Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 7

Red Team Blues: Behind the Scenes with Wil Wheaton

This week on my podcast, I bring you some clips of Wil Wheaton’s recording sessions for the audiobook of Red Team Blues, my next novel, an anti-finance finance thriller starring the 67 year old forensic accountant Martin Hench, who specializes in high-tech scams.

I’m currently kickstarting this audiobook, pre-selling audiobooks, ebooks and hardcovers. I have to self-produce my own audiobooks, because Audible – the monopolist audiobook division of Amazon – refuses to carry DRM-free titles like ...

Red Team Blues

This week on my podcast, I read a selection from my next novel, Red Team Blues, an anti-finance finance thriller about Marty Hench, a 67 year old hard-charging forensic accountant who’s seen every finance scam that Silicon Valley has come up with over the previous 40 years. Marty’s ready to retire, but an old friend pulls him in for one last job, an offer he can’t refuse: recovering the stolen keys to a hidden backdoor in a cryptocurrency system that are worth more than a billion dollars. Reco...

Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk

This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk, making the Luddite case against bossware and other jobs where your boss is an app.

The rise of gig work produced a massive surge of “craft” workers who toiled on their own premises, most notably the drivers for Uber, Lyft, Doordash and delivery services who worked from their own cars, assured that they were independent businesspeople, able to book the hours and jobs they wanted. If the scenery cau...

Twiddler

This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, Twiddler, which further explores my theory of enshittification, and the factors that make it endemic to digital platforms.

The early internet promised more than disintermediation — it also promised endless configurability, where users and technologists could install after-market code that altered the functioning of the services they relied on, seizing the means of computation to tilt the balance of power to their benefit.

Technology re...

Tiktok’s enshittification

This week on my podcast, I read my Pluralistic blog post, Tiktok’s enshittification, which sets out a kind of master theory of enshittification, illustrated by Tiktok’s platform dynamics.

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitab...

Social Quitting

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus column, “Social Quitting, about the enshittification lifecycle of social media platforms.

But as Facebook and Twitter cemented their dominance, they steadily changed their services to capture more and more of the value that their users generated for them. At first, the companies shifted value from users to advertisers: engaging in more surveillance to enable finer-grained targeting and offering more intrusive forms of advertising that would fet...

Daddy-Daughter Podcast, 2022 Edition

When my daughter Poesy was four, her nursery school let us know that they were shutting down a day before my wife’s office closed for the holidays, leaving us with a childcare problem. Since I worked for myself, I took the day off and brought her to my office, where we recorded a short podcast, singing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (a frankly amazing rendition!).

We’ve done it every year since, except for 2016 when I had mic problems. Now she’s 14, and we’ve just recorded our tenth installment...

Twitch Does a Chokepoint Capitalism

When Amazon bought Twitch, the story was that the new conglomerate would be more efficient and that would benefit everyone – streamers and audiences. That’s the story we hear about every anticompetitive merger, and it’s always a lie.

One major efficiency that the Amazon-Twitch merger was supposed to produce? Lower bandwidth costs. That’s one of the largest expenses associated with running a streaming service, after all, and Amazon Web Services is the 800lb gorilla of cloud computing. They’ve b...

Sound Money

This week on my podcast, I read “Sound Money,” my latest column for Medium, which explains why money creation is necessary for a prosperous economy, despite the scaremongering of “inflation hawks.”

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What is Chokepoint Capitalism?

This week on my podcast, I read “What is Chokepoint Capitalism?” a recent column for Medium explaining the thesis of my new book with Rebecca Giblin, which explains how creative labor markets got rigged, and how we can unrig them.

(Image: Erik B. Anderson, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified)

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