Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 8
December 12, 2022
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...
September 27, 2022
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...
September 11, 2022
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.”
August 21, 2022
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)
August 8, 2022
So You’ve Decided to Unfollow Me
This week on my podcast, I read “So You’ve Decided to Unfollow Me,” a recent column for Medium describing the joys of writing to attract the audience of people who want to read what you want to write.
(Image: Sascha Kohlmann, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified)
July 31, 2022
View a SKU: Let’s Make Amazon Into a Dumb Pipe
This week on my podcast, I read “View a SKU: Let’s Make Amazon Into a Dumb Pipe,” a recent column for Medium discussing how interoperability could flip Amazon’s monopoly power on its head and enable us all to coveniently shop locally.
July 24, 2022
Why none of my books are available on Audible
This week on my podcast, I read “Why none of my books are available on Audible,”
a short audiobook I produced to be distributed through Amazon’s ACX platform, explaining how that platform’s sloppy rights verification and mandatory DRM screws over writers.
(Image: Paris 16, CC BY-SA 4.0; Dmitry Baranovskiy, CC BY 4.0; modified)
June 27, 2022
Reasonable Agreement: On the Crapification of Literary Contracts
This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, Reasonable Agreement: On the Crapification of Literary Contracts, about the growing trend of standard, non-negotiable contract terms in freelance writing contracts that are outrageous in their unfairness.
June 20, 2022
Monopolists Want to Create Human Inkjet Printers
This week on my podcast, I read a recent blog post, Monopolists Want to Create Human Inkjet Printers, exploring the way that med-tech mergers are bringing the ghastly inkjet printer business-model to artificial pancreases.
(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; Björn Heller, CC BY 2.0 (German); modified)
June 12, 2022
Regulatory Capture: Beyond Revolving Doors and Against Regulatory Nihilism
Regulatory Capture: Beyond Revolving Doors and Against Regulatory Nihilism.
This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, Regulatory Capture: Beyond Revolving Doors and Against Regulatory Nihilism., about the origins of the theory of regulatory capture, and the all-important, but rarely discussed difference between right and left theories of regulatory capture.
