Cory Doctorow: You Bought it, They Break It

Summary

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What Now? with Trevor Noah

Episode: Cory Doctorow: You Bought it, They Break It

Release Date: July 9, 2026
Guest: Cory Doctorow, author and technology critic
Host: Trevor Noah
Additional voices: Eugene

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Episode Overview

In this thought-provoking episode, Trevor Noah welcomes tech writer and activist Cory Doctorow for an in-depth conversation about how modern products—from apps to cars to ebooks—are being deliberately made less functional for users. Doctorow unpacks the concept of “enshittification” (the intentional degradation of products and services), explores the hidden policies enabling corporate power, and dispels myths around regulation, choice, and consumer helplessness. The discussion is lively, high-spirited, and sprinkled with memorable metaphors, anecdotes, and Doctorow’s trademark sharp wit.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Origin of ‘Enshittification’ and Societal Frustration

• Enshittification Defined: The intentional process by which products and platforms get worse for users and better for the corporations through design, policy, and legal mechanisms (06:27).

  • Notable Quote:
    Trevor Noah: “Everything that we are getting and experiencing is becoming more and more... We feel like the amount of food that we get for the money we pay is becoming...We feel like our cars and the value that you get...Everything in your life.” (07:19)

• Why It's Not Just Perception: Cory explains that these aren’t individual hallucinations or nostalgia, but outcomes of deliberate policy and corporate behavior—like reducing repairability or inflating prices (09:02).

2. How Law Enables Consumer Lock-In and Corporate Control

• The DMCA and Right to Repair: Doctorow details how Section 1201 of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act made it a felony to circumvent software restrictions, giving companies the power to make repairs illegal—affecting everything from cars to ventilators (10:36, 15:02).

  • Notable Quote:
    Cory Doctorow: “J. J. Freeman calls it felony contempt of business model. Basically they just created a path where any firm could take any conduct it didn’t like and make it a literal crime.” (11:00)
  • Real-world Example: During COVID lockdowns, hospital technicians couldn’t fix life-saving ventilators because of parts pairing restrictions. A Polish technician risked a felony sending unlocking devices to hospitals (13:41).

• Global Reach of U.S. Tech Policy: Such laws are exported globally through trade agreements, affecting nations like South Africa and the EU (13:07, 32:16).

3. Monopoly, Competition, and Consumer Powerlessness

• Killing Local Economies: With legal lock-in and vertical integration, not only are products worse, but small repair shops, resellers, and local economies are choked off (17:31).

  • Trevor Noah: “Every single small business around it dies.” (17:48)

• From Ownership to Licensing: The idea of truly owning a product has evaporated; now, buying a game or an ebook often just means licensing it until the seller changes the terms (21:03).

  • Notable Quote:
    Cory Doctorow: “In the book, I call this the Darth Vader MBA, Right? As in, ‘I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.’” — on how companies can arbitrarily change terms after you’ve bought something (22:05)

• Why Competition Matters: Without real competition, prices and quality aren’t kept in check. Trevor likens it to corner stores/bodegas in South Africa, and their decline as large chains took over (30:14).

4. Policies Drive Product Degradation—Not ‘Inevitable Progress’

• Exposing Corporate Decisions: Recent antitrust lawsuits revealed internal memos showing that companies like Google deliberately made search worse to increase ad revenue (26:24).

  • Notable Quote:
    Cory Doctorow: “He says we can grow search revenue by making search worse. So you have to search more than once...” (27:12)

• The Feedback Loop: When regulation is weak and monopoly tolerated, the “worst idea” often wins internally because there’s no discipline from competitors or the state (29:30).

5. Consumer Choice vs. Collective Action

• The Myth of ‘Voting with Your Wallet’: Boycotts and consumer choices are insufficient when institutional forces and policies dictate markets—real change needs collective, political action, not just individual purchases (65:00).

• Why We Need Referees (Regulators): Trevor analogizes effective regulation to UFC referees—ensuring fair play benefits even the strongest market actors in the long run (46:50).

6. Hope: The Push for Antitrust and Reform

• Signs of Change: Recent years have seen a surprising upsurge in antitrust enforcement worldwide—in the US (under both Trump and Biden), Europe, Asia, and more. Even “business-friendly” leaders (like Justin Trudeau) passed muscular pro-competition laws (37:00).

• Coalitions Forming for Reform: Doctorow outlines a rare coalition: national security hawks (who dislike foreign dependency on US tech monopolies), entrepreneurs (wanting opportunity), and digital rights activists—all seeking an open, user-empowering Internet (107:35).

• Hope Versus Optimism: Doctorow distinguishes between passive optimism and “hope”—a commitment to collective action, even if victory isn’t assured (108:48).

  • Notable Quote:
    Cory Doctorow: “Hope is the belief that if you materially improve your circumstances, you can ascend a gradient towards a world you want to live in…” (109:18)

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Memorable Moments & Quotes

• Cory’s Elon Musk Anecdote:
  Cory Doctorow: “…that is when he called me a scourge on humanity.” (01:25, 67:30)

• On DRM and Product Downgrades:
  Cory Doctorow: “You can't advise people to buy this…if that can be changed with no remedy on your part, no recourse and no way to predict it.” (23:04)

• On Monopoly Board Game as Metaphor for Monopoly Power:
  Trevor Noah: “I don’t know a single person who has finished a game of Monopoly. And I also do not know a single person who has enjoyed the ending of that game…” (96:42)

• On Changing the System:
  Cory Doctorow: “Join a union. Form a union. Get involved in local politics…that’s still not totally unshitified and it still is responsive to people.” (110:35)

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Topical Segments & Timestamps

• Elon Musk and the Utopian Myth: 00:04–01:37, 66:12–69:57
• Inshittification Takes Over: 05:44–09:02
• Legal Roots of Product Lock-In: 10:36–18:26
• Consequences for Repairs, Ventilators, Agriculture: 13:07–18:26, 81:45–83:46
• Ownership vs. Licensing (Digital Goods): 21:03–23:32
• Corporate Memos Revealed (e.g., Google Search): 25:21–29:30
• Monopoly Kills Competition, Drives Up Prices: 29:30–32:31
• Fair Use and Global Policy Incoherence: 32:31–35:43
• Antitrust: History, Trump, Biden, EU, Global Efforts: 36:00–38:14
• Apple’s Payment Tax & Repair Lockouts: 38:14–41:35, 44:31–45:34
• Structural Analogies for Market Regulation: 46:50–51:14
• Food, Agriculture, Seeds, and Monopoly: 58:09–62:15, 81:45–83:46
• Consumer Helplessness vs. Organized Boycotts: 64:26–66:12
• Monopoly: The Board Game and Real Life: 96:31–100:11
• Pathways to Change, Forming Coalitions: 100:11–110:51
• Rapid-Fire 'How is X Enshittified?': 112:58–119:31

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Practical Takeaways & Doctorow’s Advice

• Organize for Policy Change: Individual consumer choice is powerless against monopoly; organize collectively—join unions, advocacy groups, and especially local politics (110:35).
• Demand Regulatory Oversight: Small government requires small corporations; only competitive markets are efficiently regulated (51:14).
• Scrutinize Ownership Claims: If you bought it, you should own it; beware fine print that erases your rights (84:13).
• Hope Through Incremental Struggle: While optimism is passive, hope means acting even in the face of uncertainty, moving systems step by step in a better direction (108:48).

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Notable and Memorable Doctorowisms

• “Self-licking ice cream cone” (Repeated throughout—the system exists to perpetuate itself)
• “Felony contempt of business model” (11:00)
• “The Darth Vader MBA: ‘I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.’” (22:05)
• “Billionaire on Millionaire violence” (115:35)

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Final Message

Doctorow’s Core Prescription:
Join collective efforts—whether unions, local political campaigns, or advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)—because only collective, organized action can curb corporate overreach and restore user rights in a world of persistent “enshittification.”

Hope, not fatalism, is the path forward.

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This summary skips ads, intros, and production credits to focus on podcast content.

Transcript

[Trevor Noah]

Is this why Elon Musk called you a scourge on humanity?

[Cory Doctorow]

He did call me a scourge on humanity, but it was because I told him that I thought it was a different thing.

[Guest/Interviewer]

He.

[Cory Doctorow]

He was like, so I'm a. My other life, I'm a science fiction novelist, and I write when I'm anxious. I wrote like nine books during lockdown. So I write books for all ages. I have a new middle grades book coming out next year. I mean, everything. Pictures, picture books, tech criticism, everything. And he was singing the praises of a writer who I knew a little, but quite very much admired. A guy called Ian Banks, who died very tragically of cancer, who was a utopian socialist. And he was like, I consider myself a utopian socialist in the model of Iain AM Banks. And I was like, no offense, but I knew Ian. He was an ardent trade unionist, and you're a union buster. And he's like, well, in Ian Banks's novels, I didn't see any unions. And I'm like, yes, these novels are set 100,000 years in the future in which there are galactic brain artificial intelligences piloting spaceships the size of planets with 100 billion people living on them. The fact that he didn't see a need for unions there tells you nothing about whether he thinks we need a union here. And he was like, well, if Ian Banks could have seen one of my Tesla factories, he would have seen that we don't need unions either. And I said, again, no offense, I think there is a difference between traveling faster than the speed of light and eking out marginal gains in the production of electric vehicles.

[Guest/Interviewer]

Damn.

[Cory Doctorow]

And that is when he called me a splurge on humanity.

[Trevor Noah]

Damn.

[Cory Doctorow]

But I wanted to pop the stack. Cause this started with talking about he

[Trevor Noah]

got blocky after that.

[Eugene]

Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, he did.

[Trevor Noah]

I'm always fascinated by that side of Elon, the blocking butt.

[Cory Doctorow]

He's like, he's a baby.

[Trevor Noah]

He is the number one champion of free speech and jokes and opinions and all this until he doesn't have a rebuttal for you. And then he's like, block, you racist. Go away.

[Eugene]

Block.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right, Gone.

[Trevor Noah]

This is what now with Trevor Noah. We're coming to you from a boot room sponsored by Febreze, which, if you know anything about soccer, is usually the last place you'd want to hang out. Because this is where all the gear lives. The cleats, the jerseys, the socks, the bags. Everything that probably never sees a washing machine until it's too late. But right now, it actually smells fresh in Here. That's because Febreze fabric is built for exactly this kind of odor. The stuff trapped in fabrics that you can't just throw in the wash. It doesn't just cover it up. It actually fights the odor. And I have to say, this is one of the more confident sponsorships I've ever seen. Usually brands want to put their names on the nicest room in the building. The VIP lounge, the luxury suites, the hospitality area. Fabrize looked at the boot room and said, no, no, no, put us in there. And honestly, I respect that. Because this room contains decades of bad decisions. Wet cleats, forgotten gym bags, socks that should have retired years ago. The kind of smells that don't just enter a room. They sign a long term lease. And yet somehow it smells fresh. Yeah. Can you smell that, Joe?

[Cory Doctorow]

Smell what?

[Trevor Noah]

Exactly. That's what is so impressive about this. Because a lot of the things in here are exactly the things that you can't throw in the wash. None of it. The cleats, the bag, the car seat after practice. That's the whole point. Febreze fabric is for the things the game touches that the washing machine can't. And it's made with no dyes, no formaldehydes, and uses a 100% natural nitrogen propellant. If your soccer gear is starting to smell like its own locker room, it's time for Febreze fabric. It doesn't just mask the odors, it fights them. Ah, fine. Febreze fabric at Walmart. This message is a paid partnership with Apple Card. Imagine this. You're at a checkout counter. You're ready to pay when you realize you don't have your wallet. Dun, dun, dun. You could drive all the way back home and you could get it. But you remember that you have your Apple card on your iPhone so you can tap to pay with Apple Pay. Imagine that. No need to carry a wallet. But, you know, one of the things I do like about having my card on my phone is we live in a world where you lose your card and then you don't know where it is. And then you're like, what do I do? Well, if your phone is connected to your card and your card is connected to your phone, you know what's going on. The best thing about having the Apple card connected to your phone is, you know what every transaction is. You know, like, sometimes you're like, what did I spend this month? The Apple card will show you one month. I had spent an obscene amount of money ordering videos online.

[Eugene]

Just videos.

[Trevor Noah]

They were just videos.

[Eugene]

What kind of videos?

[Trevor Noah]

That's not the point. The point is, I knew that I didn't want to order those videos anymore because I'd spent too much money on was videos on how to not spend money online.

[Cory Doctorow]

I felt like I'd been duped.

[Trevor Noah]

Point is, Apple showed me what I was spending my money on, and I was able to change my spending habits. And you can do it, too. I earn up to 3% daily cash back on every purchase with my Apple card. That's unlimited daily cash back no matter where I shop. Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app on your iPhone subject to credit approval. Apple card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch terms and [e-mail]. Corey, I'm glad you've come and joined us on the podcast. It's mutual, but not for the reason you may think. I see I have beef with you.

[Cory Doctorow]

Oh, no, what have I done?

[Trevor Noah]

I'm pretty certain that I came up with the term shitification.

[Cory Doctorow]

Oh, dear.

[Trevor Noah]

And then all of a sudden, in like, 2022, I saw people saying, n shitification, you see, which I think is more grammatically correct. I just said. But I. I know I said it. I know I said it. Unless you inceptioned me. I just remember saying to a friend of mine, I said, yo, I'm so sick and tired of the shitification of everything. And then they were like, what do you mean? And then I was like, everything's just becoming shittier and shittier. It's like they're making it shitty on purpose.

[Eugene]

I can see you coming up with that. Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

And then people were just like, yeah, whatever. And then you, like, came up with n shitification, and now the whole world is on it, and I feel like I've been wronged.

[Cory Doctorow]

You know, when it's railroad time, you get railroads. When it's n shittification time, you get coinages pertaining to the general shittiness of everything. So it's. I mean, we are just living in that. But seriously, coinages are like this. So there are lots of coinages, you will find simultaneous or near simultaneous coinages that appear to be completely distinct just because the ideas in the Zeitgeist. And, you know, like, I've spent 25 years working on these issues, and I've come up with lots of words and parables and narratives and all kinds of things. And while I think the minor license to vulgarity is something that excites people, I also think that, like, in this moment, people are. Are eager for a kind of atavistic way to Talk about how they feel about their technology more than ever. Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

You know what's funny? It's gone beyond technology.

[Eugene]

Sure.

[Trevor Noah]

Even when I was telling Eugene about this episode, I was like, I'm so excited to talk to Corey because he has done for society what I think society has been pining to do for itself, but just sort of hasn't been able to piece together. And that is that, like, everyone, everywhere feels like everything that we are getting and experiencing is becoming more and more. Yeah, right. We feel like the amount of food that we get for the money we pay is becoming. We feel like the amount of things that our time can do is becoming. We feel like our cars and the value that you get are. You feel like everything in your life.

[Eugene]

Plane seats are getting smaller.

[Trevor Noah]

Everything. Everything.

[Cory Doctorow]

Your appliances last three years, not 30. Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

Yes, you can get like you can. My grandmother in her house till the day she died, had the fridge that I knew from when I was a kid.

[Eugene]

But even that term lifetime guarantee is gone now.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

I didn't even think of that. Yeah.

[Eugene]

Remember, there was. Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

Almost everything had a lifetime guarantee.

[Eugene]

Let's say 20 year guarantee store or a lifetime guarantee of this. Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

And the thing is, this is why I appreciate your work so much, is because there are things that are so pernicious. Is that the word in society, where they're like. They steal away and they. And they. And they're like in. But what makes them. What makes them so insidious is that we all think we're being individually crazy and curmudgeony. You know what I mean? So you just feel like in your life, you're like, I feel like old cars were made better. Then it's like, oh, here we go again, grandpa. You know, I feel like this was. And it's like. And what you've done is you've taken all of it and gone, hey, we're not crazy. Things are being made shittier.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. And I like to think that the kind of full theoretical unpacking, because it talks about the policy environment that created it kind of takes us beyond like, oh, you shopped badly. You didn't realize if you're not paying for the product, you're the product. So your failure to be a careful enough consumer caused this. Or even like the personality defects of these guys who run these services are to blame. Like, they're bad people. Right. I count the spoons if they came over to dinner. But, like, they're just doing what policy lets them do. And, you know, one of the things about having worked in this now for like most of my adult life on these tech policy issues is that I know that this outcome was not only foreseeable, but foreseen. Right. There were specific junctures where policymakers said, we should do X. And everyone showed up and said, don't do X, this terrible stuff is going to happen. And they were like, nah. And so, you know, like, on the one hand it makes me very angry and feel a little vindicated, but on the other hand makes me hopeful because like, if we can move this beyond the great forces of history and like, oh, it's just, you know, like the iron laws of economics demand that things, you know, margins be squeezed where they can be and move it into the realm of like specific policy choices, well then we can reverse them. Right? We're not prisoners of history. We're just people whose leaders were cowardly and short sighted and selfish and bad at their jobs. And so, you know, there's obvious remedies for that. They don't always involve a guillotine.

[Trevor Noah]

Do you, do you think that these politicians were bad at their jobs or do you think that we just made the assumption of thinking they were working for us when they were working for the corporations?

[Cory Doctorow]

It's a little of both. So, you know, there's a specific one that I am particularly exercised about. So there's this law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. From 1998, DMCA Section 1201 of the DMCA establishes a felony for modifying technology without permission. So like, if someone sells you a printer that only takes the ink from HP and you modify to take generic ink, then that's a felony?

[Trevor Noah]

That's a crime.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, it's, there's a kind of nuance there where it's like you have to bypass an access control to do it, but all you have to do is add the access control to the product and you can conjure new felonies out of thin air. So J J Freeman calls it felony contempt of business model. Basically they just created a path where any firm could take any conduct it didn't like and make it a literal crime.

[Trevor Noah]

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

[Cory Doctorow]

Just by designing their technology.

[Trevor Noah]

I mean, if I extrapolate this to everything, like, because people may not even use printers anymore, right? That's like saying if you have a car and then you modify the engine,

[Cory Doctorow]

that's already the case. That's a crime.

[Trevor Noah]

Wait, that's already the case?

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah. So if you like the whole right to repair fight about cars is because the diagnostic messages that go from the Part to the. What's called the main computing unit, the mcu, the main computer in your car. Those are encrypted. And decrypting them, bypassing the access control, is a felony. And each engine component has a chip. It's called a system on a chip. It's a cheap little full feature computer that costs less than a dollar. And when you put the part in the car, the part and the MCU do a little handshake where it says, can you send me a magic code that demonstrates that you were installed by an official technician and that you were made by the original manufacturer and that you're not a generic replacement part? And if it can't, even though it's a real part that really work, the car just refuses to recognize it. And it's not just cars, ventilators, major appliances, your phone, medical implants. It's called parts pairing. And because this is federal law, right? This is DMCA 1201. It's a federal law. When states pass right to repair laws, they really can't reach to this because it prevents it. In Oregon, what they've done is they just said you're not allowed to sell a device that requires parts pairing. But that's as far as they've gotten, though. One of the most disgusting examples of this is there's an American company called Medtronic that pretends it's Irish for tax purposes. They did the largest tax inversion in history.

[Trevor Noah]

Medtronic does the. They do a lot of like the CPAP machines and all of those things.

[Cory Doctorow]

They are the largest medtech company in the world.

[Trevor Noah]

Oh, I didn't know that.

[Cory Doctorow]

Diagnostic devices, implants, prostheses, the whole range. Right. And they make the world's workhorse ventilator. So everyone, every hospital has got a building full of their ventilators. And the ventilators use parts pairing. And during lockdown, you had technicians at the hospitals who were taking like a dead working screen from a dead ventilator and putting it in a dead ventilator with a working screen, vice versa, right?

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

And then it just wouldn't recognize it because it just couldn't. And you were supposed to have the technician come and bless the repair, but there were no planes flying. And this was the moment where we need ventilators more than ever. And so there were just ventilators that didn't work. Now the crazy thing is how this got resolved. So every country in the world has a law just like DMC12 1, including South Africa. It comes in through the free trade agreements with the U.S. the U.S. trade Representative has made it the number one trade priority of the US to get all of its trading partners to enact laws like this, basically to make it illegal everywhere else, to disinfitify the products that America exports so that American tech firms can steal all your data and money and so that you can't go into business fixing it. And there is a law like this in Poland. It comes through the European Copyright Directive, Article 6. And there was a Polish medical technician who used to work for Medtronic who was making his own ventilator illegal ventilator unlockers, and anonymously shipping them to hospitals. Like, he would find people online complaining about this, and he'd be like, give me your address, I'll send you the thing. And because it was the lockdown, he just had whatever he had for enclosures. So they would get like a guitar pedal with like a USB port and you plug it into your ventilator and it had like a little raspberry PI,

[Trevor Noah]

like MacGyver in this thing.

[Cory Doctorow]

Like clock radios, bedside lamps, like, literally whatever this guy had in his place in Poland during the lockdown. But he risked felony prosecution for this. And there's so much of this in Poland. Poland is like a weird epicenter for this. So there's a Polish train company called Nuvog, and companies that bought Newog trains would find that when they took them to a third party depot for repair, they would just stop working. And they would like, brick themselves. And you'd have to call up Newog and Newog would go, oh, we'll do some remote diagnostics. It's €20,000. Okay, we fixed it. Or sometimes if you just park them for a long time, they do this. Or sometimes they're pieces of track where if they ran over it would do it. So they hired an independent team of security researchers called Dragon Sector, who reverse engineered the firmware on this train and the manufacturer, nuvog. The way that they were winning all these train bid contracts is they sold the trains really cheap and then they charged up the ass for repair and maintenance. And they had booby trapped the train to detect if it was parked in someone else's maintenance yard and then make itself inoperable. And one of the rectangles they drew around a train maintenance yard, they drew it too wide and it went over a piece of mainline track. So train would stop working when it goes. It would just go. It would just stop working. And then they threatened to sue. Well, they are suing the researchers. They threatened to sue a Polish member of Parliament for talking about this in Parliament.

[Trevor Noah]

This, like, this is. There's so many things that you just triggered in my brain. 1. One of them being how we can go down the road, or rather we can. We can sort of like start at this, at this point, and then extrapolate it to everything else. Because I was thinking to myself when I was growing up, when we were growing up, we take for granted how many industries and how many jobs and how many people existed because they were tangentially connected to a product. Right. All over the world today, people are saying, oh, my town is dying, my city is dying, stores are closing, people are unemployed, things are falling apart. But we oftentimes don't ask ourselves what those things were. And then when you think about it, you go, oh, this was a place where they repaired TVs, this was a place where they repaired cars. This was a place where they. But they had nothing to do with the car or with the tv. They were just tangentially connected to it.

[Eugene]

And now the thing had to be made first.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, but, but, but, but what you've just made me realize is as companies and corporations have gotten better at strangling that with these laws that they've somehow got into, you know, into effect, every single small business around it dies.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, so you reminded me, I didn't finish telling you how this law came into effect and why. I know that they were warned about it and what kind of politician passed it. So during the Clinton administration, Bill Clinton asked Al Gore to think about demilitarizing the Internet. Because the Internet was like, it started in Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and it was run by like military contractors and universities with military contracts, few weird hobbyists and high tech companies. But mostly it was just US government military, and it's like kind of cluster military industrial firms. And so Al Gore did this thing called the National Information Infrastructure Hearings. They were called colloquially the information superhighway. You may remember that term.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, I remember that term.

[Cory Doctorow]

And Clinton had this guy who was his IP czar, so his head of copyright policy, corporate lawyer named Bruce Lehman, still alive in Florida. Hi, Bruce. And Bruce Lehman had this idea for what became DMCA 1201, this anti circumvention law that would basically make it illegal to unrig the system. And he took it to Al Gore and to Al Gore's everlasting credit, he said, no, that's terrible, go away. And so Bruce Lehman, in a move that he has later repeatedly described as, quote, doing an end run around Congress, went to the United nations in Geneva, and there's a specialized agency there called the World Intellectual Property Organization. You may remember them from saying to South Africa, you can't make your own anti retrovirals during the height of their AIDS crisis. So that was all policy set at wipo. So he went to WIPO and he said, we're going to make this into a treaty obligation. And it became these two treaties. We call them the WIPO Internet Treaties. One's the WIPO Copyright Treaty, and the other one's the WIPO Performers and Phonograms Treaty. But the Internet treaties. Then he went back to Congress and he said, well, now you can't say no. You're obliged to pass this law.

[Eugene]

Part of the treaty.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. And so that's how he got it. So the question is, what kind of politician did it? Do we mistake them for working for us, working for them? I mean, the Clinton administration, like every presidency, was a coalition of people who wanted different things.

[Eugene]

Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

And oftentimes, the way those coalitions are managed is across purposes. So in the Biden administration, you had these, like, generationally amazing trust busters like Lina Khan, who brought these cases against companies like Microsoft when they wanted to buy Activision. Then you had judges that Biden appointed, including one whose son worked for Microsoft, who heard that case and said, I don't see a problem with this. Right. And so you often get that within administrations. You get people who, who really want opposite things, and there's this kind of division of the spoils, and sometimes that just ends up neutralizing everything.

[Trevor Noah]

It, it feels, it feels like it's so far down the road that it's. Everything now feels hopeless.

[Eugene]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah. Because I, I, I think of the other day. My brother texts me and he goes, hey, man, I can't play any of my PlayStation games because it's telling me that the license of the game is not. But he was playing them, and then he wasn't playing. And then when we went down this rabbit hole trying to understand what had happened and how it had happened, there'd been some update that they had done. But basically we realized that before you would buy a video game, you take your money, you buy the video game, take it home, the video game is yours.

[Guest/Interviewer]

Yours?

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, it is yours. You can loan it to a friend, you can sell it to GameStop or whoever, it is yours. Now, what they say is, no, you have bought a license to play the

[Cory Doctorow]

game from us until we change our

[Trevor Noah]

minds, until we change our terms of service. What's crazy to me, though, Is like, they can just shut it off at any time and then you don't have it anymore. But I go, but we don't, as people, we don't have that power. I cannot change the terms of service on the people that I was in a terms of service with me. So I can't go back to, you know, PlayStation or whoever and be like, yo, remember how I gave you that $80 for that game? Yeah. My terms of service have changed.

[Cory Doctorow]

You owe me 40 back.

[Trevor Noah]

You owe me 40 back. Because my term of service is that if I play a game and I finish it with a 97% completion rate and I get all the trophies, then you guys have to give me half my money back. They'd be like, yo, get this guy off the premises.

[Cory Doctorow]

Sure, yeah. In the book, I call this the Darth Vader mba, Right? As in, I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further. Right. Like, that is the one lesson of the Darth Vader NBA. I gave you deal X and now it's deal Y. And this is a fight I've been having about. So these technologies that restrict access that are covered by Section 1201 of the DMC and these other laws, they're called a lot of different things. One of them is digital rights management.

[Eugene]

You may have heard that.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yes.

[Trevor Noah]

Drm.

[Cory Doctorow]

Drm. So this is the thing I've been beating the drum about for like more than 20 years. And one of the things I used to write for Wired, I still write for them sometimes, but I was writing for Wired, and my editor at the time was this guy Chris Anderson, really good guy. And they published this guide to things to buy this Christmas. Electronics to buy this Christmas. And I wrote a blog post saying this guide is all wrong because all these products have DRM and they can be remotely downgraded. So you cannot review a product and say, if you want X, Y and Z, buy this product.

[Guest/Interviewer]

Oh.

[Trevor Noah]

Because the quality of the product may

[Cory Doctorow]

never be taken away. Right. You have to warn people somewhere. And he was just like, oh, you're being paranoid and unrealistic. We had a little. This was like in the aughts when we had great fights on blogs. It was like two men of letters exchanging lengthy missives.

[Trevor Noah]

It was very good, my good man.

[Eugene]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

Here is all the ways that you are incorrect about this issue, first and foremost, almost let me draw your attention to the faux pas you made.

[Cory Doctorow]

Indeed, indeed. So, yeah, and like, I went to Poughkeepsie, I went to Consumer Reports, and I was like, you're reviewing these products but like none of them are fit for consumption because every product in the category can be remotely downgraded, right? So like you cannot, you can't advise people buy this because you want a device that will play back a certain file format or whatever, if that can be changed with no remedy on your part, no recourse and no way to predict it. Because one of the things about the timing of inshidification is that it came after a bunch of these lawsuits the Biden administration brought, where we got publication of memos from inside the companies that really showed you how these decisions are made, right? So they're like, it's not a mustache twirling CEO. It's usually like with government agencies or parts of government. It's factional disputes within companies. And so like one of the things about DMCA 1201 is it's, I call it an insitogenic policy because it means that the worst ideas, the worst people make the most money. So it means that when you're arguing within the company, I think we should do X, I think we should do Y. So imagine there's no DMCA 1201. Imagine there's no anti circumvention law. So we're like having a product planning meeting about our website. If and, and I say, hey, I'd like to make the ads 20% more invasive and obnoxious because I think that'll give us 2% more clicks. And someone who doesn't give a damn about user welfare might still put their hand up and say, elon, I love how you think, but has it occurred to you, like 40% of our users are going to type in the search bar. How do I block ads? And of course we never see revenue from them again because no one ever goes back and types, how do I start seeing ads again, right? But if it's the app, right, and there's anti circumvention and it's against the law to reverse engineer an app because apps are closed platforms, the web is open.

[Trevor Noah]

You cannot block the ads.

[Cory Doctorow]

So at that point the guy says, why are you stopping at 20%? Right? Like, why don't we make the ads 100% more invasive, get a 10% increase in our click through. Doesn't matter if someone types, how do I block ads in the app? Because it's a felon. Yeah. So you know these genic policies, we can see how they. Then there's like a line from them to these choices made by product managers and people within firms. So One of them came out of one of the Google cases. So Google is a thrice convicted monopolist. They lost three federal antitrust cases in one year. It was a great year for antitrust, bad year for Google. And in one of those cases, well, in all those cases, you get all the memos published, like internally, DOJ makes them publish all their memos. And one of them, the search case, this great reporter at Zitron wrote about how Google got worse at search. And it happened in 2019. Their search market share or their search revenue had. Growth had stalled, and that was because they had 90% market share. So you don't grow your. From a 90% market share.

[Trevor Noah]

It's hard to not have those exponential jumps.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you can raise a billion people to maturity and hope that they'll become your customers. That's a product called Google Classroom. It'll take a while to pay off, but in the meantime, they had this crisis, right? And so you see these two factions forming up. One's led by this guy, Prabhakar Raghavan. He's an ex McKinsey guy. He's an engineer, but a business guy. And he's in charge of revenue for Google search. And his rival is this guy Ben Gomes, who's like an old school Googler who started building out their servers when it was like a computer under a desk and oversaw all of the data centers in the world and is now in charge of Google search technology. So Google search revenue. Google search technology. Prabhakar Raghavan's got a great idea. He says we can grow search revenue by making search worse. So you have to search more than once so that we can show you more ads.

[Trevor Noah]

No, Corey, you can't be serious.

[Cory Doctorow]

And he's like. And Ben Gomes is like, but that's a terrible idea. I didn't give my life to this company for this. And he's like, but we spend more than $20 billion every year buying all the shelf space for search, right? We buy like, if there's a search box that you encounter in the wild, it's wired to Google server. It doesn't matter what operating system, what hardware vendor, what browser.

[Trevor Noah]

It all goes back to search. It all goes to Google.

[Cory Doctorow]

So, like, why are we bribing Apple $20 billion a year not to enter the search market if we're not going to exploit the fact that no one can find any other search engines without us to make it worse? And so it's very easy to make it worse. There's things like Query stemming, where if someone does a search for trousers, you run a parallel search for pants and then you merge the results. There's spell check, right. Someone misspells her Sherman, you make a guess and you just automatically fix it. Well, maybe you don't automatically fix it or even like context awareness. Right? So like we're recording this right after the attempted shooting at the White House press corps dinner. So someone searches for that. Well, you know that there's a news item about it. So you put those, those at the top rather than the generic best link for White House press corps. Right, okay, right. And, and you just turn that off. And now people have to search two or three times and you have. Ben goes like, well, I didn't miss all those little league games of my kids to make the search wars. I believe in what we do here. And you have Prabhakar Raghavan basically saying money talks and bullshit walks. And I'm sure Pragavhar Raghavan was not the first person at Google to realize that if you made search worse, people would have to search more than once and make more money. But he was the first guy to win that argument. And my thesis is he won the argument because we allowed Google to buy all of its competitors and buy all the shelf space and bribe Apple $20 billion a year not to enter the search market. And then we created the conditions in which the worst person at Google's worst idea was the most money making one. They had nothing to fear from competitors. They knew the regulators wouldn't come after them. They were even at the point where they were like less worried about losing staff. I mean, obviously now they just hate their staff and wish they would all be replaced by chatbots. And so, you know, they were like just untethered from discipline and in the absence of consequences, the bad idea just was the one that won the argument.

[Trevor Noah]

So if I'm hearing what you're saying, then one of the initial seeds that can send us onto this journey, you know, one that can grow into like a forest of initiatification, is when we allow competition to die. Yeah, because, because if you, if you, if you, if you have a market where, I mean, we, we've seen this in life, I don't care. You know, like some people might listen to this and think, oh man, I, yeah, but I'm, I'm not in the tech world, I'm not. It's like, no, no, let's even think of it on a small, small level. We've seen this in South Africa. There's a You know what New York would call a bodega, we call a spazza shop. Like, just a local store that's, you know, really.

[Eugene]

Corner store.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, just corner store.

[Eugene]

Mm.

[Trevor Noah]

When there's a ton of corner stores, two things happen. Prices are generally in check with each other. Right. Unless there's price fixing, which generally didn't happen with corner stores.

[Cory Doctorow]

Hard to do with 200 companies.

[Trevor Noah]

Exactly. So you would go, how much for this? Now I'm going there. And the person would be like, how much is it there? All right, I'll adjust my prices. And so it kept everybody's price in check. And the second thing it did, which was almost more important, was it made sure that somebody could hold you accountable for the quality of the product you were giving them, because they could go get it somewhere else. Cause in South Africa, we had, like, just all of a sudden, a burst of fake products. So people were selling, like, fake Coca Cola. Like, it was Coca Cola in a bottle.

[Cory Doctorow]

Counterfeits.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, counterfeits. But it wasn't Coca Cola. And people were like, this tastes weird. This tastes. And they're like, ah, don't worry. And then what happened was when they could own enough of the stores or enough of the corner stores and it was part of, like, one syndicate, where would you go now for the real product? You couldn't.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right.

[Trevor Noah]

And so these two things together now even affect you on a. So now not only are you paying more, you're also getting less for the more that you're paying.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

And then you. I almost feel like this becomes like the. It's the. It's. It's. It's the fault line that'll cause the earthquakes of society is how I think of it. Cause this makes people angry in the streets, but they don't know what's making them angry. And then we just think, like, everyone in society is getting, like, angrier and more pissed off and more, but it's like, no, this is it. This is the fault line.

[Cory Doctorow]

So it's funny you raised that. So I work for the Electronic Frontier foundation, so nonprofit that works on digital rights. We have allies in South Africa who work on these issues related to IP and digital rights and surveillance, all these things. And I was, you know, the. The latest round of updates to the copyright law there included the expansion of the limitations to copyright to match the American set. So what we call fair use here.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

Which would have made it a lot simpler to. For, like, university teachers to teach and high school teachers to teach and, you know, photocopy course packs. Do all these things that are just kind of normal and. And the U.S. trade Representative was like, no, that American policy is very extreme and you shouldn't have it here in South Africa.

[Trevor Noah]

No way.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, it's terrible.

[Trevor Noah]

You know what's funny? I. I used to talk to the team about this. So when you and I were doing the show in South Africa.

[Eugene]

Yeah. Uhhuh.

[Trevor Noah]

Eugene and I were doing like a late night. It was like a new thing in South Africa. It wasn't really a thing that had existed. We said, can we use clips from like the news and from stuff? They were like, hey, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They were like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Remember we wanted to play the Idols clip.

[Eugene]

They were like.

[Trevor Noah]

They were like, what the hell do you bloody hell think. They're like, yo, this is not allowed. Yeah, in the country. It's not. So I thought that was normal. I was like, okay, I get it. You can't take somebody else's thing and comment on. I understand, I get it. Then I came to America, right, And everyone was doing it on everything. The Tonight show, the Late show, the Daily show, the news, msnbc. And I was just like, what?

[Guest/Interviewer]

Everyone?

[Trevor Noah]

And they were like, oh no, here, it's fair use.

[Eugene]

Yeah, yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

And I said, what does that mean? They're like, well, it's fair that you can use something because you are trying to do something else. You're not just trying to plagiarize it. And this is fair to do.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, it's just.

[Trevor Noah]

And now you're telling me that those people told South Africa, you can't have it, don't do our one.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's great. So at eff, you know, when I started, I was, I watched tech companies really have their users back. This was sort of the Napster era. And there was, there was this kind of broad sense that we should like not make it really easy to remove content from the Internet because then people would like censor stuff. You need evidentiary standard. We shouldn't just spy on people. We should. It should be really easy to go from one service to another, what's called interoperability, where plug into each other all

[Trevor Noah]

browsers, can you move your accounts, can you move your contacts, can you move your chats? Yep. And I remember this period and that

[Cory Doctorow]

was because there were hundreds of them. And when there's hundreds of companies, they're a rabble, right. They can't agree, like not just on what their policy position is. They can't agree on like what they'll cater the meeting where they try to work out the policy issue, right? Like they're, they're, you know what it's like getting even a dozen people to agree. And I watched the media industry kick their ass, right? So they were like two orders of magnitude larger than the media industry during the Napster wars. But there were seven media companies, which now five. And the media companies had one playbook, right? And whether they were in Congress or in a court or at wipo or whatever, they just said the same thing. And there was this incredible unity that you get when you boil down a large group to a small group. And, and what we did is rather than making media more like tech, we made tech more like media. And now we've got like an Internet that's five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four. And they totally agree on all the ways that we should be screwed. And in fact, they've more or less merged with these media companies. But this amazing thing has happened since more or less since Google and shittified in the last, like six or seven years, which is that everywhere in the world we've seen this, like, almost spontaneous upwelling of policymakers taking aim at monopolies, right? At. At, at concentrated corporate power. There's a famous study out of Princeton. They, they call it colloquially the oligarch study because it's got a very long academic name. But they went and they looked at like about 2,000 policy outcomes, and they concluded that the biggest predictor of what would happen in a policy fight is what billionaires wanted. And if billionaires wanted it, we got it. And if billionaires didn't want it, we didn't get it.

[Trevor Noah]

Are you being for real?

[Cory Doctorow]

And. Yeah, and basically the policy preferences of ordinary people had no bearing on policy outcomes.

[Trevor Noah]

Are you being fraudulent?

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, 100%. But here's the thing. No billionaire wants antitrust enforcement.

[Trevor Noah]

No, they hate it.

[Cory Doctorow]

But we have had antitrust enforcement in America, right? And it started on a Trump one. It didn't start under Biden, it started under Trump one. Yeah, for, I think most.

[Trevor Noah]

Trump won. I like that.

[Cory Doctorow]

That's a dope one.

[Trevor Noah]

Trump won.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

From the people who brought you. Trump won. I'm back. He's back. Let's do it again. We're back. Part two. It's part two.

[Cory Doctorow]

So we got it under Trump one. But also the European Union, like, started making these really muscular regulations. The Digital Markets act, the Digital Services act, now the Digital Fairness Act. Then European member states like Spain and France and Germany started doing Stuff. And then we also got it in England, and we got it in the UK in a period where, like, their politics were so screwed up that, like, they had prime ministers who were lasting for 10 years that were shorter than the shelf life of a head of lettuce, you'll recall. And yet this was the period in which the competition and markets authority, which is their answer to the ftc, did its best work ever. Like, all the best Americans. I'm Canadian, and in Canada, we had this.

[Trevor Noah]

When Canadians say that, Brad, I love it so much. It's one of my favorite things Canadians say. You know why? You know why I love that thing? Because as a South African, I can't hear the difference between most Canadian accents and Americans. So when a Canadian says that, the whole time I thought you were American, then you're like, like, all the best American. I'm Canadian. I'm like, whoa, you did it again.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. And honestly, I can't hear the difference. I mean, I can hear the difference between a Texan and someone from Newfoundland, but I can't. But, you know, generic newscaster, Canadian accent, generic newscaster, American accent, all the same. But we had the world's most useless competition authority. So our competition bureau, in its entire history, had challenged three mergers. And that number may seem low, but the number of mergers they'd successfully challenged was zero. And in 2024, Justin Trudeau whipped his caucus to pass the most muscular antitrust law with the most sweeping powers of any competition bureau in the world. And Justin Trudeau was not like a foe of corporate power. Right? He was like. His whole brand was sort of Pete Buttigieg style, like, kind of neoliberal, like, you know, sort of McKinsey good.

[Trevor Noah]

The status quo. But let's make it a little bit better.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we get this out of Justin Trudeau, but we also got it in South Korea and in Singapore and in Japan and Australia and also China.

[Trevor Noah]

Wait, what was happening?

[Cory Doctorow]

So different things in different countries. South Korea and Japan pursued antitrust cases against Apple for price fixing in the App Store. So if you sell anything in an app, if you collect any money in

[Trevor Noah]

an app, 30% goes to Apple.

[Cory Doctorow]

Apple requires you to use their payment process. They make $100 billion a year on that. It is the most profitable line of business they're in. It's more profitable than anything else they do. It is pure profit. It's a 30% tax on the digital economy. Right, Right. And it's crazy. It's just like a. It's a shocking sum of money.

[Trevor Noah]

But wait, wait, let's. Okay, let's delve into that, because this is something that I've. I find myself grappling with. It's a tough one. On the one hand, I do think it's crazy that Apple charges you 30% of any revenue that is coming in from your app that you're charging in the app specifically. On the other hand, I go, there was no App Store. There was no App ecosystem. There was no. They're making it. Have you tried to sign up for anything that's not in Apple?

[Cory Doctorow]

Ahaha.

[Trevor Noah]

Eugene, do you want to hate your life? Heh heh. Hey, my man. Good luck paying. Good luck. It's messy, it's hard. Good luck canceling, by the way. You try cancel a product that you didn't sign up through, like, Apple, like, get some other service. Because I've tried to, like, get out of the ecosystem. Now I'm gonna go sign up on the website myself and I do my thing. Till this day, there will be $5 leaving my account where I'm like, I mean, I don't know. I keep sending email, cancel, unsubscribe. I no longer wish to. Reason for leaving, because I don't want to give you my money anymore. Reason for I don't want to be here anymore. That's too bad. Can we put you through to somebody? I don't want to be put through to anybody. But so there's that side of it where I go, what is the amount that Apple or anyone should be able to charge for inventing a new thing that makes you money that you didn't make? Cause you are making 60% from zero.

[Cory Doctorow]

70%.

[Trevor Noah]

70%. Sorry, you're making 70% from zero. From zero.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right.

[Trevor Noah]

So you're making that 70% from zero. Why?

[Cory Doctorow]

Sure.

[Trevor Noah]

Why shouldn't like this. And I genuinely mean, it's like a grapple. Because I go like, who decides to pay? Yeah, but who decides?

[Cory Doctorow]

So, okay, so put on. Take off your. I use a phone app and put on your, like, sim regulator app.

[Trevor Noah]

Okay.

[Cory Doctorow]

You're trying to like, figure out what's best for society.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, let's do it.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right. So right now the way that it works is reverse engineering an iPhone to add a different payment method is a felony. Right. So Apple gets to put you in jail if you try and add another payment method. Method. And Apple's argument is that by blocking independent repair, independent software installations, independent payment processing and so on, that they're able to do this sort of paternalistic thing. They've got their users back, and they will step in and do it. And there's an extent to which that is undoubtedly true, but there is a threat that Apple will never defend you against, which is Apple. And so where Apple doesn't have your interest at heart, then you have no recourse, because you can't change your phone if you don't like what Apple's doing. So in 2021, Apple updated iOS. I think it was 2021. They updated iOS, which the operating system for, like, phones and watches and tablets. And they give you a single tick box, and you ticked it, and then Facebook couldn't spy on you anymore. In the apps, 96% of iOS users tick that box. The other 4% were either drunk or Facebook employees. Or drunk Facebook employees, which makes a lot of sense because if I worked at Facebook, I would always be drunk.

[Trevor Noah]

Hey, Corey's getting fire shots. Cory's here with his machine. Cory doesn't play games, Right?

[Eugene]

So.

[Cory Doctorow]

So you get it, right? Like, this is clearly like neoliberal economists. The same ones who say monopolies are efficient. They like to talk about revealed preferences, okay? Where if you do one thing but say another thing, the thing you're doing matters more than what you're saying. You have a reveal preference. This is, like, a thing you can only believe if you incur the kind of neurological injury you get from taking an economics degree, which makes you incapable of, like, perceiving or reasoning about power. You see someone who's, like, sold a kidney to make the rent, you go look at that person with the reveal preference for one kidney. So. So here's the thing. When you give people a real choice, they can reveal a preference, because Facebook would have set up until that moment. People use Facebook, so they don't want the privacy. So here's the kicker. When Apple was turning this on for Facebook, they were also turning on their own surveillance system for the iPhone that gathers all the data Facebook used to gather in order to target ads to you because they have a competing ad broker, and there's no way to opt out of that. Right? And it's against the law to do one to Apple as Apple did onto Facebook. But that's, like, just for table stakes, right? So in China, the government said to Apple, you must remove all the privacy tools. There's no VPNs, there's no end to end encrypted messages that aren't backdoored. And they backdoored icloud in China so that they could figure out who to, like, stick in a gulag Right, Right. So again, Apple's got your back until they don't. And when they don't, what do you do? And then finally, here in America, Apple decided that an app called Ice Block, which is an app that warns you if there's a guy in Oakley's and a gator who wants to shoot you in the face or, like, send you to an El Salvadoran slave camp for the rest of your life, that. That doesn't belong in the App Store. That.

[Trevor Noah]

What was the argument?

[Cory Doctorow]

Ice Officers are a protected class.

[Trevor Noah]

Oh. As they should be.

[Cory Doctorow]

They're a visible minority. And so, I mean, the argument is, please don't tear off my stuff, Mr. Trump. That's the argument. Right. That's why Tim Cook flew to D.C. to assemble a little gold participation trophy for Trump. Do you remember that?

[Trevor Noah]

Oh, yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

You know, it's why he paid a million dollars to sit behind Trump on the dais at the inauguration. It's why they gave millions of dollars for the Epstein Ballroom. You know, it's because it's mafia. Right? So when Apple has your back and wine is not scared. Oh, man.

[Trevor Noah]

So, you know, you can tell someone has multiple passports in this conversation.

[Cory Doctorow]

I have.

[Trevor Noah]

Someone here has multiple passports.

[Cory Doctorow]

I'm Canadian, British. In America.

[Trevor Noah]

There you go.

[Cory Doctorow]

You can see

[Trevor Noah]

just freewheeling here.

[Eugene]

So literally evil can even do this conversation.

[Cory Doctorow]

So how do you get Apple to, like, have your back again? Right. They have to be afraid. They have to be afraid that something bad will happen to them. Right? If we want them to be good, there have to be penalties for being bad. Because within Apple, I guarantee you, in fact, it's public, because they all leaked to the New York Times and Wired and whatever. There are tons of Apple employees who are like, this is bad and we shouldn't do it.

[Trevor Noah]

Oh, wow.

[Cory Doctorow]

They say it about China. They say it about App Store fees. They said it about Ice Block. Right. And they're losing the argument. What if their argument wasn't just this would make me feel icky, but also that hundred billion dollars a year we take in from transactions is about to be shifted to arrival because people are so pissed off with us that they would happily switch. Right? Apple makes this argument all the time. They say, well, if we let third parties fix your phone, well, maybe they do something bad to your phone. Well, that's possible. So maybe we should have a law that says, if I fix your phone and install spyware, I go to prison or get fined or whatever. Right? And in fact, you talked about canceling under the Biden administration. Lina Khan created what was called the Click to cancel rule, which.

[Trevor Noah]

She's my hero.

[Cory Doctorow]

Me too. Me too. God, I. I used to send her texts that said, I can't tell you how disorienting it is to get out of bed in the morning and look at my phone and go, oh my God, my government's great.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah. Like Lina Khan was. Because you know what it felt like with Lina Khan? It felt like there was somebody in government doing what the government is supposed to do. So here's how I've seen it. So Lina Khan was fundamentally tasked with making sure that trade and competition were fair in the United States. Right. And this is something that people oftentimes obscure in these conversations. If you talked to billionaires and CEOs of corporations, all this, they would make Lina Khan seem like the devil. And they would oftentimes say, you need to let business do what it does. And you know, you gotta be unrestrained because if you restrain industry, it will not move in the direction. But this would be the equivalent of two fighters in the cage in ufc saying, you gotta get the refs out of the cage, man. Right, get the refs out of the cage and then just let the fighting be unrestrained and then true fighting will emerge and then you will know who the best fighter is. And it's like, yeah, that's true. But a lot of people might die.

[Eugene]

Mm.

[Trevor Noah]

A lot of people might die. So the reason we have a referee even at UFC is because there is somebody who knows what the rules are and their job is to enforce the rules, to make sure that the spectators and the fighters in the cage are protected to officiate. Yeah, you don't need to see anybody dying. Yeah, and you too don't need to die. And so even though you may not think it as one of the fighters, it's actually good for you. And this is, this is the thing people don't realize is that having somebody who is competent at enforcing the trade and competition laws in a country is actually good for companies. You know why when you are winning in a death match, you don't think someone should stop a death match.

[Eugene]

Yeah.

[Guest/Interviewer]

Uh huh.

[Eugene]

Cause you're on top of.

[Trevor Noah]

But when you are losing a death match, you will pray to God that there was someone there to tap you out. Someone there to go, hey, hey, you tapped. The fight is over. I've seen multiple major corporations who were once like, you know, at the pinnacle, hp, et cetera, et cetera, you know, just absolutely killing it. They never want any enforcements, but when they fall down, or when they're on the ascendancy, they'll point out constantly how they're being oppressed by other companies, how the competition is being stifled, how they're being blocked out of doing certain things. Like, one of the most famous stories for me was Virgin Cola. Richard Branson was really a genius at making innovative and interesting companies that just created a new type of value where people didn't expect it. But Virgin Airlines, you know, Virgin Atlantic, Virgin, you know, you know, the ship, etc. But a big one was Virgin Cola. One of the craziest things I learned about Virgin Cola was it was actually a product that people were starting to like more than Coca Cola. No, I didn't know this, but it was past, like, taste tests and. And just in raw sales. It was doing this. It was doing this, it was doing this. It was just people like, we like the taste of this more than Coca Cola. And then what did Coca Cola do? They went out to all their distributors and all the people and they said, if you give this guy shelf space, we're gonna cut you off completely. And remember, right now we are responsible for such a large amount of your revenue.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right.

[Trevor Noah]

So if you let this guy come into your places, if you give him favorable shelf space, if you even give him shelf space, we're gonna shut this shit down. And good luck to you not having any of our products.

[Cory Doctorow]

Sure.

[Trevor Noah]

What can you do as a store? You're a corner store, mom and pop store, supermarket. Doesn't matter how big you are.

[Eugene]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

They're a huge part of your turnover.

[Eugene]

They've got a lot of products underneath.

[Trevor Noah]

They've got too much product. And so you go, sorry, Virgin, you're out. And that's literally why Virgin Cola died. It wasn't badly anythinged. It wasn't. And so in that, if you are the Virgin Cola, or if you are the anything in any field, you can think, when you're on top, you're always gonna be on top. But when that behemoth flips and they're coming after you, that's when you're gonna wish that there was enforcement. But by then, it might be too late, because now there might only be one company. And so now it just becomes an environment where competition cannot even begin to exist. Does that make sense?

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, I think you said that very well. Do you remember on Saturday Night Live, Lily Tomlin used to do this bit where she'd play an AT&T operator?

[Trevor Noah]

Oh, yeah, right.

[Cory Doctorow]

And she would do these fake ads for the phone company and they would always end with we don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company. Yeah, right. And Lena used to say companies aren't just too big to fail, they're not just too big to jail, they get too big to care.

[Trevor Noah]

Yes.

[Cory Doctorow]

And so there has to be some external source of discipline. So this started when you asked me about competition. And I tell even my like most Ayn Rand pilled libertarian friends, you know, people who can't open their copy of Atlas Shrugged anymore cause the pages are stuck together. I say even if you think the only thing the government should do is enforce contracts, you still need a referee who's more powerful than the players on the team than the teams on the field. Otherwise, what does it matter if the government says, oh, you know, party A violated their contractual obligations to party B if party A is more powerful than the government. So the largest corporation you're willing to tolerate determines the size of the government you're gonna have to have. It has to be bigger. And so if you want small government, you need smaller corporations.

[Trevor Noah]

Oh, that's an interesting argument. I've never thought of that. People say I want small government, but then they don't consider.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, because you get economic planning, you get central planning. One way or the other, there's always going to be a planner. So either it's Apple saying ice block should be illegal. Right. And what's your lever on Apple? Like, if you don't like how Apple's behaving, what do you do? You say, oh, I'm not, I'm going to switch to Android or I'm not going to buy any apps anymore. You just do this like half ass. Like people in this day and age think that a boycott is how you shop, right? I participated in the boycotts against apartheid. They were not shopping differently. They were a global movement organized in solidarity with the ANC and trade unions in South Africa that arranged for a set of like articulated objectives and a tactic around it.

[Trevor Noah]

Right?

[Cory Doctorow]

People get the tactics. Shopping hard. It wasn't shopping hard. You know, the bus boycott in Montgomery was not like, I feel like walking to work today. Right. They did 380 days without riding the bus because they organized solidarity networks with carpools. They were working with the bus drivers to keep them fed while the buses were shut. Like that's what a boycott is. It's not shopping hard.

[Trevor Noah]

Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

So either Apple gets to decide which software people. So iPhones basically, iPhones aren't. Are a minority in the market, but they're the super majority of the top decile. So the 10% richest people in the world, okay, the vast majority of them own iPhones, which means that like any significant digital business that doesn't work on an iPhone doesn't work work. Right? So, so they're effectively a market planner. Right? They're like, they're like someone in, you know, Moscow coming up with a five year plan in 1976 for the digital market. So either it's them and you have no leverage over them. All you can do is like, I don't know, go on Reddit and complain, or it's the government. And I know people are like, well, what are we going to do about the government? And right now it's a very hard question, but what universe? Like, how many universes are there in which a giant corporation that you're angry at listens to you versus how many universes have we had in which the government is responsive to people? It's still not a great track record for the government, but at least there is the nominal basis of being publicly accountable. The people in these firms will tell you that they have a fiduciary duty to be terrible to you if that makes them a nickel more in profit. Right. They'll take it.

[Trevor Noah]

Isn't that something that was misunderstood as well?

[Cory Doctorow]

It's a piece of propaganda Milton Friedman came up with. It's not.

[Eugene]

But isn't it?

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, because apparently the original thing was you have a fiduciary responsibility to your shareholders, but then apparently there's like an end of the sentence that no one says.

[Cory Doctorow]

It's more like the problem with fiduciary duty is they act as though it's a bright line test. Right? You just say, oh, well, what did the managers of this firm do? Was that in accord with their fiduciary duty? And that you can just like a Martian looking through a telescope could tell you from, you know, millions of miles away whether it was or wasn't fiduciary. But like, you fire half the people and you're like, well, I'm fulfilling my fiduciary duty by reducing our payroll. You give everyone a raise while I'm fulfilling our fiduciary duty by increasing morale, which will increase. Fiduciary duty is the all purpose excuse.

[Trevor Noah]

Okay? You can just use it for anything and be like, this is my fiduciary.

[Cory Doctorow]

The market made me do it.

[Trevor Noah]

Okay, all right, that makes sense.

[Cory Doctorow]

So it's. So the, the, the thing that competition does is it makes the firm small enough to regulate, which means that we don't need as Goliath, a state to regulate them. And it also means that when the state tries to make evidence based policy, when they're like, okay, so we're going to build this building, we have these reinforced steel joists in the ceiling and we want to make sure that the roof doesn't fall in, we need to know what our building code should be. Yeah, right. And so they're going to like put out, it's called like a notice of inquiry. Right. And we're going to ask the public what they should do. And you're going to have people who have a certain patented process for making one alloy and people who have machines that make a different thing and you know, lots of different stuff. And they're all going to show up and they're going to say this should be in the building code. And then they're going to look at each other's submissions and they're going to do reply comments. They're going to like, that building's going to fall down. If you build it the way my competitor does. And here's my math, right. Here's my evidence. So they're doing the work of the regulators, right? They're like, they're, they are checking each other's bullshit. Yeah, right.

[Trevor Noah]

Because, because they all, when we have enough of them, it's like a healthy ecosystem.

[Cory Doctorow]

Okay, Exactly.

[Trevor Noah]

If you, if you have a vast array of species, they keep each other in check. You know what I mean? So the fox hunts the rabbit and then the rabbit eats the plants and then the plants and it's just this cycle.

[Cory Doctorow]

Nitrogen.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, there we go. But it's like everyone is doing a thing in this cycle, but once you start to create a monopoly, you go, we just have rabbits now. And then, now what happens is there are far too many rabbits for the plants. And then everything that's growing is being eaten. But nothing's eating the rabbit. But nothing's e People don't understand that companies and businesses are like this as well is that they themselves keep each other in check with everything. Some might even spot like something unlawful that the other company's doing because they're in the same field.

[Eugene]

Sure.

[Trevor Noah]

So they go, you guys are breaking the law. And it's like, oh, thanks for telling us. We wouldn't have paid attention to it because we didn't have the same incentive. But it benefited us. And so you did. And so in a weird world again, we don't understand that having the more of it people, you know, where people don't get how this affects their everyday lives. And I think this is why I'm so passionate about. It is sometimes some of these conversations seem so highfalutin that you think you're in a conversation that doesn't affect you. You know, people are like, ah, the Federal Trade Commission and what mergers? Why do I care if there's a merger? Why do I. Simple, simple one. If you look at the power of something getting too big, you have your card service, your Uber app, or whatever you use, people forget when Uber came in, they did something really slick. They said, we're going to charge prices that are far below what the industry rates are. So they were beating every taxi in every city in terms of price. What generally happens when prices are lower? Demand goes up. People say, I want to use that service. Everyone starts using that service. It is greater in many ways than a taxi service because it fines you. It doesn't racially discriminate the way taxis were oftentimes found to be doing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It is great because there was Uber and taxis. And then what starts to happen? The taxi industry starts going down. Starts going down, starts going down. It loses its value. It dies. For all intents and purposes, it dies. When you walk in New York City now, you barely see the color yellow in the streets anymore the way it used to be. So it dies. Uber goes, oh, competition dead. Great, let's get these prices going now, people. And now Uber starts taking the prices up, taking the prices up, taking the prices up. And now you have no recourse. You have no. You can't even say, I do not wish to catch an Uber. I'm gonna wait for a taxi. Go wait. See how long it takes for.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, sure.

[Trevor Noah]

There is no taxi to pick you up. And we can, we can, we can move this to every industry, every mother who's looking at the price of diapers and going, why do diapers cost this much? Now I can't seem to find them cheaper anyway. Yeah, it's because even the extras that you are looking at are not extras anymore. It's one company that's selling you the diapers. You go, like. One of the ones that really got me was when we look at, like, diseases in food, even if we take it away from economics, if you look at farms, you know, that have chickens or cows or anything like that, eggs, we don't realize that as humanity, we are closer and closer to the precipice of just having our food supply wiped out because we've allowed one company basically to own so much of it. Forget the money. Now just think of our survivability. If one company owns the majority of eggs that we have and they have these laws that make it illegal for you to now have an egg that is somehow similar to their egg and they go, our egg is our egg. And if your chicken comes from our egg, then our chicken, it's our chicken. Now it's not your chicken, it's.

[Cory Doctorow]

Well, that company's called CalFresh. Nearly all the eggs in the grocer's fridge come from them.

[Trevor Noah]

Yes.

[Cory Doctorow]

And we were all having egg discourse about eggs being expensive. It's cause CalFresh raised the price.

[Trevor Noah]

There you go.

[Cory Doctorow]

They said it was bird flu. They said it was this and that. Just calfresh turned the knob.

[Trevor Noah]

Yes. But the thing is, if there was a disease that affected that specific type of egg.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

And wiped them all out or there was a disease in them. Because we've allowed CalFresh to become this thing, we are all going to pay the price. We'll be right back after this short break. When summer gets hot, the best plan is one that keeps everyone cool and fed. Whole Foods Market has fresh shortcuts for summer road trips, backyard barbecues and pool parties. So you can beat the heat with the quality you expect. Start with sales on Best of Summer fruit, peaches, organic blueberries and organic nectarines for salads, smoothies or snacking for the cooler. Stock up on poppy, Waterloo sparkling water and more grilling well look for no antibiotics ever. Meat like New York strip steak made in house, kebabs, skewers and sausages rounded out with brioche buns, corn, zucchini and everyday low prices on 365 brand chips and dips. Hosting something bigger. Whole Foods Market catering can help with platters, salads, sushi, cheese boards and more. Prime members can get their first order over $25 delivered free. So summer flavors come right to the door. Terms apply. Shop Whole Foods Market in store or online and get your first delivery free with Prime. One thing about summer is that everything just feels easy. It's the season for comfortable go anywhere pieces that make getting dressed simple. And that's what makes quints such a great fit for the season. They focus on well made essentials that you'll actually live in all summer long. Quince's 100% European linen pants and shirts are breathable, easy to throw on and the summer upgrade your rotation needs. And their tees are soft enough to live in all day. And the lightweight cotton sweaters are exactly what you want. When summer Nights cool down. One thing about summer is that everything just feels easier. Or at least that's the goal. You want clothes that don't require a strategy meeting every morning. You know, you don't want to stand in front of your closet negotiating with yourself like you're trying to broker a peace treaty. No, you want to relax. And that's why I've really been enjoying quints. Their 100% European linen shirts and pants have basically become my default setting for the summer. They're breathable, comfortable, easy to throw on and somehow make it look like I put a lot more thought into getting dressed than I actually did. And that's honestly been my experience with quints in general. The pieces just fit into your life. Their tees are soft enough to wear all day, and the lightweight cotton sweaters are exactly what you want when the sun goes down and the evening cools off a bit. For me, it's been the linen pieces that have changed the way I get dressed for the summer because they take the decision making out of it. You put them on, you feel comfortable, and you move on with your day, which to me is exactly what summer style should be. So make your summer wardrobe easier. Go to quince.com what now for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's quince.com what now for Free Shipping and 365 day returns. Quints.com whatnow pretty much every brand offers rewards these days, but let's be honest, most of them aren't all that rewarding. Well, starting now, Verizon's doing rewards. Different rewards you'll love all year round. For every customer you see, they're introducing Verizon Dollars, which gives you cash back every month just for being a customer. That's it. Plus you have the flexibility to use those glorious new dollars how you actually want. Shop with Verizon, get gift cards for the brands you love, or transfer them to the partner programs. They're also introducing Verizon Shine, where now every Monday you can snag once in a lifetime experiences like NFL tickets across the globe, all inclusive music festivals and the chance to meet your favorite stars. Plus daily drops tickets and presale access all week. So grab Verizon Dollars just for doing you.

[Guest/Interviewer]

Whew.

[Trevor Noah]

Oh, and epic experiences from Verizon Shine just because it's Monday. Now those are some rewarding rewards only from Verizon. Enroll [e-mail].

[Eugene]

You know, as as this conversation goes, I feel like the average Consumer, I feel helpless. Oh. I feel like there's nothing much I can do. But there's one point that you made that actually piqued my interest when you were speaking about boycotts in the township. Yeah. During apartheid, I think it was the 70s and the 80s. And there used to be another form of it called the stay away.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Eugene]

So in a stairway, you don't take public transportation, you don't go to the factories, you don't go.

[Cory Doctorow]

General strike.

[Eugene]

General strike. Yes. But those two went together. And you were so right by saying that it doesn't mean people just because they didn't buy washing powder, they didn't wash their clothes.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right.

[Eugene]

Just because they're on a stairway, they couldn't move around. It was sort of organized for people to be able to get by, but for the corporation to feel the impact. And I feel like as time went on and as things happened, we as the consumers were made unaware accomplices by being shareholders in companies.

[Cory Doctorow]

Hmm.

[Eugene]

Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

I think there's something to that. I do think there's also just this neoliberal idea that the best way to participate in politics is to vote with your wallet. And, you know, billionaires love this idea because their wallet's thicker than all of our wallets put together. And so that's the one vote they can. There's like, whatever. A thousand billionaires. Right. But they can win every wallet vote. They can't win any other kind of vote. So it's very convenient that we've been told, you know, your consumption choices, that what you should really do if you're angry at Elon Musk, is agonize endlessly about whether you should have a Twitter account. Right. And not.

[Eugene]

That's what you should be doing.

[Cory Doctorow]

Not try to act politically. Not try to, like, say, oh, well, maybe he shouldn't be allowed to buy more companies. Maybe his public contracts with the federal government should be canceled. Maybe the ways that he's material mislaid his shareholders should be prosecuted more vigorously. No, no, no, no, no. It's all about whether you have a Twitter account.

[Trevor Noah]

Is this why Elon Musk called you a scourge on humanity?

[Cory Doctorow]

He did call me a scourge on humanity, but it was because I told him that I thought it was a different thing. He was like, so I'm a. My other life. I'm a science fiction novelist, and I write when I'm anxious. I wrote like nine books during lockdown, so I write books for all ages. I have a new middle grades book coming out next year. I mean, Everything. Picture books, tech, criticism, everything. And he was singing the praises of a writer who I knew a little, but quite very much admired. A guy called Ian Banks, died very tragically of cancer, who was a utopian socialist.

[Trevor Noah]

Okay.

[Cory Doctorow]

And he was like, I consider myself a utopian socialist in the model of Ian Banks. And I was like, no offense, but I knew Ian, he was an ardent trade unionist and you're a union buster. And he's like, well, in Iain Banks's novels, I didn't see any unions. And I'm like, yes, these novels are set 100,000 years in the future in which there are galactic brain artificial intelligences, piloting spaceships the size of planets with 100 billion people living on them. The fact that he didn't see a need for unions there tells you nothing about whether he thinks we need a union here. And he was like, well, if Ian Banks could have seen one of my Tesla factories, he would have seen that we don't need unions either. And I said, again, no offense, I think there is a difference between traveling faster than the speed of light and eking out marginal gains in the production of electric vehicles.

[Guest/Interviewer]

Damn.

[Cory Doctorow]

And that is when he called me scourge on humanity.

[Trevor Noah]

Damn.

[Cory Doctorow]

But I wanted to pop the stack. Cause this started with talking about, he

[Trevor Noah]

block you after that?

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah, he did.

[Trevor Noah]

I'm always fascinated by that side of Elon, the blocking butt.

[Cory Doctorow]

He's a baby.

[Trevor Noah]

He is the number one champion of free speech and jokes and opinions and all this until he doesn't have a rebuttal for you. And then he's like, block you racist. Go away.

[Eugene]

Block.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right.

[Trevor Noah]

Gone.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right.

[Trevor Noah]

I don't understand how the owner of one of the world's largest town squares, as we now call it, blocks people.

[Cory Doctorow]

Oh, I understand it.

[Eugene]

Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

But to me he's a thin skinned baby.

[Trevor Noah]

Yes. But to me it's the antitheses. Do you understand what I'm saying?

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

It is antithesis of the thing.

[Eugene]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

You have come in and said everyone should say what they want and we should do this open mic club.

[Eugene]

Oh, no.

[Trevor Noah]

Let's go, let's go, let's go.

[Eugene]

Yeah, you're too open mic now. Come on. The mic is too open.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, like it's such a. It's. But, but, but, but actually that's something I wonder is like where do you think, where did the fracture occur? Because I can use Elon Musk, you know, I can talk about like founders of Google. I can talk. Yeah, man. I won't lie. A lot of what they set out to do was noble and beautiful. It was brilliant.

[Eugene]

It always starts like that.

[Trevor Noah]

I will always be grateful to Elon Musk because of what he did with electric cars. Because I love driving an electric car and I think it's better for everyone. I won't.

[Cory Doctorow]

You're a hater or a lover. You're a hater.

[Eugene]

He traumatized.

[Trevor Noah]

Can I tell you? He didn't hate. He didn't hate. He doesn't hate electric cars.

[Eugene]

No, I'm traumatized by one he hate.

[Trevor Noah]

He drove mine. And then like the experience of trying to charge an electric car and then like, where and how, and I wish

[Eugene]

I knew you then, because I think there's a conspiracy when it comes to these charges.

[Cory Doctorow]

Well, and you know, one of the things that happened in the Biden administration is they forced Musk to open up access to Tesla chargers for non Tesla cars. They said, we're going to put federal dollars through the Inflation Reduction act into building out a federal network of cars, car chargers. But they will only work with cars whose manufacturers don't block people from using their chargers. So if you have a charging network and you don't let third parties use it, then we won't let you use the public one. We won't let the cars you make use the public one. And so Elon Musk opened up the Charger network. That was Tim Wu. He was great, A. A great guy who worked in the Biden White House. He and I have known each other since we were nine years old.

[Trevor Noah]

We went the same elementary Dungeons and Dragons together.

[Cory Doctorow]

We played Dungeons and Dragons together. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.

[Trevor Noah]

But this is. You see that thing you're talking about? So I go like this. I'm constantly grateful, you know, to many of these visionaries for some of the things they've inspired and created. But it's interesting, that phrase you said, Eugene, it always starts like that.

[Eugene]

What?

[Trevor Noah]

What changed? What changed? To take, I'm gonna make a bet and say 90% of the people who ran or were the top people In Silicon Valley, 90% of them, at least, they were progressive. They were trying to create a utopian society. They were pushing towards this idea of us sharing and having more and being more and all of this, and then now they've turned into like, sort of like the oil barons of old.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

What happened?

[Cory Doctorow]

It's the last scene of that incredible documentary, Animal Farm, where you look from the pigs to the men, and the men to the pigs, and you can't see the difference. So you Know, I think it's related to this point that I was making about how we're seeing this surge of antitrust. Like I said, in Europe, in Japan and Korea, they went after Apple and Singapore. I forget what the case was. Australia was about Facebook and Google and the news companies. But also in China where they said to the big tech companies, companies in China, you can't block little companies from interoperating with you so that they can enter the market. And I think that it is remarkable that we've had this surge of antitrust stuff because as you say, these people are currently like, they're definitely in the stage in life where they don't see any reason why this death match should be stopped, right? Because they're winning. And there is this incredible current in the air where people are just sick of this. They're just really angry, as you said, they don't know why, but they're really angry. And we sometimes talk about like political will and it's hard to know what a political will is, but I think it's like the wind where you don't see it until something gets in the way. And so what we've seen is like anytime a politician sticks their head up and goes, maybe we should do something about concentrated corporate wealth, all of a sudden there's this scale, you know, that just like, sort of like it's like they put a little sail, like a little handkerchief size sail and suddenly the ship that's been becalmed in the doldrums for 20 years is like scudding across the seas, right? And so there is this like great upwelling of anger at what's happened. And I think it's because we decided that we wouldn't stop monopolies from forming. And absent some kind of muscular government action, monopolies will always form that monopolies. It's not because they're efficient, but because the parochial interests of the people who own firms are always better served by cooperating with other people who own large firms, by for example, buying each other and so on than they are by competing. When you compete, Peter Thiel calls it wasteful competition, you erode your cash basis, right? Like when Google gives Apple $20 billion a year not to enter the search market. It's like the Pope dividing up the new world, right? They're saying, well, we're not going to compete with you where you are. You're not going to compete. That's where we are. The $20 billion costs us less than it would take if you were competing directly with us. But it also saves you more than you would have to pay in capital expenditures if you were to develop your search engines. So we're all good. This is us sort of conspiring. Adam Smith, who's the father of capitalism, he has this famous quote. Men of the same trade seldom gather, but the conversation turns to a contrivance to fix prices. There's just this incredible temptation. And so without, without state intervention, this will happen. And it's just very hard to resist temptation. Like I think that like there comes this point where every like you've, you built this self licking ice cream cone. It's kind of just, it's like the money's, the money's just piling up, you know, and like, and you know you're supposedly, you're fierce competitors with these people. You all kind of know each other and especially like maybe not the founders, but in the upper ranks, you know, especially when there's only a small number of firms, everyone like job hops from one firm to another because often you know, like the VP can't become an SVP in that firm because there isn't someone ready to quit or die. And so they get headhunted laterally and they move back and forth.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, everyone moves diagonally.

[Cory Doctorow]

And so like they're all like godparents to each other's children. They're like executors of each other's estates. They play pickleball. They're in the same polycule, you know. And like they just end up with this kind of emergent consensus. Yeah. Are you a pickleball man?

[Eugene]

The sport of the corrupt.

[Cory Doctorow]

I know I'm no pickle baller.

[Eugene]

What a self licking ice cream. I can't wait to use that phrase now.

[Trevor Noah]

Like I'm dying to use the phrase

[Eugene]

of like back at this again. So in, in South Africa currently there's a commission that is investigating corruption within first municipalities. Start with the police, then it became with municipalities and obviously the tender system and the business dealings that is being done. And it so came out that it's not that a person can go whistleblow to their boss because in most cases the boss is the corrupt person.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right.

[Eugene]

And you can't go to the police and find a constable sitting at a charge office. And what's the charge? I think something is going on at my company. But regulators play a big important part. So competitors that didn't get the deal are the ones that blow the whistle?

[Trevor Noah]

Yes.

[Eugene]

Yeah. Then someone on the inside who knows exactly how the deal went is the one that can give the competitor evidence to go to a regulator, then it turns into a court case, and then charges can get pressed. But here's my thing. The average person sitting there, knowing what they don't know, what can they do? Because like you said with the stairways, it was easy. With the boycotts, it was easy. There was another one called the go slow where you show up at work but you actually don't do anything.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, go slow. Yeah, yeah, they're sometimes called right work to rule go slows. They're all the. Yeah, same thing. You follow all the rules, but you're not really doing anything, which means you don't do anything.

[Eugene]

But here we are now we're finding ourselves here, and as you guys speak, I know you guys love tech so much, and he's done a good job over time of explaining tech to me.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right.

[Eugene]

You explaining another side of it, which is the dark, evil Vader self licking ice cream version.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Eugene]

And I'm like, what can I do? So I do know I'm cornered.

[Cory Doctorow]

I have an answer for you. It's kind of grounded in this punchline of my favorite joke from eastern Canada. The punchline is, if you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here.

[Eugene]

Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

Like, we had a more robust enforcement system. Like before we decided monopolies were efficient and we were just going to tolerate them. So that happened in the Reagan years. Have you ever heard, you ever heard anyone say, oh, that thing is so screwed up, it's really borked. Have you ever heard borked? No. It's a saying about something that's really bad. It's named after this guy who was a judge, Robert Bork, who Reagan tried to put on the Supreme Court. And he handled his confirmation hearing so badly that now we say things that are really screwed over.

[Trevor Noah]

Bork, I didn't even know that that was possible in America. Oh, yeah, I thought you always get on the Supreme Court.

[Guest/Interviewer]

No.

[Eugene]

Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

No, no. This was before pre Susan Collins. So Bork's big idea was that monopolies are good and that they're efficient and that like, if all of us are using the same search engine, that must mean that it's the best search engine. Wouldn't it be weird to use public funds to punish a firm for pleasing the public? So he was like, we should just allow these companies to get too big to fail and they'll never become too big to care. It'll be fine. The market will correct it. So when we decided to start tolerating monopolies, we got Monopolies, right? We got them in everything. Media, clearly.

[Trevor Noah]

Right?

[Cory Doctorow]

Five. Five publishers, four studios, three labels. Two companies that control the apps and one company that does the ebooks and the audiobooks. Right. It's like, why giving creative workers more copyright has not helped? Because, like, it's like giving bullied kids extra lunch money. Right? Like, they just say, oh, yeah, you've got an extra 20 years of copyright. We'll just put that in our contract now. Right? We're not going to give you more money. So we had this idea that monopolies maybe were efficient, and they're not. And so we need to fix that. And we've been here before. You know the Lenny Bruce sketch about before? There's a crime, a law. There has to be a crime.

[Eugene]

No, no.

[Cory Doctorow]

And it has this whole thing about, like, how is it that we have a law against having sex with a chicken? Someone must have had sex with a chicken first. Right? And so the way we got these laws, it wasn't like someone came down off a mount with two stone towels tablets and said, we have to stop these firms from engaging in merging.

[Trevor Noah]

They watched it happen. Yeah, okay. And they reacted to it.

[Cory Doctorow]

They were in a situation, if anything, worse than the situation we're in. Right. And this, you know, from the 1890s to through the Gilded Age, right? This was the period in which you had the robber barons, the trusts. That's why we call it trust busting. So what used to happen is like John D. Rockefeller would say, hey, everybody who makes oil, we're going to start a new company called a trust. And if you've got a 16% share of all the oil in the country, you get a 16% share of the trust. And if you've got 20%, you get 20%. And then I'm going to run the trust. All the oil companies will be one company that I'll run. They'll have different names, but I'll run them all and just. We'll disperse the profits according to your market share. As of now, there was like a whiskey trust and a shield trust and a coal trust and a genius. Everything in the country was running this way. The First Antitrust Law, 1890. Robert Sherman. He was a senator. He's the brother of Tecumseh Sherman, a guy burned down in Atlanta. And he said, if we would not tolerate a king, we should not tolerate an autocrat of trade with the power to fix the price of the necessities of life. And so we get this law in 1890. It was in response to the rail companies. But by 1912, we used it to break up Standard Oil. And the way that we broke up Standard Oil, which was the most corrupt, most oppressive company in the history of the world, I think even like right up there with like the Dutch East India Company and the Hudson's Bay Company. Really horrible, horrible firm with a stranglehold on the planet. You may have seen these old editorial cartoons of like a fanged octopus whose head kind of looks like an oil derrick with its arms wrapped around the world.

[Trevor Noah]

I think I've seen images like that.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. Gilded Age. There are also weird Nazi images that are also this, that are bad. But this was before the Nazis.

[Trevor Noah]

Okay, got it, got it.

[Cory Doctorow]

Half a century before the Nazis. So this woman, Ida Tarbell, who was the first woman in America to get a science degree, she was a biologist. She was a generationally brilliant orator, sort of the Obama of her age later became a really important suffragist. Her father was a Pennsylvania oilman who'd been destroyed by John D. Rockefeller. And she had a grudge. And so she researched what John D. Rockefeller was doing. And unfortunately she was working before they invented titles. So her book was called the History of the Standard Oil Company, volumes one and two. But it was published in Collier's magazine, which was a read magazine, one of the most important magazines at the time. And it was so infuriating to people that they demanded action from their political classes.

[Guest/Interviewer]

Wow.

[Cory Doctorow]

And by 1912, we broke it up. Now this is living memory. 1912. People who are alive in 1912 are dead now. But there are people today, alive, who worked under those people. Yeah, right. And there are people alive who worked under those people. We are not reinventing the lost art of a fallen civilization here. No one's asking us to like, figure out how to embalm a pharaoh or build like pyramids without power tools, right? This is stuff that we can do. And the point about this political will is it is surging all over the world. We can't solve this as individuals, Right? You're not going to shop your way out of it. We can't solve it by fixing the problems of these people who have talked themselves into becoming these like, ketamine addled failures, right? But we can fix it by fixing the policy environment, right? The policy that create the insh. The era in which everything turns to shit. We know what those policies were. We decided to stop enforcing antitrust laws. So companies form cartels and monopolies and duopolies. And then they influenced all of our other policies. So we Got IP policies like the ones that make it illegal to repair modified technology. We got other policies like the pharma policies that stop South Africa from making antiretrovirals at the height of the AIDS crisis. We got the progeny of those which stopped the global south from making their own MRNA vaccines at the height of the pandemic.

[Trevor Noah]

We've got that with. With seeds as well.

[Cory Doctorow]

Monsanto doing stop people from growing food. Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

People that are experiencing famine around the world, many of them cannot now plant seeds to grow food because the seeds have now been monopolized, which is one of the craziest.

[Cory Doctorow]

Monsanto Bear. Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

Come on, guys. How can we allow a company to own seeds? Not even like their seed per se, but just a seed that they can argue very similar. Yeah, like the lineage of that seed. Like they're like, no, we have the ancestors of your seeds, not the seed. Our seed is related to the seeds.

[Cory Doctorow]

We didn't sell you the seed. But the seed came from a plant that we bred or genetically engineered.

[Eugene]

So the seed came from our seed,

[Cory Doctorow]

but not even a plant that came from a plant that came from a plant. Like they own the life form.

[Eugene]

So how are they stopping people from planting?

[Trevor Noah]

No, they don't stop you from planting, but if you grow any of it, they come after you. And the governments around the world help them enforce this against even come to

[Eugene]

your farm and test the genetics of your plant.

[Cory Doctorow]

There was a member of the legislative assembly.

[Trevor Noah]

You playing games, bro?

[Cory Doctorow]

There was a member of the legislative Assembly. So like an MP or like a congressman in Alberta who is a farmer who had this happen. His neighbor seed blew onto his land.

[Trevor Noah]

I remember the story.

[Cory Doctorow]

And he was shut down by the federal government of Canada because they have an obligation under WIPO treaties, under these UN treaties that protect intellectual property. They have an obligation to enforce Monsanto's patent in Canada. And so Monsanto shut him down. This is happening in India. The suicides among farmers are very high in India. And a lot of it has to do with the rising prices of these foundational inputs to agriculture, seed and fertilizer and pesticides. So the parochial preferences of individual firms and the people who run them and their shareholders. And you said we all own shares in these companies. But. But really like the median American worker has $955 saved for retirement. So we don't own shares in all these companies?

[Trevor Noah]

No, no, no. I think. I think what Eugene meant was, he meant metaphorically, they've made us shareholders because we have the phone.

[Cory Doctorow]

Oh, yeah. Well, we're stakeholders.

[Trevor Noah]

We shop on their. On their platforms.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Eugene]

And then your bank has sort of told you, you can buy this.

[Trevor Noah]

And then we feel like we're like,

[Cory Doctorow]

well, like, you know when you bought your phone that you could only install Apple apps on it and you knew when you bought the ebook that it wouldn't belong to you, and so on and so on. And my rebuttal to that is like, you knew when you entered the stream of commerce that since time immemorial, if you sell me something, it's mine. Right.

[Trevor Noah]

I agree with this.

[Cory Doctorow]

So emotionally fragile that you can't believe that when I buy a device, I decide what software is on it, then maybe you're in the long maybe. Maybe it's not that I bought the wrong thing. Maybe you shouldn't be in this line of business. Right. Like, I'm a writer, I work in books. I'm a recovering bookseller and library worker too. I love books. And like the thing where when I sell you a book, it belongs to you, that's not just older than, like copyright, it's older than printing, it's older than bound books, it's older than paper, we have scrolls on papyrus that this was the deal for.

[Eugene]

For.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right. So it cannot have come to as a surprise to anyone who decided to sell books that the deal with the book is you bought it, you own it.

[Eugene]

Right?

[Cory Doctorow]

It's your goddamn book. And so like when someone says to me, oh, well, why did you buy the ebook? We had the fine print. It very clearly said, by buying this book, you agree that I'm allowed to come over to your house and punch your grandmother, wear your underwear and make long distance calls and eat all the food in your fridge. You knew when you clicked. I agree.

[Eugene]

Right. Great one.

[Trevor Noah]

That really is. That was really a great position.

[Eugene]

I never. When you speak about farmers and obviously when you speak about the, the seed genetics, I never. Because I was speaking to someone who's in agriculture and then Agritech, to be more precise, and they were saying that planting season farmers, no matter how much money they make, they still have to go to the banks to ask for money.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Eugene]

I never understood why would you. If you're running a business and you can afford to fund your own business, why would you need to go borrow? And now it makes sense.

[Cory Doctorow]

Although this is much older. So this is one of my weird special subjects.

[Eugene]

You only have one.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The history of debt. Right. So the first money we have, before we had coin money, we had debt ledgers, and debt ledgers were because of agriculture in ancient Babylon. And so if you wanted to plant a crop, you would have the money for the crop after it came in, but you needed the money for the fertilizer and the farm labor and everything before it came in. And so there was a credit market in ancient Babylon. They would record how much you owed and then you would pay it back out of the harvest. And the thing is that no matter how good a farmer you are, sometimes the crop will fail, right? There'll be a locust, there'll be whatever. And so run that long enough and eventually you end up with a group of hereditary creditors and a group of hereditary debtors. Because if you can't pay the debt, then you've got to roll the debt and then you owe. Then you will never get ahead. Right. You have, by the time you've like lost two or three crops in your career, you're just always perpetually behind. And then if that happens long enough, the agricultural output of the country, which is the most important output it has, becomes the plaything of the creditors who are like, actually, I want more ornamental flowers for my table, not more staple crops. And then the society fails. And so Babylon's answer to this is something that persisted all through the Bronze Age called the jubilee, which was that at fixed intervals. So every 50 years plus when certain occurrences happen, like a change of the king, all debts were forgiven. And this persisted. Yo.

[Eugene]

What?

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, and this persisted through Rome. It persisted through like, like all of all the civilizations of antiquity. Yeah, because they, they had this problem over and over again that when you have a group of creditors, they start to command the productive output of debtors. And these are self reinforcing phenomena where the creditors get richer and the debtors get poorer and more beholden. And creditors are not good planners. Right. They're just not good planners of civilization. They have personal interests. You know that like this is one of the problems of letting people amass too much power is that even the smartest person is prone to folly. You know, Henry Ford at one point was worried about rubber for tires. And so he was like, I'm going to build my own rubber plantations in Brazil in a town called Fordlandia in the middle of the jungle. And I'm going to.

[Trevor Noah]

It was already called that.

[Cory Doctorow]

No, no, he built it.

[Trevor Noah]

Oh, okay, wow.

[Cory Doctorow]

And he was like, I'm going to take, I'm going to build a copy of Dearborn Mission, which is the company town in Brazil. And he. So he got the same firm of architects. So he'd built this town In Michigan. He was going to build it in Brazil. And he was like, all right, I want you to make it ready. And they said, okay, but Southern hemisphere, right? So we put the windows in the other side of the building. It was like, don't be stupid. We put the windows on. On this side of the building because it's going to be just like Dearborn.

[Eugene]

No.

[Cory Doctorow]

And that was it. They did it. Right? Because, like, even the smartest guy is really dumb some of the times. And if there's no one there to call you on your bullshit, you crawl up your own asshole and die. Right? Like this. Just. Everybody has seen it. Everybody knows someone. You must know this through media, right? You must know people who just got to the top of their game.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

And turn into Howard Hughes.

[Trevor Noah]

But this is common with everyone. Like, I often say this. When it comes to billionaires in particular, it is interesting to me that we assume that somebody having a copious amount of wealth means that they also have a copious amount of knowledge about everything. And I'm like, no. You realize you can be in the position where you made a shit ton of money because you knew one thing very well.

[Eugene]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

That's it.

[Cory Doctorow]

And you got very lucky.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, yeah. No, no. I mean, when Mark Cuban said that on the podcast, he said. Mark Cuban was like, yo, yo, yo, yo. He said, if you took all my money away tomorrow, I could go out there and I know how to make money. He said, but I can't be a billionaire again.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right?

[Trevor Noah]

He said, don't. The billionaire part is extremely, extremely lucky.

[Cory Doctorow]

Selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo required that SoftBank, which is their VC, who gave them all the money, who then gave all the money to Uber, who then are now giving all the money to OpenAI that they be there, like, being they are the sucker at every table.

[Trevor Noah]

SoftBank. It really is weird. Why is SoftBank like this one guy,

[Cory Doctorow]

Masayoshi Son, he is a dumb man with access to a lot of money.

[Trevor Noah]

But how do they stay around for so long? I don't get it.

[Cory Doctorow]

Well, now it's the Saudis giving it to him who are like, they are the Beverly Hillbillies.

[Trevor Noah]

Do you know the story of SoftBank? SoftBank is crazy. I mean, obviously you know the details. No, but every time you hear a story of like, a boom, a boom and a bust in, like, a bubble. So you'll hear like, people were making hundreds of millions and they were selling their companies, and then the next day, they were all worth nothing. Somehow, many of these junctures, the person who's left with nothing is a company called SoftBank. Please, please break it down.

[Cory Doctorow]

Because it's the Forrest Gump of shitty investments. So this guy, Masayoshi Son, he's just. Just very good at talking dumb billionaires out of lots of money, which he then pumps into companies where they inflate bubbles. And they do have exits sometimes, right? Oh, okay. But they have the exit. But then. Then the firms are worth nothing. I mean, Yahoo bought every promising startup of the Web 2.0 era and destroyed it. Right. And he gave them the money to do it. And there was a period where their stock gains were high. And I don't know whether his investors got out or what when he got out. But you know, Yahoo was destroyed by this string of acquisitions. Right? Like, Yahoo had a business and they turned it into an acquisition factory.

[Trevor Noah]

And that's what killed them.

[Cory Doctorow]

That did nothing. Right. That just destroyed business after business. In part, because when you buy all the competitors, you put them under one roof, then they fight with each other.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah. And another thing people take for granted is this. If your business starts off moving in a direction, as in it is creating or doing something right. And then you start becoming more focused on your competitive competitors and you start buying them up. Seems like a smart idea. The thing that people forget is you now own those businesses.

[Eugene]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

So you have to do one of two things. You either have to shut them down, but that also requires, like, work and it's money that you're losing. Or you have to figure out how you integrate them into your business, which is a terrible idea most of the time because they have their own culture, they have their own systems, they have their own people, they have their own ideas. So now you go, do we take their marketing department? Do we take their head office? Do we keep ours? Do we not? And now you know what you've done? You have lost focus on what you were doing.

[Eugene]

Your original business. Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

Do you get what I'm saying? It's the equivalent of somebody saying, I'm going to date or marry every single person who I think might be competition.

[Cory Doctorow]

I'm talking about Elon Musk again.

[Trevor Noah]

You're a scourge on humanity, Corey.

[Cory Doctorow]

But let me.

[Trevor Noah]

You go, like, you know what? Anyone I see as competition, I'm. I'm just gonna. No, they're gonna. I'm gonna. I'm gonna marry them. I'm gonna bring them in. I'm gonna marry. Then it's like, yeah. And then you're gonna end up in a house that has, like, 50 spouses. Because you were trying to stop those spouses from being competition that would make them happy. Because you're like, no, I just don't want them as competition for my spouse. Then it's like, no, no, just focus on your spouse. No, no, no. That person might become competition for my spouse. I'm gonna. You're also married to me. You're also married to me. You're also married to me. No one's competition for my spouse. And then at the end of it, you now have 50 spouses in one house and things are falling apart. And you wonder why, right? You lose your focus as well.

[Cory Doctorow]

So, yeah, so I mean, Brandeis called this the curse of bigness. He says that when firms get too big, they start fighting with each other. The locus of competition moves from external to firms external to the firm, right? So like you're like, I want Google to be better than the other search engines. And then it becomes divisions in Google, saying, I want my divisions to do better. Right.

[Trevor Noah]

So the culture moves inward.

[Cory Doctorow]

That's right. And so it's kind of like an autoimmune disorder, right? You have these kind of princelings who are like, you know, I want to especially like, you know, the big Hollywood firms, big studios, right? They've got like VPs, presidents. VPs or no, it's like directors, VPs, SVPs, EVPs and presidents. And each one is like an order of magnitude richer than the other one. So like the career earning opportunities to go from one tier to the other and the millions are 10 of millions. And so there's a lot of looking over at this SVP's underlings to see if any of them are about to do something that might bring that division to prominence and then screwing them. And so there's a lot of like backstabbing. I mean, you've worked in the studio system, right? You know what this is like, this is constantly rat fucking each other, right? Because that's their major locus of competition.

[Trevor Noah]

But you see, this is. I didn't, I didn't think of it through that lens. I have noticed at times people are working in companies but not in tandem. They are either actively sabotaging each other or letting the other person fall into a pothole. That's right, because they're like, if that happens, then I'm gonna look better. But I never considered it.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

An institutional idea. We're gonna continue this conversation right after this short, short break.

[Guest/Interviewer]

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[Cory Doctorow]

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[Trevor Noah]

You know what I think of with all of this is I go, I'm so sad that Monopoly, the board game, ha. Never achieved it. Achieved all of the popularity but none of the message.

[Cory Doctorow]

Uh huh.

[Trevor Noah]

Cause you played Monopoly. I'm assuming we've all played Monopoly. I don't know a single person who has finished a game of Monopoly. And I also do not know a single person who has enjoyed the ending of that game of Monopoly. Unless they were the last person with the money.

[Cory Doctorow]

Sure.

[Trevor Noah]

Like you put people down for a game of Monopoly. I don't care who you are, put them down, start playing. Good times. Oh yeah, give me my 200.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right.

[Trevor Noah]

I just passed go. Ooh yeah.

[Eugene]

Oh yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

Everyone's having a great time. And then people start buying properties. Everyone's friends. Until everyone has a property, everyone's just like, oh, I can't wait to buy this. You also can't wait to. You should buy that. Oh ho ho, yeah. The blue ones look good on you. Yeah. And people go around people and people start buying. People start buying. And then really quickly in the game you notice a shift in the table. There are the haves, the haves and have nots and the have nots.

[Cory Doctorow]

Uh huh.

[Trevor Noah]

And what makes the game so powerful is not just that you have the haves and the have nots. You see how unfair it is for the cause. Now you get to a point where you add those little hotels and you know what I mean? You just build this thing up. Build this thing up.

[Cory Doctorow]

Wealth begets wealth.

[Trevor Noah]

You do less.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right.

[Trevor Noah]

People do more. You even get to the point where the person who has is like, I don't even feel like rolling. You guys just roll and come to me and you're gonna have to pay me for just existing.

[Eugene]

And even the conversation of the players that have, they have more in common with each other now.

[Trevor Noah]

Oh you completely.

[Eugene]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

Why don't. I'll give you the railway station. Cause I want you, you should own all of the utilities and travel hubs. Let me have that street. And they're so cordial with each other. They're so lovely. And then like here it's like, please, can, can you, can you break a hundred for. Ah, shut up. So put it on the table. I don't trust you. Put it down before I touch it. I'm not gonna touch that. Your dirty.

[Eugene]

Mm.

[Trevor Noah]

Okay. I'll give you 95. What do you mean you'll give me 95? I'll give you take it or leave it. I'll give you 95. But it's 100. Do you want the change on? Okay, fine. It's amazing how that game shows us.

[Eugene]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

Why we don't want monopoly power.

[Cory Doctorow]

You know the story of the game though. It was created as the Landlord's game by a woman who was a Georgian. So. Or Georgists. So Georgists are this weird economic philosophy that says that all taxes should be land taxes. They have this it's facially plausible idea that because land is the most scarce thing and because appreciation land value is never the fault of the person who owns the land. It's always like the neighborhood gets more valuable and that's there's this like mismatch in incentives. If you can just like own a piece of land and your neighbors do things and your land gets more valuable, blah, blah, blah. So this georgist woman made this game called the Landlord's Game. It had two sets of rules. You played one cooperatively, one competitively to produce this pedagogical output. This traveling salesman played the game, stole it, sold it to Parker Brothers.

[Trevor Noah]

Yo, you're lying.

[Guest/Interviewer]

No.

[Cory Doctorow]

100%.

[Trevor Noah]

This is even better.

[Cory Doctorow]

100%. And it was a monopoly. Decades later, that Parker Brothers finally admitted that this woman was the creator of the Landlord's game. And I think either she or her descendants got a small amount of money and, you know, there's like a small credit on the Parker Brothers website for her. That's it. Like.

[Eugene]

Yes.

[Trevor Noah]

How can a game about screwing people over come for

[Cory Doctorow]

a little on the nose? Yeah, yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

Is there a system or a country or place you've seen right now that's like really just nailing this? Is there a beacon we can look to while we can.

[Cory Doctorow]

I'll tell you what I'm hopeful about. I don't think there's anything that's nailing us, but I mentioned every country in the world adopted a law like the DMCA that bans modification, circumvention of technology to modify it. And they did that because the US Trade Representative said, if you don't do this, we're gonna hit you with tariffs.

[Trevor Noah]

Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

Well, happy Liberation Day.

[Eugene]

Amazing.

[Trevor Noah]

The tariffs came in anyways now, and

[Cory Doctorow]

so now there's like this army of people out there. So, you know, Jeff Bezos, when he started Amazon, was infamous for this one, saying he would say, your margin is my opportunity. Opportunity, Right. So you look at the margin that Apple has on payments or the margin that inkjet printers companies have, and this is my favorite one. I know you say not everyone uses printers, but like.

[Trevor Noah]

No, no. But I grew up with. Can I tell you something? I'll tell you my story. So I grew up with them because my mom had her own little home business.

[Cory Doctorow]

Oh, yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

When I tell you, Corey, the journeys that I've been down, because you'd buy the printer and you'd be like, okay, this is great. We've got a printer. What they would do often is the printer would come with half or quarter filled cartridges. They wouldn't tell you this, so the printer wouldn't come with enough.

[Eugene]

But.

[Trevor Noah]

And you're like, okay, fine. You don't buy a car with a full tank of gas. So I get. It's fine.

[Cory Doctorow]

Sure.

[Trevor Noah]

Until you go and get more cartridges and then you find that the cartridges cost more than the printer.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

[Trevor Noah]

But like. But like exponentially. More like. I'm talking. I remember once we had one printer. It was HP printer. The printer itself, my mom bought for 700 rand. So what, like $35 somewhere there? And then the cartridges, each color was around 700 rand or 600. Yo, we were like, that's not possible.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, and it won't print black if there's no violence. Yes, yes. No, they wouldn't scan if one of your cartridges is actually.

[Trevor Noah]

So I remember when they came out with microchips. So what happened was first they just had the ink and it was this mission. So then what we started doing was my mom was like, yo, I met a guy who sells the ink. And what they can do is they'll give you a syringe and then you can do this yourself. And it's messy, but if you can figure it out, you got it.

[Cory Doctorow]

Okay, fine.

[Trevor Noah]

So we started doing this. Then they came out with new printers. And the new printers from Epson and from HP had this little gold microchip on the back. Then I was like, what are these things for? I'll tell you what they were for, Eugene. They were there so that it knew

[Eugene]

when the ink was finished and what you were doing.

[Trevor Noah]

They were like, nah, brah. They're like, nah, something's changed here. This is not the ink. No, it's full. And it's like. It doesn't seem full to me. Full of bullshit. That's what it's full of.

[Cory Doctorow]

Same thing where the car won't recognize the part or the ventilator won't recognize the part. It's the same thing and it's the same law that protects it. So, you know, the cartel of ink, print ink companies, or printer companies have monotonically raised the price of ink. Now ink is the most expensive fluid a civilian can purchase without a government permit. At $10,000 a gallon, it will be cheaper to print your grocery list with the semen of a Kentucky derby winning st. Right? So, yo man, who's this weekend the Kentucky.

[Eugene]

Eugene.

[Trevor Noah]

Eugene. Who's this guy now? Yo, bro, who's come get your mans? Eugene, this man just said Corey, I don't know. So I wish, I wish everyone who dealt in economics and history had your vibe. Well, that's. Everyone would listen to economics and history.

[Cory Doctorow]

So the point is that there's a lot of people out there who are like, that margin should be my opportunity, right? This is colored water selling at $10,000 a gallon. I'll sell it to you for $5 a gallon. And like you say, people who are not at the apex of technological knowledge. I mean, I don't know Your mom, But I assume your mom was like, not a computer scientist.

[Trevor Noah]

No, no, no, she wasn't. She definitely wasn't.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. You know, and people who are not, like, from the upper socioeconomic strata or whatever, they're like, even more motivated than dudes who look like to figure out how to get the most out of their technology. First person I ever saw with two sims in their phone was a minimum wage daycare worker at my daughter's daycare when we grew up. She grew up in East London. So, you know, these minimum wage daycare workers were like, I want the SIM that gets me unlimited calling to some

[Trevor Noah]

of my family, but I also need

[Cory Doctorow]

the SIM that gets me unlimited text. And they figured out how to put two sims in their phone, right? How to get a phone with two SIM cages and the modified Android.

[Trevor Noah]

Not even. No, no, no. What we used to do before that was we just used to have a SIM card inside the COVID Remember the SIM card in the back cover? And you just knew when the time changed or you changed, you.

[Cory Doctorow]

You take your case off, put the

[Trevor Noah]

battery out, put the new SIM in.

[Cory Doctorow]

Let's go. So lots of people out there, like, this kind of army of, like, would be entrepreneurs and investors. And a lot of these investors are like, it'd be really nice to get into a business whose success isn't determined by how many trump coins I buy. It'd be really nice to invest in something that wasn't A.I. you know, like, A.I. has got this very speculative thing, like, maybe we'll figure out how to take a business that costs $1.4 trillion and makes $50 billion and eventually make it cost $50 billion and make $1.4 trillion. We're not sure how that's going to happen. If you give us $3 trillion more, maybe we'll figure it out. But meanwhile, we know how to make money processing payments on the iPhone. You just process the payments on the iPhone and you charge 3%, not 30%, and you lift the tax on economic activity. And lots of people would like to have this, right? Like, if you're a newspaper collecting subscriptions through the iPhone and you flip from 30% to 3%, it's like you got 25% more subscribers overnight. Right. You know, this is amazing possibilities. So you have this.

[Trevor Noah]

You don't even need to grow your business. Your business, basically, if you are selling on these devices, your business is already, let's say, 25% bigger than it is.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, that's right. So you've got, like, this army of, like, investors and then you have all these technologists. So the best and the brightest from all over the world have gone to Silicon Valley for two generations, seeking fortune and fame to make a dent in the universe and so on. Now they've all been chased out of the country by a guy in, you know, a gator in Oakley's, right? So they're looking for something cool to do. They know how. They know how to do this stuff. They're smart, right? And so you have investors, you have a reason to do this, right? And then add to that the geopolitical stuff. So Trump has been using his tech companies to shut down his political adversaries in other countries. So the judge at the International Criminal Court who swore on an arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu for genocide, Microsoft shut down all of his online accounts. So he lost his working files, his email, his archives, his calendar. He can't recover his password for any of the other services he uses because they all go to his Microsoft email address, which doesn't exist anymore.

[Trevor Noah]

We really take this stuff for granted.

[Cory Doctorow]

And then Trump did it again to the High Court justice in Brazil, who sentenced his ally, Giovsonaro, for attempting to steal the election in Brazil. So then you have people all over the world going like, wait, isn't this what we were told, like, China would do if we let them run our 5G?

[Eugene]

Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

And then you think about the fact that, like, these Russian soldiers who stole these John Deere tractors and took them to Chechnya, that John Deere was able to like, push an over the air update that permanently immobilized them. You're like, wait, he could do that to any tractor. He could do that to all the tractors, right? If, like, Trump wants to steal Greenland, he doesn't need to roll tanks into nuke. He can just, like, go to Greenland and shut down the government. Government and shut down all the tractors and shut down the cloud services, shut down the cloud services and push updates to all the iOS devices that brick them, and all the Android device, like he could straight of Hormuz, all the Licorice, Ozempic and Lego in the world, right? With a click of a mouse. So you have people all over the world who are like, God damn, we need to get off the American Internet, right? And so you have a geopolitical wing of this, right? Like NATSAC hawks, national security hawks, you have an entrepreneurial wing, and then you have the digital rights hippies like me, who've been banging this drum for 25 years. And remember, we started off talking about Coalitions.

[Eugene]

Yes.

[Cory Doctorow]

Well, this is a coalition the world has never seen before. Right. These three groups of people who have three different constituencies, three different arguments. But we all want the same thing. We want to transition from an Internet that is controlled by a small number of large American firms into one in which we restore that technological self determination that made us so excited to use the Internet in the early days, where users of the technology have the final say over how it's used. Where our digital services are built on open, transparent, auditable technology. Not black boxes. Like, again, like back to the structural engineering. If you hired a firm of structural engineers to build this building and they're like, we're not going to tell you the math we use to calculate the load.

[Trevor Noah]

We wouldn't accept that.

[Cory Doctorow]

Don't go in the building.

[Trevor Noah]

But we also wouldn't accept that.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah, but they provide you with the software.

[Trevor Noah]

It would be the equivalent of having an architect or an engineer or whatever, somebody build your house and say, we're not gonna give you the drawing. We're not gonna tell you anything about

[Cory Doctorow]

your house, where the H Vac is, where the electricity is.

[Trevor Noah]

You bought your house. But they're like, we will never tell you. And then you go, but what if something goes wrong? They're like, call us.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. It's a trade secret. Yeah. So now this is your house. We are like closer to a transition to a much better Internet than we've been in my whole career, my 25 years at the electronic foundation.

[Trevor Noah]

Damn, that's amazing. Look at it now. I'm optimistic.

[Cory Doctorow]

I don't mean it's. I don't mean like it's a slam dunk or whatever. And I would caution you off of optimism. I think optimism and pessimism. Wait, though, wait. Because I think hope is good. I think optimism and pessimism are a waste of your time. But optimism and pessimism are this kind of fatalistic belief that things are going to get better or worse no matter what we do. Hope is the belief that if you materially improve your circumstances that you can ascend a gradient towards a world you want to live in. And as you attain that higher vantage point, there's terrain that will be revealed to you that was occluded when you were down at this lower elevation.

[Trevor Noah]

Okay, okay.

[Cory Doctorow]

And that from that point we may be able to take the next step. Right. And we don't know how far up the hill we can get. We can't see our way from A to Z. You know I'm a novelist, right? So When I write, I can give you a clear, clean path with like a steadily rising curve of dramatic tension and payoffs and stakes that get to a climax. And then, you know, Princess Leia gives everyone a medal. Right. Like, that's how it works in fiction, but in the real world, it's messy. You go up two steps, you go down one because you've reached a dead end. You do a traversal, you go up again, you get stuck there for a while, then you find your way up again. But so long as there's a move you can make, there's always more hope. And the moves we can make now, weirdly, thanks to Comrade Trump, who appears to be doing praxis, the moves we can do now are much more aggressive than any of the moves we've had available to us forever.

[Trevor Noah]

That's fascinating.

[Cory Doctorow]

And so I am full of hope. I'm not a happy person. I'm not an optimistic person. I'm a very sad and frightened person. But I am more hopeful than I've been in my whole professional life.

[Trevor Noah]

Well, can I tell you something, Corey? You have made me a happy person. I think I can speak for my colleague here when I say you've made us happy people. Cause you've made like, oh, thank you.

[Eugene]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

You've left us with like a. Oh, yeah, let's go, let's go do this thing.

[Cory Doctorow]

And I love it.

[Trevor Noah]

We'll do it.

[Cory Doctorow]

If you want to make change, join a polity. Get involved. Like, join a union. Form a union. Get involved in local politics. Turns out local politics determine whether you have flock cameras and that determines whether your neighbors are going to be taken to a gulag. Right. Get involved in local politics because that's still not totally unshitified and it still

[Trevor Noah]

is responsive to people because it's so many now. You just made me realize that. Yeah, that's where local politics, because it's so fractured, it's the 200 businesses.

[Eugene]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

National politics is one of two. Local politics is like

[Cory Doctorow]

billions of them. And join the Electronic Frontier foundation, the non profit I've worked for most of my adult life. Eff.org we eff different. Not that eff.

[Trevor Noah]

Join. You heard it. Join the eos. What a slick way to get us in.

[Cory Doctorow]

Join the effort. Not economic freedom. The electronic Electronic Frontier Foundation. We've been around for 35 years. I don't know how long the electric, the economic freedom fighters have been around.

[Trevor Noah]

I think we had it for 12ish years.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, I think we were there first.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

But they have cool berets they do have cool berets. They've got the sartorial style down. We all dress like Linux nerds, but they dress, they're sharp. But yeah, join eff. We've got lots of ways to get involved. We have fought the most important court battles and activist fights over digital rights. Like, the reason you have cryptography that like, will keep a secret on your phone is because we sued the NSA because they wouldn't let civilians have it. The reason you need a warrant to read email if you're a cop is because we sued the Secret Service. Like, this is us. You know, we've been, we've been doing this since the very earliest days of the Internet. And we don't win all of our fights. In fact, we lose a lot of them because some fights you just fight because you can't not fight them even when you're vastly overmatched. But we win a surprising number of our fights. And When I joined EFF, there were six of us. There's like 110 of us now. We are working internationally, like I say, I work with our allies in South Africa on their copyright implementation. And we've now become part of a huge constellation of these digital rights groups internationally and in the US and so I like to think that that's because of our leadership. I, I, I've been there now, as I say, 25 years. I'm 55, so, so most of my adult life. And I can't imagine what the world would be like without EFF in it.

[Trevor Noah]

This is amazing. Before you go, actually, let's do this. Yeah, let's, let's, let's play a little game that'll that I think will help a lot of people. Okay. I'm going to list a product or an industry and then you tell us how it's being. Shit if I sad about it. No, no, but, but rather, no, you know, what I want to do is not why I feel sad, but rather just to help people understand how it's affecting. Because, you know, some people go, ah, tech, tech's not my thing.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right, right.

[Trevor Noah]

And some people might go, ah, the finance industry, that's not. But I just want you to explain as quickly as possible how each like vertical sort of affect people. So, so let's go. So let's start with technology, like phones, computers, et cetera. Like, how, how is that being shitified?

[Cory Doctorow]

And what, so lots of different ways. Consumables, right, like ink or whatever, they're, they're now being locked. Parts are being locked. Repair is Being locked, Software is being locked. You have these high service charges associated with things like payments. So one thing we didn't talk about is if the Merchant is charging 30%, how are they recouping it? They're charging you more, so your prices are getting higher. So there's this inflationary pressure as well. And then of course now you have this stuff where like these things spy on you all the time. And then when they want to know who is at the anti ice march, they can just go to them and they'll turn it over to, to them. And so you have that risk to democracy as well.

[Trevor Noah]

Okay, cars. Some people like Emma, I just like driving cars. This doesn't bother me. I'm not a tech, I'm not a tech person.

[Cory Doctorow]

So locking out independent mechanics, locking out third party parts. Right. Spying on you in every conceivable way from asshole to appetite.

[Trevor Noah]

Your car.

[Guest/Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

So your car is just like it's a data acquisition platform on wheels. It's funny cause they kind of brag about it. So Massachusetts had a ballot initiative, question one in 2020 where 75% of base stators voted to force the cars to allow independent mechanics to fix the cars. And their response was these scare ads where they're like if you let strangers get at the data in your car, they'll murder you because there's so much data in your car.

[Trevor Noah]

Well, but that's them telling on themselves.

[Eugene]

Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

Mozilla Labs 2023 did a roundup of all of the cars privacy policies and data acquisition and they said there is not one car they would recommend driving on the road that's being sold right now.

[Trevor Noah]

Because it's just like where you're going, when you're going there. Everything what you listen to on the

[Cory Doctorow]

radio, what conversations are you having, not that, but Nissan, weirdly so. One of the things about surveillance data is they're all lying to each other. They're all like saying they can do things they can't do. Nissan offers to sell data brokers facts about your sex life and the smells in your car. Neither of which I'm pretty confident. Neither of which they know. But they're just like making stuff up that they'll sell. Cuz like these are all like grifters grifting other grifters. So they're ripping each other off. It's like Billionaire on Millionaire violence.

[Trevor Noah]

Okay, let's go to that.

[Eugene]

The speaker in my car is not.

[Cory Doctorow]

Microphone is not, probably not, but they are like they are looking at things like all of your informatics you know, like, if you've got your. Your, like, Google Android car or Apple car, like, all of that stuff is being sucked up by the car. And even. And you know, like, some cars, they're like, oh, if you want to use, like, the advanced features, like, like warm your car up from inside the house using the app, that's like five bucks a month. And if you don't pay it, you can't access your car's network. Yeah. But your car's network is still active, and it's giving data about your car to the automaker, just not to you. And the worst is subprime car leasing. So, like, if you're poor and you can't get a regular car lease, there's this whole market, it's worth a couple trillion dollars called subprime car leasing. And those cars are fitted out with all kinds of crazy surveillance gear.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

And also they have, like, some of them have a second stereo system that the user can't control, that if you're a day late on your payments, just blares at top volume. You are late on your payments. You are late on your payments.

[Trevor Noah]

Serious.

[Eugene]

Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. And if you, like, go too late, they, like, immobilize your car. Even, like, some of these leases will say you can't take it across the county line. And so the New York Times wrote about this, and there's a woman who, like, took the kids on a drive to the forest, and they went over the county line without realizing it, and then the car wouldn't start, and they were stuck in the woods like, it's very bad. And they. So they repo these cars over and over again. The leases are like any subprime credit arrangement. They're designed to, like, balloon and make it so you can't afford it later. So you get, like, a teaser rate and a balloon rate. And so then they repo the car, and then they sell it to another poor person. So they sell the same car to, like, 10 poor people. And so, like, basically, like, you can make loans to progressively worse credit risks if it's easier and easier to repo

[Trevor Noah]

because the risk on your side is not.

[Cory Doctorow]

You're offloading the risk. Right. So they just have, like, basically this whole sideline of repo Teslas. There's a dealer option where if you are late on your payments, the Tesla will lock itself up, summon the repo man to the parking lot, and then blow its horn and blink its lights when the repo man gets there and back up and unlock its doors so they can get End I would have

[Eugene]

thought it drove itself back to the dealership.

[Cory Doctorow]

That's funny.

[Trevor Noah]

That's evil and funny.

[Cory Doctorow]

It's very funny.

[Trevor Noah]

Let's go into like food.

[Cory Doctorow]

I don't know as much about this. I mean, obviously there's the genomic stuff that we were talking about. Mostly what you've got in food is just monopolization on the grocery side.

[Trevor Noah]

Okay, got it. Then that will inflate the prices.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's a law, the Robinson Patman act, that they stopped enforcing 20 years ago, but the FTC tried to bring a case against Pepsi and Walmart under it. And basically it was created when A and P grocers started to take over the country. And what A and P would do is they would demand extremely deep dish discounts from wholesalers and then to make it up, the wholesalers would raise prices on everyone else, all the mom and Pops. So it accelerated the collapse of the mom and Pops into A and P. And these two congressmen, Robertson and Patman said, oh, we can't allow this, this is bad. So they banned this conduct. And it was the decision under Reagan to stop enforcing this that created Walmart. So this is what Walmart does. They demand preferential discounts that then result in wholesale increases in all of their competitors stuff. So Walmart and Pepsi, the FTC said what they were doing is they had this deal where Pepsi would do what you said Coke was doing to your mom and pops where they would say you can't have Pepsi products unless you charge a certain amount for it and then Walmart would charge less. So what they were doing was raising the prices everywhere, but Walmart was still cheaper and they were doing it through this Robinson Patman preferential discounting thing. So they made the prices go up across the entire market. Every retailer was charging more for all Pepsi products. And that's Frito Lay. It's a bunch of other things. It's so many. Like they're a big conglomerate. Yeah. So yeah, that they. That was like. So yeah, all your groceries are really expensive because monopoly grocers and monopoly food producers are cooking the market to screw you.

[Trevor Noah]

Corey, this was too much fun, man. You know what? You are so amazing that I'm willing to accept that you came up with inside Ification.

[Cory Doctorow]

Oh, that's very nice of you.

[Trevor Noah]

You are just like, yo, man, you're just on top of it. Your vibe. Thank you. We're going to check out the eff. The other Eff.

[Cory Doctorow]

The other Eff.

[Trevor Noah]

Eff White is what we'll Call it we're pretty. No, no, no. Don't worry about being diverse. I'll show you EF and then you'll see the pictures.

[Cory Doctorow]

Look, I've seen the every now and again. I'm like trying to find like one of our graphics to stick in something and rather than like look in our repository, I go to, you know, like Google image search and I type eff, you know, and then I get like, they got you.

[Trevor Noah]

And then they make you search again. You have to search three times and then you pay the ads. They even got you, Corey.

[Cory Doctorow]

And then they show me an ad for a red beret and the next thing you know. Yeah, can't escape it.

[Trevor Noah]

This was fun.

[Cory Doctorow]

Thank you so much. I had a great time. Appreciate it. Thanks guys.

[Eugene]

Thank you so much. Corey. Thank you so much. Good luck to the next partner I speak to because they're gonna hear the phrase self licking ice cream.

[Trevor Noah]

Eugene, you had him there.

[Guest/Interviewer]

Eugene.

[Cory Doctorow]

I was like, yeah, yeah. Well, you're like me. You're a magpie. I love the little phrases.

[Trevor Noah]

What now with Trevor Noah is produced by Dayzero Productions in partnership with SiriusXM. The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaz Yamin and Jess Hackle. Rebecca Chain is up our producer. Our development researcher is Marcia Robiou. Music mixing and mastering by Hannis Brown. Random other stuff by Ryan Hardooth. Thank you so much for listening. Join me next week for another episode of what now.

[Guest/Interviewer]

You're more than just one thing. You're the boss. Hey Google, what time is my meeting with Tim today? The athlete that class wrecks me. The ringleader. And we're good and always their mom. Everyone in the all new Mazda CX. Five more to move every side of you. Learn [e-mail] Google is a trademark of Google LLC.

[Cory Doctorow]

Sequences shortened and simulated.

[Guest/Interviewer]

Hi, I'm Angie Hicks, co founder of Angie. When you use Angie for your home project, you know all your jobs will be done well. Roof repair, done well. Kitchen sink install, done well. Deck upgrades, done well. Electrical upgrade, done well. Angie's been connecting homeowners with skilled pros for nearly 30 years. So we know the difference between done and done well. Angie the one you trust to find the ones you trust. Find a pro for your [e-mail].