← Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
The world has moved on
This week on my podcast, I read a recent post from my Pluralistic newsletter, “The World Has Moved On,” which analogizes Stephen King’s Dark Tower series to the Enshittification hypothesis. In the Dark Tower novels, we crisscross a fallen world in which decay is all around us. The buildings are rotten, the machines have stopped... more
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:12]
A
Well, hello and welcome to a Cory Doctorow Podcast. It is Sunday and I'm at my desk in Los Angeles, not a thing that happens very often. Almost didn't happen today because we went to the Rose bowl flea market this morning and spent quite a long time there because it was a particularly good day and my birthday is coming up, so my wife got me some nice things, including a genuinely apocalyptic clown oil painting with a clown looming over a kind of blazing cityscape. It's really something. It's in my Flickr feed. You got to have a look. Anyway, that plus a morning spent tidying up after a big dinner party last night, barbecue in the backyard, means that I got off to a late start. But here I am at my desk recording for you. And if you are in Los Angeles like me, well then on 19th of June you can see me at Skylight Books with Brian Merchant to talk about my new book, the Reverse Centaur's Guide to life after AI. And on the 21st of June I will be in Menlo park at Kepler's with Angie Coiro, also talking about the Reverse Centaur's Guide to life after AI. 23 June sees me in Toronto for an afternoon panel at the IAB State of the Nation conference called the Sovereignty Debate. And then in the evening, very limited tickets, go and get yours now I'm going to be at Ozer Records at an event hosted by Type books on on June 23rd in Toronto I will be in New York on June 24th at the Strand Bookstore with Jonathan Coulton. And on the 25th I will be in Philadelphia with David Williams at the Filter Club hosted by The Philadelphia Citizen. June 26th sees me in Chicago with the Amazing Rick Perlstein at Exile in Bookville. And then I'm back overseas on August 17th you can get me at the Edinburgh Book Festival. I'm doing a solo talk and a panel with Jimmy Wales. On October 6th I'll be at Notre Dame for an event called An Evening with Cory Doctorow. And there are much more events coming up, but I will have to keep you apprised of those as they emerge. So today is the day that I finish the copy edits on my next book. Well, not my next book, the book after my next book. Well, not that either. The book after the book that I've got coming out. The Reverse Centaur is the graphic novel of Inshidification, which will be January, and the book after that is the graphic novel of Unauthorized Bread, which is April. But the book after that, August 2027 is my geopolitics book, the Post American Internet and today is the day I finish copy edits on that. Tomorrow I start the big structural edits. I think it's probably about two days worth of those and then I will have that second draft in to my editor. That will be very exciting and also nice to get that off my plate before the book tour starts. That has been my goal and why I've been breaking all land speed records and also missing sleep to get these edits done. We have a really full house this week. My daughter Posey is back from school. She's about to go on her summer vacation. She grew up kid from Thailand and she's going to go and stay with that kid's family for a couple of weeks before going to Toronto to work for my brother at his hockey camp and then coming to stay with us in London. But for a couple of weeks we have her here in Los Angeles. It's so nice to have her back in residence as it were, with all the stuff she's cleared out of her dorm room at Santa Cruz. She is going back in the fall and has rented a house and so this might be the last time all that stuff comes back. This might be a one time repatriation. And so without further ado, because I do have all these other things to get on with, I've got to have my swim and make the graphic for tomorrow's blog post and finish those edits on the post American Internet. I'm going to go right into today's reading and today's reading is one of my blog posts from my pluralistic.net newsletter. So then, without further ado or Foo farah here from the 11 June edition of pluralistic.net is the World has moved on. The world has moved on. Douglas Adams wrote, anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things. I think about this quote whenever I get angry at the technology around me. When I rail against the great in shipning, am I simply committing the sin of nostalgia? Nostalgia is a toxic impulse. J. Hodgman I am, after all, old. I've written before how conservatives yearning for simpler times is really just a wish to be a child again. The reason time seems simpler during your childhood is that you were a child and if your parents did their job, they shielded you from a lot of the complexity of their adulthood so you could enjoy your childhood. That's where the National Customer Rage Survey comes in. It's been surveying a panel of 1,000 representative consumers every three years for a decade, continuing a research project that started in 1976. The survey measures respondents attitudes towards the businesses they deal with and as of 2025, it's fair to say customers are pissed. We're experiencing more problems with the products and services we use. Those problems are more severe, they make us angrier and they produce lingering stress. More and more we are seeking revenge on the businesses that piss us off. So it's not just me an Old Man Yelling at the Cloud the World Is Getting shittier the latest customer rage survey inspired the Guardian's Heather Timmons to launch a new investigative series looking at how Fucked up everything is. Her inaugural installment is very good, and it's drawn a massive reader response. I spoke with Timmons this week about the series. She told me she's been deluged with emails from readers who feel that the world is different now, and many of them cite my work on inshitification. Timmons wanted to know what advice I had for her readers. I told her that I don't think you can solve this as a consumer because this isn't a market problem, it's a political problem and shopping isn't politics. Later, Timmons forwarded one of those reader emails to me. It gave an eloquent and evocative account of just how rancid the vibe is these days. The writer said that when they and their spouse encounter this rot, they cite Stephen King's Dark Tower novels, quoting the oft repeated phrase from that series, the world has moved on. At this point, I should warn you that the following contains some Dark Tower spoilers. So if you're planning to read a decades old but very good dystopian Western science fiction crossover series, and if spoilers bug you, this might not be the essay for you. So spoiler alert. Still with me? Okay then. In the Dark Tower novels, we crisscross a fallen world in which decay is all around us. The buildings are rotten, the machines have stopped working and no one knows how to fix them, and babies and livestock alike are frequently born with deadly congenital defects. Much of the world has fallen into wasteland, cracked and barren. An army of wreckers led by the demagogue John Farson, who styles himself the good man, are slowly but surely conquering the land, laying waste to those few remaining outposts of civilization and conscripting the young men in those conquered lands to march on their neighbors. It wasn't always this way. There was a time when the world was defined by hope and virtue and light, when the machines were fixed and the crops were harvested. Life wasn't golden. There were still squabbles and sorrows and even wars. But life was good. And then the world moved on. For reasons no one truly understands, the normal push pull of decay and renewal turned into a one way irreversible process in which everything that crumbled or snapped or burned up couldn't be repaired or replaced or recovered. Our mysterious ability to beat back the second law of thermodynamics, an absurdity we probably should have always treated as an aberration, has collapsed. The world has moved on. The Dark Tower series is a long, long, long buildings Roman, with many detours through the life stories of the characters in the ensemble cast, as well as the biographies of many of the figures they meet along the road. It's mostly an adventure novel, as road trip tales tend to be, but those character studies and the lore they surface from our world and theirs creates an overwhelming many layered, richly te sense of loss and worse despair. For the world has moved on, and despite the love and care and bravery of many of the people in that world, the world cannot be redeemed. Each terrible day of those people's lives is the best day of the rest of their lives. From here on in, it only gets worse when Timmons reader and their spouse greet every fresh depredation in modern life. Hours on the phone with customer service to resolve a billing error that the company repeats every month, say, with the world has moved on, they are invoking something heavy. This isn't just a rancid vibe. It's the fucking end times for all that. The Dark Tower novels are a series of cracking adventures and thoughtful character studies. They are also a mystery. Over and over again we are made to ask ourselves, why has the world moved on? Was it John Farson and his army? Was it the man in Black, the evil wizard whom the book's protagonist has pursued across time and space? Was it the Crimson King, the evil force whom the man in Black serves well? Yes and no. Midway through the novels, we learn that the Crimson King and his evil minions have laid siege to the beams, vast ley lines that span the universe and provide the force that pushes away entropy, creating breathing room where repair and care can live. All things serve the beams, we're told. The beams are the organizing force of the universe. The answer to the riddle of how such pitiful things as we could have fought back remorseless entropy for so long. By attacking the beams, the villains of the series have all but snuffed out that force. And so the world has moved on. When I read that email and the invocation of the Dark tower, I was immediately struck by how apt this comparison is. Because as I've written many times, there were always inshidifiers who would have plundered your data and money and treated you with naked contempt. There were always inshitifiers, but those inshidifiers faced external forces that checked their wreckers urge. They were held in check by competition and regulation and workers sense of fairness and duty, and by the threat of new products and services that might pop up to correct the defects they deliberately introduced into their products by inshittifying them. And the foundation the dark tower upon which all the beams converged was antitrust enforcement grounded in the idea that we could not afford to let any company, not a good company or a bad company, get so large that it could no longer be regulated lest its executives become autocrats of trade. The same people who laid siege to antitrust law would later come after all forms of checks and balances. These are the people who gave us the unitary executive and Project 2025 and the collapse of accountability that has allowed the worst people to commit the gravest sins they could imagine and still reap vast fortunes. These beam breakers wanted kings and they got them. I collect definitions of conservativism and one of my favorite comes from Corey Robin's book the Reactionary Mind. Robin asks how it is that we could call so many disparate, irreconcilable ideologies, various ethno national nationalisms, imperialism, financialism, patriarchy, Christian nationalism, libertarianism, white supremacy, and so on conservative. What binds all these views together? Robin's answer, the foundation that all these otherwise disparate views share is that some people are born to rule, while others are born to be ruled over. When these lesser people are elevated to positions of power, their inferiority creates a system of misrule by which we all suffer. The best outcome for everyone is for all of us to know our place and defer to our social betters. That's why conservatives are obsessed with affirmative action, DEI and any form of anti racism. For them, the discriminatory outcomes we see in the world are natural, reflecting the inborn defects in the people at the bottom of the social order. That's why after every plane crash, every collision between a cargo ship and a bridge. Every spectacular corporate bankruptcy, conservatives rush to uncover the race, gender, religion and sexual orientation of the captain, the pilot, or the CEO. If the person who oversaw the catastrophe has anything remotely resembling a marginalized identity, then this is loudly trumpeted as confirmation that diversity hires promoted above their station are ruining our society and wrecking our bridges. Naturally, if the person in charge was a wealthy, well born straight white guy, that's just proof that shit happens. It definitely doesn't prove that white straight guys as a class should be removed from positions of power. For conservatives, virtue is whatever people who are born to rule desire. Hence Frank Wilhoyt's definition of conservativism. Exactly one proposition, to wit, there must be in groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out groups whom the law binds but does not protect. It's not a crime if the president does it. It's also not a crime if your boss does it, or if a monopolist does it, or if ICE does it. It's not a crime if the IDF do it, or if the Epstein class do it. Taxes are for the little people the attack on antitrust law was part of the attack on the rule of law, the campaign to put everyone back in their place. It's a piece of the effort to establish a new hereditary aristocracy. And every hereditary aristocracy requires hereditary serfs. That would be us. The ideology of economism, which says that market outcomes are the only way to govern a society, cashes out to the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. If we interfere with mergers or labor practices or commercial conduct, we distort the market, which is literally going against nature. That's why Trump dismantled the consumer protection agencies, the antitrust agencies, the labor protection agencies, the environmental protection agencies. When someone in power cheats the system, that's not a crime, no matter how many people they rob, maim or kill. As Trump told us on the debate stage in 2016, that kind of cheating makes me smart. That's why Elon Musk almost got to force every pension saver in America to bail out his money incinerating AI business and his failed social media take over. Because the rules that protect everyday investors are for the little people. Musk's mistake was trying to get a bunch of billionaires to hold the bag too. The one form of systemic violence our society will not tolerate is trillionaire on billionaire violence. The world has moved on. 50 years of neoliberal rule has weakened and snapped the beams. The rule of law, consumer and labor rights, civil rights, the beams that radiated from our dark tower antitrust law, which blocked the emergence of autocrats of trade. The people who besieged those beams, they had the same motives as the Crimson King and John Farson and the man in Black. They were willing to pay any price for a world free from consequences for people like them. They knew that they were born to rule and that the rules were for the little people and that breaking those rules made them smart. They wanted bossism, or, as rendered in the original Afrikaans, baskap, which means the social, political, and economic domination of South Africa by its white population. Not for nothing, Boss Cop is the foundation of muskism, the ideology that Elon Musk epitomizes, even if he can't articulate it. In the Utopia of Rules, the late David Graeber described how neoliberal deregulation produced exactly the kind of state that we were warned we'd get under communism. Thanks to monopolies, all the stores were the same, and they all sold the same goods. Thanks to the dismantling of labor protection in unions, no one had enough money to get by. Thanks to elite impunity, we were ruled by monsters who committed crimes in the open and thrived as a result. Thanks to unchecked greed, we paid everything we had for health care, only to be denied treatment when we needed it. Thanks to the dismantling of the welfare state, more and more of us had to wait in long lines to fill out absurdly long forms in triplicate. Thanks to the intrinsic instability of such a terrible system, more and more of us ended up in prison, and protest became more and more illegal. Graeber pointed out that the rise of the Web made it seductively easy for people in authority to force us to fill in forms. When analog bureaucracies impose paperwork costs on us, they also impose paperwork costs on themselves, because processing and filing those forms requires substantial effort, even if filling in those forms requires even more effort from us. When it comes to virtual paperwork, the asymmetry is even more pronounced. Sure, it takes some admin to set up an online form and write the scripts to process its outputs, but that's a one off. The form giver can perform very little admin and still impose a giant repeated admin burden on the rest of us. AI has only made this worse. Now, thanks to vibe coding, everyone can produce a form and its associated processing and analytics backends with prompts, which creates a grave moral hazard. The kinds of activities that I used to fill in a single short form to Accomplish now requires 10 lengthy forms created by different People in the same organization all asking for variations on the same information. Through AI we have democratized bureaucracy. It's Kafka as a service. What's more, when you're dealing with a monopoly, you have no choice but to complete whatever paperwork they throw at you. And when those vibe coded backend scripts shit the bed and lose or misinterpret your data, you have no choice but to endure an infinite telephone hold queue if you're lucky, or get shunted to a customer service bot if you're unlucky. It's entirely possible to build web forms that are thoughtful, fast, respectful of our time and well processed. The problem is that fielding these forms requires that the form giver undertake some intensive, moderately expensive work once while skipping this step merely requires that we all perform intensive time consuming work over and over and over again. This is how we end up with government forms that require you to list every trip you have ever taken to the USA since your infancy with every flight number, which you can only get help with by talking to a chatbot that emails you an out of date PDF no matter what question you ask of it. This is how we end up with massive customer service queues, long lines at tills, and no one at the gate to answer your questions when your flight is canceled. Understaffing is a form of inshidification, one that shifts value from shoppers to owners and shifts consequences from owners to workers. This is how we end up with broken machines that no one can fix. Firing workers and replacing them with chatbots or contractors means incinerating their process knowledge, the precious, inchoate, unrecorded understanding that keeps everything working. This is how companies that make products we love suddenly decide to wreck those products when the only consequences for shitty products is angry customers with nowhere to go and no one to vent their rage upon except workers who have no labor rights and can't afford to quit. Why not do a mafia bust out for every business? The world has moved on. Nothing works. Everything costs too much. No one can help. No one knows how to fix anything. The beams were broken by the Crimson King and his economism crazed minions. The Dark tower might fall. So what consumer advice do I have for people who are angry about this? I don't have any consumer advice. I'm afraid you can't shop your way out of a monopoly. Once again, shopping is not politics. What I have for you is political advice to restore the beams and beat back entropy again. We need a better system, not more virtuous individuals. If you feel as I Do that, the world has moved on. Then to wrench it back, you will have to join a polity support activist groups like the Electronic Frontier foundation, the digital rights group I've been at for the past 25 years. Join a union. If there's no union at your job site, start a union. If you work in tech, you start this process by talking to techsolidarity.org and the Tech Workers Coalition in the UK. Get in touch with the United Tech and Allied Workers. Get involved in party politics. Find a political party whose local organization supports your values even if the national version of that party sucks, and then work with your fellow grassroots activists to drag or replace the party leaders. Get involved in local politics if there's one thing Moms for Liberty has taught us, it's that unregarded, seemingly unimportant local offices have enormous potential to change facts on the ground for the people where you live. Those changes don't have to be changes for the worst. Doing politics is hard. Hell, after all, is other people. It would be great if we could make change by changing ourselves, but that's not how any of this works. The world has moved on and you can't save it. But together we can restore the beams and beat back entropy. Hell is other people, but only because other people are so great. But it's so hard to figure out how to work together. We can do it though. We did it with the post war settlement, the 30 glorious years when we built the welfare state, regulated polluters and bosses and kicked off the civil rights movement. We did it then and we can do it again. We must all things serve the beams. All right, so that is my last podcast until I am back in London in July. Let me see, when will that be? I will be at my desk in London on, ooh, crikey, the 26th of July. That is my next Sunday at my desk in London. It's going to be a busy season so you take care of yourself for a little over a month. When I see you, I will be a year older. I'm turning 55 on July 17th. Same birthday as Disneyland and Zsa Zsa Gabor. That's the reason I'm not around that weekend. I'm going to be off in a cabin in the woods with my wife for that birthday and I just can't wait. So take care of yourself. Please come and see me on the road if you're anywhere near the cities that I'm at. And yeah, I guess that's all I gotta say. I gotta go hang up my apocalyptic clown painting. Talk to you later. That was the Cory Doctorow Podcast, Licensed Creative Commons Attribution Non commercial share alike 4.0. Or as Woody Guthrie put it in another context, this song is copyrighted in the US under seal of copyright 154085 for a period of 28 years. And anyone caught singing it without our permission will be a mighty good friend of ourn cuz we don't give a dern. Publish it, write it, sing it, swing to it, yodel it. We wrote it and that's all we wanted to do. Many thanks to John Taylor Williams of Rynek Studio. That's Wry Neck for engineering and mastering. John Taylor Williams is a broadcast technology specialist, an audio engineer, and a musician. In his spare time, he likes to carve useful objects out of wood, antler, and steel.