How Silicon Valley enshittified the internet

25:22We're back with InShittification author Corey Doctorow. Before the break, Corey was walking us through what InShittification is, some prime examples of what it looks like in practice, and the ways in which it feels specific to the tech industry. But there's another dimension of this that I really wanted to explore with Corey, and that's the legal angle. The rise of powerful tech platforms like Google and Facebook is very much intertwined with the many court cases and regulatory battles that set the ground rules for how these companies could operate on the internet. You'll hear Corey and I throw out the names of a few pivotal court cases and U.S.

25:55laws that have become the bedrock of the modern tech industry. And Corey has been on the front lines of these fights for well over a decade now. So I really wanted to ask him about intellectual property, about copyright and fair use, and ultimately where the AI of it all fits in. You're probably one of the most influential figures in the copyleft movement. We've talked a fair bit about DMCA 1201. That's the DRM provision. But there's another very famous and highly litigated section of the DMCA. And that would be the thing that, you know, in this age of streamers and YouTube and so on and so forth, everyone is aware of this one.

26:34Notice and takedown. A lot of the case law that was pioneered in the 2000s, early 2010s, has to do with notice and takedown, has to do with CDA, which is different but related, has to do with, honestly, the underrated one would be Google Books, Perfect 10, the cases that sort of solidified fair use. These cases, along with low interest rates, of course, and a bunch of other societal sort of general environmental things, led to the rise of tech and allowed a handful of firms to gain almost monopolistic control over markets. I also think that AI wouldn't exist without these cases. And kind of we've been talking around AI with all of this, like the degradation of the power of the tech workers is very much linked to this.

27:30I think that with inshittification sort of taking off as a term, a lot of people conflate it with AI slop. I even hear sort of the same wordplay, slopification, the slopocene. What role does AI play in the history of inshittification? And also, like, was fair use worth it? That was the flip side of copyleft. I want to dispute the frame there. I do think that what we're talking about here is limitations on intermediary liabilities. So actually, let me take a step back here and just talk about intermediation, disintermediation, because that was the thing we were all excited about in the 1990s, disintermediation.

28:09Why were we excited about disintermediation? It's not because intermediaries are per se bad. You know, in the book, I tell the story of this writer. I grew up idolizing this guy called Crad Kalodny, who was a writer in Toronto, kind of an outsider artist. He would write his own stories. He would edit them himself. He would typeset them. He would bind them. He would print them. He would sell them on street corners with a sign around his neck that said, very famous Canadian author, buy my books. and like he would use the whole auctorial experience. Like he secretly recorded the drunks who picked on him and sold cassette tapes of the best drunk nonsense he put up with.

28:47You can download them for the internet archive on the street with Crad Kolodny. And as much as I love Crad's works, there are a lot of writers I want to hear from who are never going to do that stuff. It's fine that we have booksellers and printers and editors and distributors and marketers. All that stuff is fine. So why were we so keen on disintermediation then? It's not because intermediaries are a problem. It's because the user patient of the relationship between the parties that the intermediary is connecting turns what should be a kind of utility function into a gatekeeper. and powerful intermediaries, I think are a scourge.

29:28Powerful intermediaries, like if you ever look at like kind of what businesses the mafia goes into, it's usually powerful intermediaries, because if you can get in there and start abusing people, that's your opportunity to really rake in the money from both sides of the two-sided market. You know, things, that's why like the mafia were We're in jukeboxes, right? Because being the intermediary is a really important role. All of the limitations on intermediary liability that you're talking about. So CDA 230, that says that for non-copyright, non-criminal matters, unlawful speech acts by parties who use your platform are their problem and not your problem, right?

30:09If someone libels someone else on your platform, that's between that person and the person they libeled. It's not your business. You do not have to hold, review, and then assess all the speech that every user on your platform wants to engage in, in order to host a place where people can talk to each other. Any more than like a restaurateur needs to make sure that everyone at every table is like talking nice and no one's talking shit about a friend, right? It's just like not your business as the person who convenes the speech forum. So there's that. There's copyright intermediary limitations. So notice and takedown that says so long as you expeditiously remove things after being informed that they're infringing, you can't be held liable if they turn out to infringe.

30:56There's that Perfect 10 case and the other fair use cases, the Google Books case that say that doing things like making a transient copy of a work for the purpose of indexing it are lawful. And the thing about that is all of that makes being an intermediary cheaper and easier. And if you want to have a robust competitive intermediary sector, you do not want being an intermediary to be more expensive and harder. because what that does is it creates a winner-take-all, first-mover, deepest-pockets-wins-forever market, which is the market we have. So how do we get this market, even though we took such care, to protect the ability of new entries into intermediation?

31:39And the internet needs intermediaries because, like, compared with publishing, being on the internet is especially hard and esoteric, right? Running your own file server, running your own web server, running your own mail server, running your own DNS server, running your own content distribution network, running your own anti-DDOS network, your payment processor, right? That stuff is just so intense that if we said only people who can do all of that for themselves, like gnawing their own web server out of a whole log with their own teeth are allowed to be on the internet. No one would be on the internet except for the very largest corporations.

32:13It wasn't that we failed to police intermediary conduct. It was that we failed to police intermediary mergers. So how did Amazon get so big? It wasn't by being the best in every sector. Amazon bought all of its competitors and they bought them in the dirtiest way possible. So in the book, I tell the story of a startup called diapers.com. It was doing really well. It was the leading retailer of goods for new parents and Amazon couldn't crack that vertical. So they made a purchase offer and they were like, no, you know what? We've, we've got a good business here. We won't sell to you. So Amazon broke antitrust law.

32:51They did something called predatory pricing where they sold goods for newborns below cost to the tune of$200 million in a couple of months. And they drove diapers.com out of business. They bought them for pennies in the dollar diapers.com's investors sold to Amazon, even though they had a better offer from Walmart because they were afraid of what Amazon would do to their other startups if they didn't sell to Amazon. Amazon then shut down diapers.com and no one ever said no to Amazon. How did Amazon come to dominate every vertical? They bought all the companies that had good businesses and they were able to buy all the companies that had good businesses because we didn't stop them when they broke the law.

33:28And so they terrorized everyone who might come close to them. And in investing circles, they call it the kill zone, anything adjacent into a big tech company. And they won't back any company now that is in the kill zone. Google. Google has had one successful consumer product in the previous millennium, right? They had a great search engine. And then everything they made in-house was just a failure, like Orkut and Google Plus and Google Video and Reader. All these things they shut down. Meanwhile, all their successful products, maps, video, satellite imagery, documents, document collaboration, cloud servers, server management, customer service, all of this stuff they bought from someone else, except for the Hotmail clone, right?

34:09Except for Gmail, which they copied from Hotmail, right? So Google would not have been a kind of eternally dominant firm if we'd made it innovate in-house. It would have been, you know, to use a little MBA jargon, it would have been creatively destroyed, right? It would have been disrupted by someone else. And instead, they got to buy all the shelf space for a search engine, they made their own search engine worse. In the DOJ case last year, we saw that in 2019, they deliberately worsened the search engine so that you would have to search more than once and they could show you ads each time you searched so they could make their search results worse and make more money.

34:47That's how we got here, right? It's not because of fair use, right? It's not because of limitations on intermediary liability. There's a much more proximate causal effect to monopoly than these things like how firms conduct themselves. Like, I think that the claim that the growth of monopolies is related to anything other than the drawdown of anti-monopoly law is an extraordinary claim. And it requires extraordinary evidence. It's like, we used to not have a rat problem because we had rat poison. And then these economists said, stop putting down rat poison. Rats are eating our face off. And they're like, how can you be sure it was taking away the rat poison?

35:23And I think our starting point should be the rat poison here, right? So as to AI, AI, I think you're right that without the limitations on liability, we wouldn't have AI, you know, particularly the fair use stuff. But if you think about what you get from the lawfulness of the things that are involved in AI training, so indexing and making transient copies of work for the purposes of analysis. Like, if you ever want to go look up what CBS's DEI policy used to be before they caved into Trump, you want people to be scraping and retaining copies of works, right? Like, without permission. If you want to have computational linguistics, if you want to have that kid in Austria who scraped all the web prices of the two major grocers and showed that they were moving in lockstep and that they were colluding to rig prices, we need scraping, right?

36:14So what about the analysis, right? What about counting the stuff in the documents, which is stage two of training, right? training run. Well, again, like, do we really want to say counting things in copyrighted works requires permission? You know, I know Anthropic just settled this giant case, but that was because they pirated the books, not because they counted the words in them, right? If you go to the flea market and buy a pirate CD and then count the number of adverbs, the CD might be illegal, but your tally of the adverbs is not. And then finally, there's publishing a literary work, right?

36:43That's what a model is, a piece of software. That's why software is copyrightable. It's a literary work. You publish a literary work full of facts about other literary works. Well, if you like dictionaries, encyclopedias, bibliographies, like books of facts about other copyrighted works, you probably want them to be legal. But, you know, more importantly, and back to this idea that we allowed monopolies to form, it wasn't just in tech where we saw those monopolies, also in media. and, you know, we creative workers, you and me, we sell into a market with five publishers, four studios, three labels, two companies that control all the apps and one company that controls all the eBooks and audio books.

37:22And if we were to get a new copyright that said we can control training, they just changed their standard deal to say, okay, you can control training. And to do business with us, you have to let us have your training rights, right? Giving a bullied kid extra lunch money doesn't buy them lunch. It just transfers the lunch money to the bullies. Meanwhile, for the first time in my 25 years as a digital activist, I'm on the same side as the U.S. Copyright Office, which has said things made by AI don't have a copyright. Which, you know, great. Like, only things made by humans get a copyright. That's why the monkey selfie isn't copyrighted.

37:57And you know what? Like, the only thing our bosses hate more than paying us is people taking the stuff we make for them without paying them. And if we tell them the only way you can stop people from taking the stuff you produce is to pay us to make it, they're just going to pay us, right? Like we actually have an answer to the AI problem. It's not an answer to the energy problem. It's not an answer to the fact that$700 billion in CapEx has been spent in an industry that's bringing in$45 billion gross revenue annually, and the crash is going to kill us all. But it is an answer to like the specific issue of creative workers.

38:30When was the last time we had a really easy answer where the U.S. Copyright Office was like, here's the thing that we're going to do and it's going to make creators richer. Like, not in my memory. We should just go, like, stand in line behind the Library of Congress and go, like, what they said, right? We finally got an answer. But, you know, let me put it this way. What if there was zero memorization in AI? Would your worries go away? I mean, I don't know, right? Like, it is, the reason why I am pushing you on this is because I don't know. It is a source of eternal stress for me. When I talk to people who I like and respect who are really worried about AI and make a good case against it, someone like, say, Molly Crabapple.

39:13I think if you ask Molly, and I believe when I did ask her this, if the AI didn't memorize anything, would you still be opposed to it? Her answer was yes. So I don't think that people in the anthropic case, I don't think the... I know the New York Times made a big deal out of memorization. I don't think Salzberger wants to pay writers. You know, I don't think he's doing this to pay writers, right? He's not on our side. Take another step back. Right now, I don't think copyright prohibits AI training, but it could, right? Like it didn't come down off a mountain on two stone tablets. So we could write a new copyright.

39:47So if we're going to talk about like writing a new law, if we're going to say like, we artists are going to go and get Congress to make a new law to benefit us. Well, we've only seen one group of artists successfully resist AI and ensure that their rights and prerogatives would be preserved. And it was the Writers Guild. And the way that they did it is because they have a carve out to the Taft-Hartley Act that allows them to do sectoral bargaining. And so all of the workers who write screenplays are represented against all of the studios in one union, even though they're freelancers, they're all protected under one bargain.

40:21And that used to be common, And the Taft-Hartley Act outlawed it. So if we're going to make a new law in order to protect artists, right? Well, we can make the broader copyright law, which our bosses love. And that should make us very suspicious. The thing that your boss wants is never for you, right? Or we could do the thing our bosses hate and that every other worker in America wants, which is sectoral bargaining. And so, yeah, if we've got like our bosses on our side, it'd probably be easier to get the law passed than if it was just us. But it's not just us. It's us and every other worker briefing for sectoral bargaining, right?

40:55And, you know, unlike copyright, which we have expanded monotonically for 40 years, notwithstanding these fair use cases, which are important, but are peripheral to the larger story of copyright. Copyright lasts longer, covers more kinds of works, covers more uses, and has done so consistently for 40 years. The size of the entertainment industry is larger than it's ever been. And the share of money going to creative workers in real terms and as a proportion of the total pie that's gotten so much bigger from this has gone down. Right. So, like, maybe this will be the first time we've ever passed a copyright law that makes artists richer and corporations poorer.

41:31I wouldn't bet on it. I mean, while we do have something that makes workers richer and their bosses poorer, it's called sectoral bargaining. So if we're going to do one thing, that should be our one thing. So you were just on stage at the Brooklyn Public Library with former FTC chair Lena Kahn as part of your book tour. My hero. Everyone loves her for the click through unsubscribe. Click to cancel. Yeah, click to cancel. A banger. I know. There is not a single person, real person in this country who hated that rule. And it is it is an eternal tragedy, like a real like marker of where the admin state is that that that got blocked.

42:13So with Khan out of office and we were now in the second Trump administration, we have an FTC chair who a lot of questionable things going on over at the FTC. But like his major project is a snitch line for wokeness. He scrapped all their enforcement action and replaced it with a snitch line for employees to rat each other out for wokeness. Do you think that we missed an opportunity here to more aggressively regulate the tech industry? Yeah, we definitely missed an opportunity. I mean, they did as much as they could. But, you know, the Biden administration was very divided on this. You know, I don't think Biden went from a career serving corporate interests as a senator and as a congressman into becoming a flaming anti-corporate guy.

42:55I think that the party politics of the Democrats dictated that he had to give key appointments to people who came out of the Sanders-Warrin wing. And that's how he got the antitrust. And then they never talked about it. They did all kinds of stuff and they never talked about it. They, you know, Trump talks about stuff he hasn't even done. And he's out there jawboning about it. Biden, they really hid that light under a bushel and Harris did not campaign on it at all. But I do think there's a weird silver lining to Trump. He is a very dark cloud to have produced a silver lining. But, you know, I was EFF's European director.

43:31I worked in 31 countries in that capacity. and everywhere I went when we talked about making better internet policy and doing things like getting rid of anti-circumvention law and making it legal for the people who lived in that country to fix the products Americans delivered to them so that they didn't steal their data and they didn't rip them off and they were better to use and you could plug other things in them and so on they would say well if we passed a law like that the U.S. trade representative has made it very clear that we would face tariffs from the United States if we did this well you know like if I threaten to burn your house down if you don't do what I say, and then I burn your house down, you don't have to keep doing what I say.

44:11And Trump's made it so clear that tech is like an arm of the state, right? Like Microsoft is cutting off the international criminal court's chief prosecutor's outlook and deleting all his like court files because Trump doesn't like him, right? So you have these projects like Eurostack in Europe where they're putting a lot of money and energy into cloning tech silos, American tech silos in open source. But what they haven't given any thought to is how you migrate people out of those tech silos. You know, Apple and Google and Oracle and so on, they're not going to help you move your data. They're going to do everything they can to lock that data in.

44:44So it's kind of like they're building housing for people in East Berlin, but they're building it in West Berlin and they haven't figured out what they're going to do about the wall. And Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, which mirrors Section 12.1 in the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent and is the primary impediment to this was passed under threats of tariffs. So now is the time to get rid of that damn law. And, you know, I don't think we've ever been closer to it than we are now. All right. Highly, highly specific question. Addie Robertson really wanted me to ask this one. It's that what we're seeing with like, especially the sort of persona type chatbots where you sort of like you build your AI girlfriend or whatever, But also like these social media networks that they're starting to launch that are just the AI is built into it and then you do the AI at other people.

45:35You just create slop and then you slop at other people. Where do you think things are going with sort of the framework around the Internet that regulation and copyright and CDA 230 and so on and so forth, They're all built around the idea that user-generated content is going up and users are talking to users. Now we're looking at slop to slop, right? And you agree that it's like, that's not. Yeah. People are not speaking the slop. People are not themselves the creators of the slop to a degree, right? Like if you modify the slop to a certain degree, then you've got enough. The copyright office says you've got enough human intervention where it is not a registrable work.

46:18But let's just say pure slop to slop, pure, like we are modifying bots to talk to each other. To what extent is that all changing, going to affect how we look at policy, how we look at regulation and so forth? there's two different things i want to say about this so one is about the likely outcome of ai and one is about the thing that you fainted out there with the what is the nature of slop right how expressive is it i don't like ai art and the reason i don't like ai art is because i think art is the it starts with someone who has a big irreducible numinous complex emotion and they try to infuse it into some intermediary medium, like a sculpture or dance or a book or a song or an image in the hopes that it causes a facsimile of that emotion to materialize in someone else's mind when they experience it.

47:14And AI doesn't have any of those things. And your prompt is, you know, if you prompt an AI to do something, the prompt, assuming it's quite short, you know, it could be quite long. You could write a whole book as a prompt, right? That might be very communicative. But if you're writing two sentences, then those two sentences are diluted across a million pixels or a hundred thousand words. And basically the communicative intent of the work becomes undetectable. And this is why I think we call it inhuman or eerie. You know, eeriness, Mark Fisher says, is the seeming of intent without an intender, right?

47:53In some ways, when you look at AI and you see a picture, it's as though a very realistic image is formed in the clouds. It can be aesthetically striking, but the clouds have nothing to say to you, right? And, you know, we are habitual imputers of intent to words and images because our experience of them is that every set of words has a speaker and every image has an image producer, a painter, or a drawer, but it doesn't have to anymore. And very quickly, I think a lot of that novelty and that strikingness has worn off. It's become very hack to make this stuff. And so as to how communicative is AI, I think it depends, right?

48:33It really depends on to what extent the communicative intent of the prompter is visible through it. I don't want to foreclose on the possibility that AI could be a communicative act, right? It's a very fact-intensive question, and it's tied into these questions of aesthetics. In some ways, though, I think it doesn't matter because I don't think that the AI bubble is going to last much longer, right? I think that a lot of these questions, they're like questions about blockchain governance, right? What will we do when all of our institutions are run on the blockchain? How does limited liability work for a DAO, right?

49:09Those were questions that people put a lot of energy into. And I spent a couple of years kind of wasting my breath trying to explain to people why I thought AI was just, or rather crypto was only ever a way to do speculation and money laundering and had no greater technological significance. And now it's very clear, right? Like even the people who are giant crypto boosters are just like, yes, it's allowed us to perfect gambling. That no one's talking about using blockchain to like keep slave labor out of the cacao supply chain anymore, right? All that stuff is just gone. And, you know, when you look at the foundations of AI right now, it's economic foundations.

49:50Seven companies are 30 % of the S &P 500. Their capital outlay is in the$700 billion range. Their gross revenues are$45 billion a year at most. And that includes just the sweatiest goddamn accounting tricks you can imagine. So like that's Microsoft saying, oh, we gave$10 billion in Azure credits to OpenAI and then OpenAI gave them back to us. That's$10 billion in revenue. That's like Starbucks giving you a gift certificate for a latte and then you redeeming it and then booking it as revenue, right? Except it's$10 billion and it's$10 billion out of$45 billion. And they're like, well, it's okay because we'll recoup that investment before these assets depreciate.

50:27They say the assets depreciate over five years. Some independent work out of the Princeton group that studies this stuff says it's two years. So these assets are going to be cooked in two years. They burn out at an incredible rate. And the revenue model that they've projected for this stuff, it's not the stuff that we're worried about here, deep fake porn, slop, election disinformation. It's displacing wages, right? And so I think if you want to understand the political economy of AI, you always have to ask yourself, what is the total wage bill of everyone who stands to lose their job from this AI application.

51:06So while it's really gross that they took stuff from illustrators in a bid to bankrupt illustrators, and that the CTO of OpenAI went on stage and said some creative jobs never should have existed, it's not economically significant to anyone except those illustrators. Because the total wage bill for every illustrator working today is like rounds to zero against the budgets that they're using to train these models. And so it's a demo, right? Deepfake porn, like again, like all the money being generated by deepfake porn adds up to nothing compared to the AI budgets. You know, election disinformation, you know, that famously high-waged sector that is election disinformation, right?

51:48Zero out all those wage bills, you get nothing back. And so what you have to look at is what AI does in high-wage sectors. So can AI be a software engineer? Well, AI can definitely write code, it needs review, and so on. And we can argue about how good that code is, but AI can't be a software engineer. Software engineering requires a very wide and a very long context window because software engineering is not writing modules. It's assembling modules and thinking through the logical connections between them, how they chain together, how they handle exceptions, where inputs come in, where outputs go out, how they iterate between each other and so on.

52:24And AI does not scale context, right? Adding a linear amount of context to AI adds an exponential amount of compute to AI. This is why it kept losing count of how many fingers you have, is because by the time it counted all the way to five, it had lost count again, right? And so it just kept adding fingers, right? This is why you see it being unable to tell you how many states have an R in their name and so on. These are all context window problems. And yes, they're quote-unquote hallucinations, but they're hallucinations related to this context issue. And it's not a thing that we have a theoretical basis for, for fixing using the kind of stuff we're doing now.

53:04Next word guessing programs are not good and hold in context. So I don't think it's going to replace software engineers. They will fire a lot of software engineers and replace them with chatbots. The chatbots can't do their jobs, right? And actually, you know, it's worse than like firing programmers who do work that we need and replacing with chatbots that do that work badly. It's like the foundation model is going dark and then no one doing that job. That's even worse, right? Than it being done badly. And the same goes for radiologists. No one's talking about taking the radiologist to examine 100 x-rays a day and giving them an AI co-pilot that asks them to look again at two of them so that their output falls.

53:44They're saying fire like 90 % of your radiologists who have a$30 billion per year wage bill in the United States. It's a good number, right? Find, you know, 100 of those people and you're cooking. 100 of those professions, you're cooking. But they're saying fire 90 % of your radiologists, have the ones that remain, rubber stamp the radiology reports at a rate that they cannot possibly have examined them and then turn them into the accountability sink when someone dies of cancer, right? So you look at all of those foundational problems with AI and you look at the answers that the AI sector has, like maybe if we keep shoveling words into the word guessing program, it will become intelligent.

54:22Well, that's like saying maybe if we keep breeding these horses to run faster, one of them will give birth to a locomotive, right? Intelligence is not word guessing with more words. They're unrelated to one another. It is a separate problem to solve. It's not that word guessing programs can't do impressive things. It's just that they can't do the things that justify a$700 billion capex and opex that is so high that even if you could zero at the capex by taking all these companies through bankruptcy and selling off their assets at 10 cents on the dollar, no one could afford to run those models anyway, because no one would pay enough for the things that those models are producing.

55:02And so I would not be surprised if the number of foundation models in a couple of years was zero. It might be larger, but I would not be surprised if it was zero. The open source models are going to stay forever. And we'll do really cool and interesting things with them, including terrible things like slop. But no one's even started optimizing those, except for Chinese hackers who can't get real GPUs because the U.S. has sanctioned them. So they're the ones who are actually going out and figuring out how to reduce the compute load and programs. And, you know, periodically they bust out something like DeepSeek and everyone goes nuts and NVIDIA loses$600 billion off its market cap in 24 hours.

55:39And, you know, you love to see it. But, like, we'll figure out all kinds of cool ways to use those open source models, especially when you can buy GPUs for 10 cents on the dollar. And there's a bunch of newly unemployed applied statisticians looking for work. We'll find really cool things to do with it. And maybe those questions will become germane then, but they won't be germane in the sense that they are now because it won't be like the entire U.S. economy is a bet on what we do about this stuff because the entire U.S. economy will be in ashes at that point. So we'll have a totally different political economy when we're considering those questions.

56:11We need to take another quick break. We'll be right back.

56:26We're back with inshittification author Cory Doctorow. Before the break, we were discussing the legal and regulatory side of the problem and how the intersection of inshittification and generative AI feels like it's taking over the modern internet. But now I wanted to ask Cory about the second half of the title to his book, the part where we try to figure out what, if anything, we can actually do about any of this. So your book's final third or so is prescriptive. It's what do we do about this? You give some thoughts on how we might get out of the current situation we're in, what it might take to pull it off.

57:00Like, what do we do about inshittification? The big question when we're talking about tech regulation is administrability. And it's been the great defect of tech regulation to date. And when people who understand both regulation and tech argue with people who only understand regulation or who only understand tech, often you end up in an argument about administrability. So like where you have people saying, well, I know what we'll do. We'll make it illegal to have hate speech on the platform and harassment. We'll make the platforms responsible for it. We'll make them go and make them find the hate speech and the harassment and get rid of it.

57:34If you're thinking about this from a policy perspective, this gets really hard because you have to agree a definition of hate speech. You have to investigate an accusation of hate speech and agree whether it meets that definition. And then you have to make a technical determination about whether the firm conducted itself in a way that was sufficient or whether this arose out of negligence or malice. And that's a multi-year process. And it's fine to have multi-year processes for some things like probate, right, because you only die once. But people are harassed on platforms a thousand times a second.

58:07And so this is just a bad administration mismatch. And it misses the real question, which is why do people who suffer hate speech and harassment stay on platforms? And it's because the only thing worse than being a member of a disfavored minority who faces harassment and hate speech is being a member of a disfavored minority who faces harassment and hate speech and being isolated from the people who matter to you. So what if we just make it easier to leave the platforms, right? We have number portability for our phones. You know, if you want to switch from T-Mobile to, you know, Google Fi, you do a little administrative work and three seconds later you're on a different network.

58:42No one's ever called anyone else up and said, hey, you wouldn't believe whose SIM is in my phone now. It just doesn't matter, right? We have in like the legacy networks, they're all designed as silos, right? Twitter, Facebook, TikTok. But modern networks, Blue Sky, Mastodon, they're designed for identity portability. You know, on Mastodon, you click a link, you get a little thing that's like a little text file. It's got everyone who follows you, everyone you follow, all your blocks and mutes and so on. You put that on a different server, it just all moves over like that. we could make Twitter, you know, support that and then give those files to users who want to leave Twitter and want to go somewhere else so that they could talk to the people who they left behind on Twitter and, you know, read what those people are saying, but not be under Elon Musk's jurisdiction anymore.

59:28And, you know, if we have a dispute about this and like you come to me and I'm the regulator and you say, Musk never gave me my little data file, I don't have to adjudicate any questions. I just go to Musk and I say, look, I know you say you gave Sarah her file. She says you didn't. Escrow it with me and I'll give it to her. And like one person could administer 100 million users' complaints, right, in real time with like delays of minutes. And every time a platform boss did something that was bad to their users, they would lose users. And so maybe they get the message, although I wouldn't bet on it because these guys are very stupid.

1:00:04And so maybe they go out of business finally. Maybe they'd stop shambling around these zombies who've got their users locked inside of them who, you know, don't die even though everybody hates what they're offering, right? That, I think, makes for a very good remedy. And I'll mention one other thing that's less crisp, but I think very important to this moment, which is labor organizing. So tech workers didn't organize when they had the chance, when they were scarce. And that's the paradox of scarcity-driven worker power is that workers don't feel like they need a union when they're scarce because they're treated well when they're scarce.

1:00:38They don't look ahead far enough to what happens when they're not scarce. We know what happens to workers for tech companies who aren't scarce because that's warehouse workers and Chinese factory workers and delivery drivers. These are the people who have suicide nets at their workplaces, who pee in jars, who are injured at three times the national average. That's what Jeff Bezos will do to his programmers. That's what Tim Cook will do to his programmers as soon as he's not afraid of them anymore, right? Because that's what he does to workers he's not afraid of. So it can be very disheartening to think about forming a union now, even though there are more workers who want to be in a union than at any time since the Carter administration.

1:01:13And opinion of unions is higher than it's been at any time since the Carter administration. and the unions have larger cash reserves than they've had since the card administration. But all of that notwithstanding, Trump has fired so much of the National Labor Relations Board that they're not, they no longer have a quorum. They can't act anymore, right? They can pursue old court cases, which is how we just got this wonderful judgment that says Amazon drivers work for Amazon and not for the contractors they use as cutouts. But they, you know, unfair labor practices can't be adjudicated anymore. But Trump has made a really important category error here.

1:01:45He thinks the reason we have unions is that we have labor law. And obviously it's backwards. We had unions for a long time before it was legal to be in a union. They fought these incredible violent pitch battles in the streets and eventually capital sued for peace, right? They were like, we need a labor peace here. And the National Labor Relations Act is a compromise. Sure, a lot of it is about what bosses can and can't do to workers, but as much of it is about what workers can and can't do to bosses. And I'll give you one guess which half of that law has been enforced most vigorously since it was passed.

1:02:21You know, when you fire the referee, you don't have to end the game, but you certainly don't have to play by the rules. And we are back where we were in living memory when we were making unions without support of this state. And there's never been a better time to do it. And there are people alive today, not who are part of that movement, but who are trained by people part of that movement. No one's being asked to recover the lost praxis of a fallen civilization. You don't need to figure out how to like embalm a pharaoh, right? You just need to figure out how to do what our forebears did when they unionized a century ago.

1:02:56And we're going to have to do it again. One more question. What makes you optimistic about our ability to make the internet less shitty? So I have no optimism because I think optimism is a species of fatalism. It's the belief that things are going to get better no matter what we do. I also have no pessimism because I think things won't get worse no matter what we do. I have a lot of hope, you know, the belief that if we do something, things might get better. And, you know, when I'm being a novelist, which is the other thing I do. I can plot a course from A to Z and show you how we're going to get all the way to the end state we want.

1:03:35But when I'm an activist, I can never see my way to A to Z. All I can see is maybe the next move and maybe the move after that, because I'm down here, you know, way below the peak I want to attain. And most of the terrain above me is occluded because of my vantage point. And if I can ascend that gradient, even a couple of steps, The amount of terrain that I can now survey grows and I can see other things that I can do. And this moment where people are angrier about tech and about oligarchy than they've ever been, this moment where against all received wisdom of political science, countries all over the world are doing antitrust, right?

1:04:17Political scientists will tell you that things that billionaires don't want do not happen. It doesn't matter how popular they are in the public. The policy preferences of economic elites determine policy outcomes, big empirical studies of thousands of policy outcomes that conclude this. And yet we are getting antitrust action over the last seven or eight years, not just in the US, in Canada. The Canadian Competition Bureau had pursued three merger review cases in its history and it succeeded never. And in 2024, Justin Trudeau whipped his caucus to deliver some of the most expansive powers of any competition bureau in the world and give them a giant budget to use it.

1:04:54In the UK, we saw the Competition and Markets Authority doing stuff that just like was, you know, off the charts in terms of its ambition. And that was under a series of conservative governments that were each more shambolic than the last, including one that only lasted for 40 days. And yet they were doing it. The EU has done it along with EU member states, Germany, Spain, France. We've seen it in South Korea and Japan. And you know, here's a weird thing. The Marshall Plan involved transposing American antitrust law into the law books of Japan, South Korea, and Europe, which means that all the cases that work in the US work there too, and vice versa.

1:05:31And Japan and South Korea took a European case and ran it again in their courts against Apple and won gigantic settlements out of Apple on that basis. So, we have this ability to compose these coalitions of the willing now that we couldn't do before when Germans were angry about John D. Rockefeller and how he was abusing their port system, and Americans were angry about how he was abusing their refineries. They couldn't share tactics. But Apple, Google, Oracle, Facebook, they do the same thing in every country. And so many countries have the same antitrust laws. So we can do the same thing back to them in every country.

1:06:05We have antitrust enforcement in Singapore and in China, right, where the cyberspace directive bans Chinese tech companies from blocking new market entry because Xi Jinping doesn't see those companies as his soft power agents abroad. He sees them as his competitors and he wants to take them down several pegs. So something's changed, right? The law of political gravity has been repealed. Water has started flowing uphill, right? And so we have this big move we can make, right? This giant move to disenfranchise the rest of the world's internet, to get away from American imposed tech policies. And we have this incredible willingness to do it and Donald Trump has poured gasoline on the flames, which is usually a bad thing.

1:06:49I'm all for like moving fast and breaking things so long as those things belong to billionaires. And it looks like we are opposed to break a lot of billionaires' things. I'm very excited about it. Thank you so much, Corey, for coming on The Decoder. That was Corey Doctorow, the author of the book, And Shittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. Thank you, Sarah.

1:07:13I'd like to thank Cory Doctorow for taking the time to speak with me. And thank you for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this show or what else you'd like us to cover, drop us a line. You can email the team at decoder at the verge. They really do read every email. Decoder is on YouTube now. You can watch full episodes at decoder pod. We also have a TikTok and an Instagram. They're also at decoder pod. Check them out. If you like Decoder, please share with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network Decoder is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and edited by Ursa Wright Our editorial director is Kevin McShane The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder See you next time

1:08:04Refresh your good vibes with Tic Tac Mit den richtigen Vibes wird Oh man

1:08:18...to...

1:08:23Now try! The different TikToks from minty-frish to fruity-sues. TikTok refresh your good vibes