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- [00:00]
Jesse David Fox
Hi, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Are you looking for a beach read this summer? May I suggest your big wireless bill? It's got suspense, mystery, a slightly flat emotional arc, and a shocking twist where you realize you've been overpaying the entire time. Fortunately, though, Mint's story is better. Every plan $15 a month, even unlimited. That's it. Happy ending, zero tears.
- [00:19]
Cory Doctorow
Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment
- [00:23]
Jesse David Fox
of $45 for three months, $90 for
- [00:24]
Cory Doctorow
six months or $180 or 12 month plan required $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees Extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes. Me slow when network is busy.
- [00:29]
Jesse David Fox
See terms
- [00:32]
Cory Doctorow
you might need MIDI if you ever hairsprayed your bangs into a waterfall or tried to go for a run with a CD player, if this was you, then, you might need MIDI now. Perimenopause can start 10 years before menopause. If you're experiencing symptoms like night sweats, weight gain or anxiety, speak to the menopause experts at MIDI Health. Book a virtual appointment@joinmidi.com midlife needs midi results may vary. Medications prescribed only if clinically appropriate, based on a consultation with a clinician. It does feel insurmountable, right? When you have like the tech bosses paying a million dollars each to sit behind Trump on the inauguration dais and spending millions more to build the Epstein ballroom and so on, it can really feel like these guys are like there's no way that we could beat them back. But you know, our ancestors did this in living memory. Like John D. Rockefeller's control over the economy really dwarfs, you know, Larry Ellison or Elon Musk. And we figured out, took a long time, but we figured it out. We figured out how to, how to put those guys in chains, how to smash their empires.
- [01:40]
Jesse David Fox
This is a good one. I'm Jesse David Fox, senior writer and vulture and author of Comedy Book. Have you that funny feeling that content online is just a little worse than it used to be? That actually a lot of art, movies, tv, music, comedy is just not as good as three, five, ten years ago. Or maybe you're a person who makes art for a living who feels like the frog in boiling water slowly being squeezed by the powers that be out of being able to make a living. How did this happen? Why is this the case? To use a term coined by my guest this week, Cory Doctorow, insidification. That is the title of Cory's latest book about how the Internet and in turn our modern lives slowly and often intentionally were made less enjoyable and less functional by the people that control the major tech companies. Corey is an author, professor and digital rights activist and generally one of the most articulate speakers on how the de facto tech monopolies are degrading our standard of living. It is not an optimistic conversation, I will admit, but it is hopeful. So here is Cory Doctorow. I'm here with Cory Doctorow. Thank you for joining me.
- [02:41]
Cory Doctorow
Thank you very much. It's nice to be here.
- [02:43]
Jesse David Fox
So I wanna start actually here. So there tends to be a thing that happens when you have conversations about art and artists and creative people and that a portion of the audience knee jerk reaction would be like boohoo, crime your river. You get to make art for a living. And so I don't want that comment or and I want to right at the beginning try to tell these people why it matters. The state of making art and consuming art to sort of everyone's life. What does it reflect about a system?
- [03:13]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah. So part of the point of insidification, this, this dirty word I came up with is to move away from the idea that if you're not paying for the product, you're the product. But also which I think is the consumer side of things where it's like you as the person who looks at art on the Internet are getting harassed by algorithms because you were too cheap to pay for content. And. But the other side of this is that the people who make the things you want to watch are, are also trapped by the same system. And in fact there's a class alliance. Even if your interests are not coterminal, even if the person who is trying to get your attention using the platform is not someone you want to give attention to, you are both being abused by the platform. You have a common enemy there. In the same way that like Amazon sellers and Amazon buyers are both getting ripped off in different ways. You know, we are all very familiar with the idea of monopoly, which is the idea of a powerful buyer, but no one ever made a board game that you wanted to kill your family and yourself after playing called Monopsony. And Monopsony is that it's like a monopoly, but it's a firm with control over sellers or suppliers. And so if we're talking about a platform, that would be the content creators, the artistic workers, whatever you want to call them. And monopsonies are just as harmful as monopolies. And I think the great like mind zap of Reaganomics in the last 40 years is to split the class alliance between suppliers and consumers. Which, you know, we're all familiar with the Walmart idea that so long as the prices go down, it doesn't matter if like the, the products we buy are awash in blood.
- [04:56]
Jesse David Fox
Right.
- [04:57]
Cory Doctorow
Because that's the supplier's problem and not the, not the buyer's problem. And, and really there is an alliance and it. Tell me if I'm talking too long, but this carries over to AI, right? Like, well, AI will stable, but just like just tiny way. We're told the. That chest X rays are going to be too cheap to meter because AI is going to be your radiologist and that you are in like you are. You have a class enmity to radiologists who to protect their racket would like you to have lung cancer because they want to keep the cost of chest X rays high. And if it were the case that we could make chest X rays too cheap to meter, that would be one thing. But the actual pitch from an AI company to a hospital owner or manager is fire 3/4 of your radiologists, have the algorithm do their work and have the remaining 25% sign the chest X rays and take the blame when someone dies of cancer. So what this is really about is lowering quality. Right. So they want to make, they want to pauperize the radiologists and they want everyone to die of lung cancer.
- [06:03]
Jesse David Fox
Right.
- [06:03]
Cory Doctorow
It's like we have an actual class alliance with the radiologists. And so I guess that would be my point is if you think the platform sucks for you, as someone who's looking at stuff, the people who are making the stuff you're looking at also think the platform sucks. And even if you. And they are not always on the same side on this, you're on the same side.
- [06:20]
Jesse David Fox
Yeah, yeah. You know, it's also like they, I think, I think you write in your book that choke point capitalism, like, like in many ways artists and creative people are like canary in the coal mine because they're uniquely able to be exploited because it's a thing you want. You know, like the people's desire to create is a, is a. Is something that the powers that be realized is something to manipulate. And if anything is worse now because social media has trained people to want to be famous in particular, can you talk about what it is and why essentially kind of breaks this, the understanded rules of how like employment theory should work about if you keep on treating employees worse.
- [07:00]
Cory Doctorow
Right?
- [07:00]
Jesse David Fox
Sure.
- [07:01]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah. So. So I mean, the most trenchant version of this comes from a librarian and theorist who very sadly died this year, a woman named Fobazi attar. And she coined this term vocational awe. And it describes the strange circumstance in which people care so much about the work they do that their bosses can say, well, you know, I'm going to treat you very badly and you're going to stick around because the work is too important to stop doing. And ETAR was describing people who do public service, primarily female coded professions, nursing, teaching and so on. During lockdown, there were private equity nursing homeowners who were just like, booking people for like, three day shifts alone in a nursing home full of dying old people and just daring them to walk off the job, to leave these people to die in bed. And so that's vocational awe. But artists have a different version of it. And it's, you know, it's embodied in that joke about the kid who runs away to join the circus and his dad finds him shoveling elephant shit and says, son, come home. And the kid says, what? And quit showbiz? We do create, you know, the way ants make hills. And making art is a thing that's really important to us, you know, psychologically, in terms of our fulfillment. It's true at every level. It's true of people in every circumstance. People who are miserable make art. People who are happy make art. People who are in the most ghastly privation make art. And so it means that, on the one hand, art is always going to be an economically irrational activity that, like, people will make art even though they have no reasonable expectation of return. And it also means that where you have someone who controls access to an audience or remuneration or anything else that would help you make more art. Right. Have the independence and the fiscal space to make more art is going to have an enormous amount of power over you.
- [09:04]
Jesse David Fox
Yeah. And power on the nature of the art that you make, which is like a perfect setting for us to go forward to. So I think at this point, the word insidification has spread enough that people now have the intuitive definition for the word. But I'm going to ask you to do a thing that I'm sure you've never done before, which is explain the basic spiel of what it is so people know.
- [09:27]
Cory Doctorow
So it requires a little scene setting only to say that I'm in my 25th year working for a nonprofit called the Electronic Frontier foundation, world's most important digital rights group. And being a digital rights activist is this strange business of getting people to care about stuff that's very abstract. And in the future, when, for very good reasons, we mostly care about things that are immediate and concrete. And so you come up with parables and you come up with metaphors and you come up with narratives. I write science fiction novels, so I tell stories about it. And it turned out that like the secret to unlocking normies interest in abstract digital rights issues is dirty words, the minor license to vulgarity. So enchitification. It is a description of how platforms go bad. It's a theory about why they go bad, and it's a prescription for what to do about it. And the top level is just this description. Platforms start off being good to their end users while finding a way to lock those users in. Once it knows that those users can't readily leave, it makes things worse for those users in order to be good to business customers. Once those business customers are also reliant on the platform because of monopsony, then it makes things worse for them and it harvests all the value for shareholders and executives. The platform is a pile of shit. It has just enough residual value to keep users locked to each other, keep businesses locked to those users, and all the other value has been evacuated from the platform and dispersed to its owners.
- [10:50]
Jesse David Fox
Yeah, there's obviously you have tons of examples. I think a place I would like to start is what happened to Google Search.
- [10:59]
Cory Doctorow
That's a really good one because oftentimes we have to infer what happened within a firm to make it go bad. But Google is a thrice convicted monopolist. And so there have been these three federal cases in which, in two cases, the doj, and in one case, another firm that brought a private action forced Google to disgorge memos that described how it went bad. And in one of those federal cases, one of those DOJ cases about search, you see playing out in the memos this incredible fight that was reported out very beautifully by a great writer and critic named Ed Zitron. And it's this fight between the people who want to make Google be as good as possible and the people who want Google to be as profitable as possible. So in 2019, Google had reached the end of its search revenue growth for the very good reason that it had a 90% market share. And it's just like not possible to continue growing. I mean, you can raise a billion humans to maturity and make them your customers. Google Classroom is a very interesting product, but it takes a while to pay off. And so they needed something else. And you see these two factions forming about what to do about this. And one is led by the guy who's in charge of Google search revenues, an ex McKinsey guy that was trained as an engineer named Prabhagar Raghavan. He oversaw Yahoo Search revenue from like a 90% market share to the closure of that product and failed upwards to being in charge of revenue for Google search. And he has got this very straightforward idea. He's like, we are the only search engine anyone knows about for the very good reason that we have bought the search box everywhere where you might encounter it. It doesn't matter which operating system you use, which carrier you use, which manufacturer you buy your products from. If there's a search box on it, it is wired into our servers. We're bribing Apple $20 billion a year not to enter the search market. We should just make search worse. If we make search worse, you'll have to search more than once. And every time you search we get to show you more ads. And so it's not hard to make Google search worse. They do a lot of things to make guesses about what you're looking for. As we record this, there's a big news cycle about a shooting at the White House Press cor dinner. So you know, Google knows this in a kind of corporate sense that knows that there's this event. So if you search for White House correspondence dinner, it can put stuff about that shooting at the top rather than the thing that would be otherwise predicted. The generic best lane. So there's context awareness. We've all had the spell checker, right, where it says you search for X, did you mean Y?
- [13:33]
Jesse David Fox
Right.
- [13:33]
Cory Doctorow
And then there's something called query stemming where you search for trousers and it does a parallel search for pants and it merges the results. Those are three like really easy ways. You can just dial those down or turn them off. And people have to search more than once.
- [13:45]
Jesse David Fox
Yeah.
- [13:46]
Cory Doctorow
Now against him is this guy called Ben Gomes. And Ben Gomes is like the original kind of template of an OG Googler. He started with a company building servers when it was like one computer under a desk. He oversaw the build out of global data centers. He is a technologist and he is palpably horrified by this because he's given a lot to the company. I mean we can, we all know the pressures of those tech jobs, right? The 80 hour work weeks and the missing your mom's funeral and so on. And also the sense of mission, the vocational awe which where you are really changing the world, right? And Google did, right, Google. Like if you think about all the trillions of ways in which Google has helped people, it's really remarkable. And if you are a certain kind of thoughtful person. It might be very humbling and you might think of it even as a calling. And so he's like, we can't do this. I'd feel terrible about myself. And for most of Google's history, He was about 20 years old at that point. The people who said I would feel terrible had won that argument. And they'd won that argument, they thought because they worked at the don't be evil company, but actually it was A, because they worked at the don't be evil company, which meant that you could attract talented people who could get a job somewhere else, and B, because they would lose more money than they would make by being evil, because they had competitors and they had regulators and they had like, external sources of discipline, not just their workforce, but also markets and states who might crack down on them. And those have evaporated.
- [15:07]
Jesse David Fox
Right.
- [15:07]
Cory Doctorow
And this is the theory about why inshinification is happening, because we lifted away all the sources of discipline that punished firms. And so you had these factional disputes, which firms are always going to have or even a psychological dispute within one person. We all have the angel on one shoulder and the devil and the other whispering in our ears. It's much easier to hear the angel when there's consequences for listening to the devil. And so we take away all the external sources of discipline and we create like an inshygenic environment.
- [15:35]
Jesse David Fox
Right.
- [15:35]
Cory Doctorow
Where like the worst ideas of the worst people make the most money and money talks in bullshit walks. And Google search got worse. Right. And that's what happened.
- [15:43]
Jesse David Fox
Yeah. I think why I love it as an example is 1, you. We know it happened. We know for a fact. Sure, it's not. And also you. I am certain a version of that conversation happens every day in this sort of. I mean, Google owns YouTube. I'm sure it's happening with YouTube as well, which essentially is. Is our job is not to satisfy our customers. Our job is to get our customers to stay on our platform as long as possible. Right, sure. So that in. When we're now talking about art is a very different thing. Like, of course, television always was like, we want you to keep on watching the show so we'll make it good. And there's things about. But it's. It's hyperized and it is realizing the job is attention, not satisfaction. And if anything, satisfaction is a problem because it. You're like, if you watch you like, then you're done. So there's two ways that are clearly, you can see it obviously the, the one that is. I think probably most people experience is what has happened to their feeds. But I want to take it another step, sort of back or sideways and talk about Spotify, because I think all versions of these sort of blur of the entertainment tech space that we're sort of that is now taking over art want to get what Spotify has already succeeded at getting. And by succeeding, I mean ruining an art form, arguably.
- [17:03]
Cory Doctorow
Sure.
- [17:04]
Jesse David Fox
And you write about Spotify quite a bit in Choke Point Capitalism. Can you talk about what Spotify did and how the sort of use of algorithms and the use of playlists completely changed people's relationship to music?
- [17:18]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah. So I wrote this book with my good friend Rebecca Giblin In 2022, this book called Choke Point Capitalism. Rebecca is a copyright law professor in Melbourne and I've campaigned on copyright for like 40 years or 20 years rather. And so the question we kind of started to ask was, over 40 years, how is it that we have made copyright last longer, we've made it cover more kinds of work, we've made it restrict more activities in relation to those works, we've increased the statutory damages that you can secure if your copyrights are violated, and we've made winning a copyright case easier. And the media industry is larger and more profitable than it's ever been, and the share of income going to creative workers is lower than it's ever been. How has this happened? And our conclusion was basically that like in a market of five publishers, four labels, three, three studios, two companies that control all the apps and one company that controls all the audiobooks and ebooks, that giving a creative worker more things to bargain with is giving them more things to bargain away. That giving a creator who is bargaining in that marketplace more copyright is like giving a bullied kid extra lunch money. Really doesn't matter how much lunch money you give, the bullies will take it. Give them enough money and the bullies will like launch a global campaign saying, think of the starving school children, give them more lunch money. Which I think we're seeing now with media companies saying the answer to AI, which is a serious problem for creative workers, is more copyright that we can just appropriate. So in the case of Spotify, Spotify was the first sort of all you can eat music platform after Napster, that worked with the labels instead of moving fast and breaking things. And so they brought in the labels as equity partners from the start. So the labels owned shares in Spotify, which meant that they had an irreconcilable conflict of interest because they could get money out of Spotify in two ways. They could take it out as a supplier who is licensing content to Spotify and every dollar they bring out, that way musicians have a contractual claim on because there's a royalty. Or they could take it out in the form of capital gains or dividends or other dispersals that you get from improving the cash basis of Spotify. The cash basis of Spotify improves when it's single most expensive input, which is licenses for copyrighted works get cheaper. So the cheaper the licenses for the works are, the more money there is to take out of the business as an owner and not a licensor. And the money they take out as owners is theirs to disperse as they see fit. And so they construct this royalty system for Spotify. And the royalty system includes a very, very, very low per stream amount. And you may have heard musicians say that like I get a homeopathic fraction of a penny when you listen to my songs on Spotify. But for the big three labels who co owned and that's Universal, Warner and Universal, Warner and Sony, 70% of all sound copyrights and 65% of all compositions are owned by those three firms. So they get a minimum monthly guarantee. And so say it's $20 million a month for Sony. If the pay per license per stream is low enough, then there's no way it will add up to $20 million worth of streams. And so say there's accountable royalties for $10 million a month for Sony tracks. The other 10 million is what are called unattributable royalties. And Sony can disperse those however they see fit. They can give them to one artist, they can give them to several artists, they can put them into artist development, which might just be someone's idiot nephew goes to the clubs. It's their money, it's their free cash flow. They also get inclusion on playlists and other forms of promo. Now, if you're One of the 30% of musicians who aren't signed to a label, you are also getting this deal because the deal is what's called a most favored nation deal, which means that you cannot offer a better per stream rate to an independent label than Sony, Warner and Universal are getting. However, you are not getting playlists, you are not getting a guaranteed monthly minimum, you're not getting free promo. And so now you have these playlists and the playlists because we're conditioned to listen to them, because we're even tricked into listening to them. If you search for an actual album, you will often get a playlist with the album's art, some tracks from the album and then other stuff, and we'll get to what that other stuff is there in a minute. So because we're being conditioned to listen to playlists and eternal playlists, they can improve their cash basis by substituting in things that have either a lower royalty rate or. Or a higher promotional reward for them over the things that you've asked to hear. So the lower royalty rate, there's a. The Spotify is a Swedish company. There are a bunch of bands no one's heard of in Sweden who do buyouts. They don't. They're not entitled to royalties, so they make sound alike, especially for ambient music. So if you're listening to, like chill tunes for a rainy day, right, The. The. The stuff that is actually in there that someone made who is named, and that may be the reason you tune into that playlist quickly gives way to the stuff they're not paying a royalty for. And with machine learning, you can do a pretty good job of figuring out how much garbage you can slip into the stream before people tune out. So you can sort of titrate the amount of shit you shove into the stream. It also might be something someone's paid to put in there. So maybe one of these independent labels is paying for inclusion on a playlist. Well, this is a way that they can improve the cash basis. So instead of paying a royalty for this music, they are getting paid a promotional fee to put the music in. So it's basically you are handing over your trust to them. You're handing over the reins of your attention, and without having to do any of this kind of mystical stuff that people talk about where they're hacking your dopamine loops that kind of elevates them to a kind of evil sorcerer level just by doing these incredibly banal things that they can do because they have a monopoly and a monopsony, they are able to victimize you and the musicians at the same time while improving their lot. And the lot of the three big labels.
- [23:25]
Jesse David Fox
Yeah, I mean, there's a couple things that come up there. One, there's the. You can already see the counter. The. How there's a situation where there's like, some artists are billionaires and they use that as an example to be like, see, it works. You just have to be Jay Z, you have to be Taylor Swift. And because there's so much discretionary money, I'm sure in the negotiations with Taylor Swift, Jay Z, et cetera, it's. We'll just give you more of the money. You're sure what I think people's understanding of Spotify is. Is like, I'm. Not only are people getting no money per stream, but it's not. You stream it, they get that money, right?
- [24:00]
Cory Doctorow
That's right, yes. So it's not. It's not being given per stream. They also just announced that I think the threshold was a thousand. If you have fewer than a thousand streams per month, you won't get paid. And that is a shocking amount of their overall play. Right. So they've just effectively taken a huge number of musicians out. The sums involved were small, but cumulatively it's a big part of their cash basis. Yeah, no, I think. I think that's entirely right. And. And, you know, I have a name for this gambit. I write about it in inshidification. I call it the Giant Teddy Bear Gambit. So I like all the best Americans. I'm Canadian and I grew up in Toronto and we have this, like, traveling fair that comes to the city every year called the Canadian National Exhibition. We have a permanent fairground and we used to go every summer. And by like 10am on the midway, you'd see someone walking around with these galactic scale teddy bears that you get nominally by getting three balls in a peach basket. But like, to a first approximation, no one has ever done it because the peach basket is gimmicked. And what's happened is some carny has, like, they've grabbed some schlub and they've said, hey, fellow, you come over here. I like the look of your face. Tell you what, you get one ball in the peach basket, I'm going to give you a keychain. You get two keychains, you can trade up to the teddy bear. That's the kind of nice guy I am. And that guy becomes a Judas goat. He wanders around the CNE all day with this increasingly unwieldy teddy bear, convincing people to go and give the carny five bucks. And you know, this is Joe Rogan getting $100 million to take his podcast off of the Internet and put it behind Spotify's paywall. Right. And it's what happened to Pineapple Media and so on. And. And it didn't work in most cases. Like Spotify basically had to give up on weaning people off of listening to podcasts and instead listening to talk radio on Spotify. It just failed. Yeah, thankfully, it's one of the few inshidificatory gambits by a giant monopolist in recent memory that just collapsed. I mean, that in the metaverse, obviously, but yeah, it's. I mean, that giant teddy bear gambit is everywhere. And because there is no transparency into the recommendations, into inclusion in a playlist, into algorithmic feeds or into pay scales, there is no way to know when you hear someone talking about it. And it's everywhere. So there's a thing called algorithmic wage discrimination that is rampant in the gig economy. And the lawyer Veena Dubel has done some brilliant work on this and what she found is that Uber is estimating drivers economic desperation by measuring how discerning they are in taking jobs. So if you take shitty jobs, your pay goes down. And when you look at this sort of ethnographically and look at the forums where drivers are hanging out, you know, big telegram channels and Reddit forums and so on, people think they're bad at Uber. They're like, I drive Uber every hour that God sends and I make less money. And then you've got someone else who's quite selective, who's, who's making tons of money and they're like, yeah, you are bad at Uber, I'm good at Uber. But neither of them are.
- [27:00]
Jesse David Fox
And then they make content of like, how to win an Uber. I mean, the thing about Uber, and I was going to bring it up, is Uber's doing this. They're this size of company. I am a 9% certain that if Uber's doing this with drivers, yeah, Instagram, Facebook, whatever, Google is doing it with artists. When you see creative people, yes. Trying to figure out how to hack the algorithm or whatever. Oh, they're jumping on trends. They don't understand why they get paid out less than whatever. It's because they figured out that you, your desperation to jump on trends allows them to pay you less. That you've tricked yourself into becoming a low wage worker.
- [27:37]
Cory Doctorow
Yes. Well, formally that's called a superstition. Right. It's when you misunderstand the causal relationship between two phenomena and you do it over and over again, Right. Every time I wear my lucky hat, the, you know, sporting gentleman of my, of my favorite are triumphant on the field. Therefore I will wear my lucky hat every time. And then if they don't win, it's like, I wore my lucky hat wrong. And you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out how to wear your lucky hat. I mean, that's just a superstition. And the difference here is that it's not the mere misfiring of your brain's ability to make causal inferences. It is the deliberate inducement of a superstition by A firm. And it's not just in creative labor markets, and it's not just taxi drivers. The AI Now Institute just published some really important work by Katie Wells and her collaborators about nurses. There's four apps that give all the contract work to nurses in this country. And hospitals really like to hire nurses on contract because that way they can get around the union. And the apps are buying their credit history from data brokers. And the people who carry more credit card debt are offered lower wages. They pay a desperation premium. Of course, this means that their credit card debt accumulates, which means that their wage goes down. Right. And it's a vicious cycle. And think about that the next time someone is putting your catheter in. And they might have had to drive Uber till midnight the night before and skip breakfast that morning to make rent.
- [28:54]
Jesse David Fox
Yeah. I want to talk a little bit more about Spotify and playlists, because I think playlists are useful because it showed how convenience, the one presented with infinite choice. Convenience essentially replaced what would once be called taste in some ways. Or essentially they're like, go here and people filter in sort of their ideas of what they want. And Spotify figured out for people to sort of off they. They by eliminating choice. How does that infect. How does that impact the. The person's relationship to music especially? And I'll add, you mentioned in, I think in your book that there are. They prioritize music that is so inoffensive that you don't even realize you listened to a song.
- [29:40]
Cory Doctorow
Sure. That's true. I don't like that convenience framing only because it. It puts it into a kind of consumerist framing where the problem is that you shopped inefficiently. And like, you know, when this happened on radio. Right. So people used to tune into their favorite radio DJ and they would listen to the music the DJ played and it wouldn't always be the music that was to their taste, but it was enough to their taste that they would listen in. And then record executives started bribing station managers to put tracks in. It was called payola. People went to prison over it. Right. And it was because, like, reaching for the dial is like, it's not that it's inconvenient, it's that it's zero sum.
- [30:19]
Jesse David Fox
Right. You're.
- [30:19]
Cory Doctorow
It's not like people are like, I'm just like, I am so torpid that I cannot bestir myself to move my mouse and change the Spotify track. It's that I am so busy.
- [30:30]
Jesse David Fox
Yeah.
- [30:30]
Cory Doctorow
That I can't do it. You know, I can't reach it. I can't. I put my phone down. Walking around with my Bluetooth headphones, I'd have to walk halfway across the house and the baby is crying or, you know, I'm in the middle of changing the oil in my car or whatever. So it's not convenience, right? It's like the. It is an exploitative conduct that should be extinguished not through consumer action, but by regulation or. The other possibility here is that historically what we've done when firms inshinified their products is we made complementary goods that disinshidified them. When printer companies started jacking up the price of ink, people made generic ink. And to get back to this idea that we have an inchitogenic environment, there's a 1998 law called the Digital Millennium Copyright act, or DMCA. And Section 1201 of the DMCA establishes a felony punishable by a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for modifying technology that has been designed to resist modification. Which means that modifying a printer to take generic ink or modifying the Spotify client to skip the junk or to overlay the search and you know, automate like you could imagine very easily. You could imagine a Spotify app that is not the official one that searches for whatever album you're looking for Paul's Boutique, and goes to MusicBrains, which is an open free repository of all the music ever recorded metadata finds out what the tracks are on Paul's Boutique and how long they are, looks at all the things that Spotify calls Paul's Boutique, finds the one that is actually Paul's Boutique and plays it right. That would be like, you could probably vibe code that in an hour it would be a felony because you would have to bypass Spotify's anti modification layer. And so again, back to this idea that like, when you remove the external source of discipline, the devil on one shoulder trumps the angel on the other. If you're worried that making the ad load too high or making the printer ink too expensive or making the playlist too shitty will provoke someone to evince a change in their consumption habits such that they never come back again. People install ad blockers, they don't uninstall ad blockers. Right, then there is some discipline enforced upon you. We created this law like it was our choice. It didn't come off down off a mountain on two stone tablets. Originally it applied to a narrow slice of products because there weren't many products that were kind of designed to fit within the Statute, it was like, you know, Sega Dreamcasts and DVD players were really, it stopped you from like de regionalizing your DVD players.
- [33:01]
Jesse David Fox
Yeah, I remember that.
- [33:01]
Cory Doctorow
Bring a DVD home from Europe and watch it in America. It's the most penny any shit, right? But it was predicted and foreseen at the time that as microprocessors got cheaper and as the advantages of this form of control over competitors. Right, it's not really control over user habits because for the user habit to change, a competitor has to enter the market. So this is really control over who can compete with you in the market. That this control over competitors as well as your customers would eventually drive firms into redesigning their products to take advantage of this. And if you've ever heard farmers complaining they can't fix their John Deere tractors, it's the same law, right? So like this is exactly what's happened. This, this tiny policy change that had this absolutely foreseeable outcome was made in 1998. And for the last 28 years we have just seen this monotonic expansion of products where you have felony contempt. A business model where, where, where changing the product in a way that benefits you at the expense of the firm that made it has become a literal crime. And what boss wouldn't say yes to that often?
- [34:10]
Jesse David Fox
Yeah, yeah. So when you see the, the what has happened to feeds, these video feeds that is now sort of like social media companies have turned to feed companies in the last few years especially it, it is as is like everything, it's the frog boiling water. Next thing you know you go to Instagram, which is where you saw your friends. And it's not at all where you see your friends. You just go where you see. Not even things you hypothetically like or a mix of things you like with a lot of things you don't. How do you, what do you see that like? I think a lot of people when they think insertification of the Internet now, they think why am I keep on being shown things I don't like, things that make me upset, things I don't care about, interests I don't have. How do you see that? How does that fit into your perspective?
- [34:54]
Cory Doctorow
Well, I think you hit the nail on the head when you talked about your friends. Yeah, right. I think the, there are lots of different ways to do lock in on a platform. So like Uber had a very baroque lock in strategy. The Saudi royal family gave a Japanese venture capitalist named Masayoshi Son $31 billion, which he then gave to Uber. Uber lost 41 cents on every dollar they made for 13 years, pissed away $31 billion, put all the livery cab businesses in cities that aren't New York out of business, put all the rideshare business, except for Lyft and a few at the margins, induced a lost decade in transit investment. Because why would you have a bus in your small town when Uber is so cheap? And then they doubled the price of the ride and they cut the driver compensation in half. Right? That's very complicated. Social media is much easier. Economists have this thing they call the collective action problem, which is just like, you love your friends, but they're a pain in the ass. You can't agree on what board game you're going to play this weekend. So how are you going to agree when it's time to leave Facebook? Especially, like, if you're on Facebook because you know there are people who have the same rare disease as you there, and your friend is there because they left another country and that's where the people back home are. And then someone else is there because that's where their audience or their customers are or just where they organize the carpool for the little league that their kids are in. It's, like, very hard because you don't have to just convince those six people. You have to convince all the people those people are connected to. And so you have this very high switching cost. And basically, so long as you love your friends more than you hate Mark Zuckerberg, you'll hang around. And so you can see this, like, steady descent into inshidification that is really playing off of this. Now, what's interesting about this is that TikTok did something different. TikTok actually created an extremely good recommendation engine that then they were endlessly tempted to tinker with in order to stick things in your eyeballs you didn't want to see. And basically to initiatify. There's A thing that TikTok has called a heating tool. They talk about it internally. This story was broken, I believe, by Anna Marie Cox at Forbes, that they go to, like, say, a sports bro, and they're like, you should really try putting your content on TikTok. And then they use the heating tool to elevate the likelihood that that will be recommended to people who just aren't interested in sports. And that guy convinces himself he's the Louis Pasteur of sports content on TikTok, and he goes around and, like, giant teddy bear stuff.
- [37:13]
Jesse David Fox
He.
- [37:13]
Cory Doctorow
He tells all the other sports bros, this is where the money is. And they all pile in. And then once they've they've kind of satisfied themselves. They take away the heat from the sports bros and they put it on whatever astrologers. Right. So TikTok figured out how to do it. It was very successful. People liked their recommendations. They were at, at a certain point they were kind of spookily good.
- [37:31]
Jesse David Fox
Yeah.
- [37:32]
Cory Doctorow
And although they tend to regress to the mean. But at the start they were very, very good. And then Facebook and Twitter and other platforms like them, YouTube shorts, I guess. YouTube too. You know, they have never like these are all one hit wonder companies. Right? They did. They had one insight, then they bought a bunch of other people's companies ever since. They like, don't. These are not Willy Wonka's idea factory. This is rich uncle penny bags. They buy other people's toys and play with them. You know, take away Google's acquisitions and you have a company that has no ad tech, no mobile platform, no video platform, no server management tools, no customer management tools, no docs, no maps, no collaboration, nothing. Yeah, yeah, right. And where they've launched those internally, they failed.
- [38:13]
Jesse David Fox
It's.
- [38:13]
Cory Doctorow
They just like they are only capable, almost without exception of, of buying other people's companies and monetizing them. So they, they're like haunted by this suspicion that maybe they just got lucky.
- [38:25]
Jesse David Fox
Yeah, right.
- [38:25]
Cory Doctorow
And that they're not super geniuses.
- [38:27]
Jesse David Fox
One, two, three. I'm stand up comedian John Marco Cerese.
- [38:32]
Cory Doctorow
And I'm actor penis model Russell Daniels.
- [38:35]
Jesse David Fox
The downside is our podcast where we bring on guests to talk about how miserable their lives are because, let's face
- [38:42]
Cory Doctorow
it, things are not getting better.
- [38:44]
Jesse David Fox
Every episode we talk about what's wrong with our lives, our guests lives, the
- [38:48]
Cory Doctorow
world, but in a fun way.
- [38:50]
Jesse David Fox
Bottom line is you're going to walk away feeling better about your life. We've had so many cool guests.
- [38:55]
Cory Doctorow
Caleb Huron, Busy Phillips.
- [38:57]
Jesse David Fox
Stavros Halkias.
- [38:59]
Cory Doctorow
Laverne Cochrane.
- [39:00]
Jesse David Fox
Hassan Piker.
- [39:01]
Cory Doctorow
Alana Glaser. I promise you're gonna have a good time.
- [39:05]
Jesse David Fox
Now on the Vox Media podcast network,
- [39:07]
Cory Doctorow
this is the downside.
- [39:11]
Jesse David Fox
There's a civil war happening in the Democratic Party. And if there's one place that that's playing out most clearly, it's in Michigan.
- [39:18]
Cory Doctorow
A crucial Senate primary battle in Michigan that could determine control of Congress in November. Congresswoman Haley Stevens and A El Sayed, a progressive Democrat and a moderate Democrat.
- [39:28]
Jesse David Fox
In the end, it all comes down to the dreaded E word, electability. But in Michigan, one candidate is trying to turn the electability concept on its head. If we think that voters walk around asking where do I sit on some
- [39:43]
Cory Doctorow
theoretical left right spectrum then in theory,
- [39:46]
Jesse David Fox
the bulk of the voters are somewhere in the middle.
- [39:48]
Cory Doctorow
The problem though is that that model
- [39:50]
Jesse David Fox
hasn't really accurately predicted our politics for
- [39:53]
Cory Doctorow
a very long time. If Michiganders wanted moderate, why would they
- [39:56]
Jesse David Fox
have elected Donald Trump twice? Dr. Abdul El Sayed is making the progressive case for America first, and he's trying to settle the Democrats ideological battle in the process. This is about the many versus the money. I'm Estad Hernton and this is America Actually. Catch us Every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast.
- [40:16]
Cory Doctorow
So they're always panicking. Being technical people, they have a technical term for panicking. They call it pivoting. And they observe TikTok and they're like, well that's where the money is. Now the interesting thing is that a feed of like theater kids doing cable access television on your small screen is readily substitutable for any other feed of theater kids doing amateur dramatics on your small screen in exactly the way that a connection to your friends isn't. So I am quite amazed by the degree to which they are throwing out their most important asset, which is the lock in they have by controlling access to the people who matter most in the world to you and by like tightering down the quantum of material in your feed that comes from people you follow. Not least because there's pretty good evidence that people prefer that. So in 2022, a couple of teenagers reverse engineered Instagram. They didn't care about this law that makes it a felony and they made an app called OG app and you gave it your login and password for Instagram. It went to Instagram, pretended it was you, it downloaded everything Instagram was spooling up to show you. It threw away the recommendations, it threw away the ads, it threw away the spawncon, it threw away the boosted material that was predicted to be viral and just showed you things posted by people you followed in reverse chronological order. It hit the top of both app stores, Google and Apple, in the same day, the day it launched. And then Facebook sent a takedown to both and there's honor among thieves. And that was the end of OG app. And like doing more aggressive stuff or forming capital to do this would be a crime. So that's the end of OG app. But like we can see when we give users the choice, they take it. You know, neoclassical economists have this bizarre idea they call revealed preferences, which is that if you say you want one thing but you do something else, it's because secretly you actually like the other thing, maybe you don't even know it yourself, but through your deeds, we can find out your intentions. The problem is that if you don't have a real choice, you can't find anything out. Like, if you have the specific brain damage that you can only get by doing an econ degree, you will observe someone in the world who, like, sells their kidney to make rent and just go, oh, look, that person has a revealed preference for one kidney. Because you're like, incapable of understanding power. Right. You can neither perceive nor reason about power. So it's just, it's, it's all reveal preferences. But the real reveal preference is everybody wanted OG app.
- [42:42]
Jesse David Fox
Yeah, I think it's because, again, but it goes back to the, the original thing that we're talking about, which is that I, I assume they're. They see TikTok, you know, people spend seven hours on TikTok or whatever and they go, people spend 17 minutes on Facebook 10 times a day or whatever that. Whatever. Or Instagram or something like that.
- [42:59]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah.
- [42:59]
Jesse David Fox
And they go, what if we can get that, those seven hours? But Facebook eyes it. And I mean, that's what we're seeing. I mean, it is a sort of weak lock. We're all, they're all racing to lock people in this sort of endless scroll.
- [43:14]
Cory Doctorow
Yes.
- [43:15]
Jesse David Fox
And I think they just determined, oh, your friends, we can't. You're not paying your friends to make content. These sort of. I think, if anything, the sort of phase of social media before it, which is everyone's performing all the time. Everyone's performing. That's not really your birthday party, whatever that is, that doesn't exist anymore. There now is. They realize the seemingly. Or at least they're trying to. Oh, it's actually much easier to just sort of like, exploit people who think they're getting a profession over this, then exploit people who are literally doing this for recreation to connect with their friends.
- [43:46]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah. I mean, the crisis for Mark Zuckerberg is that the most compelling reason to use his platform is that's where your friends are. But your friends refuse to arrange their relationship with you to maximize how much time you spend hanging out.
- [44:00]
Jesse David Fox
Right.
- [44:00]
Cory Doctorow
Because your friends, like, by definition, you're not going to argue with them all the time. Right. Like, sure, you have disagreements with your friends, but you're not going to get into one of these things where you just like argue for 16 hours straight and then feel miserable because that person will just stop being your friend.
- [44:12]
Jesse David Fox
Yeah.
- [44:13]
Cory Doctorow
Right. And they're also probably not going to surprise you a lot with Something that you're all going to want to talk about because again, you're all friends, you're kind of consuming the same movies and books and whatever, so you have stuff to say. Oh, the pit was great last night. I thought it was cool too. How about that one thing? That was fine. I thought it was dumb. Huh? You always think that stuff's dumb. Interesting. See you Friday. Yeah, right. That's like. But that is a relationship whose significance is not its substance. Right. But it's. But kind of its form.
- [44:39]
Jesse David Fox
Right?
- [44:39]
Cory Doctorow
The fact that you and your friends are just sort of sharing water, as it were, on this platform. So Zuckerberg moves to performers and he's like, well, you know, performers will endlessly try and come up with ways to seize your attention because, as our friends on the right like to tell us, incentives matter. And so they only get to pay the rent if they can get you to pay attention to them. So they will try a million strategies. So it's like, this is like Tom Sawyer convincing all the kids to paint the fence here, right? So you're all going to like, you know, everyone who's ever dreamed of being adored by strangers is going to try to figure out how to, quote, unquote, hack your dopamine loop, right, for Mark Zuckerberg. But of course, now we're getting into the next phase, which is like, well, you know, those people, especially the successful ones, they're quite uppity and they, they, they expect to, like, be treated fairly and transparently. And also people like them, they have like, parasocial relationships with them. And so then they get angry at me and then their, their fans get angry at me. Why don't I just replace them with chatbots? Yeah, right. And that's like, I think that's one of the reasons these guys love the, the fantasy of chatbots. One, one part of it is I really need my programmers and my programmers know it, so they're really mouthy. I wish I could fire all of them. And then the other is like, I, you know, these performers are the reason my, you know, these like, inconvenient eyeballs attached to humans are stuck to my platform. Maybe I can replace these performers who, again, demand things. Yeah, Jeff Bezos would really like to like, replace his workers with things that don't need to pee. Right? Because, like, Jeff Bezos, for a man with a penis shaped rocket, really hates kidneys. And, you know, this, this kind of billionaire solipsism is really bound up in AI, you know, where like just a world without people.
- [46:29]
Jesse David Fox
Yeah. I mean, 100%. I think that's the. The goal is, okay, we'll keep on making it. We. You know, like, I focus largely on comedians and this sort of. And so I know both. And the thing about comedians is they are often the first to a lot of new technology because psychologically they sort of are desperate for attention. And also it's a low overhead art form. So. And as a result, they will. They pivot quickly to whatever the thing is. Right. Which is like, now we need you to do these type of videos. Now we do these type of videos. And. And it. And it works. And it really works for some people. Right. That's. But I think what ultimately is happening is like, they still are people. They can't pivot fast enough.
- [47:08]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah.
- [47:08]
Jesse David Fox
Where. Well, AI will just do. We'll keep on pivoting until they find the things that work. Right. And I think that is the thing that I think either unintentionally or intentionally that I have noticed is for, let's say, my last 15 years on the Internet as a sort of in the arts, broadly defined, you see a desire to make what people put out on the Internet more and more narrow. We're narrowing the definition of like, what artistic expression is what we expect out of artists. So it becomes less and less personal expression and more and more just sort of fulfilling what the algorithm wants expression to look like. So the gap between here and AI doing that is actually a smaller leap than the gap would have been if it was whatever art was like in this. In here.
- [47:56]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah. You're already pretending to be a robot. I mean, that's the thing is that Jeff Bezos wants warehouse workers to pretend that they're robots.
- [48:01]
Jesse David Fox
Right.
- [48:02]
Cory Doctorow
To not need pee breaks. Which means that replacing with robots is going to be quite easy. Same with the customer service scripts that we give to people who live in the Pacific Rim and work in call centers where we've already taken away all of their agency. I mean, this is one of the great tragedies of customer service in the globalization era is that someone who learns to be fluent in English in the Philippines or India or whatever is already much brighter than most of the people you and I are hanging out with, because they're really, they're really trying hard. And they're probably like very bright and compassionate and kind. And all they have is this three ring binder that tells them everything they're allowed to do and none of it is solving your problem. So they just, they become. Dan Davies calls them accountability sinks. And sometimes they're called moral crumple zones, you know, and they just absorb the abuse.
- [48:50]
Jesse David Fox
Yeah.
- [48:50]
Cory Doctorow
So it's not just that, like, there's someone absorbing abuse. It's like someone who could actually help you if they were allowed to, is absorbing your abuse. And so it's very easy to replace a thing that is not allowed to exercise any agency, a person who's not allowed to exercise any agency and is there to be abused with software.
- [49:06]
Jesse David Fox
Yeah. Right. It's just. It's like there. These are people who could entertain you. But if you say that the way to entertain, which is not actually what, as we've said, the way what. How social media is operated. You were asking entertainers not to entertain, but to hold your attention. That is a different thing. So you're. You're being like, oh, well, if they're just holding my attention, a lot of things could hold my attention. I'll watch a ball bounce around.
- [49:28]
Cory Doctorow
Sure.
- [49:28]
Jesse David Fox
And that's. I mean, like, this is the worst possible scenario of it. But you do see how the band of expression gets narrowed. I mean, the example I think most of is if you ever see painting that does well on social media, it is sort of a very narrow version of abstract painting that is often sort of like a person is presenting it and it's like bright colors and you sort of move on from it. Right. It was just so far away from like, whatever we think of fine art, and it is narrowing the band of. And does that mean the people, the million people watch that go to a museum, go like, this sucks. This isn't like Instagram art. Some of them may be, but I think also it's. I guess, I think the conversation is, I talk to a lot of content creators, broadly fine artists, and they're like, is this what I have to do? Do I have to play it? Cause it seems to be the only thing that works. And I think there's at this point to get at any audience.
- [50:24]
Cory Doctorow
There's an important distinction to be drawn here, though. So it is often the case that a technology that allows for a broader distribution or new distribution favors a different kind of creative expression. Right. I mean, obviously the written word is different from a folktale. Right. And recorded performances are very different from live performances. And we all know about performers who are amazing live and terrible recorded and vice versa. Right. I mean, one of my favorite guitar players is a guy called Leo Kotke. And he actually is at his most entertaining when he's live, when he tells stories about how bad he is live, because he just sits there woodenly with his eyes closed and his head down. And he's got this story about opening his eyes once and realizing that there's a thread of saliva dribbling down from his mouth to the 12th fret. So, you know, but he's an incredible recording artist, right? So, like, that is one thing, right? To be a short story writer in the heyday of the pulps is one thing, and just to find yourself with a huge market, but it's another thing entirely for firms that have control over audiences because of lock in monopoly and other mixes of policy and market forces that allow them to keep your audience where they are to then tell you what you are and aren't allowed to hear. So that's more like say the Hays Code, right? Where it's like the audiences want movies in which the bad guys sometimes win, but the movie studios and the cinema owners have collaborated or colluded to prevent those movies from seeing the light of day. And that's a very different thing to there being a new affordance in the media, you know?
- [52:01]
Jesse David Fox
Yeah, I mean, it is, I think to the. A lot of artists there's this. What it creates a cycle of like, well, at some point I will get to get to them. The thing that I actually want to express them. Which is, I think, as you said, like always has been the case with everyone trying to navigate Hollywood broadly defined. Which is like, okay, I'm going to make all these compromises. And eventually I think the difference is tech has sort of sped it up and made it much more sort of like treadmill. Like, which is sort of like, one day I'm gonna get to that carrot and when I eat that carrot, it's gonna taste delicious or whatever. But they keep on. Somehow the treadmill keeps on getting longer and longer.
- [52:35]
Cory Doctorow
So here's an interesting way I think of framing it. So historically, when we came up with a new medium, we made the old medium more like itself. So when the screen comes along, stage plays get much more stage play. Like, because anything that would be better on the screen but could conceivably be crammed onto a stage is no longer crammed onto a stage. And so we get things that are very stage like on the stage. And then the screen becomes the outer perimeter at which visual media pushes. And then we get small screens and we get very small screens and all the rest of it. That's not what's happening now. So we are not getting like a. We get short form video and therefore movies get more movie.
- [53:15]
Jesse David Fox
Like, right.
- [53:16]
Cory Doctorow
We're just like. We are Seeing, you know, like the opera got more opera like when it had competitors because suddenly there were other things.
- [53:23]
Jesse David Fox
Painting became more purely about expression when you got the photographs.
- [53:28]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Photorealistic painting is more of a party trick than anything else at this point.
- [53:34]
Jesse David Fox
But now it seems more and more that for whatever reason the value system of these apps has changed the medium that hypothetically should be more free as a result of it. Well, like the examples that probably the, that I think of immediately are. I don't know how often you see crowd work videos but like comedians are expected now to content create or I think then the, the story with Netflix is they tell people. You have to say the plot. Yeah.
- [54:04]
Cory Doctorow
Remind people that watch the screen. Yeah. How do you think about that? I mean, I think you're right and I think you're getting at the problem of monopoly as historically articulated. So I know I've talked about this idea of an inside of policy environment to really like put a button on it. We had a long period in which we viewed monopolies as per se evil. And it was articulated in the debate in the Senate for the first anti monopoly law, which is called the Sherman Act. Senator John Sherman, the brother of Tecumseh Sherman, the guy who burned down Atlanta, was stumping for this law that, that bears his name in 1890. And he said if we would not have a king in America, we should not have an autocrat of trade with the power to fix the price of the necessities of life. That we basically that it's autocracy that we're worried about it's power. In the 60s, a group of fringe economists led by a guy called Robert Bork, whose eventual Senate confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court went so badly that now we call anything that really is messed up. Borked this guy Robert Borkman conceived of this idea called the consumer welfare theory, where he said actually monopolies are efficient. That if we observe a monopoly in the wild, we should assume that the reason 90% of the world is using Google is Google as the best search engine. And it would be perverse to shut that company down or take action against it to punish it for pleasing the public. And this was a very fringe view. It came into currency with Reagan and it is, well actually with Carter a little, but especially with Reagan. And it has been policy ever since, right up to the Biden administration when it was abruptly reversed for four years and has now come back again. And so we, we like had a pro monopoly policy and it meant that the delusions, the Parochial interests, the. The aesthetic choices of individuals became totally dominant, you know? And so an example of this would be, like, a company town. So. So Henry Ford was worried about the supply chain for rubber for his tires. So he decided he was going to build a company town that was a clone of Dearborn, Michigan, in Brazil called Fordlandia in the middle of the jungle. And he was going to have rubber tappers live in his town. Now, Dearborn, Michigan's a little model town that he had built. He hired the architects. So he said, go build me Dearborn an exact replica of Dearborn. And they said, okay, but we're going to put the windows on the other side of the houses, right? Because it's like the southern hemisphere. And he said, no, no, we have southern exposures for our houses. Are you crazy? Right? Like, this is the awesome power of a billionaire in full flight, right? And everyone's got the window on the wrong fucking side of their house, right? Because this guy is just dumb, right? He just has this dumb idea, and then we all have to live with it. So this is like, one of the things is that sometimes you just get these aesthetic choices, you know, Elon Musk smashing the algorithmic weights to favor the kind of dumb things that he likes. And suddenly everyone on Twitter is sort of trapped in there with him with the feed that he thinks is good, which is one in which he's mentioned as often as possible, right? And so that's like. That's the kind of crisis that you get with billionaires. And what's very funny is the economists who brief for this still say that it's not them, right? Like, we have monopolies in everything. There's monopolies in, like, mattresses and tennis shoes and intermodal freight and glass bottles and vitamin C and sterile bags of stuff, saline and, like, professional wrestling. You know, there used to be 30 leagues and now there's one. And the billionaire who owns it, who's like this weird, rapey Trumpy guy, you know, he's. He, like, reclassified all his workers as contractors and took away their health insurance. And all the wrestlers you love are begging for pennies to die with dignity on GoFundMe. And like, these guys, you point out that these monopolies are ruining our lives, and they're like, well, why are you blaming us, right? Like, why is that our fault? Like, you think our pro monopoly policies are somehow correlated with the growth of monopolies? It's like, we used to not have a rat problem because we had rat poison. And these Guys were like, stop using the rat poison now rats are eating our faces. And they're like, well, why is that my fault?
- [58:10]
Jesse David Fox
Right.
- [58:11]
Cory Doctorow
Don't you know that the iron laws of economics and the great forces of history have ushered in the time of the rat? Right. Sunspots have made rats more fun than at any time in history. And sure, the rats did buy the rat poison factories and shut them all down, but we're not using rat poison anymore. That's just economically rational. Right. So like, it is amazing the lack of accountability for this stuff.
- [58:30]
Jesse David Fox
Yeah. I think it's a short. I think also you don't even know where to put the accountability. Even like for example of the things you said, professional wrestling was owned by this one guy, then was bought by a company that essentially owns all of Ultimate Fighting or all of whatever fighting sports, all professional wrestling and one of the two major agencies. Right. And that also was a production company.
- [58:53]
Cory Doctorow
Right.
- [58:54]
Jesse David Fox
So it is like, where do you even start to point the blame? And then you're just a content creator being like, I need to make a living until someone points out a completely different way than the one way that I see is being presented to me. The one way that they have the most control ever in terms of controlling how much money we make and how to do. And, And I imagine every month they are not trying to make. As we go back to the Google example, every day people are going to work and they're not going to work being like, how can we make it better for artists to express themselves? How are we going to make it better for artists to monetize it? They are figuring out how can we get it so the artist spends more time there making more stuff.
- [59:37]
Cory Doctorow
Right.
- [59:38]
Jesse David Fox
We do not care about quality. Quality is not in our business model anymore. It is. Quantity is in our business model. How can we get the creator making more stuff so that there's less, there's more stuff for people to be on it? That's there, that's the system.
- [59:51]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah. Well, so, you know, the, the problem with that framing is that it, it's it, it kind of lays the blame at the feet of the artists for not. For not making the change. Right. It's not. Or maybe it puts the blame at the feet of the people who are running those platforms, you know, these kind of ketamine addled Zucker muskian failures. Right. But you know, honestly, like those people never really seriously claim to be working on our behalf. There is a group of people who draw a salary to work on our behalf who have the Power to change this. And it's policymakers.
- [60:24]
Jesse David Fox
Yeah.
- [60:25]
Cory Doctorow
And, like, one thing that I've said many times in this conversation so far is that these outcomes were not just foreseeable, they were foreseen. Right. Policymakers were told this would happen if they took the decisions. They did, and they took them and it happened. Which means that to get into the third part of insidification, which is what we should do about it, if we know what policies created it, then we know what policies will fix it.
- [60:46]
Jesse David Fox
Yeah.
- [60:47]
Cory Doctorow
And it does feel insurmountable.
- [60:49]
Jesse David Fox
Right.
- [60:49]
Cory Doctorow
When you have, like, the tech bosses paying a million dollars each to sit behind Trump on the inauguration dais and spending millions more to build the Epstein ballroom and so on, it can really feel like these guys are, like, there's no way that we could beat them back. But, you know, our ancestors did this in living memory. Like, John D. Rockefeller's control over the economy really dwarfs, you know, Larry Ellison or Elon Musk. And we figured out. Took a long time, but we figured it out. We figured out how to. How to put those guys in chains, how to smash their empires. So we're not asking anyone to figure out how to, like, recover the lost arts of a fallen civilization. Right? Like, no one, no one needs you to, like, embalm a pharaoh or build a pyramid without power tools. We just need to do the hard yards that our ancestors did in living memory. We have to rebuild a labor movement. We have to rebuild a movement against concentrated corporate power. We have to understand that this, like, while you're trying to have a living, which is important, you also, to preserve that living, need to find yourself in solidaristic connection with other people situated like you, that you're. They're not your competitors. Even if you do compete in some narrow sense that you. You and they have a class alliance to get back to where we started. That there is that you're on the same side. Even, like, if you. Even people who use platforms like, say, Google are in some sense on the same side as advertisers. Because we think of advertisers being the people who Google is good to. Advertisers are paying the highest rates they've ever paid. They're getting the lowest ad targeting fidelity they've ever seen. Ad fraud is off the charts. You know, in 2017, Procter and Gamble went from spending $200 million a year on programmatic ads, which are surveillance ads, to zero. Because they were like, we don't think these ads are performing the way they used to. They saw a 0% drop in sales.
- [62:36]
Jesse David Fox
Right.
- [62:36]
Cory Doctorow
Like just $200 million being stolen because Mark Zuckerberg couldn't be bothered to guard the value. Because why would you when you've got your advertisers locked in? And so, you know, we need to like strengthen that alliance. We need to build that alliance. That alliance is what's going to carry us out of this moment where we are at risk of incipient fascism and the collapse of democracy, because that is intimately connected with the growth of monopolies. You know, one funny thing about anti monopoly law is it's the same in America as it is in Europe. And the reason for that is after World War II, the American technocrats in the Marshall Plan went to Europe and they said monopolists who bankrolled and benefited from Hitler and Franco and Mussolini. So we are going to transpose our anti monopoly law onto Europe's law books because they understood that fascism is the endpoint of monopoly.
- [63:28]
Jesse David Fox
Right.
- [63:28]
Cory Doctorow
It's how states and corporates, Corporations merge is through monopoly. And so rebuilding that is a really important part of getting out of this moment. And the corollary of that is that anything you're doing to get out of this moment is also contributing to getting rid of monopolies.
- [63:49]
Jesse David Fox
Yeah. You know, I think the thing that I always think about is that you, you reject the idea of being optimistic or pessimistic.
- [63:56]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah.
- [63:56]
Jesse David Fox
And the, I believe the word you think about is hope. What does that mean to you?
- [64:00]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah. So optimism, pessimism I see as both a form of fatalism, you know, the idea that things will get better or worse no matter what we do. And hope is the belief that if you take an affirmative step to a better future, that you'll ascend a gradient towards the peak you want to reach. And that as you move up that gradient, new terrain will be revealed to you. So, you know, I'm a novelist, which means that I can give you a neat dramatic path from A to Z. That's not how life works. Right. That's the difference between life and a novel. In life, there's reversals, there's lateral moves, there's long times where you're like becalmed in a doldrums before you start moving again. It's fits and starts, but so long as you're ascending that gradient, so long as you can see one way that you can materially improve your circumstances, you create the opportunity to discover that terrain on which you can see an even better, more ambitious way to improve things. And you know, I'm obviously no Fan of Trump. But right now I see the Strait of Hormuz crisis creating a bunch of one way conversions from fossil fuels to electrification all over the world, you know, and like, that doesn't mean that I think it's good or that I'm cheering it on, but, you know, when life gives you sars, you make sarsaparilla. Right. Like, you know, that we should be salvaging what we can from this terrible moment.
- [65:24]
Jesse David Fox
Yeah. I think the thing that, what I like about it is that I think the powers that be have learned how to take advantage and monetize both optimism and pessimism. Like, if you go there are grifters on both sides and what you hope is suggesting is you have control, which is, I think, the thing that they don't want people to know.
- [65:41]
Cory Doctorow
Sure, yeah. It's not teleological.
- [65:43]
Jesse David Fox
Right.
- [65:44]
Cory Doctorow
It's not like things will just the arc of history is bending towards one thing or another. This is, we will bend the arc of history and maybe our descendants will be the ones who actually realize it, but it will be because of the work we did. Back to anti monopoly. So John Sherman argues for the Sherman act in 1890, but it wasn't until 1912 that we broke up Standard Oil. And the precipitating event, it wasn't what caused it. Right. But it was the last thing that happened that tipped it over was one journalist, a woman called Ida Tarbell. She was the first woman in America to get a science degree. She was a biologist, but she was a great orator. And she really hated John D. Rockefeller because her dad was a Pennsylvania oil man who'd been ruined by the Standard Oil Company. And there was this wildly popular American magazine at the time called Colliers. And this was, you know, the early 20th century, so it was before they invented cool titles. So she wrote a book in two volumes called the History of the Standard Oil Company, Parts one and two. But it was syndicated in Colliers. And it was such a powerful unpacking of how the scam worked that it became impossible not to do something about it. And again, she was standing on the shoulders of giants. People had done incredible things to get us to that moment where people were so pissed off and understood the forces that were at work, and not just a series of bad individuals, but actual classes and forces moving around the country that she was able to precipitate the collapse of the most powerful and vicious commercial empire the earth had ever seen. And so I don't know when our work will bear fruit, but I know that it will. Because in finance, they have this saying, stein's Law. Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. And this is not sustainable. And so one way or another, it's going to stop.
- [67:37]
Jesse David Fox
Thank you so much.
- [67:38]
Cory Doctorow
Thank you.
- [67:39]
Jesse David Fox
That's it for another episode of Good One. Good One is produced by myself, Zachary Mack, Neal Janowitz, and Ann Victoria Clark. Music composed by Brandon McFarland. Write a review and rate the show on Apple Podcasts. Five stars, please. I am Jesse David Fox and you can follow me at Jesse David Fox, Buy my book, comedy book, wherever books are sold. Thanks for listening to Good One from New York Magazine. You can subscribe to the magazine@nymag.com Pod be back with a new episode next week. Have a good one.