Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 7

The Swivel-Eyed Loons Have a Point

This week on my podcast, I read my lastest Locus column. “The Swivel-Eyed Loons Have a Point,” about the unlikely – but undeniable – common ground I share with the most unhinged far-right conspiracists.

The swivel-eyed loons at the anti-15-minute-city protests point out that such a scheme constitutes a form of pervasive location-tracking surveil­lance, and that this surveillance could be leveraged to attack disfavored minorities. They’re not wrong. Just look at London, where a (again, perfect...

The Red Team Blues tour: Burbank, SF, PDX, Berkeley, YVR, Calgary, Gaithersburg, DC, Toronto, Hay, Oxford, Nottingham, Manchester, London, Edinburgh, Berlin

Burbank: Apr 26, 6PM, Dark Delicacies

San Francisco: Apr 30, 2PM, San Francisco Public Library (with Annalee Newitz)

PDX/Cedar Hills: May 2, 7PM, Powell’s (with Andy Baio)

Mountain View: May 5, 7PM, Books, Inc (with Mitch Kapor)

Berkeley: May 6/7, Bay Area Book Fair (with Glynn Washington and Wendy Liu)

Vancouver: May 10, 9:50AM, Open Source Summit

Vancouver: May 10, 6:30PM, Heritage Hall (with Sean Cranbury)

Calgary, May 11, 7PM, Wordfest (with Peter Hemminger)

Gaithersburg, May 20, 3:15PM, Ga...

The Red Team Blues tour: Burbank, SF, PDX, Berkeley, YVR, Calgary, Gaithersburg, DC, Toronto, Hay, Oxford, Nottingham, Manchester, London, Edinburgh, London, Berlin

Burbank: Apr 26, 6PM, Dark Delicacies

San Francisco: Apr 30, 2PM, San Francisco Public Library (with Annalee Newitz)

PDX/Cedar Hills: May 2, 7PM, Powell’s (with Andy Baio)

Mountain View: May 5, 7PM, Books, Inc (with Mitch Kapor)

Berkeley: May 6/7, Bay Area Book Fair (with Glynn Washington and Wendy Liu)

Vancouver: May 10, 9:50AM, Open Source Summit

Vancouver: May 10, 6:30PM, Heritage Hall (with Sean Cranbury)

Calgary, May 11, 7PM, Wordfest (with Peter Hemminger)

Gaithersburg, May 20, 3:15PM, Ga...

How To Make a Child-Safe TikTok

This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column. “How To Make a Child-Safe TikTok: Have you tried not spying on kids,” about the bizarre unwillingness of considering a middle-ground between “unregulated TikTok” and “banning TikTok” – namely, prohibiting TikTok from spying on kids.

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(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; Vxla, CC BY 2.0; modified)

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...