AI and the Enshittification Era with Cory Doctorow

Summary

The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart

Episode: "AI and the Enshittification Era" with Cory Doctorow

Date: July 29, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the economic, social, and political realities of artificial intelligence with renowned science fiction author, activist, and tech critic Cory Doctorow. Jon Stewart—known for his skepticism around technology—seeks out Doctorow's perspective after reading his latest book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It's Too Late. The conversation unpacks the narratives (and hype) around AI, critiques the economic logic underpinning Big Tech, and explores the real (and surprising) threats posed by AI—not as an existential planet killer, but as an accelerant of inequality, monopolization, and worker exploitation.

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Key Topics & Insights

1. The Hype Machine: Criti-Hype & "Cyber Rasputin"

• Criti-hype: Doctorow warns against echoing the tech industry’s self-aggrandizing claims, even in critique—e.g., calling Zuckerberg a "dopamine hacking wizard" actually helps Facebook’s ad business.
  • (04:00) Cory Doctorow: “You just don’t want to do the work for them. [...] You're repeating the hype, right? You're just helping them sell it.”
• Algorithm comparisons: The notion that tech algorithms “rewire” us is overhyped; inertia and network effects ("body at rest") keep us locked in platforms—social media is more like a difficult-to-leave social arrangement than a mind-control device.
  • (07:00) Cory Doctorow shares personal and historical family stories to illustrate "collective action problems."

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2. AI Economics: Is There a Bubble—Or a Ponzi?

• AI’s inflated valuation: The sector racks up massive ongoing costs (billions on GPUs/data centers and marketing), with meager and unsustainable revenue models. Doctorow draws a stark comparison:
  • (12:00) Jon Stewart: "Congratulations, you've just invented a shitty version of a train," referencing AI-run long-haul trucking as recycled over-sold tech.
• Unit economics vs. the web: The internet became profitable as it grew; AI's operating costs scale with usage, making it less profitable as it grows.
  • (19:00) Cory Doctorow: “Every new AI customer costs the company money. The more that AI customer uses their products, the more money they lose.”
• Financial contortions: Venture-backed AI companies use accounting tricks, calling unsustainable subsidy/spending “marketing” to maintain the illusion of growth and profit.
  • (17:00) “Anthropic just said that they were profitable but not using generally accepted accounting practices, which is just awesome.”

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3. The Potemkin Village Problem & Market Irrationality

• Comparison to dotcom bubble: Stewart asks if AI is "a Potemkin village" propped up by storytelling as much as substance (18:06). Doctorow argues it’s even less sustainable than the first internet boom.
• Financial reckoning is coming: The current AI market is an elaborate three-card Monte, with tech titans like Musk and Altman unjustly propped up by pension funds and index investments through financial sleights-of-hand.
  • (24:48) Cory Doctorow: “If you did that—Elon Musk just unloaded on you. You’re his liquidity now.”
• MAG7 and systemic risk: The "Magnificent Seven" stocks dominate the market's gains, but much of that is "passing around the same $100 billion IOU really fast and pretending it's in all their bank accounts at once.” (41:00)

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4. Centaurs and Reverse Centaurs: Power Dynamics of Automation

• Centaurs: Automation empowering labor (humans using machines as force multipliers, e.g., spell-checker use).
• Reverse Centaurs: Automation as a whip, where human workers serve the needs and pacing of machines—e.g., warehouse staff forced to keep up with conveyor belts.
  • (38:10) Doctorow: “In automation theory, we call a person assisted by a machine a centaur... A reverse centaur is the horse's head on the human body; it’s the machine giving orders to the person.”
• AI’s real danger: It’s not about machines doing our jobs, but bosses replacing skilled labor with inadequate automation to justify layoffs and cut costs—even when the tech can only "pretend" to do the work.

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5. AI as a Tool of Worker Abuse & Exploitation

• The Uber-fication of Everything: AI is (already) being used to segment workers, push down wages, and exploit desperation by surveilling personal data.
  • (57:35) “If you accept a low ball offer, your next offer is lower... That’s the Uber algorithm.”
  • (58:41) “They buy credit card data... The more outstanding credit card debt you have, the lower the wage you’re offered.”
• Surveillance Pricing: Pricing and wage discrimination algorithms erode trust and fairness—nurses, drivers, and even consumers are subjected to personalized offers based on their desperation, not merit.

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6. AI’s Real Value—and Its Limits

• AI as a product is not worthless: There are real, modest uses (e.g., spell-checking Doctorow’s typos or aiding radiologists), but these don’t justify the astronomical investments or layoffs.
  • (29:10) “I have a local model on my laptop... I use it to find typos.”
• Doctorow: “Not a planet killer; a worker killer.”
• True threat: Widespread, market-wide layoffs fueled by the "promise" of cheap automation could cause huge economic and social disruption, loss of institutional knowledge, and rise in authoritarianism.

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7. Monopoly Power and Learned Helplessness

• Enshittification: The process by which platforms degrade user and business experience over time, squeezing both for profit once they're “too big to care.”
  • (44:59) “It's, you know, productization is a function of capability, not like a customer loyalty perk for giving them enough money.”
• Disempowerment is not inevitable: Antitrust laws worked before; coordinated, collective action (not consumerism) can work again.
  • (46:36) “When I say we need to break up monopolies, I’m not asking you to embalm a pharaoh or build a pyramid without power tools.”

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8. The Political and Social Stakes

• Regulatory inertia: Lawmakers have not passed a new consumer privacy law since 1988—and ignore regulatory capture or corporate abuse at their peril.
  • (72:09) “The last time Congress passed a federal consumer privacy law was in 1988. Everywhere else, privacy invasion is legal.”
• Learned helplessness and agency: AI and monopolistic tech thrive when the public accepts the narrative of inevitability; Doctorow urges collective political action, not passive “voting with your wallet.”
• Hopeful message: Reforms are possible—organize locally, join movements, demand accountability.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the AI bubble:
  • (12:49) Cory Doctorow: "Look, I write thrillers about forensic accounting, and in my considered professional opinion, to call that an accounting is to do violence to the noble accounting trip."
• On AI’s empty promise:
  • (14:14) Doctorow: "Sam Altman’s out there running the money-losingest venture in the history of the human race. His story about how it stops losing money is eventually you displace enough wages that bosses split the savings with Sam Altman and he comes out of hell."
• On platform monopolies:
  • (44:59) Cory Doctorow: "Ask a Facebook advertiser what kind of deal they're getting from Facebook. Everybody gets screwed. It doesn't matter if you're paying for the product or not."
• On agency:
  • (77:27) Cory Doctorow: "Voting with your wallet... their wallets are thicker than yours. Shopping isn't politics... It's a movement. Local politics are important."
• On labor and capital:
  • (40:48) Jon Stewart: "This AI bubble is kind of the final boss battle between capital and labor."
  • (40:52) Cory Doctorow: "Never say final. Who knows?"

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Important Timestamps

• 03:55 — Doctorow on “criti-hype”; dangers of echoing Silicon Valley’s self-serving myths.

• 10:12 — Stewart and Doctorow break down the AI “planet killer” myth; AI’s real harm isn’t existential.

• 12:00–14:00 — The "shitty version of a train" moment; AI economics numbers broken down.

• 18:06 — Stewart: Is AI a Potemkin village?

• 29:10 — Doctorow describes his practical use of AI (typo-checking, not world-changing).

• 38:10–41:00 — Centaur vs. Reverse Centaur: Who serves whom in automation?

• 57:28 — AI used to surveil and push down worker wages.

• 62:07–63:31 — Real cases: the false promises about replacing radiologists with AI.

• 72:09 — Privacy law stagnation; the importance of government policy in shaping tech.

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The Episode’s Tone

A blend of biting humor, historical perspective, frustration with institutional inertia, and defiant optimism. Stewart and Doctorow balance sharp critique with encouragement toward collective action—highlighting that none of these trends are inevitable or insurmountable.

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Final Thoughts & Takeaways

• The true danger of AI isn’t world-ending superintelligence—it’s the active effort to use technology as a cudgel against workers and consumers, speeding up the already destructive forces of monopolization, devaluation of labor, and inequality.
• The “AI revolution” as currently framed is less about innovation, more about storytelling and rent-seeking.
• Real change—regulation, antitrust enforcement, and genuine worker protections—will require bottom-up, organized activism, much as successful reforms did in past eras.
• Agency belongs with us: “Our ancestors faced greater challenges and prevailed. We’re no less capable.”

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For further action:

• Support digital rights groups like EFF (eff.org), join or organize a union, get involved in local politics—use agency against inevitability.

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[End of summary. For further context, refer to the above sections for detailed analysis and essential moments.]

Transcript

[Cory Doctorow]

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[Jon Stewart]

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the weekly show podcast. My name is Jon Stewart and and I will be your host for today's program. It's Tuesday, July 28th. We're all recovering from the bombing raid that the President United States pulled on the White House Correspondents Dinner. Not so fucking easy, is it, buddy boy? It's, you know, as a comedian, you know, when you watch somebody bombing like that, the traditional thing to say is, hey, don't quit your day job. But I think in the President's case, I think we would all make an exception. And if he would like to quit his day job and pursue full time, I think he can improve. I think he's got some timing weave didn't quite work with some of the more concise roasts, but. And once again in the battle between Caitlyn Collins and Donald Trump, Point Collins, I believe the score now somewhere around 328 to 0. Her, her sophistication, focus of class is just wiping the floor with that dude. But, but moving on from those events, I have been in a bit of a doomer spiral concerning AI and its effects on how it will be changing the way we work, the way we interact with each other and all those things. And I recently read a book that changed my perspective slightly. I don't want to get to tell you it gave me a tinge of optimism. But in fact, and it was a feeling that I'm not so comfortable with. But I thought, well, geez, let me, let me talk to this just incredibly wonderful and prolific author who, who wrote this book that I'm talking about. The book is actually called the Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI how to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It's Too Late. So let's get to it. Let's bring on in our guest for today, Corey Doctorow. Ladies and gentlemen, we are delighted and honored to have with us today maybe one of the most prolific writers that I know and, and his work is just phenomenal. You know, him from insidification. The new book is the Reverse Centaur Guide to Life after AI. Science fiction writer, activist, journalist, author, for God's sakes. Cory Doctoro, thanks for joining us.

[Cory Doctorow]

Oh, what a pleasure. Thank you very much for having me on. John. Real bucket list.

[Jon Stewart]

I'm. I'm delighted and a. Just an enormous fan of your work and your writing. Disturbed at how much of it you're able to do in how many different genres. But we're putting that aside for the moment. You need. I am an AI. I'm a doomer. I believe I am a doomer. And reading your book, you are far less pessimistic. Not just about its ability to destroy our civilization as we know it, the existential threat, but even the promise of it as a job. Destroying Cyclops that comes in and. And gathers up all of our productivity and puts us all on Elon Musk's dole. So, so let. Let's go through.

[Cory Doctorow]

Sure.

[Jon Stewart]

Talk me out of a tree, Corey.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, so I'm really indebted to this STS Society and technology studies scholar at Virginia Tech. A guy called Lee Vincel coined this very useful term, which is Crita hype. This is when you repeat the hype of the tech industry and then at the end of it, you put in brackets and that's bad. And the thing is, you're repeating the hype, right? You're just helping them sell it. So, you know, Mark Zuckerberg shows up one day and says, hey, everyone, I don't know if you know, but I'm like Cyber Rasputin. I'm a dopamine hacking wizard. Where Mester failed and MK Ultra and pickup artists and neuro linguistic programming weirdos failed. I have succeeded. I built the mind control ray out of big data. And then his critics go around and go like, Cyber Rasputin. The reason Grampy is a QAnon is cyber Rasputin made him a QAnon. It's not because, like, Grampy was always racist. And Mark and Mark Zuckerberg introduced him to a lot of other racists so they could just do racist shit all day. It's because he was brainwashed by Mark Zuckerberg. And then Mark Zuckerberg's sales guys go out and they're like, you asking me why you should spend 40% more to advertise on Facebook? Well, I don't know, but my critics will tell you my boss is an evil dopamine hacking wizard and he can sell anything to anyone, right? So this you just don't want to do the work for them.

[Jon Stewart]

Right, right. But is that any of that hype? So when you talk about that, is the algorithm not designed? Isn't it designed purely to do exactly what you're saying? He might not be the wizard, but in the same way that, you know, I've talked about this a little bit in the same way that Doritos are not food. They're ultra. They're designed in a lab to kind of get past your body's ability to, say, two bags, that's not enough at all. I need three. Aren't they doing that to us?

[Cory Doctorow]

So, yeah, I mean, this idea of hyper palatability, which is like a problem with. With highly processed food. I see where you're coming from when we talk about social media algorithms, but I think that, like, you know, this. This. This idea of Occam's razor, you know, finding the more parsimonious explanation. Yeah, sure. Like, things that are entertaining are entertaining, and you'll watch them. Right. But also, it's really hard to get the people you love to act in a coordinated fashion. You know, economists have a term for this. They call it the collective action problem. Right. You love your besties, but, like, the six people in your group chat can't agree on where to go for beers on Friday. So, you know, there's 200 of you on Facebook, and some of you are there because, like, you share a rare disease with a community there. And some of you are there because you, like, move from another country, and that's where everyone is. Some of you are there because that's how you're organizing the carpool for your kids, Little League. And some of you are there because, like, your customers, your audience are there. And Mark Zuckerberg, you know, he kind of understands that if you love your friends more than you hate him, you'll probably stick around and so he can turn the screws. And so you have this thing, it's like, why am I on Facebook all the time when I hate it? Well, because your friends are there, right? And you can say, well, my friends are there because, you know, they are also brainwashed. Or you can say, my friends are there because it's just really hard to coordinate our departure. You know, I have a personal example of this, which is that my grandmother was a Soviet refugee, and she had been a child soldier in the siege of Leningrad. So from like, 12 to 15 was, like, hauling bodies. And then she gets evacuated across the winter ice, ends up in Siberia, gets knocked up by my grandfather. They desert, they go to Azerbaijan. My dad is born and then they go all the way to Canada, you know, like all the best Americans. I'm Canadian. Right. So they go all the way to Canada. No one else leaves on Ingrad. They're all there. Because what had happened with my grandmother is she'd had like some important bond shattered, right? Like this, this bond where she was in this relationship where she was taking care of the older people, they were taking care of her and so on. The people who stayed behind, that's not what happened to them. They all stayed. And there has not been a moment since that their lives weren't worse than my branch of the family's life. And you know, now we get on these zoom calls with my Russian family and like all the men are worried about getting drafted and sent to Ukraine. It's just, just awful, right? So like, why didn't they leave? It's not because they were brainwashed by Stalin, right? They didn't leave because like they wanted to be with each other. And as much as they loved each other, you know, Sartre was an optimist. Hell is other people. You can't get anyone to do anything ever. And so you're all just stuck there.

[Jon Stewart]

So it's nothing more than a body at rest tends to stay at rest and a body in motion tends to stay in motion because it does. And I certainly can't quote studies on this, but it feels like it. If it doesn't rewire the mind, it is added in a, an accelerant into maybe some of our lesser impulses as, as link.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah, six and one half dozen of the other. I mean, we have this problem all the time because like people exist in a society, right? So like. Right, yeah, we, we go for junk food social interactions instead of the meaningful ones. But also like, you know, my mom's dad who's, you know, the oldest of 10 and dropped at a school at 13 to take care of his brothers and sisters when his dad died. By the time my mom came around and her two siblings, he was like a three 35 year old door to door insurance salesman who owned his own home. Played bowling on the weekend, also golfed, also was like in a fraternal organization, they went to picnics and they took six weeks off on one income. Right. Like, I don't know anyone who's not working like five jobs, right? So yeah, why do we squeeze in all of our social interactions around the edges? Well, maybe because like getting a whole evening free to go bowling and then like also being a member of like your local Kiwanis and whatever requires that you not be, like, stuck in the gig economy, working every hour that God sends to pay for a house that doesn't cost 20% of your income, but 60% of your income. And sure, like, all this stuff might be bad for you, it might be hyper palatable, you might be getting sucked into it. But like, let's not give Mark Zuckerberg credit that we don't know he deserves, especially when it helps him sell ads.

[Jon Stewart]

Right. In other words, don't, don't. Intentionality is not necessarily what he's doing. It may just be a byproduct of. And that if you hype them, that helps them. And that gets us to AI.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yes.

[Jon Stewart]

Which you have kind of the idea is AI is going into that same model. Is that the. The feeling that you have is we are hyping it as a planet killer, as a Death Star, and that is helping them in terms of valuation. Is that the mistake we're making?

[Jillian Spear]

Yeah.

[Jon Stewart]

By. By over blessing them?

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. I mean, there's lots of different stories that AI tells that are quite outlandish. So there are ways in which AI is a planet killer. Right. The carbon emissions are definitely not doing the planet any favors.

[Jon Stewart]

The actual planet killer. Yes.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right. But this idea that, like, oh, my God, what if we teach the word guessing program too many words and it wakes up and turns into God and makes us into paperclips. Right. Like that is, you know, it's like. It's like, what if we breathe these horses to run so fast that one of the mayors gives birth to a locomotive? Right. Like, it's just not, by the way, go.

[Jon Stewart]

Favorite sentence in the book, the Reverse Centaurs Guide to Life after AI. Oh, I have to tell you, you're talking about how they talk about AI is go. The big thing is long, long mission truckers. That.

[Cory Doctorow]

Oh, Long haul truckers.

[Jon Stewart]

Long haul truckers. That the AI is going to turn them into autonomous long haul truckers, and that's going to disrupt the, you know, the largest industry in America, which is trucking, which is apparent. And you break it down very nicely that it's not. It's really like there's only like 25,000 of them. But you say, first of all, congratulations, you've just invented a shitty version of a train.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah. A bunch of. A bunch of large vehicles following each other at a constant distance in a dedicated lane. Right. I mean, you know, great. Right, Right. That's awesome.

[Jon Stewart]

But that's one of the greatest sort of puncturing of the bubble of its importance. And is that something we need to continue to do?

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, so. So this is another one of the stories that they tell. So there's one story that they tell, and they're all interrelated. Right. But there's one story they tell. The AI is just going to keep getting better, and eventually it's going to be God, and it will either solve all of our problems or, you know, use us as fuel. Right. And then there's the other story, which is that the AI can do so many jobs that have such high wages that the fact that right now, like, the sector is making $50 billion a year, they claim it's $60 billion a year. 10 billion of that is like money that Microsoft gave to OpenAI and OpenAI gave back to Microsoft.

[Jon Stewart]

They're just passing back and forth.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jon Stewart]

Oh, beautiful.

[Cory Doctorow]

Look, I write thrillers about forensic accounting, and in my considered professional opinion, to call that an accounting is to do violence to the noble accounting trip.

[Jon Stewart]

You know, like the CPAs of America salute you, sir.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. So, like, $50 billion a year. When I wrote the book, the total capital expenditure to date was 700 billion. They've added at least another trillion since. And if you believe Gartner, they've added a trillion in the last year. And if you believe Gartner, who admittedly did say that, by now we'd all be spending six hours a day in the metaverse. If you believe Gartner, it's going to be 2.5 trillion in total by the end of the year. Right? So on $50 billion revenue, right? And they have to keep spending it because the Data centers, the GPUs, they're like, replacing them every two to five years. So, like, this is. This expenditure just recurs. It's not like you train the model and then you're like, well, we got the model now. I guess it's all set, right? It's new model, new model, new model. Right. And so you have these ongoing operational expenditures, you have these ongoing capital expenditures. And, and their answer to how do you turn $50 billion into. Of revenue into profit when you're spending a trillion dollars a year to make it like, look, if you want $50 billion revenue and you've got a trillion dollars, I can do it for you. I'll give you 100 billion back.

[Jon Stewart]

It's called just put it all in an index fund, and you should be,

[Cory Doctorow]

okay, I'll put it under the mattress and give you 100 billion back and we'll call it a day.

[Jon Stewart]

Right?

[Cory Doctorow]

Right. You know, like Sam Altman's out there running the money losing adventure in the history of the human race. And his story about how it stops losing money is eventually you displace enough wages that bosses split the savings with Sam Altman and he comes out of hell. Right.

[Jon Stewart]

Are you at work right now? Are you the boss? Are you the boss and you're listening to the podcast to taunt the other workers that you domineer over because you're a terrible boss? My point is simply this. This is an intervention. Stop being a control freak and doing everything yourself at work. You're busy, you're multitasking, you're valuable. Hire experts. Upwork makes it easy to hire freelance expert specialists to get the jobs done that maybe you don't want to do or don't have the expertise to do, but don't admit you don't have the expertise to do it or don't have the time to do or you want to focus on other parts of the business. Upwork is a one stop platform. You find, hire and pay expert freelancers across web and software development, data and analytics, marketing more. Do you want to do the marketing? Do you have time to do the marketing? Do you even know how to do the marketing? What are you going to stand on a corner and pass out flyers? No, you're a busy person. That's why you're using upwork. Then you can browse profiles, review past work, hire, get started quickly. Telling you, man, upwork takes care of all this stuff you don't feel like doing and you need experts to do. And they'll handle contracts, payments. It's free to sign up. Upwork is efficient. So visit Upwork.com TWS right now, post your job for free. It's Upwork.com TWS to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upwork.com TWS do it now. Unless you're a scared. Corey, let me ask you. So, yeah, what is that when you say it generates 50 billion in revenue, right? And then you say they've added another 10 billion, but that's really just an accounting gimmick. What is? The way that AI returns that investment. What is that 50 billion? Is it user fees, people buying subscriptions? That's all it is?

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah, it's subscriptions. Yeah, yeah. It's enterprise licenses and subscriptions.

[Jon Stewart]

What about government contracts and things like that?

[Cory Doctorow]

Government contracts? Yeah, all that stuff. It sums up to 50 billion.

[Jon Stewart]

Okay.

[Cory Doctorow]

Now there'll be new numbers and they'll whatever. And you May have noticed that Anthropic just said that they were profitable but not using generally accepted accounting practices, which is just awesome. It's like we are profitable, but. But the math is so cool that we can't even describe it to you. If you use real regular math, it's not going to look like we're profitable. We've got this new math and the same week they had this other announcement which is we had this tool Mythos, that's such a cool security tool that we can't show you how it works.

[Jon Stewart]

It's too dangerous.

[Cory Doctorow]

But it's really good. It's too dangerous. The fact that our IPO is like that we're trying to get like this IPO in shape, right? Like, nothing to do with it. We just like, just whatever. Like, don't look under the blanket. What's under the blanket's amazing. It's definitely worth buying into the IPO at like 150 at. But, but don't look under the blanket. You look under the blanket, you're going to turn into a pillar of salt and then, you know, it'll be on your head. So, you know. And also, don't ask us to explain the math by which we're profitable. And also we've been selling $100 bills for a dollar each. And like when we started down this IPO road, we were like, why don't we start charging $5 for these $100 bills? And every CEO who's been buying the $100 bills was like, I'm sorry, at $5, these $100 bills are not worth it.

[Jon Stewart]

So does this then reframe is the threat of AI not that it will turn us into paperclips or that will replace all of our high paying jobs, but that because it is a three card Monty, it will utterly shatter our economy. That it. I mean the MAG7, most of the growth in the American economy is driven by this AI promise, right? I mean we, we went through this in the Internet boom. And the Internet I think has become standardized and is a valuable part of the economy. So is this truly a Potemkin village? What are we dealing with?

[Cory Doctorow]

So let me give you some because that often comes up, right though this is like the web. The web lost money. AI lost money, right? That's like, it's, you know, that's, that's like, you know, this food is delicious. That food is delicious. Therefore they're the same food, right? Like it's the, the fact that they share this one trait doesn't make them the same thing. Right, right.

[Jon Stewart]

So they both go in your mouth.

[Cory Doctorow]

They both go in your mouth.

[Jon Stewart]

Yes. Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

There's some Monty Python bits about this.

[Jon Stewart]

I'm sure there is.

[Cory Doctorow]

A duck. It's a witch. Yeah, yeah. So. So here's the thing. The web had very good unit economics.

[Jon Stewart]

What are unit economics? What is that?

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah. So I was just going to say no one should do an economics degree because you'll end up with a neurological injury. But learning something back at economics is useful. And so learning, like what? Unit economics are super useful. Unit economics are what happens to your business when you get a new customer or make a new sale. Right? Like, how much money do you make? Like, per unit, how does your business do? Right. So in the web, like, yeah, they were losing money, but every new customer made them more profitable. Every use by a new customer made the web as a sector more profitable. And also every generation of the web is more profitable than the previous one. Compare that to AI. Every new AI customer costs the company that just acquired the money. The more that AI customer uses their products, the more money they lose. And every generation of AI has lost more money than the previous one.

[Jon Stewart]

Tease that up.

[Cory Doctorow]

So.

[Jon Stewart]

So the more. Because, you know, we talked a little bit about Zuckerberg and the evil genius, clearly the incentives on social media were an intention incentive. The more they can keep you on social media, the more money they can make because I guess the more ads they can sell and. And that type of thing is AI. The incentives are inverse to that. So the more you use their AI, how does that cost them more?

[Cory Doctorow]

Oh, well, because every time you use AI, it costs the money to run the inference. Can I. Can I sidebar here? Just a little on inference, man.

[Jon Stewart]

Any time you want, Cory. Doctor. Okay, sidebar. Okay.

[Cory Doctorow]

Because I want to mention one of the very best researchers on AI economics, which is this guy called Ed Zitron,

[Jon Stewart]

who you should have on Eddie Zitron.

[Cory Doctorow]

He's an ama. Amazing guy.

[Brittany Medevic]

Zed.

[Cory Doctorow]

He's British.

[Jon Stewart]

Zed.

[Brittany Medevic]

Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

All right, so ed, someone leaked OpenAI's finances to him, right? Their balance sheet, because it's all private, right? So he gets a look at it, and it really looks like their inference cost. So inference is like you type in, you know, draw me Sonic the Hedgehog with big boobs, right? And then it makes Sonic, that. That step is. Is the inference step.

[Jon Stewart]

Have you been reading my diary, doctor? Where did you.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, they leaked their qu. They leak your queries.

[Jon Stewart]

Oh, son of a. Yeah, so you

[Cory Doctorow]

ask that and you get the. That's the inference step, right? That's the using it part in an economic speak, that would be the operating expense of, of AI, right? So like it looks like they're, they're, they're, their OPEX is going down, which is like, okay, that's all right, right? Because if they can just do the capex once, make the model and then it's, they just start making money from the opex, then you can make money from it. Right? Just like you build a railroad and then you sweat the asset by running rail cars up and down it. But here's the thing. Their marketing budget is as big as Coca Cola's. Now Coca Cola has like three full time ad agencies, right? And ads everywhere. So where, where's the OpenAI like army of marketers? So here's AD's theory and I think he's right. What they're doing is they're saying when we sell you that a hundred dollar bill for a dollar and let you $100 worth of inference for one buck, that's not inference, that's marketing. So we're just putting it somewhere else on the balance sheet.

[Jon Stewart]

But even Corey, even if it's a, let's say it's a loss leader, let's say it's, you know, they used to do that in the mall. Sure. Somebody would stand out there with a little plate with little cheese cubes and you'd walk by and go, oh, this is delicious. We'll come into Hickory Farms and they figure you'll buy, the loss leader is take this cheese and you'll buy a hundred dollars worth of Vienna sausages or whatever else is in there. But if the money that they are spending to bring in new people, but each new person who's using it costs them more money than they're making. Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Jon Stewart]

Well, that's the shittiest business model. And I, I've never even heard of anything like that.

[Cory Doctorow]

So there's, there's two poles of finance wisdom that I turn to in these moments, right. One is this thing called Stein's Law, which, which is anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. The other, John Kenneth Galbraith. The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent bars. Yeah. So look, if you're spending more than you're making, you're eventually going to have a reckoning of some kind, Right? But when does that reckoning come? Well, you know, like if you're Elon Musk, you take your money furnace, which is called groan, and you stuff it inside your like beltway bandit rocketry company that bills uncle sucker billions of dollars for rockets that is profitable. And then you IPO it and you get a special deal from Nasdaq so that it IPOs in the NASDAQ 100 instead of having to wait a couple of quarters the way it normally would. Which means that every fund manager who's managing a NASDAQ index fund has to go out and buy SpaceX at whatever price. Right? They're like legally obliged. That's what it means to run an index fund. And you list very few shares when you go public. Instead what you do is you get another exemption again from the feds that let insiders unload without the normal lockout period. And so now you have these fund managers who need to buy SpaceX at any price, which is just a way to offload Grokx and the money furnace. They need to buy it at any price. And there's no shares available from SpaceX, which means that the Emiratis and the billionaire Silicon Valley guys who backed him when he bought Twitter for 40 billion, who backed him when he, when he built the money furnace for Grokx, now they get to be made whole by your pension fund which you stuck in an index.

[Jon Stewart]

Oh my God.

[Cory Doctorow]

Which, you know, like was just supposed to be like the thing, you know, remember Warren Buffett? Like three pieces of investing advice fits on the back of a postcard. This is what I told my wife to do with my money when I die. Just put in an index fund and forget it.

[Jon Stewart]

Right? That's right. That's right.

[Cory Doctorow]

If you did that, Elon Musk just unloaded on you. You're his liquidity now. They were supposed to also do it with the s and P500. And to their credit, not a thing I would often say about Standard and Poor's, but to their credit, S and P said no at the last minute after a lot of public pressure. And I think after a lot of. And S and P is like, it's got a lot more old money. I think there was some Millionaire on Billionaire violence there. I think there were like a lot of rich people who are like, don't do this to the S and P, do it to Nasdaq.

[Jon Stewart]

Right?

[Cory Doctorow]

You know, Nasdaq's the Bernie Madoff exchange.

[Jon Stewart]

That's a UFC fight that you've got nobody to cheer for.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Jon Stewart]

It's just, there's nowhere to go there.

[Cory Doctorow]

Let them fight.

[Jon Stewart]

This is. Corey, what you're describing is a time bomb that's going to make mortgage backed securities you know, look like a lemonade stand. Because, mean. Is that why all these guys are trying to get to Mars? Like, they figure when this thing.

[Cory Doctorow]

Oh, a sidebar. Adam Becker, astrophysicist, You should have him on someday, wrote an amazing book about this. He points out that if you detonated every nuke on Earth at the same moment as the meteor that killed the dinosaurs struck us again, Earth would still be more habitable than Mars could ever be because it would still have water, oxygen, gravity, a magnetosphere and a troposphere. Right. Like, we're not going to Mars. We should send robots to Mars. Maybe we'll send a person someday. We're not going to go live on Mars. That's nuts. You know, like that, like this is, it's, it's like.

[Jon Stewart]

So we're all investing.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Jon Stewart]

The, the whole idea of this bubble is they've sold us a future that is not actionable because the technology that they've created isn't the job killing wonder. Isn't the intelligence, the sentient creature.

[Cory Doctorow]

Sure.

[Jon Stewart]

That they're telling us and they're using it as a way to amass assets, as a, a growth story for their valuations. Is that, would, would this be a way of, of.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jon Stewart]

Refrain, Right?

[Cory Doctorow]

That's right. Yeah.

[Jon Stewart]

Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

So you, you know, like, here's the paradox of, of a growing company, right?

[Jon Stewart]

Yes.

[Cory Doctorow]

The market loves a growing company, of course. What's called the price, the price to earnings ratio, right? Like just how much your money your company is worth based on how much money it earns sure. Goes up if you're growing for, like, the obvious reason that a share is a, a claim on the future revenue of the company. Right? So like a company that's made a million dollars this year, but we think is going to make $2 million next year is worth more than a grow million dollars this year. It's going to make next year, Right. What happens when you have grown to the maximum size, Right. What happens when you're Google and you have a 90% market share? Well, suddenly you're overvalued, right? Like, where are you going to grow if you've got 90% of the market searching? With Google, you can raise a billion humans to maturity in the hopes that they become your customers. That product is called Google Classroom.

[Jon Stewart]

Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

But Google Classroom is going to take a decade to pay off. Wall street wants growth now. And so you got to have some other story. And you know, we've had, first we had these stories that were sort of plausible, right? Google's like, oh, we're going to be Facebook because we got Google and Facebook was like, oh, we're going to be YouTube because we're pivoting to video. The problem with that is like, well, Facebook has got ideas about why Google can't be Facebook and Google's got ideas about why Facebook can be YouTube. You get these arguments, right? So then it's like, oh no, we're actually going to grow into a sector that doesn't exist. And while, like, it doesn't exist, which means it's hard to know how much it's worth, who's to say it's not worth infinity since I just made it up. I'm the expert blockchain, web3 metaverse, blah blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? And, and like they're just guys running across the river on the back of an alligator without losing their legs. Right. They just got to keep going. Like as soon as your belief collapses in, you know, DOWs and NFTs, they've got to have Web3 in the shoot for you.

[Jon Stewart]

Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

And now we get to AI. And AI is different. It's different because, like, from a computer science perspective, AI is real.

[Jon Stewart]

There is a value to it. Yeah, yeah. And, and there is an actionable look. There's not a person that I know that has not availed themselves of the cogent organizational abilities of Chat, GPT or Claude or whatever they're they're getting, or even the agentic abilities.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. I have a local model on my laptop that I downloaded with Olama, which is like some software that meta released and it's just an open source model that runs locally, doesn't talk to the Internet and I use it to find typos.

[Brittany Medevic]

Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

It finds a bunch of typos that like, you know, my spell checker misses.

[Jon Stewart]

So this is going to destroy our world and you're just grammar policing. You're just going through.

[Cory Doctorow]

All right, well, look, I'm sure you've encountered this. My readers are very invested in my knowing when I've made a typo. And so if I publish a typo, I'm going to hear about it.

[Jon Stewart]

Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

And I actually have this weird thing where I don't want to get locked into the platforms because I've seen how they go. So I publish everywhere once all at once. It's called Posse, Post, own site, share everywhere. Which means that I'm just like manually turning everything into like threads on Blue sky and Mastodon and putting it on Tumblr. I still use Tumblr to medium email rss, like all of it. And then I make a typo and like I have to change it in all of those places, which is like 20 minutes work sucks, so finds typos for me. And like every spell checker I've ever used, it flags a bunch of things that aren't typos. So here's one absolute, you know, rock solid truth about AI is unless you know your subject, AI is not, is not going to be a consistent help for you in, in, in using it.

[Jon Stewart]

You already have to be versed.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I, look, I've been telling cop. I've written more than 30 books. I've been telling copy editors and publishers, lawyers that they're wrong for, you know, 25 years. Right. I, I've been telling spell checkers to go to hell for 40 years.

[Jon Stewart]

Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right now it, when I look at the suggestions that come back, like, I have, I have collaborators who are like, institutionally using Microsoft Office 365, which has all this incredibly intrusive AI suggestion stuff built in. And so we're working on a document together and I'm like, this is the worst advice I've ever seen. And if you don't know what you're doing and you take that advice, your writing's going to suck. But that's just, you know, it's true in different ways for other spell checkers.

[Jon Stewart]

And there is an uncanny valley to what is brought out by those chatbots and those other things. And when you read it, it's pretty clear. As much as it flatters you with, wow, that's a great idea that you just came up with. And then it creates it. There's definitely, as you read it, you think to yourself, there's something not quite. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right here. Whether it's soul or art or anything.

[Cory Doctorow]

And you've just reminded me of something. So this, this flattery. Earlier you talked about AI as a job killing technology. Is it or isn't it? I think it is, but not the way that the AI guys say it is.

[Jon Stewart]

Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

The AI guys say this can do your job. And getting back to criti hype, we should distinguish between this can do your job and an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with this, even though it can't do your job because your boss is a credulous dolt who is infinitely horny for replacing workers with chatbots. You know, I was out on the picket line during the writers strike.

[Jon Stewart]

Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

And I'm a member of an affiliated unit. I'm in the animators Guild in the writers unit. So I was out there carrying a sign. It was around the place, around the corner from my place in Burbank, and a writer told me something really important. He said, you give shitty notes to a writer's room the same way you prompt a chatbot, right?

[Jon Stewart]

Oh, that's so smart.

[Cory Doctorow]

Like, give me ET but it's about a dog. Put a love interest in it and like a car chase.

[Jon Stewart]

Yes.

[Cory Doctorow]

And admittedly that's just air, bud. Right? But you like, you like, you tell that to a writer's room and either explicitly or implicitly, they're going to go like, why don't you fuck off and make a spreadsheet? We're writing a movie here, right? Whereas you say it to chatbot and just shits out the script and you go off to the, you know, the steakhouse, right? And you come back and the movie's made. Now, the fact that it's like, unproducible, I think may not matter as much as we think it would when that's weighed against the ego shattering confrontation with people who know how to do things and who roll their eyes and tell you that your brilliant idea is stupid, illegal, or will kill people. Right. Or impossible.

[Jon Stewart]

Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

You know, because like, you're. You're the boss, right?

[Jillian Spear]

You.

[Cory Doctorow]

You tell yourself you're in the driver's seat, but, you know, if you don't show up for work, everything is fine. And if they don't show up for work, nothing happens. You're in the backseat with a Fisher Price steering wheel. And AI might wire that toy steering wheel directly into the drivetrain so you can be sold that technology.

[Jon Stewart]

Oh, you know, I Like to sleep because I'm old. That's a new song I've been working on. You know, I'm in a band. We. We do original songs. I have not presented this song yet to the band to see what they think of it, but I might. It's called I Like to Sleep because I'm Old. When you get older, you got to have yourself a little bit of the comfort. And that's where the avocado green mattress comes in, man. And unlike most mattress brands, they'll only sell you online. They do have stores, too. You can go into a store, you can try them out. Unbelievably comfortable Avocado mattress is designed for comfort support, helping your body stay aligned. You know, the last time my body was aligned, it's been. I think it might have been the last time the Mets won the World Series. That's how Long it's been since it's been aligned. But these mattresses. Avocado green mattress. Responsibly sourced, organic materials that are built to last. So get an Avocado Green mattress. Avocado products are made, not manufactured, and thoughtfully crafted with real materials to deliver lasting comfort and support. You can experience them in person at an avocado showroom or premier retailer near you, or shop online at avocadogreenmattress.com TWS to check out their mattress and furniture sale. It's avocadogreenmattpress.com TWS avocado green mattress.com/TWC period. And this is where your book is. Really, what you're talking about is who's zooming who.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Jon Stewart]

So are we in control of a tool or is a tool and a story and in control of us? And that's where you. You get into your story of. Of Centaurs. So, yeah, how do you become It's Master Blaster. Are you the little guy sitting on top of the big guy or are you the big guy and the little guy sitting on top of you?

[Cory Doctorow]

Or are you Tina Turner and just.

[Jon Stewart]

Or are you Tina Turner?

[Cory Doctorow]

Best fit you've ever seen.

[Jon Stewart]

You look so good. God damn in thunder.

[Cory Doctorow]

God damn.

[Jon Stewart]

Yeah, but like, who are we, Master

[Cory Doctorow]

or are we Blaster or Mel Lastman hunting the last Jew across the wasteland?

[Jon Stewart]

Yes.

[Cory Doctorow]

What are we Not Mel Lastman. Mel God. Mel Gibson. Lastman was the terrible mayor of Toronto. He wasn't an anti Semite, as far as I know, he was Jewish.

[Jon Stewart]

Mel Lastman was the mayor of Toronto. Was there an era before the Fords? I thought the Fords had always run Toronto.

[Cory Doctorow]

Oh, yeah, no, no, yeah, he was. He. He walked so Rob Ford could run.

[Jon Stewart]

Oh, beautiful somebody.

[Cory Doctorow]

He was a buffoon. Yeah, he was a. And he also. He had a secret family. It was awesome. Small plug here. No gods, no mares. A podcast about buffoonish mares. My favorite podcast in the world right now.

[Jon Stewart]

God, that's hilarious.

[Cory Doctorow]

Oh my God, it's so good. Okay, so, yeah, so Centaurs, Reverse Centaurs. It won't surprise you to know that this isn't the first time that labor and automation came into conflict. So there is a literature, right, we know, like, how this works. And, and broadly, when labor drives automation, it's in service to quality. And when capital drives automation, it's in service to throughput, to quantity. Right? And, and that's because, like, if you buy a subscription, you want to get maximum value out of it or if you acquire an asset and it's depreciating, you want to use it before it depreciates off the books.

[Jon Stewart]

Right?

[Cory Doctorow]

Right. So this is why, especially when you have a. A market dominated by, like, cartels and monopolies and duopolies, automation often makes things worse, but more plentiful, because you remember Lily Tomlin doing the phone operator in San Diego?

[Jon Stewart]

One ringy dingy, two ringy dingy.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company. Right. When there's, when you're the only game in town, you can make things worse. And if you can make them cheaper and worse. Well, Right, So in automation theory, we call a person assisted by a machine a centaur. And the analogy here is you've got the human head, it's got all the judgment, it's got the discernment, it's got the, the intellect. And it is on the body of a horse. And the horse is strong, it's tireless, it's dexterous, it's fast, and the horse takes orders from the person. Master Blaster. So when you're riding a bicycle, you're kind of a centaur. You even look like a centaur. But, like, when you're using a spell checker, you're a centaur too, Or a calculator. Right. A reverse centaur is the reverse. It is the horse's head on the human body. It's the machine giving orders to the person. And so that is because there's a part of the job the machine can't do. So think here of like Lucy and Ethel at the end of the conveyor belt, right?

[Jon Stewart]

Putting the chocolates in the chocolate box.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right. The conveyor belt can do everything except get the chocolates in the box. Why is the conveyor belt running so fast? Because if you automate the, the chocolate factory, you're not going to run the conveyor belt more slowly than the workers at the end of it. You're going to run it at the limit of their speed and endurance.

[Jon Stewart]

Right. This is why productivity, I believe they call it.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is why Amazon warehouses are the most automated warehouses the human race has ever seen and have triple the injury rate of other warehouses in the sector. That's not a coincidence. It is the consequence. Right. When you spend seven figures to automate a warehouse, you're not going to run it slower than you need to. And so, you know, if you're a human and you're the peripheral for the machine. Right. Doing the, the part of the job at the perime perimeter that the machine can't do. And you're working at the absolute limit of your endurance, and you're working at the absolute limit of your dexterity and the absolute limit of your strength over long periods. You will eventually make a mistake. And in a warehouse, you get impaled on a forklift when that happens. Right? And so that's the difference between a centaur and a verse centaur. As you mentioned at the start of this. I'm a science fiction novelist. And, you know, good science fiction is not about what gadgets do. It's about who the gadget does it for and who the gadget does it to. It's about the social arrangements of our technology. Because while objects do have politics, those politics are still contingent on the society that they're based on and the way they come into being. And if you finance an AI bubble by raising a trillion dollars a year on the promise of firing workers, a lot of workers are going to get fired, even if the AI can't do the job. And when you run out of money and those chatbots get shut off, you end up with this circumstance. We take people who do a job that needs doing, we replace them with chatbots that do that job badly, and then the chatbots go away. You can't find those workers again. Right. They've retired, they've become discouraged, they've retrained, they've exited the workforce. All the process knowledge they had about, like, how things work and where things are stashed, that's gone forever. It's vaporized, incinerated. And then you spend generations rebuilding it. Right. This is asbestos in the walls of the technological civilization. And that's not because it's AI. It's because the. The force of the AI bubble is fire workers and replace them with automation.

[Jon Stewart]

Because that's the. The dream. The dream is this is. And I've heard them say it, not to us, but to each other, which is, you know, AI is a way for people who run companies to get more productivity without the tax of labor. They refer to labor. So it. It almost feels like this AI bubble is kind of the. The final boss battle between capital and labor.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. Never say final.

[Jon Stewart]

Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

Who knows?

[Jon Stewart]

The second to last battle.

[Cory Doctorow]

What's the Albert Einstein quote? I don't know what World War III will be fought with, but World War four will be fought with sticks and stones.

[Jon Stewart]

Sticks and stones, yes. Yes.

[Cory Doctorow]

So maybe that's the final battle.

[Jon Stewart]

Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

But you know, you mentioned the magnificent seven, right? 35% of the S&P 500 is seven companies. Six of them are losing money on AI and the seventh one is the one they're losing the money to. They're all passing around the same hundred billion dollar IOU really fast and pretending it's in all of their bank accounts at once. Right. Someday. Because anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. Someday they will implode. And look, look, you know, we don't have to greet environmental calamity with austerity. Even like Trump during the pandemic, like figured out that stimulus is what you do when the private sector is no longer employing people.

[Jon Stewart]

John Maynard Keynes, baby. Everybody forgets about John Maynard Keynes. Bring him home.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah. So we don't have to do that. But if we fall into the pattern we've done for the last 25 years, our response to vaporizing a third of the economy is going to be more austerity. And like again, like the. The jury is no longer out on this. When you do austerity, you make people into fascists. There was, there was just a study. I live in the UK now. My wife quit her job in Hollywood and I followed here her to London to work at the BBC. And, and, and there was just a study here about what happens to your voting when your doctor's office closes. Because remember the. We have socialized medicine here with the NHS and they've been doing austerity for 15 years.

[Jon Stewart]

How are you not all dead? I don't understand. We've been told that if that happens, everyone is dead.

[Cory Doctorow]

Well, I gotta go see the death panel later. I'll let you know how it works.

[Jon Stewart]

Thank you. I'd love to know what they decide.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah. So when your NHS doctor's office, what's called the surgery, that's what they call a doctor's office when you're. When your primary care physician surgery shuts down in the next election, you vote for the fascist party. Right? You just become a sucker for people who show up and say undeserving others are the reason you don't have what you need. Not everyone falls for that.

[Jon Stewart]

Good thing that could never happen here in America.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, right. So this is what I'm afraid of. I'm not afraid that AI is going to turn us into paperclips. I'm afraid. I'm not afraid that AI can do your job. I am afraid that you might get fired and replaced with AI that can do your job. And I like the job you do. And I like the job lots of people do. And I, I don't want them fired. I like benefiting from their careful and conscientious labor. And I'm worried that the economy is going to collapse.

[Jon Stewart]

Right. So the real threat is the economic disruption. I'll give you. You know, this takes me back to sort of a more analog time of the world before all this. But I remember aol, AOL came out and it was this revolutionary community. And you could go on and there were message boards and there were little group. It was sort of a mini Facebook and Twitter and it was almost all these different. Before the social media companies specialized.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Jon Stewart]

And it looked monopolistic and it looked inevitable. And their market cap, in the same way that we're talking now, soared and it was the future. And they bought Time Warner. They were. AOL came in and went where the future. You know, there's this other company, sort of a sustainable analog growth company. Yeah. They make money every year, tons of it. We're gonna absorb them. And then the bottom fell out. Now there was enough around it to absorb some of that damage. And we went through a recession during that time. Are we in a position now where we can't even absorb. You know, there's too big to fail and then there's too big to recover from.

[Cory Doctorow]

Well, look, people have dug themselves out of bigger holes. Right. And I always say this when we talk about monopolies more broadly because, you know, in shidification, you mentioned this other book I wrote. Yes, it's really a story about monopolies. It's a story about what Lena Khan calls too big to care and the

[Jon Stewart]

cycle of how these, how companies bring you in and then abuse you.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. And the businesses that they bring in, because you're stuck there. So, you know, people say if you're not paying for the product or the product, ask a Facebook advertiser what kind of deal they're getting from Facebook. Right. Everybody gets screwed. It doesn't matter if you're paying for the product or not. It's, it's, you know, productization is a function of capability, not like a customer loyalty perk for giving them enough money. Right. So, you know, I often talk to people about monopolization, as you'd expect, and people get very discouraged. They're like, well, what hope do we have of breaking up these giant monopolies? And I'm like, guys, you know the, the anti monopoly laws that we stopped enforcing 45 years ago, they weren't passed because it seemed like a good idea in case a monopoly emerges in the future. Right. They were passed because people were being crushed by rapacious monopolists. And we figured out how to shatter their power. And we didn't have the Internet we could use to coordinate ourselves. They. They were running different scams in different countries. So enforcers didn't really have any common cause. You know, if you ate a John D. Rockefeller in Germany, it was because he was screwing up your ports. If you hated him in Pennsylvania, it's because he was screwing up your refineries. Even if US Enforcers and German enforcers were like firing a zeppelin across the ocean every day full of files, they. It's not like they had the same case. Google, Google does the same thing in every country.

[Jon Stewart]

Right? But even back then, when they would do that, at least they would build you a fucking park. Like at least those guys.

[Cory Doctorow]

Oh, no, that came later. That came later. You need. Yeah, no, no, that was when they started to clean up that, that was when they, that's when they got worried about guillotines on their lawns.

[Jon Stewart]

Yeah, they.

[Cory Doctorow]

They weren't building parks. They were, they were. They were hiring Pinkertons to beat your brains.

[Jon Stewart]

Right?

[Cory Doctorow]

So here's the thing, here's the point I'm making though, is like, what these people did is not the lost art of a stolen. Of a fallen civilization, right? When I say we need to break up monopolies, I'm not asking you to figure out how to embalm a pharaoh or like build a pyramid without power tools, right? There are people alive today who learned their trust busting from the people who broke up Rockefeller's empire, right? Like, this is like, they did it. We can do it. They weren't smarter than us.

[Jon Stewart]

We did it with Ma Bell. We did it. And guess what? People still use phones. And the other thing that drives me nuts, and you brought it up earlier, which is the thing you worry about in all this, is in the inevitable hollowing out of this, what that does to a society that's going to move towards authoritarianism. You know, and we're living through another Red scare moment. But they always. The biggest threat to this country is communism or socialism, and my view is the biggest threat to this country is the inability to positively reform the kind of capitalism we practice now, which will lead to the kind of social unrest that allows demagogues and authoritarians to take over. That's the real issue.

[Cory Doctorow]

I mean, UNFDR and Henry Ford all agree, right? Like, you know, the only thing the

[Jon Stewart]

three of us agree on. Yeah, yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

Henry Ford does not agree about Jews in any Way, let's make that Henry Ford.

[Jon Stewart]

Not a big fan of me being allowed to speak like this.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, but, but no, I mean, look, there's been lots of people who recognize this, right. That like, you know, to put this in economics terms, there is an equilibrium between the cost of stopping people from building guillotines on your lawn by hiring chuds and like, you know, body armor and the cost of like building hospitals and roads so that no one wants to build a guillotine on your lawn.

[Jon Stewart]

That's right, right. Of a social safety net. That makes sense. Yeah. Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

And you know, since the Snowden days, one of the questions I've asked myself, because I, I, I should say I should have said this before. I work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. You just talked to my old boss, Cindy Cohen about her.

[Jon Stewart]

That death. Cindy Con. She's fantastic. Yeah, A fantastic woman.

[Cory Doctorow]

Amazing. I've been there 25 years. Not as long as Cindy, but, but I've been there for 25 years. And so I've worked on all these issues and like back to object permanence, right? Like I saw the policies that we made that led to this happening. And I know that when those policies were coming in, we said, hey, this is going to happen. And then it happened. And like I just, one of the things I'm on a mission to do is to make people understand this isn't the weather. It's not the great forces of history, it's not the iron laws of economics. And it's just these who did things that they were warned would up and did it. And then like if, if we call it the weather, right, Then we don't know how to fix it. Like what do you, Everybody complains about the weather. No one does anything about it. If you actually know that there's some space lasers out there. Thank you, Marjorie Taylor Green. Then you can get to the guys with the space lasers, right? So these guys, they, they, they did this to us, right? They stopped enforcing anti monopoly law. They allowed a string of mergers. And you know, when Google bought Ways, Tim Wu tells the story. It's great. When Google bought Ways, Tim Wu was at the Federal Trade Commission. He's like, why are we letting the company that owns Google Maps buy the Maps company? Everyone started to use and they said, oh well, we figured that Google Maps is how you know where you are and Waze is how you find out how to get there. Like the stupidest thing I've ever heard.

[Jon Stewart]

Waze is how you find out that there might be a car abandoned on the side of the route, like, what the hell, Right? But so how are they falling for this or are they enabling this? Corey. Because there's a distinction between are they being fooled or are they enabling the scam? Right, I understand if, if the rubes, I'll fall for it. I'll download the chat GPT and go, blah, blah, blah. But how is it that the experts, the investors, the economists, the banks, how the fuck did they not understand this?

[Cory Doctorow]

Well, let's start with the toppler, right? Let's start with the capital allocators, the billionaires, right? So to be a billionaire, I think, like a lot of them are basically solipsists. You know, you can't really think other people are real if you inflict the kind of pain that you have to inflict.

[Jon Stewart]

We're all NPCs in their. In their game.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. This is what Elon Musk Sundays. Everyone's an NPC, right? So, you know, and they are surrounded by sycophants and so they're already living like the AI future where no one's real and everyone tells you you're great and just glazes you in all day, right? So those people, I think they're like, kind of primed to believe we can replace humans with chatbots. But there's also, I think, a cohort of cynics. So like, imagine, you know, think about like all the. The kind of vast panoply of chuds we've met thanks to Trump Land, right? Some of those guys.

[Jon Stewart]

By the way, like, vast panoply of chuds is not the name of your next book. I really. I don't know what we're doing here.

[Cory Doctorow]

It'll be a chat. The. I just started to work on the next book. It's a novel. It's called Once's Enemy Action. And, you know, it's a James Bond quote. James Bond reference, Right. Anyway, that might be a chapter. So this vast panoply of chuds and we. Some of these guys are like rfk, right? They really believe, like, there is no peptide that guy hasn't met that he won't like, stick under his eyelids like Jimi Hendrix doing acid. Right?

[Jon Stewart]

But vaccines are the problem. It's. Except peptides are safe. They haven't tested. Nobody knows what they do. But put as many of them as you can into your body.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, but there's a ton more who are like, I don't know if this shit works, but Andrew Tate can sell it, right? Joe Rogan can sell it. I don't have to Believe it works to do it. You don't have to believe that putting a jade egg in your vagina is good for you to believe that Gwyneth Paltrow can sell a lot of vagina rocks.

[Jon Stewart]

Right, right, right.

[Cory Doctorow]

So I think at the top you've got these two groups, right? And they're kind of a, kind of a toxic mix, right? Because like the true believers and the cynics, where one says, well, maybe that's not the right thing, that's where the other group is actually like in their sweet spot. And so there's a bit of acceleration there. And then I just think that like, to ask like, how can the banks put this money into. Is to, is to invite the question, where were you in 2007?

[Jon Stewart]

Oh, right, but that's, that's my point is, are learning curves for losers? Like, are we ever going to understand that the inflating these kinds of bubbles with the sorts of futurist utopian nonsense is going to come back and create giant craters this time?

[Cory Doctorow]

It's different, supposedly. It's, it's always different. You know, and like, I just think that we have really fallen prey to this story about the efficient market, despite all of the times that the market has been inefficient and, and grossly inefficient

[Jon Stewart]

or the fact that we've manipulated it to, you know, the other story we tell ourselves is there is a free market.

[Cory Doctorow]

Sure.

[Jon Stewart]

And that somehow the government hasn't been picking winners and losers forever and that the free money that they give to corporations in terms of subsidies and not taxing capital in the same way that labor is taxed is somehow not them making a choice. There is no free.

[Cory Doctorow]

Sure. And you know, like, look, I, I, I think there's like two ways of thinking about regulatory capture. If you ask the Chicago school people, right. They'll. Regulatory capture is as soon as you have a business that's going to try and capture the state, therefore you can't have a state. Right.

[Jon Stewart]

Which is just like, that's the libertarian.

[Cory Doctorow]

We have to get rid of the regulators.

[Jon Stewart]

That's, you know, all the Hayek and everybody else, you know, as long as the government's not involved in anything, they can't be corrupt. Okay, sure.

[Cory Doctorow]

But I always tell my friends, like, you know, the libertarians. I know, like, even if you're so like musk addled that you can't even open your copy of Atlas Shrug because the pages are all stuck together and you think the only reason we, we should have a government is to like enforce contracts you still want. You still want the people who are like, making the contracts to be held to account by the person who's enforcing the contract. They have to be more powerful, the referee has to be more powerful than the players in the field. Right. Which means that the largest government or the smallest government you can have is determined by the largest corporation you're willing to tolerate.

[Jon Stewart]

Right?

[Cory Doctorow]

So the decision 40 years ago to allow runaway mergers, right. This kind of orgy of consolidation, right? And like now we have these cartels that are so inbred, they have corporate Habsburg jaws, right. And they just like, they can't do anything. They're completely unintelligible. Right. And, and like, you know, this, this decision has produced the circumstances for regulatory capture. Right. So, like, people, like all. A lot of the bad stuff that we worry about with AI, I should say, is actually just worrying about privacy, Right. Same with algorithms. Right. It's just about privacy.

[Jon Stewart]

Well, they're. They're Data Hoovers and they're, they're bringing it up.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Jon Stewart]

And it is. And you, by the way, you do make the point in the book that I think the way that it's generally utilized is not efficiency, it's surveillance state. It's basically, your boss can now learn a lot more about you are now very much an NPC in a game that they are moving around on and they're watching you. And what they're using the technology for is, is not what they've promised it for everybody else, which is doing these great jobs. It's finding ways to make sure that you are more controlled by your bosses.

[Cory Doctorow]

Well, and let me ground that in like something material and not like mind control race. Right. So one thing that like, AI is genuinely good at and it's actually quite exciting, is multivariant statistical analysis.

[Jon Stewart]

Oh, nothing more exciting than that.

[Cory Doctorow]

It is if you're like, if you want to do cancer research, it is if you want to do like a, you know, find out about, like, what's going to happen with Rising Seas, right. You're just, you've got like a whole bunch of variables crunching numbers and you're trying to like, make statistical analyses of them. So one of the things that, that you can do with AI is surveillance pricing and algorithmic wage discrimination. So surveillance pricing. Your rabbi on this is a woman called Lindsay Owens, has got a book coming out. She's the best gouged. She's amazing. And then algorithm wage discrimination, it's. Vena Dubal is a lawyer and a scholar, has written about this and they're both the same thing. It's, it's a, it's when you use an algorithm to segment an audience based on behavioral surveillance data. Right. I, I, I've seen what you do. I followed you around and your use of a service. And then you start running experiments on the segments to see what the highest price they'll accept or the lowest wage they'll accept. So on the wage side, this started with Uber, where drivers who accepted lowball offers. And remember, when you're an Uber driver, you have 20 seconds to decide whether the offer is good or bad, right? So you're like looking at the mileage, you're looking at the time you're driving in Traffic, you have 20 seconds to go, yes or no, right? So if you accept a low ball offer, your next offer is lower and it keeps pushing you down. Right? Now if you're picky, it's higher. And then if you start taking the low ball offers, they sneak into there, they push it down again. So whatever it is, that's your side hustle that lets you be picky, eventually you lose it.

[Jon Stewart]

Wait, that's, that's the Uber algorithm doing that to its own drivers?

[Cory Doctorow]

To drivers? Yes.

[Jon Stewart]

Why?

[Cory Doctorow]

To push their wages down. That's how, that's how Uber got profitable, right? For 13 years, they lost $31 billion of the Saudi royal family's money, 41 cents on every dollar they brought in they pissed away. They eventually, like put all the other cab companies out of business, induced a lost decade in transit investment became the only game in town, started screwing the drivers and started raising prices on riders. And they decoupled riders from drivers. You remember it used to be if you got surge priced for the ride you were paying for, they got surge paid for the ride they delivered. Now it's totally decoupled.

[Jon Stewart]

That's decoupled.

[Cory Doctorow]

It's like, it's bizarro world Marxism.

[Jon Stewart]

It's in shidification. It goes back to the other book. It's, it's that inification that is inification.

[Cory Doctorow]

So I'm going to make you really angry here. Groundwork, Groundwork Collaborative and the Roosevelt Institute. So Groundwork Collaborative is Lindsay Owens outfit and the, and the Roosevelt Institute publish a report on nurses. So it used to be contract nurses were hired through like a local body

[Jon Stewart]

shop, a staffing agency, the travel nurses and people like that. Yeah, yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

Now it's four, four national apps that compete with each other. They all call themselves Uber for Nursing. So maybe you can see where this is going.

[Jon Stewart]

Oh, boy.

[Cory Doctorow]

They buy credit card data from data brokers. And the more outstanding credit card debt you have, the lower the wage you're offered. Oh, because my desperation premium, Right, So. So AI super good at this, right?

[Jon Stewart]

The company that you're working for looks to see your level of desperation, right? So that they can lowball you.

[Cory Doctorow]

And, and so, John, like me, you have heard of Tennessee Ernie Ford. You know that there are cold bosses who would have done this shit if they could have, right? But they weren't going to be able to hire the army of Pinkertons to follow every coal miner around and figure out who's in the most debt and then get the boiler room full of guys in green eyeshades to mark up the ledgers and change their wages 10 times a minute, right? This is the thing you need AI for. This is what automation gets you on the wage side. And the same thing is happening on the price side where again, like it used to be, demographers would do this kind of cute Mad Men style thing where they'd be like, well, we got the little old ladies who own seven cats who live in Sheboygan, and we've got this and that. They would go do focus groups. AI just naively buckets people into groups based on behavioral data and then automatically runs experiments to see the highest price they will accept. Got a Sam's Cafe pizza. Order up. You know the best part about this spicy Italian sausage? I voted for this topping. Yeah, just another perk of being a member. Come join us, Sam's Club.

[Jon Stewart]

Okay, so hear this out then.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Jon Stewart]

You know, we've been talking a little bit about like, what is then the value of AI? What does it do? Why is. Why would it fulfill this promise of investment that is being made? You're almost making the case that AI is a kind of metaverse globalization tool. You know, one of the things that globalization did is it allowed companies to become much more profitable. Yeah. Because it allowed them to kind of

[Cory Doctorow]

search shift the wage bill.

[Jon Stewart]

Right. Look for the worst conditions, look for the. Look for the most desperate people.

[Cory Doctorow]

Look for who you can exploit the lowest tax rate.

[Jon Stewart]

Exactly.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Jon Stewart]

And so in some ways, you. You're making the case for AI's value. You're diffusing the bubble. But the effect of it is ab. To diffuse the bubble, you have to abuse the worker.

[Cory Doctorow]

Sure. I mean, that's the promise. But, but back to like Crita Hype. So now let's talk about the values here. So the, like, not the, not the human values, the costs. Right.

[Jon Stewart]

The dollar figures yes, yes, yes.

[Cory Doctorow]

So pauperize all the cab drivers in the country. Do it again to all the nurses. Do it to all the poor commercial illustrators who are already the poorest people I know. Right. Poorest church mice. And you do not touch the sides of the operating expenditure bills of the AI companies. Right. You have to come for like very high waged workers. And those are the areas where I think we're going to notice it, although I don't think they won't try. So look, I have an extremely treatable form of cancer. I don't want to alarm you and I see oncologists, radiologists and so on and so I've been following the stories about radiologists and AI.

[Jon Stewart]

Sure. Well that's the, that's the one they always say like you won't even need radiologists anymore.

[Cory Doctorow]

Those, you know, some solid mass tumors, you can, you, you probably, the AI can spot some that the human misses. Right. I think that's fine. So I, I've been getting my treatment at the Kaiser Hospital in la. Despite it being private medicine, I have no complaints. They took really good care of me. Four weeks ago a radiologist told me I'm cancer free.

[Jon Stewart]

So congratulations, young man.

[Cory Doctorow]

Very happy about it. Yeah, yeah, it's cool.

[Jon Stewart]

I'm looking forward to your next 50 books.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah, there you go. So if right now you know the Kaiser Hospital on Sunset in la, I don't know if you know it next to the big Church of Scientology because that's how we roll in la. Right. So if right now there was like a, a salesman for Sophie, Sam Altman deeking out some Scientologist who wanted to give him a personality test, going up to talk to the CEO of, of Kaiser and say, look, here's my pitch to you. You've got 10 radiologists on the strength they cost you 300 grand each. That's $3 million a year in wages. You give me another million dollars on top of that and I'm going to sell you an algorithm and it's just going to sit behind them a couple of days times a day it's going to tap them on the shoulder and say, take another look at that one. And sometimes you're going to, you're going to save a life doing that. It's going to cost you an extra million dollars. Plus you probably like they're going to go from 100x rays a day to 98. So you might have to hire another part time radiologist as a cancer survivor. It's fine with me. I think that's great.

[Jon Stewart]

Yes, sir.

[Cory Doctorow]

No one has invested in AI on the thought that someday it would make the things that people do more expensive

[Jon Stewart]

or need more labor.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right. So the sales call right now is salesman rushes past the Scientologist trying to give him the personality test, up to the CEO's office and says, you got 10 radiologists on the strength they cost you $3 million a year. You fire nine of them, you save $2.7 million a year. You give 1.35 of that to my boss, Sam Altman, you. You keep the other half of it for yourself. That one radiologist, he marks the AI's homework. If someone dies because he's doing this at a speed that no human could pay sustained attention to, he is what Dan Davies calls the accountability sink. And we blame him for the person who dies. And, you know, I tell this to radiologists, and they're like, okay, but we have labor power. They do. They're in short supply right now. When we use AI, it's on our own terms. But the point of AI is to take away your labor power.

[Jon Stewart]

Yes.

[Brittany Medevic]

Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

It's to find ways to erode your wages and segment you. Yes.

[Jon Stewart]

No, it's that globalization. It's that same. It's another frontier. It's the vast expanse of the ocean or space that they haven't explored yet. It's. It's taking what they've tried to do in the real world and laying it into the virtual world in that same exploitative manner. But I'll tell you a story. This goes to the flip side of it because. And I talked to Daron Acemoglu, who you may know, who's the economist from mit.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, I've been on a panel with him at the American association for the Advancement of Science.

[Jon Stewart]

Wonderful guy.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Jon Stewart]

Really, really smart. You know, his concern is always when AI begins to marry robotics and. And how that will, you know, come together. But I'll tell you a story. I happen to be a fan of what I like to call the Crunchwrap Supreme. Every now and again, I'll go with a Nachos Belgrani. It's if you're vegetarian, it's a great place to get whatever diarrhea epidemics say otherwise, damned be damned. I still go in, but I drove into my. I have my local, and they know me. And I hit. When I hit my order, they know me. I drive up one day and I hear this, hello, may I take your order? And I'm like, they're never this happy. It's AI. Yeah, they've replaced the person at the takeout drive thru with AI. My order is no beef, but can you put in the refried beans? Well, that blew AI's mind and to the point where like then the person in the thing had to come on go like, hey man, what do you need? I'll get it for you. I pull up. So now all I do is I talk to the AI and then I pull up to the drive in window and just talk with the person who's at the register about the AI bot.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right.

[Jon Stewart]

And we talk a little bit and we share anecdotes. The point being people hate it. I hate it. Yeah, people hate it. It hasn't saved them any labor. And by the way, if you think replacing the guy making your crunch wrap supreme with a robot will be cheaper, you've never tried to service an ice machine. Like machines are wickedly more expensive than human beings who will work when they're sick and break down and you don't have to do. You're not on the hook for any of it. So they think they're getting the high level people, they can't even get the, the lower income.

[Cory Doctorow]

Totally. And going back to the 90s, right. Going back to the late 90s, early 2000s, the doom era. You go, you pull out like the Harvard Business Review. You pull out like the, the business press of the day, Wall Street Journal full of these op eds wringing their hands and going, what are the CEOs going to do when all these young workers who insist on using the web show up in the workplace? You go pull those same periodicals off the shelf today. And they're like, CEOs are firing workers because they're refusing to use AI. Wow. Right. And saying if you don't use AI, we're going to fire you. Right. So I think back to like automation driven by labor as in service of quality, automation driven by capital as a service to throughput. And when capital has monopoly or cartel, they can lower quality. Right. That this is. We don't care, we don't have to. We're the Burrito company is what you're going through at your local drive thru.

[Jon Stewart]

Right. So Corey, how do you. So you say, you know, you said something earlier that I think really struck me, which is it is no mystery how to defuse this bomb. There really isn't, you know, it's, it's. But it's the kind of thing the last 40 or 50 years, economically we have valued capital to the expense of labor. Sure. And it is that IMBALANCE that has driven, I think, a lot of the turbulence in our political scene, in our social scene, in all of those things. Rebalancing that is not revolutionary. No, it's incremental. It's. What if we just taxed capital gains at the same level as salary gains? If you work and earn $100,000, should. Shouldn't that be taxed the same way? If you bought an investment and it just threw off $100,000, why is that different?

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah, look, it's. It. There's a joke from eastern Canada that the punch. The punch.

[Jon Stewart]

And people in Winnipeg won't know what the hell you're talking about.

[Cory Doctorow]

No, I'm talking about Newfoundland. All right, but the problem is, if you say there's a joke from Newfoundland, people think you're going to tell a new fee joke, which is like an Irish joke. It's not a newfie joke. It's a joke told by people from Newfoundland. There's a joke from Newfoundland whose punchline is, if you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here. Right. And look, you know, when America had more unionized workers, when it had more fair electoral districts, when it had, you know, people who had more disposable time because they had a better split with capital in terms of the disposition of the surplus generated by their labor. Right. It would have been easier to do this. But again, like, we are starting from a place that's still better from the place our forebears started from, back when, you know, the labor movement was starting in America. You know, Donald Trump thinks that you get rid of the National Labor Relations Board and you end labor activism. He's like the Grinch that stole Christmas. He thinks that you steal the tinsel and Christmas goes away. Right. Like, the reason you have tinsel is the Christmas is in the hearts of the who's down in Whoville. The reason we have the labor law is because workers struck and formed unions when they were wildly illegal. They risked beatings and murder and lynchings. They created so much pain for capital, the capital sued for the labor peace. And Donald Trump's big mistake here is he thinks that when you fire the referee, the game ends. And we all know when you fire the referee, all bets are off.

[Jon Stewart]

There's no rules.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right. For a guy who claims to be a wrestling guy, he seems to, like, not really understand this.

[Jon Stewart]

Well, that's because he's all hat, no cattle. I mean, Donald Trump is, as they say, he's all trailer, no movie.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Jon Stewart]

Like, and that's why we find ourselves in these situations. His attention span does not allow him. He's the announcement guy. It's Liberation Day. Yeah, I'm going to destroy Iran. And then when things don't come to pass. But it's been two weeks, he's like, okay, what's my next episode of the Apprentice?

[Cory Doctorow]

Right.

[Jon Stewart]

He just wants to move on to that, that next level. But what, what strikes me more here, and I don't know if you have an insight into this or what your feelings are, is that it's less about Donald Trump's inability to understand it and more about the opposition party's inability to harness this energy in a manner that is accessible and reachable for voters thirsty for this kind of rebalancing.

[Cory Doctorow]

So, look, I have, on this call, I have mentioned my affiliation with EFF, and we're a 501C3, so I can't endorse a party. But what I can say is that the people who oppose Donald Trump's agenda in both parties have completely failed to speak to the things that people need and that people want and to. And to show them that there is the possibility of an alternative. So one of the things I've been trying to work into this conversation here is how we ended up in this situation, just in respect to privacy, Right? So, like, you have these companies, they, you know, they're screwing nurses, they're like, funding, you know, fueling data theft and identity theft and so on. When I testified at the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau in the last couple of days of the. Of the Biden admin, when they were banning data brokers, which Trump unbanned. And the speaker before me was speaker from the American association of Retired People who wanted the committee to know that the ad broker industry would sell you ad targeting to people with dementia. And then the person after me was from the Pentagon who wanted them to know that you can buy, as an ad targeting group, military personnel on base who have gambling problems.

[Jon Stewart]

Oh, Jesus Christ.

[Cory Doctorow]

So, like this. So how do we end up in this horrible place with privacy? Well, here it is. The last time Congress passed a federal consumer privacy law was in 1988. And that was a law that makes it illegal for video store clerks to disclose your VHS rental history. Right. And every other form of privacy invasion is legal in America. Right. They spy on you because they can. Right.

[Jon Stewart]

Because that's where the. And because that's where the money is. We talked about it earlier.

[Cory Doctorow]

Oh, but the money's there because they can.

[Jon Stewart]

Yes.

[Cory Doctorow]

If every time you spied on someone, you Face. Look, if visa could 10% of the time just keep the money and not give it to the merchant and they were the only game in town. They would.

[Jon Stewart]

That's right.

[Cory Doctorow]

Just like, you know, your dog licks its balls because it can. And no one makes. No one makes them stop. Right.

[Jon Stewart]

Like

[Cory Doctorow]

so, but, but you know, like, like it's, it's, it's. It takes an act of will to not connect the fact that we don't have a new privacy law to the harms of surveillance. Right, Right. In the same way that like, we're like, how do we get all these monopolies? Well, we had These economists who 40 years ago told us monopolies were efficient and told us to not enforce anti monopoly law. Now we have monopolies and they're like, what do you mean it's my fault?

[Jon Stewart]

Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

I did tell you not to put down the rat poison. And rats are eating your face off. But like, it. It's the time of the rat, dude.

[Jon Stewart]

But I think because they're extorting our economy, what they're doing is they're saying, if you take this away from us.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Jon Stewart]

It implodes. And suddenly your economy is hollow. They. They've extorted us. And as far as the difference in privacy, Look. Daniel Ellsberg reveals that the Vietnam war is a lie. And he's hailed. He's attacked by Nixon, but he's hailed as a hero. And. And the tide turns against the Vietnam War. We go. Edward Snowden does the same thing about the NSA having a mass surveillance program. And what do we do? We go, oh, I'm sorry, you got to get the out of here. Like, we've changed.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Jon Stewart]

In our relationship to that in a huge way. And to the. Not to the better, for sure.

[Cory Doctorow]

But no one wants to be spot. Even so, even if there's some apathy, no one wants to be spotted. You remember Apple turned on a little tick box in iOS, the operating system for phones and tablets.

[Jon Stewart]

That's right.

[Cory Doctorow]

You ticked it. And Facebook can spy on you. 96% of iOS users tick that box. And you'd assume, like the other 4% were either drunk or Facebook employees. Or drunk Facebook employees, which makes sense. If I worked at Facebook, I would be drunk all the time. But, but you know, like, no one wants this. Right. And, and, and here's the kicker. The same time Apple did this, they turned on surveillance and iOS to power their own ad brokerage with no tick box to opt out of it. And when they got caught doing it, they lied about it. Right? So, wow. You know, like, people don't want surveillance. No one, no one goes into the cell phone store and says, now, which of these phones is going to spawn me the most? Right. They might be indifferent to it. Right. But no one is out there going, I. I love being spied on. And when they, you know, get ripped off at the grocery store or, you know, they. They get racially discriminated against in hiring or, you know, they. Or in lending or someone makes deep fake porn of them, these are all downstream of, like, no new privacy law since 1988. Right. These are all the same thing. Right. They're just different. They're like different epiphenomena of the same root cause, which is we let them spy on us and we don't punish them. And so it's profitable to do it. It doesn't have to be profitable to do it. Right. Like, that's fine from spying on you could be more than the benefit.

[Jon Stewart]

And that brings us around to, you know, the conversation. And I thank you so much for your time, and it's been so interesting. Inevitability. You know, one of the things you talk about a lot is this is not inevitable. And we are Centaurs, and we have agency. We are master, not blaster. But that has to be exercised. And it's exercised not just through democratic power, but through legislative power and through people power. You know? Yeah, these are the types of things that there is not. There's a learned helplessness that goes along with systems that seem too complex and too large to have any impact. It's not a true story. And the story that, that you've written in this new book, Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life after AI, is a story of agency. And I really appreciate it, and. Well, thank you. You, Cory. Doctor.

[Cory Doctorow]

Oh, well, John, this has been an absolute delight. I feel like I've known you for a million years because I have this parasocial relationship with you.

[Jon Stewart]

I'm not that interesting, unfortunately. It's sit around feeding chipmunks.

[Cory Doctorow]

You have really given me some of the real hope in the dark on many's the day. And I really appreciate what you do, and it has been just an honor and a pleasure to be on. And I will say to people who are feeling discouraged, look, they keep telling you to vote with your wallet. And the reason they want you to vote with your wallet is their wallets are thicker than yours. You know, shopping isn't politics, right? Like a boycott, like Montgomery bus boycott, was not people waking up for 380 consecutive days and going, ah, I guess I'm walking to work today.

[Jon Stewart]

Yeah, right.

[Cory Doctorow]

It was a movement. It's not agonizing in the grocery aisle about whether to buy this product or that product or whether you use Twitter or Blue Sky. It's a movement. And if all you do is try and change politics with shopping and nothing happens, you're going to look over at your friends who shop differently from you. You're going to go like, oh, that's your fault. And the people you need to be in community with and in solidarity with there, you're going to end up being angry at them. Join a local group, local politics. Like we never thought local politics were important. There's one thing Moms for Liberty taught us, it's that the stupidest people you know, hell yeah. Can join the most unimportant, unregarded local offices. Make huge material differences to people's lives.

[Jon Stewart]

That's right.

[Cory Doctorow]

Local politics are like, do you get a data center? Is there a flock camera? Did chuds round up your neighbors and shoot them in the face? Right Y and and get involved in national politics and get involved with civil society groups. So eff.org the group I've worked for for 25 years, great group, the best and most important digital rights group in the country, but also the whole, I won't say panoply again, the whole basket.

[Jon Stewart]

Non chuds get involved with the non chud aspects, the panoply of non chuds

[Cory Doctorow]

and join your union or organize a union. And that's how we get shut of it. And if you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here. But you know, our ancestors in the not so distant past faced challenges worse than the ones we're going through now. They did it. They weren't smarter or better than us. We can do it too.

[Jon Stewart]

Cory Doctorow, words of wisdom, words of encouragement and thank you so much and thanks for being here. Cory.

[Cory Doctorow]

Dr.

[Jon Stewart]

In shadification the Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life after all and and a million other books that are all wonderful. Thank you for being with us.

[Cory Doctorow]

Thank you, John. I really appreciate it. At Cox, your Internet and mobile price won't change for five years. That's five new year celebrations, five Valentine's days, five Fourth of July's, five Halloweens, five Thanksgivings and five summers that go by too fast. Through it all, your price stays the same with our five year price lock guarantee. Cox a step ahead requires two gig

[Jon Stewart]

speeds and gig unlimited mobile taxes and

[Cory Doctorow]

fees excluded from price lock mobile data speeds reduced after 20 gigs.

[Jon Stewart]

I love a dude whose mind works faster than I can even. Like, it's one of those guys. His mind is working, and I feel a little bit like, am I in low oxygen? Why isn't my. Why can't my brain do that?

[Brittany Medevic]

Yeah, that was. He was running ahead of everybody on that one, for sure.

[Jon Stewart]

Right.

[Brittany Medevic]

Yes.

[Jon Stewart]

He was going. He was leading the peloton, and we were all like, let's catch that guy in the yellow jacket. Let's get up there, the yellow jersey, and go through. But I also love that. And this is not, obviously, for his fiction, but in his nonfiction, he really does write like he thinks.

[Jillian Spear]

Yes.

[Brittany Medevic]

Yeah. He writes like he talks, too.

[Jillian Spear]

He's.

[Brittany Medevic]

I mean, he's a great writer. Yeah.

[Jon Stewart]

And he's able to trend. You know, not everybody is able to connect to that force as easily and as naturally, and he seems to be able to do that in a really prolific way.

[Brittany Medevic]

I know. It's what makes him so enjoyable to read.

[Jon Stewart]

Yeah.

[Brittany Medevic]

Maybe that comes from his blogging experience or. And that's maybe why he's so prolific, too. But. But it's very conversational, but in a way where it's like, you know, the smartest conversation somebody could just be having.

[Jon Stewart]

Conversational and constructed, but also quotable in a. I mean, honestly, vast panoply of chuds. Come on.

[Brittany Medevic]

That was off the top of the Dome.

[Jon Stewart]

Come on. You can't just throw that in there and walk away like it's nothing. And interesting in it. I think changed my view of what the realities and what the dangers are of it, and in some ways made me more hopeful. Like, I left the conversation feeling like, oh, no systemic agency could have real efficacy on. This is not inevitable.

[Brittany Medevic]

Yes. And it feels like the solutions to our problems are solutions we're aware of. You know, they're things that we are familiar with, but we've been avoiding regardless. It's like the way we've been talking about protecting labor against AI is UBI and, like, creating dividends from these companies, but it's really just stronger labor protections. And it's something that we know is possible, but we just haven't been doing it.

[Jon Stewart]

Well, that's. Yeah, it's possible. And it was done with Pinkerton boys.

[Brittany Medevic]

Yes.

[Jon Stewart]

With bully sticks beating the shit out of people in the streets. And it. And it can be done again. But I also thought, you know, cognizant of how that ball has been dropped by opposition parties and how. And it's been difficult to articulate it. And then you can See, like, oh, that's why the DSA stuff is gaining such agency, because it's a language people are thirsty to hear.

[Jillian Spear]

Absolutely.

[Brittany Medevic]

I know. I was thinking that during the conversation. I was like, there was a lot of class consciousness in the book. And like, if they were mad at us about communism last week, oh boy, just imagine.

[Jon Stewart]

Yes, they were. All the right wing blogs went crazy. Look at, look at Stuart nodding his head.

[Jillian Spear]

How dare he?

[Jon Stewart]

Like Lennon did with, with Marx. Ridiculousness. Brittany, what, what are the. What do the kids want to know?

[Jillian Spear]

John?

[Jon Stewart]

Yes.

[Jillian Spear]

There's 107 days until the midterms. Dems still don't have any plan.

[Jon Stewart]

107.

[Brittany Medevic]

Why does that, why does that number sound so familiar?

[Jon Stewart]

Oh, 107.

[Jillian Spear]

107 days.

[Jon Stewart]

Wait, am I missing something here?

[Brittany Medevic]

There was a book title of a book, I think.

[Jon Stewart]

Oh, shit. Was it was her book 107.

[Jillian Spear]

Yeah.

[Jon Stewart]

107 days. Oh, for fuck's sake. First of all, the listeners of this program are far more in tuned and, and brilliant. Then I get every. And they, they bring a question like that so perfectly framed, and I completely whiff on the significant of it. So apologies to the, the people who frame that so beautifully. I, I think they don't have leadership. And from what I understand from the New York Times, they also have no money. I mean, the DNC being slightly different. Like, but when you're, you know, when you're in a position for a wave election and the article that comes out is the guy in charge of the logistics of it is throwing phones at people and is broke, you're just like that isn't that. That feels like the story of, like how I ended up like on skid row. Like, how this feels like such a strange.

[Brittany Medevic]

Doesn't feel great. Doesn't feel great.

[Jon Stewart]

The Democrats feel like, you know, we have a great opportunity here and then they just go around the meeting asking for ideas of how to fuck it

[Jillian Spear]

up and then throw funds.

[Brittany Medevic]

There are no bad ideas. There are no bad ideas.

[Jon Stewart]

There are only bad ideas. No good ideas. I don't want to hear how we could save this thing. I want to. I want to understand how we could snatch defeat from clearly the jaws of victory. And the problem with it is it seems so easily rectifiable, but it is when, when you don't know the difference between Chuck Schumer and Mamdani and you don't know how to square that circle and you don't have anybody who can unify that message. Yeah, like how the. They haven't come up with their own Contract for America or some. Even if it's a gimmick to centralize the general complaints of a public thirsty for some actionable ideas and leadership is malpractice bordering on criminal.

[Jillian Spear]

But the infighting has been astonishing. Like, my Twitter feed of just people still, like, so completely mad at mom Donnie. Like, even Dems responding to last week's

[Jon Stewart]

episode, like, what are they mad at? What. What are the Democrats mad? And also, why is he engendering anger? Like, what? Other than like, yeah, he's on the third rail of Israel, Palestine, but, like, talking to him, how did that not diffuse when he's like, you know, so what you do is you take the budget and you Defer it to 32 instead of 26. And then what we do is we fix the puddles. Like, there was nothing in there that was in any way, like a call of revolution or it was, let's run this city with top of mind. The people who help us run this city, meaning the essential workers in the middle class.

[Jillian Spear]

Yeah, Yeah. I think it's this weird thing that people just want to be right, and they want to be the person or group to, like, crack the code for the plan forward without putting any actual plan forward. Right. So, like, there. There's people just trying to have a following, essentially, that I'm seeing versus actually putting sustainable, followable things forward.

[Jon Stewart]

So it's almost like they're re. The caricature that they're reacting to is incentivized by the social media that they're reacting to it on. And it just creates this wild cycle of a battle royale over a straw man and a caricature that. That didn't really exist in the first place. Jillian is positing this. I want to get her thought. There's something spinning in the mind.

[Brittany Medevic]

I mean, I was thinking about what Britney said. It's almost like there hasn't been a need for a ton of introspection because Donald Trump has been so terrible and so unpopular that we haven't had to, like, really have a reckoning with why our policies are also very unpopular. And there's a lot of people who are entrenched in these positions, and they, you know, central to their livelihood, central to their relevance, central to their healthcare. They're having a staff that, you know, waits on them at the ripe age of, like, 85 or whatever, is maintaining the status quo. So these things really are a threat to them in their, you know, position,

[Jon Stewart]

and they haven't had to face that reckoning. They haven't had to look in the mirror because the car crash in front of them is so distracting that there hasn't had to be that. I think that's definitely right. And by the way, the infighting is necessary and should have. It should be out fighting.

[Jillian Spear]

Yeah.

[Jon Stewart]

We should be watching it so that there is a robust discussion about what the direction is is. And within that discussion, leadership of that party should emerge.

[Brittany Medevic]

Yeah, that's all this was happening, you know, with Biden where everyone was so mad that people were drawing attention to what we could all see with our eyes. It's like we all have to get on the same page, you know?

[Jillian Spear]

Yeah, that's right.

[Jon Stewart]

Fuck that.

[Brittany Medevic]

There's a time and a place for the same page.

[Jon Stewart]

You know what you want to do? You want to have a battle of ideas and let steel temper or iron, you know, sharpen iron and you make your ideas better. And that's the free market of ideas.

[Brittany Medevic]

Especially in fucking primaries. People are so mad in certain primaries that you have people coming from different points of view.

[Jon Stewart]

Wild.

[Brittany Medevic]

Like we're supposed to have an ideological pure primary.

[Jon Stewart]

That's right.

[Jillian Spear]

Yep.

[Jon Stewart]

We have to have same running against same. Otherwise you just like.

[Brittany Medevic]

Well, no, you have same with. With blonde hair, you have same with brown hair. You have same old and same young, you know.

[Jon Stewart]

Right. Yeah, it's. It's nonsense, dude. But hopefully it's. It's moving us in a better direction. I'm. I'm not even going to dive that deep into this because I. I'm on a. Optimism high. Yeah, I'm on an optimism high.

[Jillian Spear]

Love that for you, Britney.

[Jon Stewart]

What else we got? What I'm thinking about the panoply of non chuds.

[Jillian Spear]

Yeah, go ahead, John. Why do you think Gutfield didn't get a cabinet position?

[Jon Stewart]

Because he has one. Fox News is. Is part of the administration that, that is t. Yeah, it's. It's the department of marketing. It's there. It's the department of communications. It's. It's an adjunct to the administration. So that is when you work there, you are in the administ. You. You are in a cabinet position or you're in a cabinet position when they're, you know, out of power, working in the opposition, but they are part of the framework that works hand in hand. And you. And the re. The way you notice they all talked. I mean, they all have his phone number. They all have all that. Like, the interesting thing about us is everybody always accused us of like, you know, working with the Democratic Party or working with them like we never talk to those people, and if we do, those conversations were generally pretty aggressive and not so pleasant. What you're being accused of is always the thing that they're themselves doing. And so they're already part of the. The party apparatus and a valuable one, by the way. And. And well. And they do it well.

[Jillian Spear]

Execution. Yeah.

[Jon Stewart]

Yeah. I mean, when you can do it from a couch.

[Brittany Medevic]

I know in New York City, too. Like, you don't have to go down to D.C. right?

[Jon Stewart]

And you don't have to sit in those meetings where you have to laugh at his shitty jokes.

[Brittany Medevic]

Oh, my God.

[Jon Stewart]

We showed that last night. We showed, like, the reason why he bombed so bad is he's used to work in bringer rooms. When you're a young comic, you have to do these bringer shows where, like, you have to bring your friends and, like, you get to do standup, and they're all like, oh, my God. And then when you go out into the real world of stand up and the first performance, and you're like, oh, yeah, hey, what's going on here? That's what happens. He's not. But he's. He's working rooms where the bar for comedy is. Is that a joke, boss?

[Jillian Spear]

Yeah, I'm dying to know a. Who wrote the speech? Like, did they bring in roast writer?

[Brittany Medevic]

Like, he's dying to know who wrote it, too.

[Jon Stewart]

Can I say something, though, in defense of the writers of Donald Trump's. So they had very serviceable premises. Oh, we're going to do another UFC fight Night. Here are the battles. Chris Christie against cake, AOC against foreign policy. You know, those jokes, I will guarantee you were written professionally and concisely. And he went in and. And trumped them up.

[Brittany Medevic]

He weaved. He did the.

[Jon Stewart]

He weaved. He went in and he went, Chris Christie, the worst. He's the worst. Sloppy Chris Christie. And immediately you're like, wait, what are we talking about? He is the one. And then he would go, who wrote this? They did. Well, who it up?

[Jillian Spear]

The performer.

[Jon Stewart]

That's right. Old bumbles McGee on stage, weaving around and talking about all kinds of other shit until nobody even had any idea. He went. He introduced the premise and went four and a half minutes before getting back to the payoff on the premise and then complained that the joke wasn't written. Right.

[Brittany Medevic]

Yeah.

[Jon Stewart]

Wow.

[Cory Doctorow]

Wow.

[Jillian Spear]

Never him.

[Brittany Medevic]

It was a tough watch.

[Jon Stewart]

Oh, it's beautiful watch.

[Jillian Spear]

Satisfying. I actually think.

[Jon Stewart]

Yeah, for a comic. No one is ever happier than a comic watching another comic eat on stage.

[Brittany Medevic]

I couldn't handle it if I was in that room. I would have been laughing because of how uncomfortable I was. I would have been like, I'll give him the laugh.

[Jon Stewart]

That's how we all like. I love watching people bomb, especially when they love the bomb. Like there is. When you're a comic, you have to love the bomb. The bomb is like. It's like a snow day. It's. It doesn't happen all that often, but it's so fun. And you get to do. You wouldn't normally get to do. And you can always tell when somebody's really bombing and other comics are there because no one's laughing. Except for three weirdos in the back who are doing this.

[Cory Doctorow]

Ah, that's.

[Jon Stewart]

That's how you knew. The writers for Trump's roast were not actually in the room because it was quiet.

[Jillian Spear]

They were up from home.

[Jon Stewart]

They were in the room. They have been back there going,

[Cory Doctorow]

oh, I love watching you eat it.

[Jillian Spear]

Oh, my God. Okay, last one. John, in your opinion, who is more pathetic, Punch or Jimothy?

[Jon Stewart]

Oh, Punch. I. I don't even think that's controversial. Is that a cont. Jimothy has been. Look it. Punch is not pathetic. Let's. Let's. Punch is a. A beautiful soul searching for love and by the way, has been more accepted now, has learned to temper whatever. Whatever Punch was pulling. Look, the. The. The. The wisdom of the tribe. We cannot replace our wisdom, for the wisdom of the tribe. And the wisdom of the tribe shaped Punch's behavior to such an extent that the tribe. All right, the hazing period is over. You are no longer a pledge. Welcome, brother. Now you can. You can lose the stuffed animal for comfort and you can wife it. Now you can join in with us and just use it for whatever purposes you find. Yeah, Jimothy. Sorry, I'm gonna. Jimothy is an angel on earth who is. Is Tiny Tim, who was respected and embraced by his family, by the community at large. They recognized the brilliance of a raccoon that could also be an ottoman. Like, you're not quite sure what Jimothy is. Is that a piece of furniture with a raccoon head or is that what. What are we dealing with this hybrid? But there was something special about Jimothy. Was Jimothy born in a manger? I'm not going to go that far.

[Brittany Medevic]

A Jimothy born in Bethlehem.

[Jon Stewart]

Was he visited by three wise chipmunks who brought him. I'm just saying there was a recognition from the get go that Jimothy had to be nurtured and adored and and respected. And this is not to diminish. Punch, who has, to his credit, found his way back from whatever. From whatever the. He was pulling before abandonment. That's ended. Settle down, Settle down.

[Jillian Spear]

The things that we talk about on this podcast.

[Jon Stewart]

All I'm saying is the only. There. There needn't be a cure for Jimothy, because Jimothy is the cure.

[Jillian Spear]

That's perfect.

[Jon Stewart]

I've actually written a song about it, and it goes a little something like this. Brought from the angels. Yeah. The only problem we have with Jimothy is obviously rhyming his name in the rap songs and odes that should praise him to the hosannas. That's really the only problem that we have. It's been harder for him to embed himself in popular culture. Punch is easy.

[Brittany Medevic]

I bet he's doing it in spite of that. You know, that's why he's such an inspiration.

[Jon Stewart]

Jillian, thank you. That's. You're. You're exactly right. He's. He's everything.

[Brittany Medevic]

This is how religions start.

[Jillian Spear]

Yep.

[Jon Stewart]

As they should. This is how they should start. Well, that's all. That's. That's all we have. That's all the time, Brittany. How can they keep. How can. You know, people are just going to stop asking questions. They're just going to go, I didn't. What am I doing? I'm in my car. I'm going to work. I don't need to listen to this nonsense.

[Jillian Spear]

They can ask us at Twitter. We are weekly showpod. Instagram threads. TikTok Talk, Blue Sky. We are weekly show podcast. You can, like, subscribe and comment on our YouTube channel. The weekly show with Jon Stewart.

[Jon Stewart]

Ah, perfect episode for a lovely late July morning. Producer Brittany Medevic, Producer Jillian Spear. Video editor and engineer Rob Vitolo. Audio editor and engineer Nicole Boyce. And our executive producers, Chris McShane and Katie Gray. Once again, thank you guys very much. Very enjoyable. We'll talk to you next week. The weekly show with Jon Stewart is a Comedy Central podcast. It's produced by Paramount Audio and Busboy Productions.

[Cory Doctorow]

Best thing that's ever happened to you, financially. Go easy. Sold my car on Carvana.

[Jon Stewart]

Unbelievable.

[Cory Doctorow]

Amazing offer, really. I hit 200 on a scratcher. Did the scratcher come to your house and hand you a jack?

[Jon Stewart]

No.

[Cory Doctorow]

How many scratchers did you hit to get that?

[Jon Stewart]

I hit a button on Carvana.com once. Okay, that's fair.

[Cory Doctorow]

It's like the lottery, except you always win. Not like the lottery at all, actually. Exactly. Inexplicably good offers worth bragging about. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up these may apply Paramount Podcasts.