way this stuff works. There was an order for number portability.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Cory Doctorow: Uh, three administrations ago.

This

Jordan Harbinger: was a while ago. Yeah.

Cory Doctorow: And you call the carrier, you go to their portal and you say, I'm porting out my number. They give you a one time code like you get when you're logging into your bank or whatever, you go to another carrier, you go to Mint Mobile and you give them that code. And, and you know, it's funny because like.

You think about social media, like it'd be the easiest thing in the [00:20:00] world to port and it is like the most prodigy, CompuServe ass thing that you have to know which social media network someone is on in order to talk to them. Like think about how unimportant your carrier has become in this year of 20 and 26, right?

No one's ever called a friend and said like, dude, you would not believe who SIM is in my phone right now.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah,

Cory Doctorow: yeah, yeah. Right. It's just irrelevant. You pick up the phone, you call the person, and that means that it is pretty straightforward to leave. I mean, there, so Min, like a lot of other carriers, it's an MVNO, a mobile virtual network operator.

So they don't have their own network there. Uh, there's a statutory requirement that the carriers sell airtime on their networks. And so you have these two regulatory orders, a number porting order, and a what's called essential facility sharing order. Uh, and all of a sudden you can have a hundred phone companies.

Yeah, yeah. You know, and they're keeping each other in check. Like there is a point where if at and t made you two rank with them, you might all go do it. Or you might say like, I do it. Yeah. Dad, mom. Sis brother, whatever. I'm leaving the plan. If at and t calls you [00:21:00] up and says, that's going to be an extra two bucks a month, I'm sorry, but that's just how it goes.

You can find me on Min Mobile or wherever, Google Fi, you know, there's a million of these carriers. There's one called Calx I really like, that's run by a nonprofit that has a long track record of resisting surveillance demands. They were the first ones to contest a Patriot Act warrant.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Cory Doctorow: Wow.

Successfully. Uh, so, you know, they've lots of choices. So you, you know, the point is that like switching costs, they don't come down off a mountain on two stone tablets. Right. Switching costs arise out of policy. And sometimes we have policies that deliberately lower switching costs. Right? Like, so that would be like an order that.

The numbers not reporting. Right. Reporting, yeah. But sometimes we have policies that raise switching costs and when those policies aren't there, companies can lower the switching costs for themselves. So 2001, 2002, I was a, a Chief information officer for hires, helping all these small businesses get their, like networks up and get online.

And it was. Big bad time for the Apple, for the Mac because [00:22:00] Microsoft had just been convicted of being a monopolist. They had a 95% market share on the desktop, and one of the things they did was they just stopped updating Mac office, which meant that if you made a Word file or an Excel file or PowerPoint file and shared it with a Mac user, it probably wouldn't work very reliably.

Like you could just wave the Mac office, install floppy around the office, and all the files would go spontaneously corrupt. Mm-hmm. It was so bad that you'd have these office environments. There'd be like 25 people on Windows PCs and like a designer and the CEO with a power book and a desktop Mac, and so I would just give them a Windows machine.

Yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: yeah.

Cory Doctorow: That they could use for PowerPoint. Right, right. And then that was so unwieldy that I just put a big graphics card in it, and they just switched to Windows. So Apple solved this problem, and the way they solved the problem is they got software engineers to reverse engineer Microsoft Office, and they made the iWork Suite pages numbers and keynote, which perfectly read and write Excel, PowerPoint, and Word.

Then they ran this campaign called the Switch campaign, which was basically like, you can just [00:23:00] switch, just buy Mac and then open all your documents on that Mac. Yeah. And it'll work just fine. And that was because digital computers have this incredible characteristic that they're in computer science jargon.

I'm, I'm a fake computer scientist, have an honorary doctor in computer science, so, okay. Not a real one. And I dropped out of a CS program. Nice. But, um, in computer science jargon, we call a computer, a touring complete universal von Neumann machine, which in computer science speak means this is an, a computing engine that can compute every valid program.

So this iPad in front of you has the same. Processing capability. The same instruction following capability as the processor in the digital SLR that's recording us, and the smart TV that's right next to us and your smart watch that's over there. And also the univac. Now, they run at very different speeds.

They have different amounts of ram. It might take a million years for the UNIVAC to run your iPad apps, right? But all computers can run all programs, which means that if there's ever like a 10 foot pile of shit in a program you use, there's an 11 [00:24:00] foot ladder made out of code that someone can give you that you can use to go straight over it, which is what Apple did.

Now in the years since we have seen the expansion of IP law to make that kind of move. A felony under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Reverse engineering a device that is designed to resist reverse engineering is a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 file.

Jordan Harbinger: Right? So they're just throwing a, that's making that wall higher with criminal laws.

Cory Doctorow: So it just makes it illegal. So this is another policy dimension. This is why I say the enshittogenic policy environment is what created this, right? We made it illegal to fix someone else's broken technology. Yeah. And then we wonder why all our technology is broken.

Jordan Harbinger: We have the an MVNO that sponsors the show they're in, they're called Cape, and they're security forward. And the only reason these things can exist is because the law is like, Hey, if you're going to own all the cell towers, you have to let other companies rent these cell towers for a fair amount of money.

Yeah.

Cory Doctorow: Essential facility sharing.

Jordan Harbinger: And so it's interesting to see how these places, they'll either be like cheaper than at t or [00:25:00] Cape, which is what we have, is like, Hey. We actually secure this, we

Cory Doctorow: have a value add,

Jordan Harbinger: right? Somebody can't go, Hey, I'm Jordan. And then they go, oh, okay, you want to take the SIM card and transfer it to another phone so you can steal all of Jordan's banking information?

Cory Doctorow: Sure. Well, in those carrier networks, they all run a protocol called S seven that was part of the original GSM spec that is used for billing for SMS and and roaming. And it's so insecure that you can, broadly speaking, get the location and movements of anyone who's got a cell phone because S seven sucks so bad.

And then the carriers are riddled with insider threats. And so you have, um, bad actors, bounty hunters, bill collectors who have been able for years to get detailed information about your location and cell phone use from the carriers. There's even commercial services where you can just go buy it and there's like a cutout,

Jordan Harbinger: you know, Bellingcat, right?

Cory Doctorow: Sure. Of course.

Jordan Harbinger: I interviewed someone from Bellingcat. He was saying that one of the ways they found these Russian spies who had come and, and basically tried to kill that spy in London.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: They found them because they just [00:26:00] have all these corrupt people working at cell phone carriers in Russia. Sure.

And they were like, what if I give you a thousand bucks? Can you give us these guys locations Yeah. For the entire year. And they were like, okay. Sure. Well,

Cory Doctorow: this is one of the things about the capacity of these firms to gather and retain so much data on us, the tech firms, is that, um, they have insider threats.

They leak like sieves. And we see this over and over again. You know, Facebook has had multiple people inside Facebook who were fired for stalking their ex-partners.

Jordan Harbinger: I always wondered about that.

Cory Doctorow: So is Google and so is the NSA, in fact, the NSA has a little cute acronym for it. So, um, you know, there's two kinds of intelligence that spy agencies collects.

The human, which is human intelligence, which is when you ask someone something and snt, which is signal intelligence, which you spy on their communications, they have a third kind, they call it love in, which is when you spy on someone, you have a crush on using the NSA surveillance technology,

Jordan Harbinger: right? Which is gotta be a million percent illegal and like a felony, but they're like, Hey, stop that.

Cory Doctorow: Right? Well, [00:27:00] and you know, again, how are they going to find out and are they really going to punish you? And so any data you collect will probably leak and any data you retain will definitely leak.

Jordan Harbinger: How creepy, you know, you're dating, you date some guy in high school, or you know, some gal in college, whatever, you know, whoever you're dating.

And you, you're like, oh, that's so weird. She works for the CIA now. Wait, she works for the CIA now,

Cory Doctorow: right? Or you know, Booz Allen. Or I, IBM M or one of the other major contractors, or Palantir, you know, who have all of this capacity and who aren't shy about using it.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Like, hey, you know, I can find you on any camera.

Cool. You can see me crossing the street in New York. Wait, you can find me on any camera? Sure. What else have you seen me doing?

Cory Doctorow: Right. Well, and you know, we have these flock cameras everywhere and you know, we're told that it's a public safety thing. Mm-hmm. But. Even if you stipulate to it, which I don't, if you stipulate to the idea that law enforcement shouldn't need to obey, the fourth Amendment should be able to track you everywhere you go.

No one has ever watched a detective movie in which the detective says, oh, I got that license plate number. I'll call a friend [00:28:00] at the department and find out who it belongs to and gotten. Oh, that's incredible. That's stupid. No cop would ever tell a buddy Right. Who, who the license plate belongs to. We all understand that that is routine.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Cory Doctorow: Well, stalkers creeps, crooks, you know, they are all able to access people who have access to

Jordan Harbinger: or they are of

Cory Doctorow: this data, or they are those people.

Jordan Harbinger: We also take each other, you mentioned this in the book, we take each other hostage on social media. Yeah. Because I don't know my immigrant community, it has a Facebook group or my parent group for my.

Kids, it's the school, it's on WhatsApp. Sure. So what am I going to do? Say I don't use meta products. And they're like, well, good luck. You just won't know anything that we're doing ever.

Cory Doctorow: Your kids really going to enjoy cupcake day.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah. So there's that. I mean, there's also like maybe you've got the same rare disease as other people.

Oh yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: sure.

Cory Doctorow: You know, this is called the collective action problems. Another term out of economics, like switching costs. And it just refers to the facts that as, as much as you love your friends, they're a giant pain in the ass. Right. And you can't even agree on like. What movie you're going to see this weekend or like what bar you're going to go to.

So how are you going to [00:29:00] agree on, uh, like when it's time for all of you right to leave Facebook? And Mark Zuckerberg understands this. He understands that so long as you love your friends more than you hate him, that you'll probably stick around even if he makes the service worse. So this is intrinsic to any kind of social service.

It's a way to do lock-in that's much cheaper and more reliable than the more exotic forms of lock-in, like getting a bribe from Google to not make a search engine. Or setting up these e extreme billing systems where if you want to get all the discounts and whatever, you all have to lock in and no one of you can leave.

And it's like a, a real hostage situation. This is a very straightforward one. It just sort of occurs organically. And this is why we see social media becoming such a cess pet now. We were talking about MySpace when Mark Zuckerberg was luring people off of MySpace. His pitch wasn't just that we are privacy respecting and not owned by a billionaire.

'cause that's. Only gets you so far, like are you going to sit there and smug, solitude, rereading the privacy policy and waiting for your stupid friends to come join [00:30:00] you on Facebook, right? He said, here's a tool, it's a bot. You give it your login and your password. It'll go to MySpace several times a day.

Pretend to be you. Scrape everything waiting for you and your feed there and put it in your Facebook feed. You reply to what will push it back out to MySpace so you can eat your cake and have it too. This is. Adversarial interoperability. It's just another version of what Steve Jobs did when he caught his engineers to reverse engineer the office suite.

And what we've done in the years since is just made that illegal.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Cory Doctorow: So in 2024 or a couple of teenagers who made an app called OG App and you gave it your Instagram login and password, it log into Instagram as you, it grabbed everything Instagram was waiting to show you. It threw away the ads, it threw away the suggestions.

It threw away the boosted content. It threw away the stuff that had been surfaced through three months ago. 'cause it looked like clickbait. And it showed you the things that the people you were following had posted in reverse chronological order and sent no data back to meta unless you liked or um, commented.

Right. So normally when you're using the Instagram app, they know everything. If you slow down when you [00:31:00] scroll, they get that, oh, I know they are in the accelerometer of the device. They know how you're holding it for moment to moment. It's a crazy amount of data. They just sent none of that back to meta.

So within a day. OG app was in the top 10 of both app stores that night. Meta sent take down notice to Apple and Google and it was gone in the morning and it's against the law to reverse engineer your iPhone to side load apps that don't come from the app store. I didn't know that. And so that was the end of it.

Jordan Harbinger: I did not know that. Yeah. I should probably stop publicly telling people about all the side loading I do on various platforms.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah. So if you have to bypass an access control, right. If there's a, a countermeasure that you have to defeat, it doesn't have to be very effective. It just has to be enough that they can go to court and say there was a countermeasure.

The toolmaker bypassed the countermeasure and then that's a felony with a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine.

Jordan Harbinger: Silly me, I thought I owned this device. Yeah. And I could use it how I wanted to use it as long as I wasn't hurting anyone.

Cory Doctorow: It's pretty abnormal. Yeah. That we have property that we want to use in lawful [00:32:00] ways and the manufacturer dis prefers it.

And that takes precedence.

Jordan Harbinger: So I routinely, and it's funny 'cause when I said, Hey, is your book on Audible? You were like, no dumb ass. When you read, read it. I think I'm

Cory Doctorow: much nicer about that. You didn't

Jordan Harbinger: say that, but I, the vibe was Maybe when you read the book you'll understand. No, it's not on audible. Um, and it was kind of funny.

I felt like as soon as I read the book, I was like, I'm turning red now.

Cory Doctorow: Oh, I, I don't mind at all. I mean, they're 90% of the market.

Jordan Harbinger: Nothing quite says changing the world like free snacks in a 90 hour work week. Quick break, then more dystopia.

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Jordan Harbinger: This episode is also sponsored in part by BetterHelp.

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Now back to Cory Doctorow.

Cory Doctorow: It's funny because I, I, I think I told, admitted to another felony on the call with you, which is I go,

Jordan Harbinger: oh, you know what I do is I just, I use this program called Open Audible, and then I download it, and then I put it in my other app. So trafficking in

Cory Doctorow: that program is a felony.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I didn't know that. 'cause I felt like, oh, I own the books.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah. Well, and here's the amazing thing. Say I as the author. Let Audible sell my books. Audible has a requirement that all their books be locked up this way. It's called Digital Rights Management. Mm-hmm. DRM, yeah, DRM. So I let Audible sell my books.

So they collect whatever, $15 from you. Now, I wrote the book in this case, I read the book. I [00:36:00] also paid for the, uh, engineer and the director. I paid for the editing and the qa. It's my book, right? I own that book. So you bought the book from Audible. I give you the tool to take that book out of the Audible app and put it in like another app.

I commit a felony right as the copyright proprietor. It is illegal for me to let you take my copyrighted work and use it as you see fit. And it's a copyright violation and it's not just a little copyright violation. If you were to go and like pirate the audiobook from Audiobook Bay, you would face a less harsh sentence than I would for supplying you with a tool to take your purchase copy elsewhere.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's insane.

Cory Doctorow: If you were to go and shoplift it at a truck stop on cd, yeah, you would face a less severe sentence than if I gave you the tool to use it as you see fit. If you were to stick a gun in the face of the truck driver who delivers the CDs, now we're getting to par in terms of your expected sentence for hijacking the truck and for me, giving you the tool to take the work I created.[00:37:00]

So this isn't really copyright, it's more like felony contempt of business model, right? It's like the right to conjure new felonies into existence by adding a little bit of access, control some DRM, and then making it so that anything you want to do that the DRM prohibits. Requires that you go past the access control.

Jordan Harbinger: Crazy

Cory Doctorow: dude. And since that's illegal, that's the end of the story.

Jordan Harbinger: So is it illegal for me to use Open Audible or is it just

Cory Doctorow: illegal for me, me to share the

Jordan Harbinger: program?

Cory Doctorow: It's well, so it is both illegal. It is a civil matter for you to use it, and it is a criminal matter for you to traffick in it.

Jordan Harbinger: What is trafficking in it?

Not mentioning it

Cory Doctorow: on it to someone else, telling them where to find it.

Jordan Harbinger: I would never do that.

Cory Doctorow: But also, and this is very important, telling someone how it works, right? Like what vulnerability did you find in Audible in order to exploit it is also correct. Now, this is important because when you do security research, this is the gold standard for security research.

You say, I investigated this thing, I investigated your smart tv, and I found out that it was spying on you or that it would let other people spy on you. And here is my proof of [00:38:00] concept code. This is how I bypass the boot loader. This is how I showed that it could be done.

Jordan Harbinger: I see

Cory Doctorow: that is a crime. So effective criticism a.

Yeah. Of defects of a device. So I'll give you a really severe example.

Jordan Harbinger: What if I say put a piece of tape over the camera on the bottom?

Cory Doctorow: So this is where, like, what is circumvention? What is an access control? That's probably fine.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Cory Doctorow: There's very little jurisprudence on what is and isn't an access control.

There's a very funny case where this weirdo started a Napster clone called Amster, and then he put all the song titles in Pig Latin. And then I

Jordan Harbinger: remember

Cory Doctorow: this name, he tried to get, his name was Johnny Deep. He was very weird. He tried to get the record companies, he tried to sue them for decrypting the song titles that were in Pig Latin.

And the judge was like, I'm sorry, that's not an effective means of access control. But I'll give you an example of one that's really bad. So, um, in Poland there's a giant train manufacturer called Newag, N-E-W-A-G,

Jordan Harbinger: okay?

Cory Doctorow: And Newag, turns out, booby traps their trains. So if they sense that the locomotive has been taken to a rival service yard, or if the locomotive is immobilized for more than a few days in a place that might have a rival [00:39:00] service yard, they, uh, brick the locomotive. It just stops working.

That's insane.

They'll send over their kill signal to it. They didn't disclose this. All that train operators knew is that their trains would sometimes stop working and they would call up  Newag, and  Newag would say, oh, let us do some remote diagnostics.

That's a 20,000 euro, uh, service charge because you didn't buy the service package from us. You unwisely bought the service package from our competitor, and then they would just charge them 20,000 euros to go in and make and you know, click the make train, go button again. And this got very suspicious because there was a piece of mainline track and when they drawn the rectangle around the Service Depot, they'd been sloppy and they'd drawn it around the mainline track.

So trains that went down, this track would just stop. So the security research group was hired by one of the train operators and they discovered this sabotage, right? That this company had basically tied Poland to the train tracks.

Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

Cory Doctorow: Article six of the copyright directive is just like Section 12, one of the DMCA.

The US Trade Representative made all of America's trading partners adopt identical laws to our antis circumvention law. So every [00:40:00] country in the world has a law like this 'cause otherwise, someone in Poland could go into business dissing American products and make a lot of money, right? So you have to have everyone else agree to stop doing this.

So the manufacturer is suing the researchers and an mp, a member of Parliament, who talked about their work in the Parliament for violating Article six of the copyright directive because they revealed the method by which they were able to access the firmware. Of the train.

Jordan Harbinger: I mean, that's hopefully a Supreme Court of Poland type of case where they go, yeah, you can't fricking do that.

Cory Doctorow: Cases normally take sort of eight to 10 years to get to the European Court of Justice, right? Which is the federal court in Europe. And we'll see how it goes. But in the meantime, look, if you are a security research firm, which is, you have to understand security research firms sounds very grandiose. It's often

Jordan Harbinger: like, yeah, it's like five dudes.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah, three people were just like super into this stuff, right? And love the intellectual challenge and make good money, like figuring out how stuff is broken and warning people, but

Jordan Harbinger: not like $50 million to defend a European Court of Justice case that's right. Against a massive multi-billion dollar train, train operator company.

Cory Doctorow: And so like, so say you're, someone comes along to you and they say, [00:41:00] um, you know, we're worried that this ventilator. Might have some back doors in it. Would you make sure that when we plug this ventilator in, it can't be remotely shut down by malicious actors? Can you do an audit of it before we put it in our hospital?

Are you going to do that? Are you going to bypass the firmware? Especially since all the ventilators in the world are made by one company. It's called Medtronic. They're an American company, but they pretend to be Irish. They did the largest tax inversion in history. All their monies floats in a state of untaxable grace, somewhere over the Irish sea.

Doesn't Apple

Jordan Harbinger: also do that?

Cory Doctorow: The Apple Google? Yeah. The iron Ireland's a made town. So, uh, they pretend to be Irish. They booby trap their ventilators, and if you put a part in the ventilator, even one of their own parts in it, but you don't pay their technician to come and type an unlock code, the computer or the ventilator won't use the part.

So during lockdown, you had med techs at hospitals who were harvesting working screens from dead. Ventilators and putting them in working ventilators with dead screens. But the screen would not [00:42:00] work with a ventilator,

Jordan Harbinger: right?

Cory Doctorow: Because they could not get someone from Medtronic to get on a plane and come to their hospital because there were no plane flights,

Jordan Harbinger: right?

And

Cory Doctorow: people were just dying because of this.

Jordan Harbinger: That's

Cory Doctorow: super

Jordan Harbinger: sad.

Cory Doctorow: Are you going to risk their wrath if someone says audit? So Medtronic makes everything, they make deep brain stimulators for people with Parkinson's disease. They make, um, uh, glucose monitors, insulin pumps, uh, implanted defibrillators and pacemakers.

These are things that you do not want to have remote security vulnerabilities. No. No. And they all have wireless interfaces, right? Because you don't want to get your firmware updates with a scalpel. Right? So what does it mean if you're a deep brain stimulator or you're implanted defibrillator can be remotely triggered by someone standing a couple of feet away from you,

Jordan Harbinger: right?

Oh my God. And their argument to this is, we want to make sure that you're really using high quality parts because this is a deep brain stimulator. Yeah. We don't, we don't want to knockoff Chinese part in there that fails.

Cory Doctorow: Sure.

Jordan Harbinger: You gotta buy ours. There's something to that, but I don't know.

Cory Doctorow: They have an irreconcilable conflict of interest.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's a good way to put

Cory Doctorow: it. Yeah. Because you know, yes, it's true. They sometimes [00:43:00] want to defend your interests and sometimes they don't. So one of the things that has kept Medtronic in the news for so many years is that their devices are wildly insecure. So for example, they had a supply chain problem where, you know, you go to the cardiologist, they put a wand on your chest to read out your implanted defibrillator and updated software.

The software update that came from Medtronic onto the PC that the cardiologist had, and into your implanted defibrillator, which is basically a giant battery attached to your heart. Yeah. Right? That software had no integrity checking. So you could just put different software in that supply chain and there would be no way to detect the tampering.

So it wasn't, it, there was no, uh, cryptographic signatures that went with it. My god. So this is like super basic stuff. Super

Jordan Harbinger: basic, yeah.

Cory Doctorow: Like your watch. Get software updates that are signed.

Jordan Harbinger: If I were to hypothetically download a movie from BitTorrent, even my transmission on Mac program will check the integrity of the file and make sure

Cory Doctorow: it matches exactly right.

So yeah, no integrity checking, uh, easy supply chain inserts. And this is just very [00:44:00] bad.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Cory Doctorow: Right. And so like the idea that, well, you should delegate all your trust to Medtronic because they really care about your security and take it seriously would be more valid if they did. Yeah. But also like one of the reasons that they don't.

Have to take your security seriously is because no one's allowed to tell you when they screw it up.

Jordan Harbinger: Right. Exactly. Like the good news is, uh, we updated your pacemaker. The bad news is we put Tetris on it. So

Cory Doctorow: quake, I think

Jordan Harbinger: quake is what

Cory Doctorow: we all install on everything now.

Jordan Harbinger: That's right. So unfortunately you're, it might work a little weird, but it's going to be pretty freaking cool.

And you should show your son.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah, yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: I want to talk about Amazon. Speaking of evil, uh, sure. Actress, I mean Facebook, there's so much we could talk about with Facebook, right? The metaverse that failed, how they suck you.

Cory Doctorow: You don't use the metaverse.

Jordan Harbinger: Does it exist?

Cory Doctorow: I use the Metaverse all day. I mean, I'm, I, this is my, one of my, my rare exits from, no, I never use the me Are you kidding me?

A brick on my face. No way.

Jordan Harbinger: Have you seen Apple Vision Pro?

Cory Doctorow: So I have a housemate who, um, for some reason can only watch the [00:45:00] NFL on his Apple Vision Pro.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Cory Doctorow: Uh, so if I come into the sitting room and he's on the couch with a brick on his face, I'm like, I guess the football's on.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I will say Apple Vision Pro is one of the coolest things I've ever used in my life.

It's like the iPhone, but in terms of like how revolutionary it is. But it's too expensive. There's not enough you can do with it, but it's like my favorite toy. But the Metaverse, I remember watching an interview with Mark Zuckerberg in there, and it was just like. It looked like a game from the eighties, except they were kind of like, we can play ping pong in here.

Right? Like, no one who would use this besides kids who play Minecraft and then they're just going to want Minecraft.

Cory Doctorow: I gotta say, I saw that video and I thought it really had legs. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Because the legs were all janky in the video folks. Uh, so Facebook sucking in all this journalism content and it was like, Hey, we're making the site more useful.

And then it was, you just don't have to go to that site anymore. And Google's doing the same thing with their AI summaries. Yep. They basically, now you search for something in Google and it's like, Hey, you were going to click on the first three links, don't bother. Here's what they say.

Cory Doctorow: Right.

Jordan Harbinger: And I find that [00:46:00] kind of useful, but I'm also like, Ooh, I feel bad for the guy who makes a living off his website surfacing ads.

Well,

Cory Doctorow: and if you ask Google, Hey, does this AI get it wrong? They'll say yes, but um, everyone should click on those three first three links to make sure that the summary is correct. Right, right. Well, sure. It's not like Google doesn't have analytics. They know that no one clicks on those first three links.

Right. So they are. Giving you summaries. They know the summaries are inaccurate, and then they are adding enough window dressing around the summary that, uh, they'll blame you, right? If you accidentally poison yourself instead of you blaming them.

Jordan Harbinger: Here's a question that I don't understand. So a lot of websites make their money from like Google Ads on the,

Cory Doctorow: yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: So let's say I have a recipe website. The first result in Google for, I don't know, eggs benedict or something like that. I've got a bunch of Eggs Benedict recipes. It's the first result now. People search for eggs Benedict recipe, they get an AI summary. My ads aren't firing, my business is screwed up. But isn't Google also taking a hit?

Because those are Google ads. So Google's like, ah, we'll take the loss. [00:47:00] We just want people to use the AI somewhere. I don't get what their, what angle is

here.

Cory Doctorow: So I have a book coming out in the spring, uh, called The Reverse Cent's Guide to Life After AI that tries to answer. Sort of why are they so all in on what is objectively the money losings technology in the history of the world, no one has ever lost as much money as the AI companies.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Right? Yeah.

Cory Doctorow: I mean, ever. And they say, oh, well, we'll make it up somehow. But it's like every time you add a user, you lose more money. Every time that user uses your product, you lose more money. Uh, the only people who have not lost money on GPUs are the ones who forgot that they needed electricity for it and then couldn't find anywhere to put it, and it's sitting in a warehouse.

Yeah, right. Are those people who have lost the least money on their GPUs? It's

Jordan Harbinger: crazy.

Cory Doctorow: So why are they spending all this money? And I think it goes back to this paradox of the firm having a 90% market share. So if you are a growing firm, the investors value you with what's called a high price to earnings ratio.

So that's the amount of money that your stock is worth relative to how much money you make. So. If you make a million [00:48:00] dollars a year and all of your stock is worth $10 million, you've got a 10 to one p two E ratio. Growth firms have very high P two E ratios on famously Teslas is in the three figures.

Mature firms have much lower ones, even if they have the same cash basis, right? Even if they're selling the same number of units and making the same profit from all of them, because the share in the growth firm is a bet on its growth. Now, the thing about having a growth stock is that it is very advantageous for growth.

So if you want to hire someone or buy a company, they will often treat your stock as though it was cash. Right.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. '

Cory Doctorow: cause it's growing and you know, if you're thinking about like, say Target versus Amazon, and they both want to buy a logistics company, right? Someone who manages warehouse stuff so they can do shipping target's.

A mature company, Amazon's a growth company. They both make offers for this company, uh, this logistics company, target has to make an offer in dollars and they can only get dollars from their customers or a creditor. If, if you make [00:49:00] dollars at Target, the treasury department pays a visit and takes you away in handcuffs, right?

Yeah. Amazon can make a bid in stock, and the way that they make stock is they type zeros into a spreadsheet. Right. They don't have to convince someone else to give them stock before they can make an offer.

Jordan Harbinger: Right.

Cory Doctorow: Okay. And so this means that a growth company always gets to keep growing because they can always buy companies hire key personnel.

When Mark Zuckerberg hired that AI scientist for a hundred million dollars, he didn't give him a hundred million dollars in cash.

Jordan Harbinger: Right.

Cory Doctorow: He gave him a hundred million dollars in meta stock, which he created by typing some zeros into a spreadsheet.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. So they can print money.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah. Yeah, they can print money.

Now, here's the paradox. Eventually. Anything that can't go on forever stops, right? And so eventually you stop growing because you've got 95% market share. And Google Classroom takes 15 years to make you a billion adult cohort who will be your customers. And so then the street wakes up and they go, oh, you haven't hit your growth target like we sometimes are like, why are these guys so obsessed with growth?

Yeah. This is why, because if you [00:50:00] don't hit your growth target, they're like, okay, you've got a good business, but it's a mature business.

Jordan Harbinger: Everybody panics sell now.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah. Which means that it's overvalued by five to one. So, uh, January, 2022, mark Zuckerberg gave a, an investor conference, his annual quarter, first quarter investment conference, uh, investor conference.

And he said, we experienced slightly lower than anticipated growth among US users. Last year and there was a one day $260 billion sell off of Facebook stock. Right. And who is the person in the world with who loses the most money when Facebook stock goes Seth by Zuckerberg? So this is how it happens that he like arises from his sarcophagus one morning and says, harken to me, brothers and sisters Thrive had a vision.

I know I told you that your future consisted of arguing with your most racist uncle. Using the website I generated to rate the ability of undergraduates. However, in the night it has occurred to me that the true future consists of me transforming you and everyone you love into a legless, sexless, low polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon character.

So I can imprison you in a virtual world I stole from a 25-year-old satirical, dystopian [00:51:00] cyberpunk novel that I call the Metaverse. Right?

Jordan Harbinger: Right.

Cory Doctorow: And that's a way to signal to the market. We are not just stuck growing as a social media network where we have a 95% market share. There is an adjacent market called VR that we can grow into.

So you'll remember there was one day when Google woke up and they said, actually, we're Facebook now and we have a product called Google Plus.

Jordan Harbinger: I remember that,

Cory Doctorow: right? And it wasn't. I mean, maybe they wanted a social media network, right? What they also wanted was for investors to say, sure, you've got an 90% search market share, but you could grow.

You could become Facebook, you could take their market share. And then Facebook woke up one day and they said, we're YouTube. Now we're doing the pivot to video. And investors piled into that. We had cryptocurrency, metaverse, Web3, blockchain.

Jordan Harbinger: I remember Facebook Pay

Cory Doctorow: NFTs. Yeah, yeah. All of these things. And now it's AI and super intelligence.

I'm not saying that they're like insincere in their belief. Like I think that they're like, it would be awesome if people like this idea as good as that one idea I had 25 years ago that people liked.

Jordan Harbinger: I think he believed in the Metaverse

for

Jordan Harbinger: sure.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah. I mean [00:52:00] it's no one

Jen Harbinger: else did.

Cory Doctorow: I mean, if you're a billionaire, you are a solipsist.

Yeah. Right. You don't really believe other people exist. Right. Of course, metaverse makes sense to you. I mean, this is why Elon Musk calls the people. He doesn't like NPCs 'cause he just thinks they, they're not real. Uh, you know, how can you look yourself in the mirror after commiserating people at scale if you think that they're real?

Right? So you have to, you know, a certain extent just like disbelieve in other people, at least most other people, in order to occupy that seat. Right? And you remember these guys were all into effective altruism and long-termism.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It's funny that I was just reading about this and it was like this whole thing where it was like, hey.

It's okay to be kind of evil now, right? If you're donating money, because in the future there's going to be a trillion people that are helping

Cory Doctorow: 53 trillion artificial people, and if you make them all a little bit happier, you will have created more net happiness than all the misery you inflict on people when you earn to give.

Today,

Jordan Harbinger: it's almost like a religious belief, like all the stuff. Sure. Yes, I had my son blow himself up at a checkpoint, but. He's in heaven now and we're all going to heaven with him. Sure. So it's all fine. And those people who blew up, [00:53:00] they're also in heaven. So what are you complaining about?

Cory Doctorow: Yeah, so this purchasing of indulgences, there's this kind of moral calculus.

So it all has a, a foundation and a belief that other people aren't real. And so, you know, I think that they believed that this might work. Right. I just think that they didn't care if it worked so long as it kept the share price going, right?

Jordan Harbinger: I make

Cory Doctorow: some so long as they could, you know, they're running across the river on the backs of alligators and they're trying not to lose a leg, right?

And so they have to make the next leap. And you know, if they go like, okay, metaverse, maybe not, but ai. And then it's like, well, everyone who's deploying AI isn't making any money from about super intelligence. Right. They just need the next and the next and the next and the next.

Jordan Harbinger: That's why they keep telling us Agis around the corner when other people are kind of like, if by corner you mean like maybe 50 years.

And they're like

Cory Doctorow: using a completely different technology,

Jordan Harbinger: like shut up scientist.

Cory Doctorow: I mean like this is like the idea that if you keep breeding horses to run faster and faster, eventually one of your prize MAs is going to give birth to a locomotive. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah,

Cory Doctorow: exactly. It's not like humans are [00:54:00] word guessing programs who know more words, and therefore, if we shovel more words into the word guessing program, they will wake up.

Jordan Harbinger: Right?

Cory Doctorow: They're profoundly different things. Now, word guessing programs can sometimes do useful things, and I think if it wasn't for the bubble, we would call AI like a plug. Oh, I got a thing that sometimes finds grammar errors that my spellchecker couldn't spot or that can wire frame a code routine or like I'm a video editor and I can move the eyeballs of 200 extras, so they're looking over here instead of over there when the director asked me to.

It's just a plugin to like Avid, right? I mean, yes, it's deep faking video, but it's just a plugin.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Cory Doctorow: Right. And if it were like a normal technology, we'd go, oh yeah, here's some useful things. We wouldn't be like, what if the word guessing program wakes up and turns us into paperclips? Also, it might be God also everyone is fired.

Jordan Harbinger: I want to shift from shitting on Facebook to shitting on Amazon from Sure.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Amazon Prime. Has really changed the, like, that has locked us in, and it's worked on me too, right? Because my buddies who run, I, I've got buddies who run e-commerce sites and sell clothes, some of which I'm wearing now. Kettle [00:55:00] Mountain will link it in the show notes.

One of my favorite brands buy it directly from the website. I, I bought something and I said, Hey, um, I was on a trip with them and I go, Hey, by the way, I bought a pair of pants from you three days ago and I didn't get a shipping notification. He just goes, Jordan, Jordan, ugh. Amazon has rotted your brain.

We don't have slaves working for us. It's going to take like four days for someone to go to the warehouse with all of the other orders and get it. Sure. And then they're going to ship it because we don't have slaves and robots. And you just expected that to ship overnight, didn't you? And was like, yeah, we don't your

Cory Doctorow: people at three times the rate of other warehouse workers as Amazon does.

Jordan Harbinger: Right. It was just kind of funny. It's like we don't ship things three hours after you order it, bro. That's kind of impossible for most companies to do. Sure. Amazon has made an exception to that. But no, if you order something off of anybody else's website and it's not sold through like a crazy three PL, third party logistics or Amazon, you're not getting it in two days.

Sure. It's just not real. And he was laughing at me because I actually expected that to happen. Sure.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well look, I mean, you could turn that on its head and say, well, [00:56:00] Amazon did something quite impressive with their logistics network at a pretty high human cost. It must be said though. I think that, um.

It's conceivable to imagine a world in which we let drivers pee and also get our things overnight.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes. I did the show with Uber Butler who made the, have you seen this? You

Cory Doctorow: made a joint? Yes, I do. I reference it in the book. Yeah. Yeah. This is a bitter lemon energy drink.

Jordan Harbinger: That's right.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah, yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: I forget what it was actually called, but it was something where

Cory Doctorow: it's called Bitter Lemon Energy.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, is it? Oh, I thought it was called something like I, I thought it had like a Clever cheese.

Cory Doctorow: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Bitter Lemon. That's the P joke.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay,

Cory Doctorow: got it. Yeah. Tech bosses would really like us to think that, um. You have to take the good with the bad that they're inseparable. That like having a conversation with your friends that Mark Zuckerberg isn't listening in on is like asking for water that's not wet.

Or, you know, wanting your parcels delivered in a, an efficient manner without maiming warehouse workers is inconceivable.

Jordan Harbinger: It's not possible.

Cory Doctorow: Well,

Jordan Harbinger: yeah,

Cory Doctorow: and you know, this is an old trick. Uh, Margaret Thatcher, you know, and she's the prime minister of the uk, she used to say over and over again so often that it became her nickname.[00:57:00]

There is no alternative. They used to call her Tina Thatcher. There is no alternative. Uh, and what she meant was, stop trying to think of an alternative, right? Like stop imagining that things could be different. So you have Amazon that has done some admirable things, as is Facebook, right? Facebook was fun.

Google was a great search engine. Apple made very, uh, beautiful and well-behaved devices, right? But they want you to think that there is no way you could get the benefit. Without enduring the costs that those costs are are intrinsic to the device and it's nonsense. You know, I'm a science fiction writer.

My job is to think of six alternatives before breakfast, so Amazon. They, um, sold us all prime, right? They, they sold us goods below cost. Now, we were talking earlier about how we used to have competition law and we stopped enforcing it. A lot of competition law is about merger scrutiny, stopping companies from buying their competitors.

But, uh, another big piece of it is about pricing and about what's called predatory pricing, which selling goods below cost with the intention of driving, uh, rivals out of business, which becomes a kind of Moneyball game [00:58:00] where like whoever can tap the deepest pocketed, investors can just hold out until everyone else is out of business and then jack up prices.

So Amazon sold out these predatory prices. Uh, prime was a big example of it. They pre-sold us shipping at a loss a year at a time. And that means that most people started their shopping journeys on Amazon because they'd already paid for shipping,

Jordan Harbinger: right?

Cory Doctorow: And if you found it, you stayed there. Now, Amazon binds all of its sellers to something called the most favored nation deal.

So most favored nation means that you have to sell at the lowest price on Amazon. You can't sell. So, you know, you said buy directly from your friend's website. Right? If your friend is selling on Amazon, he can't sell it more cheaply on his website than he sells.

Jordan Harbinger: He's

not

Jordan Harbinger: selling it on Amazon.

Cory Doctorow: Right,

Jordan Harbinger: right.

Because you, you can't say like, Hey, you can get this wallet on our website for 10 bucks less because you don't have to pay Amazon.

Cory Doctorow: Amazon will put you on page 10 million of the search results. Now, America's been through three consecutive, what are called kha recoveries. So that's where you have an economic collapse.

And then as you have a a recovery, the recovery all goes to the richest [00:59:00] 10%. So you, you have these two lines. You have the recovery line, that's how the richest 10% are doing, and you have the 90% going down and down. So we've had three consecutive case shape recoveries. Almost all the consumption, uh, capacity in our economy is gathered up in that top 10% and in that top 10%, they all have prime.

They all start their shopping journeys on Amazon. Almost all consumption in the American economy is that top decile. And so it's very hard to run a business where you say, okay, I'm not going to be on Amazon. So everyone's kind of stuck on Amazon. Now if you're selling on Amazon, you have to recoup the cost of selling on Amazon.

The junk fees on Amazon, when I wrote the book, we're running 45 to 51%.

Jordan Harbinger: The merchants are paying

Cory Doctorow: that the merchants are paying. So every dollar you spend on an independent merchant on Amazon, back then it was 45 to 51%. Now it's 50 to 60%. Now no one's got that kind of margin, so the prices go up on Amazon, but they have to go up everywhere else

Jordan Harbinger: because

Cory Doctorow: the most

Jordan Harbinger: favored

Cory Doctorow: nation because of most favored nations.

So they're more expensive at Target and at Walmart and at the mom and pop shop down the block and at the factory store because [01:00:00] otherwise you lose Amazon, you lose all the affluent consumers. So

Jordan Harbinger: everything, we're all paying the Amazon tax. Even if you go, I don't use Amazon. Yeah. 'cause Jordan's right, screw them.

CO's right. Well fine. You're still paying,

Cory Doctorow: it's an economy wide tax. Yeah. I mean this is a really good, uh, example of why. Shopping really hard doesn't solve monopolies. Back to the start of our talk, it's not because you shopped wrong that we got these monopolies. So I just want to break down one of these junk fees for you to just show you how insidious this is.

So Amazon has this thing they call an advertising business. Uh, it's not advertising as you understand it. If you're old enough to know about old radio scandals, you'll recognize it as what's called payola.

Jordan Harbinger: Uh, hell yeah.

Cory Doctorow: And that's when you pay for placement. It used to be DJ's got money to play certain records, right?

Right. It was illegal. Amazon charges for search result placement. They have an auction. Every time you search, there's an auction to see who gets in that top box, that top row, the top couple of screens in order to recoup the money. From that auction, they have to charge more, so the top result is always either more expensive or worse, or [01:01:00] both.

Jordan Harbinger: I noticed that overall pick, why is this $5 more? Has 45 reviews instead of 4,500 reviews and looks crappier and it says it's made out of plastic, but the aluminum one is cheaper and has better reviews. But is like on page two.

Cory Doctorow: So on average the first result is 29% more expensive than the best match. Yeah.

The top row is 25%. You have to go 17 places down or so on the second screen to find the best match for your query. And they mix units. So, uh, you can't just say like, what are the cheapest packs of batteries? I noticed that. 'cause it'll be like twos instead of tens and then twenties and whatever.

Jordan Harbinger: 17 cents a unit.

Okay. Is a unit one battery? Well, no, over here it's two batteries. Yeah. But over here it's actually one battery.

Cory Doctorow: So you can do apples and apples comparisons, right? So this is all designed to confound you. Now, when I wrote the book, apple was Amazon rather, was making, uh, a north of $30 billion a year on this.

Two years ago, the, the year the book came out, it was north of $50 billion. That's twice as much as all the revenue for all the newspapers in the world. So you could have two new full copies of our news media [01:02:00] for that last year was $80 billion.

Jordan Harbinger: Crazy,

Cory Doctorow: right? And so we are now just seeing this like incredible expansion and my friend Tim Wu wrote a very good book called The Age of Extraction, where he goes into this and he points out that this isn't everybody loses proposition, right?

The sellers lose because they're diverting money that they could either give you as prices or as quality. Uh, they're diverting it to this useless bidding war,

Jordan Harbinger: right?

Cory Doctorow: You lose 'cause you don't get the best product at the best price, right?

Jordan Harbinger: You pay more.

Cory Doctorow: This is a wholly useless business that is the equivalent now to three global news industries.

That's just parsit. It's just middleman extraction.

Jordan Harbinger: Well, time to return the, uh, coffee I, I guess, rented this morning. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Bombas. One of the goals this year and all year round is to stay comfy, and Bombas is leading that charge in my house. We love Bombas so much.

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You have to use Fulfilled by Amazon because then you won't be, you have to enroll in Prime where you're on page 87 of search results.

Also heard that Amazon lets knockoff, usually Chinese sellers run rampant on the platform. So I had a buddy who made a product and he found that people in his own factory or an adjacent factory were basically making knockoffs using the same pattern. And it was like he, he was making a backpack. And then EY za all caps, right.

Made a similar backpack, but like with crappy zippers and like wasn't waterproof and crappy fabric and Yep. And it, it, it was interesting. [01:07:00] It was suspiciously similar, right to the backpack, uh, that happens to be five times the price. So you get this junk knockoff using stolen ip and then he's like, Hey, Amazon, they're doing this.

And they were like. Oh well, and what? But

Cory Doctorow: Amazon does this too. So Amazon knocks off its own sellers.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Amazon Basics. It's

Cory Doctorow: much more insidious. Look at

Jordan Harbinger: this cable.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah, I mean it's

Jordan Harbinger: cheaper.

Cory Doctorow: One of the things about using fulfillment by Amazon is that they can see your whole supply chain. They know where the, they know what factory is making your stuff.

'cause you're drop shipping it to them. They have full insight into all you do. Now, Congress ask Jeff Bezos. Do you spy on your sellers in order to clone their products? And he said no. And then his general counsel said, Jeff, you just perjured yourself to Congress. And he went back and said, I misspoke.

Jordan Harbinger: So yes, we do spy on them.

You're clone their

Cory Doctorow: products

Jordan Harbinger: depending on what you mean by spy. Right? If you mean watch everything they're doing and then do the same thing. Sure. Fine. I guess we spy on 'em. Yeah. So this US company is damaged 'cause they invented the product and you can basically, they can go out of business and the only thing left is Zube Quar and the other 17 knock up.

The

Cory Doctorow: reason they have those funny names by the [01:08:00] way, is that Amazon does a trademark lookup just against the US PTO trademark database, the US Patent and Trademark Office database, uh, to make sure you're not infringing a trademark before you sell. And so they just, um, take random strings of letters that there won't be a trademark

Jordan Harbinger: for.

I see. 'cause I was like, why do they not just have one guy who speaks English going,

Cory Doctorow: yeah, that doesn't

Jordan Harbinger: sound like

Cory Doctorow: a brand, because they're not using brand names to sell. They're gaming the algorithm.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. The other thing I noticed is they'll have. A bunch of reviews and I'm like, when was this product was three days ago?

Wow. They're selling a lot of these. Yeah. Oh wait. These are obviously fake. And then if you sort by like most helpful or low reviews, you find the ones that look like real people are like. One star, this product sucks. Yeah, what the hell Buy this other one. And then all the five star ones are like great product, really ease of use.

Cory Doctorow: They do a lot of, they do a lot of stuff like they will have a product that is useful, it will rack up a lot of, uh, reviews. And then the Amazon backend, it's just got bugs in it. And so you can then take that product and you can say, well, here's a new version of it. And so maybe it's a pen [01:09:00] and you can say the new version is A USB.

Power bank, right? And so you have all these reviews, ah, that are five star reviews for a pen. Okay, I've seen that before, but now you have that rank. So there are lots of ways in which Amazon fails to police it. And you talked about Oobah Butler, you know, it's an amazing story because he did two things. So one was he went and gathered the urine of Amazon drivers, right?

That they hucked out the window of their vans because they don't give you a pee break, but you're not allowed to come back to the depot with any pee. So they pee in bottles and they huck it out the windows of the vans. And he listed it on Amazon as a bitter lemon energy drink as a prank. He wasn't going to sell it to any strangers, just got his friends to order it.

But he listed it as, uh, hand sanitizer refill so that he didn't have to do any of the food safety stuff,

Jordan Harbinger: right?

Cory Doctorow: And Amazon very helpfully automatically. Moved it into the energy drinks category for him algorithmically.

Jordan Harbinger: Right. Okay.

Cory Doctorow: And then he had got enough of his friends to buy it that, uh, he got a, a human sales call from an Amazon rep saying, we're impressed with your product and we'd like to manage your logistics and, and production for you.

Uh, so that [01:10:00] was one thing he did.

Jordan Harbinger: This is episode 1235, by the way, if people want to listen.

Cory Doctorow: Oh, very good. Yeah. So Amazon completely missed this, but the other thing that he did was he applied for a job to work at Amazon.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Cory Doctorow: And within hours they had figured out that he was someone who was going to document their labor conditions.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Cory Doctorow: And so you can see that when Amazon wants to do fine grained analytics and surveillance of their operations, they can. And so when it's like preventing union organizers from getting a job at an Amazon warehouse, they are impeccable when it's like preventing scammers from selling you bottles of piss as energy drink.

They're like. Sounds like a new problem

Jordan Harbinger: or fake reviews, which some place like Yelp will find, or some other places, they'll find it and they'll go, no way. Meanwhile, you don't know that this is now a consumable product. You didn't know it's not a pen. How does your AI not know that they're talking about a pen?

And this is a photo of not a pen.

Cory Doctorow: Come on, and this is a problem. Back to Google summaries. This is a real problem with Google summaries as well, [01:11:00] is that the people who make. Crummy reviews where they up rank things that have high affiliate fees over things that perform well are very good at search engine optimization.

So there are a lot of legacy brands like Better Homes and Garden Forbes and so on that have websites with a lot of search reputation. And it's called, this is called Search Reputation Abuse. So they build a shadow website that only search engines can find. You would never click to there from the Forbes website that are just stuffed with shitty reviews.

Like just all they've done is they've gone take the most expensive products that have the highest commission and made them their top products.

Jordan Harbinger: Is this why when you Google like top iPhone cases, it's like top 20 iPhone cases for 2026? Exactly. And they're all crap Ola.

Cory Doctorow: That's right. So they're they're just the worst ones.

Yeah. And so this is much worse when you get to summaries because the summary will just say the very best is the x. And so you're not even seeing the kind of surrounding context. So there's a woman called Giselle Navarro in the UK who runs a website called House Fresh, where they do very meticulous, um, air purifier reviews.

And it [01:12:00] started as a thing for people with chronic allergies. And then obviously during COVID it became much more salient.

I

Jordan Harbinger: need that. I love, I'm like a, I like want to bring one to every hotel I go to.

Cory Doctorow: You should go read there were reviews. They're very, very good. And what Navarro has pointed out, she's done these long, deep dives into how Google ranks search or, or review sites, is that the lower quality of the review, the more likely it is to be in the top results and the more likely it is to be pulled into the summary.

And that oftentimes the top ranked item that comes out of the summary is one that reviewers have given bottom marks to

JHS Trailer: Interesting.

Cory Doctorow: So you're buying the most expensive, least effective air purifier on the market because you're clicking through the top result.

Jordan Harbinger: That does not surprise me at all. I mean, a lot of those, back in the day when people made it manually, I had friends that were like, I was like, what do you do?

And they're like, oh, I sell. Cable, internet or whatever in markets. And I compare Spectrum versus Cox versus whatever. And it was like they got a commission from each one.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: And then it was, Hey, it doesn't really matter which one's better, just choose the one where you get the highest [01:13:00] commission. And then it became, actually, we don't need a human to do this at all.

And now it's every product on Earth, just slot. You can search for an iPhone screen protector and it will do this. And there's going to be a website that's dedicated to this. And there are companies where AI just makes a hundred sites a day with every new product ranked by top whatever, and it's all affiliate crap from Amazon or somewhere else.

Cory Doctorow: So back to in enshittification being a policy choice. So during the Biden administration, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau finalized an order. About comparison shopping for financial products. So you, you've doubtless gone to websites where you're like, which is the best credit card for me? Oh,

Jordan Harbinger: yes.

Cory Doctorow: That's a

Jordan Harbinger: funny example. Yeah.

Cory Doctorow: So top result of that is always the one with the highest commission. Yeah. Which is always the one that gouges the customer the most. So here's what the consumer Finance Protection viewer did under Biden. They said, okay, we're going to, we're going to make a, a multi-part order. The first is we're going to ban.

Deceptive ranking, right? It's just, um, there's a broad prohibition in federal statute against, uh, unfair and deceptive methods of competition. Lying to someone about what you think is the best, right? Being wrong is [01:14:00] fine. Lying is different.

Jordan Harbinger: I have to follow these rules on this show. I can't say, oh, I love this brand.

It's so good. They paid me $10,000 and I'm not going to mention that.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah, I, I have to dispose a lot of people who, shell shit coins got into versions of problems for this. I mean, that was under securities law, but it's same principle. So, um, they said, okay, you can't lie about it anymore. You have to give the best ranking you can, but also we have investigative powers under the statute.

We are going to require the banks to periodically, like every couple of weeks, give us a machine readable schedule of fees. And of, um, interest payments and bonuses and all of those other things. We are going to require every bank to adopt a standard data export format. And we are going to build a government financial comparison shopping site that uses our investigative powers to extract under penalty of perjury, fully accurate, up to the minute data you can with one click export all of your financial data from your bank account.

We will tell you what will pay you the most and charge you the lease based on your [01:15:00] overdraft, based on all the other things about your account. Wow. And then with that same one click, you can move all your financial data over to another service. So back to switching costs. You get all of your payees, all of your payment history, all of your account history.

When your accountant says, oh, I need all your bank statements from the last year, you can't say, oh, well I, I switched banks in July. I'm going to have to see if I can find those old statements. 'cause those all carry over. Right.

Jordan Harbinger: So how come I haven't heard of this?

Cory Doctorow: So it was all finalized. Yeah. And then, uh, Trump killed it.

Jordan Harbinger: Interesting. Okay. Yeah, because,

Cory Doctorow: so

Jordan Harbinger: policy lobbed for it.

Cory Doctorow: Policy. Well, the banks lobbied for the right to steal from you. To

Jordan Harbinger: steal from you. Yeah.

Cory Doctorow: You know, and it is stealing from you. I mean, there's lots of ways that they've stolen from us, you know. So one of the things that the banks were doing was they had software that would do, um, order of operations processing to maximize revenue.

So say you had a paycheck coming in and you had a rent check going out, they would process those rent check first payments, uh, paycheck second. So you'd bounce the check,

Jordan Harbinger: right.

Cory Doctorow: And then they get to charge you a $30 overdraft.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That's infuriating.

Cory Doctorow: Right? And they're sitting with both of them in their hands, right?

And they're like, I deposit the paycheck, the rent check clears. [01:16:00] I deposit the rent check first, and then I get $30. And they would just choose to deposit the rent check first.

Jordan Harbinger: So why do I have to rent software now? I mean, I get it sometimes. Like they're, hey, they're constantly improving this, but just charge me for the new version.

If I want those improvements. Now I feel like I have to rent. I'll get an app on my phone that's like a currency calculator and I go, oh, cool. Three bucks. Per year. Why? I just gimme the thing. Sure. It's just, just, I want to buy it and so I'll, I, I admit I'm falling prey to this, it, it'll be like, this is $90 for lifetime or $12 a year.

And I'm like, here's my 90 bucks, just so I don't have to think about this dumb thing.

Cory Doctorow: Sure. So, you know, back to like, why do they rip you off for the same reason your dog looks its balls? Because I can't Yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: because they can.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah. Right. So, you know, if, if we had a policy environment where it was legal to.

Jailbreak that app and unlock the functionality they want to sell you or, um, to, um, download the ex executable code so that you could keep [01:17:00] using it. Like there would be a different equilibrium. Like they would have to sit down every morning and say like, if we do this terrible thing, what share of our users is going to be so pissed off that they go and figure out how to get around it.

You know, like, think about ads, right? Um, more than half of all web users have installed an ad blocker, 51 percent's largest consumer boycott in human history. And that's because browsers are open technology. You don't have to defeat an access control to plug something into a browser so you can just. Plug in an ad blocker.

So it's legal to make an ad blocker for the web apps because they have access controls. They're illegal to reverse engineer and modify, which means that no one's ever installed an ad blocker for an app because it doesn't exist because it would be a felony to make it. Because reverse engineering the app is illegal.

So if you imagine we're having like a product planning meeting here for our website and you know, the person running the meeting says like, alright folks, I've uh, done the back of the envelope math. If we make the ads 40% more obnoxious, uh, we're going to get like a 4% increase in top line ad revenue. That's our KPI, let's do [01:18:00] it.

Right. Well someone puts their hand up and says like, I love how you think Elon, but has it occurred to you that if you make the website 40% shittier that like 80% of our users are going to go to the search engine and type, how do I block ads? And then we get nothing from them ever again? 'cause no one's ever gone back to the search engine and typed, how do I start seeing ads again?

Right, right, right. Whereas if it's apps. You know, you move on to the next agenda item. Well now I'm thinking about the apps, uh, how obnoxious we can make the ads in the app and that that person puts their hands up and says, make 'em 150% more obnoxious. Let's max out the revenue. It doesn't matter if someone types, how do I block ads?

Because the answer is, it'd be a felony to do so. Right. You

Jordan Harbinger: can't, yeah.

Cory Doctorow: So a webs, you know, an app, uh, is just a website skinned in the right kind of IP to make it a felony to defend your privacy while you use it. Right. And that's why every company is so horny to get you to use their app and not their website, because the website you are in control of, in the app, they're in control of,

Jordan Harbinger: I guess I just don't understand how Adobe can do something like, oh, you used pen tone 2, 2 7 in that logo from six years ago.

If you want to display that, you need our [01:19:00] Pantone pack, it's $16.

Cory Doctorow: It was 21. 21 bucks a month. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Per month. Yeah,

Cory Doctorow: exactly. Just once. Soone for people who aren't in uh, print design, uh, you know, if you've got an inkjet printer, you know it's got like four little buckets of ink and you mix those to make most of the colors that can be seen by the human eye, but there are a bunch of colors you can't see.

You know, you're a bright orange phone case over there that's not A-C-M-Y-K color that you can mix those four colors. It's what's called a spot color or a Pantone color. And you know, when you go to the paint store, they have this big thing of paint chips and you figure out which paint you want. Right?

And they mix it up for you. It's the same if you go to a print designer, they have a big book of Pantone swatches and you go through it and you're like, I want that safety orange, or I want this metallic green, or whatever. And they then to their printer, they say. Add a fifth nozzle to your print process and fill it with this special link.

So that's called spot color, Pantone color, ubiquitous in in print design and Pantone as a company. They own the copyright to these swatches. And then number to chemical formula, you know, equivalences and so on. These are all things that [01:20:00] they license. And one day, Adobe and Pantone. Had a disagreement, no one knows what happened because they didn't tell us anything about it.

All that we knew is that one day Adobe said, Hey, you know how you don't buy Photoshop anymore? You just use it in the cloud. Well, um, we're not paying the Pantone license fee on your behalf anymore. It's 21 bucks a month. You're going to have to give to Pantone. And if you don't, whenever we show you your own documents, your whole portfolio, going back to Photoshop 1.0, all the Pantone colors are going to be black.

We're going to steal the pan, the color out of your document,

Jordan Harbinger: your existing work that you've already paid to create with the same software.

Cory Doctorow: So there's a couple of possibilities, right? One is that Pantone went to Adobe and said, we would like whatever, $12 a user per year or whatever, and Adobe said, I'm just going to see if what the users will pay that.

That sounds good to us. Or maybe Pantone went to Adobe and said, we want a hundred dollars per user, or we're going to make you take it out of the app. Right? Maybe they were the bad guys, who knows? But here's the thing, when you create the capability to reach into your users' [01:21:00] documents and take the colors out of them.

You have to anticipate the possibility that someone will show up and demand that you do it right. No one can demand that you take the colors out of your user's documents if you are not technically capable of doing it.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah,

Cory Doctorow: right. You know?

Jordan Harbinger: Right.

Cory Doctorow: Amazon's done this. They periodically will reach into people's Kindles and delete their books because there's a licensing dispute.

Jordan Harbinger: It's crazy

Cory Doctorow: to me now, I'm a recovering book seller. I sold books in a lot of different bookstores. No matter what kind of licensing dispute occurred, no one could make me go to my customer's homes, burgle them and take their books.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Right. Or they come to the store and they go, Hey, do you have George Orwell's 1984?

And you're like, yeah, it's right over there. And they're like, alright, bring the box. And we're taking all these, that's right. I bought those. Well, not really.

Cory Doctorow: So once you have this technical capability, someone's going to use it. You know, this is, as Pavel Chekov said, you know, a phaser on the bridge in Act one is going to go off by act three.

Right. This is just like the fully anticip and anticipated outcome. Of designing a device or a service this way?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It's the same with cars, right? Like there was a big news story where you had to, [01:22:00] was it, you had to pay BMW to use the heated seats that you already bought.

Cory Doctorow: So they, they walked away from that, but they brought it back in.

You now have to pay BMW to use the automatic light dipping software that dips your high beams. If there's oncoming traffic. Mercedes does just a

Jordan Harbinger: safety feature.

Cory Doctorow: Nobody deal just a safety feature. Mercedes does it with your accelerator, so you can only use half your engine's acceleration curve unless you pay a monthly subscription.

Tesla does it with batteries,

Jordan Harbinger: right? They do with battery, yeah.

Cory Doctorow: So your battery's fully charged, but once it's at the 50% mark, your car stops rolling unless you're paying a monthly subscription, right? It's your battery in your car. And in a normal world, remember when we said this is not normal for people to be able to decide how you use your property.

In a normal world, I would look at what Elon Musk was doing and I would say. I can sell every one of his customers a product that unlocks the whole battery, right? This is what Jeff Bezos did when Jeff Bezos started the business. He went infamously to this publisher's conference and he said, what you need to realize is that your margin is my opportunity.

So when he does it to us, that's [01:23:00] progress. If we do it back to him, that's piracy.

Jordan Harbinger: Right? Right. It's piracy, right? Yeah. What's crazy is you can't transfer these things. Like, let's say that I bought, uh, that feature the self, the heated seats, which they walk back, who cares? Whatever. They tried anything.

Cory Doctorow: Now it's the high, high beam device.

Jordan Harbinger: High beam thing. Fine. So I sell you my BMW and I'm like, don't worry, I got that high beam thing. I got self-driving. You're like, oh cool, thanks. And then when you turn it on, you're like, it's not working. Sure. And they go, oh, well we saw that you sold your car to Cory. Cory has to pay off transferred

Cory Doctorow: title.

That's right.

Jordan Harbinger: So well wait, but I sold 'em the car. Yeah, but you didn't sell 'em the licensing thing that you were paid.

Cory Doctorow: Paid. If you get a custom paint job and a cool steering wheel cover and you get spoilers and an air dam and those purple lights under your car.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes.

Cory Doctorow: When you sell your car. You get to charge more for the car in theory, if you can find the right buyer

Jordan Harbinger: Sure.

Cory Doctorow: For all of that stuff.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. But yeah, I can't sell you the heated seats. Sure. I rented them from BMW, even though they told me I bought

Cory Doctorow: it. It's really kind of the end of private property.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah,

Cory Doctorow: right. It's

Jordan Harbinger: crazy to

Cory Doctorow: me because if you own something, it's yours and no one else can tell you how to use it. And the only people who can really say that they have that relationship to their property [01:24:00] aren't really people.

They're, you know, immortal transhuman colony organisms we call limited liability companies. Mm-hmm. They have. What the property theorist Blackwell, who wrote in the 18th century about property, they have so and despotic dominion over their things. That's what he defined as property that which man enjoys.

So, and despotic dominion over to the exclusion of every other person in the universe, right? They have sole and despotic dominion over their property. You. Have a kind of shared title. You're kind of a tenant and they're kind of your landlord. And it just like, you can't decide what color to paint your walls in your rental.

You can't decide how to use your eBooks even though you think you paid for them.

Jordan Harbinger: I hate this. Uber offers a different rate for drivers who behave differently. Sure. I kind of want to just tell drivers listening how to hack this. 'cause I know people are listening and they drive for Uber or Lyft.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah, you should.

Well, if you're interested in this, the person to follow is the Rideshare guy. I know

Jordan Harbinger: he listens to the show.

Cory Doctorow: They've done well. Hello. Nice to talk to you Sergio. Uh, but they do great work. Um, this is something that the legal scholar, vena Dubal calls algorithmic wage discrimination [01:25:00] and it's a form of surveillance pricing.

Do you remember, um, Delta announced a little while ago that they had done a partnership with this Israeli company and they were going to use surveillance data about you to figure out how much you were willing to pay for a plane ticket. And they charge you more if they thought you were willing to pay more.

So they already do what's called second order price discrimination, which is where they, or first order price discrimination rather, which is where they, um. You know, if you don't stay on a Saturday, they charge you more. 'cause they figure you're a business traveler. But this is second order price discrimination, where it's like you personally, I know that you have a funeral to get to or that you've got a meeting on Monday, right?

And so they can change the prices. Now a wage is a price, so it's one of the prices that gets manipulated through algorithm wage discrimination. So Uber, uh, if you're a driver, Uber can impute a level of desperation to you by how many low ball offers you're willing to accept. The more shitty rides you take, the lower the wage you're offered at every juncture.

Jordan Harbinger: Because they're like, this guy needs money.

Cory Doctorow: This guy needs the money. [01:26:00] And Uber drivers, they bucket themselves into two groups. They call themselves either pickers or uh, ants. So pickers are people who are picky, ants pick every ride that comes along. And in dole's work, she does some anthropological work. She talks to a lot of drivers and she finds that they are not just broke and not just exhausted because they're driving 18 hours a day. She talks to a guy who drives into San Francisco from somewhere outside of the city and spends three days sleeping in his car.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Cory Doctorow: To try and make enough money to pay his rent. And he's looking at all these other drivers who are doing really well, who are like on the Discord or on the Reddit forum or in some other message board.

He's like, I'm bad at Uber. Why am I so bad at Uber? What have I done wrong? And what he doesn't realize is because he is being as indiscriminate as he can be to take out all the rides to make as much money as he can. And that's their cue to charge him less. Algorithmic wage discrimination.

Jordan Harbinger: To pay him less.

Yeah.

Cory Doctorow: To pay less. Rather algorithmic, uh, wage discrimination is happening in every category where you use an app to hire a worker and you pretend that that [01:27:00] worker isn't an employee, but rather an independent business. And so nurses, for example, in this country. We preferentially hire nurses at our hospitals as contractors.

Because you could do union avoidance that way. And uh, it used to be that you'd have local staffing agencies, two or three in every city. Now there's four giant apps. They all sell themselves as Uber For nursing, we have, because we've allowed corporate concentration, we have what's called regulatory capture.

Our government doesn't update laws that would be disfavor to corporations. Uh, or they get rid of laws that are disfavor for corporations like comparison shopping for banking. So. Ronald Reagan was the last president to give us a new consumer privacy law. It was in 1988.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

Cory Doctorow: When he made it illegal for video store clerks to disclose your VHS rentals.

Jordan Harbinger: That's crazy.

Cory Doctorow: Everything else is fair game. And so a data broker will sell anyone any fact about anyone. And so the app before it gives the nurse a shift, finds out how much credit card debt they're carrying and the more credit card debt they're carrying, the lower the wage the nurse is offered.

Jordan Harbinger: That's insane.

[01:28:00] Holy smokes.

Cory Doctorow: So think about this, the next time you're getting your catheter inserted, right? So this nurse might have been driving Uber till midnight the night before and skip breakfast to make rent because they are paying a desperation premium. So this is across the economy and you can see how it's this combination of a lack of competition.

Leads to regulatory capture that then takes advantage of the fact that apps are opaque. You know, uh, my friend Tim Wu I mentioned before, wrote this book, um, uh, the Age of Extraction. He points out that in the age of the market where you actually physically went to the market, although there wasn't a single price, everyone was haggling, there was social surveillance, the price, like everyone could see what price everyone else was getting, right?

The prices are now set in this kind of, um, silo that you and the firm are locked inside of. They know all the prices. You only know one price, the price you paid, or the price you are offered for your labor. So you have this combination of all these enshittogenic characteristics and the fact that you can't jailbreak your app means that you can't share the pricing offer with everyone else.

It means that you [01:29:00] can't make a kind of meta app, not meta like the company meta, like the concept that all the nurses agree. We're all going to turn down all low ball offers and force them to bid up the wage. Um, it is like this. Environment in which bad people are doing bad things, but because policy makers who work for us let them.

Jordan Harbinger: Thank you for coming on the show and being part of the enshittification of podcasting. I appreciate

Cory Doctorow: that. Oh, well, thank you. And I should say, I work for a nonprofit called the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We have been fighting against this stuff for 35 years. This is my 25th year with them. We're at ff.org, and if you want to find out how you can get involved, you can go to ff.org and get involved in, in fighting enshittification in your life.

Jordan Harbinger: Thank you.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah, nice talking to you.

Jordan Harbinger: You're about to hear a preview from Joe Loya, a man who robbed 30 banks across California, but says the real crime scene was his childhood, where his Pentecostal preacher father beat him over a hundred times before he turned 15.

JHS Trailer: For 14 months, I robbed 30 banks, sometimes several in one day.

I lost all sense that my life was [01:30:00] going to be long at all. I just wanted to grab the loot and get the hell out of dodge as fast as possible and go spend it and have fun. That was my ethos, and so I did. Because all the crimes I did and all the violence I did, and starting with my dad when my mother died, we have received a lot of love from her and everything like that.

It's just too much for him. And when he gets angry, now he gets brutal. Like he may have socked me, he may have choked me. He may have done all those things, bibe with a bat. He wants us dead. He's using the dead language. He could kill us or I could kill myself. But this is like, it's just a tough time for me to try and process the grief myself.

And I'm being brutalized. I don't believe I have a future. So there's nothing inside of me like, oh, I gotta protect my future. I better get a job. I start better, start saving money for the future. None of that. Because the trauma is so intense. You're only looking at surviving the next day in front of you.

You know? In fact, I'm not made for society. They have all these moralities, but they're too timid for me. I've seen past the curtain, [01:31:00] like I become in my heart like this little sociopath looking at like, you guys are falling for the okie-doke. And I'm not the guy who falls for the Okie-doke. I'm the guy who stabs the Okie-doke and says, get the hell out of my way.

I'm not buying it right. Once upon a time, Joe Loya couldn't handle his emotional shit, and so now I'm a criminal. I'm a bad guy.

Jordan Harbinger: In this episode, Joe unpacks the unsettling rapture he felt in the middle of a robbery, and the exact moment, seven years in solitary, forced him to confront what he'd been running from his whole life and the turning point that finally redirected everything.

It's not what you'd expect. Check out episodes 1264 and 1265 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. So if all this feels dystopian, that's because it kind of is when companies lock us in, extract value, degrade the product, and then basically dare us to leave. That is not innovation. That is just monopoly behavior with a better PR team.

Cory makes the case that the fix isn't one magic solution. It's competition, interoperability, [01:32:00] some regulation, but you know, not the kind written by the same companies that's supposed to restrain and maybe a little worker power. Even if that word makes some people, myself included, sometimes kind of itchy.

Because when your car charges you monthly for heated seats, your books can disappear remotely and your phone decides which businesses are allowed to exist. The market is no longer doing what it's supposed to do. Thanks to Cory for coming on the show and for helping us understand the slow, methodical, profit, optimized enshittification of everything. All things Cory will be in the show notes, on the website, advertisers deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, our newsletter. I love writing this. You love reading it. This thing has been a, a huge sleeper hit. I, I'm so glad that I'm doing it and I'm, I wish I did it earlier.

The idea is to give you something specific and practical that'll have an immediate impact on your life decision, psychology relationships. It's a two minute read every Wednesday. If you haven't signed up yet, come check it out and join us. It's a great companion to the show. jordanharbinger.com/news [01:33:00] is where you can find it.

Don't forget about Six Minute Networking as well at sixminutenetworking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm happy to ignore you on any platform. No. I love talking with you guys. In fact, many of you are surprised when I reply. But I enjoy it.

You guys are fun. This show is created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tadas Sidlauskas, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting.

In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. So if you know somebody who's interested in tech or everything that's wrong with tech like Cory Doctorow, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.