Normal view

Received — 23 June 2026 Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
Received — 15 June 2026 Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

The world has moved on

TA blasted wasteland with a mushroom cloud rising over it. In the foreground are swarms of drowning people climbing over each other to escape into the limbs of a dead tree, and a crowd of agonized skeletons. All sourced from Dore engravings illustrating the Old Testament.

This week on my podcast, I read a recent post from my Pluralistic newsletter, “The World Has Moved On,” which analogizes Stephen King’s Dark Tower series to the Enshittification hypothesis.


In the Dark Tower novels, we crisscross a fallen world in which decay is all around us. The buildings are rotten, the machines have stopped working and no one knows how to fix them, babies and livestock alike are frequently born with deadly congenital defects. Much of the world has fallen into wasteland, cracked and barren. An army of wreckers, led by the demagogue John Farson (who styles himself “The Good Man”) are slowly but surely conquering the land, laying waste to those few remaining outposts of civilization and conscripting the young men in the conquered lands to march on their neighbors.

It wasn’t always this way. There was a time when the world was defined by hope and virtue and light, when the machines were fixed and the crops were harvested. Life wasn’t golden – there were still squabbles and sorrows and even wars – but life was good.

And then the world moved on.

For reasons that no one truly understands, the normal push/pull of decay and renewal turned into a one-way, irreversible process in which everything that crumbled or snapped or burned up couldn’t be repaired or replaced or recovered. Our mysterious ability to beat back the Second Law of Thermodynamics – an absurdity we probably should have always treated as an aberration – has collapsed. The world has moved on.

MP3

Received — 7 June 2026 Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

The age of vapor

The cover of the Aug 1923 issue of 'Science and Invention' magazine, announcing a '$10,000 Spritism Challenge,' and 'The Man From the Atom.' The cover features an illustration of an astronaut floating in space amidst various planets and stars.

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, “The Age of Vapor,” about the role science fiction imaginaires plays in fueling high-tech investment bubbles.


It’s one thing to make everything about imaginary technology when you’re writing SF. The point of those imaginative exercises is to illumi­nate: To provoke reflection on our present moment, to inspire or warn about the future.

But spinning narratives about imaginary technology as investment advice is a very different matter. The point here is to obscure: to con­vince investors that a company with a 90% market share will somehow continue to grow, to stave off the day when Stein’s Law (“If something cannot go on forever, it will stop”) asserts itself.

MP3

Received — 31 May 2026 Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

AI and a world without migrants

A hand-tinted image of elderly people in the lounge of a nursing home. Three killer robots have been inserted into the scene.

This week on my podcast, I read AI and a world without migrants, a recent essay from my Pluralistic blog, which psychoanalyzes the sociopathic fantasies that are driving the AI investment bubble.


I don’t care who you are, there will always be times when hell is other people. Not because other people are horrible – quite the opposite! Other people are wonderful, but boy are they ever stubborn.


From boardgames to romance, team sports to movement politics, business ideas to construction projects, there’s so much important, enjoyable and essential stuff you can’t do alone. But other people insist on having their own priorities and goals, and they mulishly refuse to organize their lives to suit your priorities.


Our species has put a lot of work into resolving this conundrum. Not only did we evolve a whole brain structure – the neocortex – that helps us understand others’ perspectives, but we also evolved many social structures (like laws and teams and governments and families and committees and bureaucracies) to help us coordinate with others to do superhuman things (that is, things that exceed the capacity of a single human).


These structures are imperfect, but they’re better than the alternative: coercion. Persuading others is not without its pitfalls, but compared to forcing others to bend to your will, “persuasion” is the hands-down favorite.

MP3

Received — 17 May 2026 Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI

A mockup of 'The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI' and 'Enshittification' on e-readers, and smartphones displaying audiobook apps, as well as the paperback edition of 'Reverse Centaur.'

This week on my podcast, I present an hour-long excerpt from the audiobook for The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, which is currently on pre-order through my latest Kickstarter campaign:


A short, provocative guide to what’s good, bad, and stupid about AI and the discourse around AI, by the author of Enshittification.

In modern tech parlance, a centaur is a person who is able to use technology to be a better, more productive version of themself. A reverse centaur is a person who is forced by technology to work at an inhuman pace—a driver made to deliver all day long, nonstop; a warehouse worker made to work without food or bathroom breaks; a programmer made to crank out impossible amounts of code.

The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI is not another anti-AI screed. Cory Doctorow uses AI in his work every day. As a creative person, he has no moral or dogmatic issue with AI—he thinks the technology is useful, even exciting, and full of potential. And yet.

AI has arrived surrounded by unprecedented hype driven by a tech industry desperate to maintain its unprecedented valuation based on its own promises of endless financial growth. Despite the fact that almost all of AI’s real-world implementations have proved underwhelming, AI is projected to be worth more than $16 trillion—a number that only makes sense if AI replaces vast swathes of the wage-earning human workforce. To justify that level of “value,” every story about AI must be presented as inevitable, world-changing disruption. Even the tales of the robot apocalypse are a calculated attempt to bolster the fearsome power of AI.

For Doctorow, it is imperative to see through that hype to the real story, to understand the technology not just for what it does, but for who it does it to and who it does it for. From that point of view, the story of AI is indeed dramatic and unprecedented, having generated an investment bubble so big that it endangers the entire world economy. In The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI—as he so successfully did in Enshittification—Doctorow recounts both how we found ourselves in this dire situation and how we can get through it, to a life “after” AI in which the tools work for us, not the other way around.

MP3

Received — 3 May 2026 Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

Comrade Trump

A Soviet propaganda poster featuring Lenin pointing angrily into the distance. It has been altered. Lenin now has Trump's hair and his skin in orange. The hammer/sickle logo behind him has been replaced with a cross.

This week on my podcast, I read Comrade Trump, a recent column from my Pluralistic newsletter, which will be syndicated in The Nerve.


All of which means that my experience of the Trump years is decidedly weird. On the one hand, I exist in a near-perpetual state of anxious misery, as Trump and his chud army of Christian nationalists and degenerate gamblers pursue a program of gleeful genocide. But at the very same time, I’m living in a world in which Trump is (inadvertently) dismantling many of the worst aspects of the old order in favor of something decidedly better.

Take Trump’s tariff policy. Back during Trump I, he decided that Americans couldn’t buy Chinese solar anymore, which had the double benefit of allowing him to pursue the twin goals of throwing red meat to Sinophobic Cold War 2.0 freaks and delivering a giant gift to the planet-wrecking oil companies that had helped him buy his way into office.

MP3

Received — 5 April 2026 Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

Not Normal

A pair of broken off statue legs, shod in Roman sandals, atop a cliff. Behind them, we see a futuristic city.

This week on my podcast, I read Not Normal, my latest Locus Magazine column, about the surreal and terrible world we’ve been eased into thanks to anti-circumvention laws.


If you were paying attention in 1998, you could see what was coming. Computers were getting much cheaper, and much smaller. From cars to toast­ers, from speakers to TVs, we were shoveling them into our devices. and an it doesn’t take a lot of expense or engineering to add an “access control” to any of those computers.

That meant that DMCA 1201 was about to metastasize. Once you put a computer into a thermostat or a bassinet or a stovetop or a hearing aid, you can add an access control and make it a felony to use it in ways the manufac­turer disprefers. You can make it illegal to use cheap batteries, or a different app store. You can add little chips to parts – everything from a fuel pump to a touchscreen – and make it illegal to manufacture a working generic part, because the generic part has to bypass the “access control” in the device that checks to see whether it’s the manufacturer’s own part.

MP3

Received — 9 February 2026 Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

All laws are local

9 February 2026 at 07:35

A pair of broken off statue legs, shod in Roman sandals, atop a cliff. Behind them, we see a futuristic city.

This week on my podcast, I read All laws are local a recent post from my Pluralistic.net blog, about the ephemerality of our seeming eternal verities.


In other words, things that seem eternal and innate to the human condition to you are apt to have been invented ten minutes before you started to notice the world around you and might seem utterly alien to your children. As Douglas Adams put it:

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

MP3

Received — 1 February 2026 Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

Threads’ margin is the Eurostack’s opportunity

1 February 2026 at 19:56

An EU flag; the stars have been replaced with a ring of Threads logos, tinted yellow. In the center floats the disembodied head of Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar. It has been modified: a black bar scrawled with grawlix covers the mouth.

This week on my podcast, I read “Threads’ margin is the Eurostack’s opportunity,” a recent post from my Pluralistic.net blog, about the tactics that digital sovereignty advocates can deploy to counter Meta’s (further) enshittification of Threads.


The funny thing is, the OG App creators were just following the Facebook playbook. When Facebook opened up to the general public in 2006, it had the problem that everyone who wanted social media already had an account on Myspace, and all of Facebook’s improvements on Myspace (Zuck made a promise never to spy on his users!) didn’t matter, because Myspace had something Facebook could not match: Myspace had all your friends.

Facebook came up with an ingenious solution to this problem: they offered Myspace users a bot. You gave that bot your Myspace login credentials (just as OG App did with your Insta credentials) and the bot impersonated you to Myspace (just as OG App did with Insta), and it grabbed everything queued up for you on Myspace (just as OG App did with Insta), and then flowed those messages into your Facebook feed (just as OG App did with Insta).

MP3

Received — 19 January 2026 Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

Code is a liability (not an asset)

19 January 2026 at 16:46

A shredder, shredding a giant US$100 bill. Benjamin Franklin's head has been replaced with a cliched 'hacker in a hoodie' illustration. The machine's faceplate bears the Claude Code wordmark. The background is the hostile red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'

This week on my podcast, I read “Code is a liability (not an asset),” a recent post from my Pluralistic.net blog, about the bad ideas behind the drive to replace programmers with chatbots.


Code is a liability. Code’s capabilities are assets. The goal of a tech shop is to have code whose capabilities generate more revenue than the costs associated with keeping that code running. For a long time, firms have nurtured a false belief that code costs less to run over time: after an initial shakedown period in which the bugs in the code are found and addressed, code ceases to need meaningful maintenance. After all, code is a machine without moving parts – it does not wear out; it doesn’t even wear down.

MP3

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Received — 12 January 2026 Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

(Digital) Elbows Up (OCADU, November 27, 2025)

12 January 2026 at 16:40
A rectangular motif suggestive of the Canadian flag, flanked by red bars. In the centre is the Jailbreaking Canada logo, a complex vector illustration of a maple leaf mixed with a keyhole, buildings, and various abstract figures.

This week on my podcast, I play the audio from (Digital) Elbows Up: How Canada Can Become a Nation of Jailbreakers, Reclaim Our Digital Sovereignty, Win the Trade-War, and Disenshittify Our Technology, a speech I delivered on November 27, 2025 at OCADU in Toronto, Canada (video here, transcript here).

I recognize that this is all very abstract, so let me make it concrete. When you buy a printer from HP, it becomes your property. What’s property? Well, let’s use the standard definition that every law student learns in first year property law, from Sir William Blackstone’s 1753 treatise:

“Property: that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.”

The printer is yours. It’s your property. You have sole and despotic dominion over it in exclusion of any other individual in the universe.

But HP printers ship with a program that checks to see whether you’re using HP ink, and if it suspects that you’ve bought generic ink, the printer refuses to use it. Now, Congress never passed a law saying “If you buy an HP printer, you have to buy HP ink, too.” That would be a weird law, given the whole sole-and-despotic dominion thing.

But because HP puts an “access control” in the ink-checking code, they can conjure up a brand new law: a law that effectively requires you to use HP ink.

Anticircumvention is a way for legislatures to outsource law-making to corporations. Once a corporation adds an access control to its product, they can create a new felony for using it in ways that benefit you at the expense of the company’s shareholders.

MP3

Received — 1 January 2026 Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

The Post-American Internet (39C3, Hamburg, Dec 28)

1 January 2026 at 12:01

Me onstage at Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Germany, during the presentation of 'A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet.'

This week on my podcast, I play the audio from A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, a speech I delivered on December 28, 2025 at 39C3, the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Germany (video here, transcript here).


Trump has staged an unscheduled, midair rapid disassembly of the global system of trade. Ironically, it is this system that prevented all of America’s trading partners from disenshittifying their internet: the US trade representative threatened the world with tariffs unless they passed laws that criminalized reverse-engineering and modding. By banning “adversarial interoperability,” America handcuffed the world’s technologists, banning them from creating the mods, hacks, alt clients, scrapers, and other tools needed to liberate their neighbours from the enshittificatory predations of the ketamine-addled zuckermuskian tyrants of US Big Tech. Well, when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. The Trump tariffs are here, and it’s time to pick the locks on the those handcuffs and set the world’s hackers loose on Big Tech. Happy Liberation Day, everyone!

Enshittification wasn’t an accident. It also wasn’t inevitable. This isn’t the iron laws of economics at work, nor is it the great forces of history.

Enshittification was a choice: named individuals, in living memory, enacted policies that created the enshittogenic environment. They created a world that encouraged tech companies to merge to monopoly, transforming the internet into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four.” They let these monopolists rip us off and spy on us.

And they banned us from fighting back, claiming that anyone who modified a technology without permission from its maker was a pirate (or worse, a terrorist). They created a system of “felony contempt of business-model,” where it’s literally a crime to change how your own devices work. They declared war on the general-purpose computer and demanded a computer that would do what the manufacturer told it to do (even if the owner of the computer didn’t want that).

We are at a turning point in the decades-long war on general-purpose computing. Geopolitics are up for grabs. The future is ours to seize.

In my 24 years with EFF, I have seen many strange moments, but never one quite like this. There’s plenty of terrifying things going on right now, but there’s also a massive, amazing, incredibly opportunity to seize the means of computation.

Let’s take it.

MP3

Received — 15 December 2025 Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

Daddy-Daughter Podcast, 2025 Edition

15 December 2025 at 03:28

Poesy and me in front of our Christmas tree.

This week on my podcast, I sit down with my daughter Poesy, for our annual Daddy-Daughter Podcast, a tradition we’ve had since she was three (she’s 17 now!). This year, Poe recaps her graduation, her triumphs with her dance team, and her life at college! She offers us a tutorial on playing Egyptian War, and we sing Jingle Bells!

MP3

Received — 23 November 2025 Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

Show Me the Incentive, I’ll Show You the Outcome

23 November 2025 at 21:36

A Gilded Age editorial cartoon depicting a muscular worker and a corpulent millionaire squaring off for a fight; the millionaire's head has been replaced with the poop emoji from the cover of 'Enshittification,' its mouth covered in a grawlix-scrawled black bar.

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, “Show Me the Incentive, I’ll Show You the Outcome,” about the process by which we ended up with an enshittogenic policy environment:


The whole point of the conservative project is to take away choices, and corral us into “preferences” that we disprefer. Eliminate no-fault divorce, suppress the vote, gerrymander the electoral map, cram a binding arbi­tration clause into every terms of service and a noncompete into every labor contract, buy up all your competitors, DRM-lock all the media, ban contraception and abortion, and you’ve got a world of partners you can’t divorce, politicians you can’t vote out, companies you can’t sue, jobs you can’t quit, services you can’t leave, books and music you can’t move, and pregnancies you can’t prevent or terminate.


And after you are relentlessly corralled into all these things you hate, you will be told that you don’t hate them after all – because you revealed your preferences for them.


Consumerism is a terrible way to make change at the best of times, and it gets less effective by the day, as authoritarianism and market consolidation shrink the world of possibilities to an endless Pepsi Chal­lenge, where “choice” is narrowed to which flavor of sweetened battery acid you hate the least.


I don’t think that end users are to blame for enshittification.

MP3

Received — 25 October 2025 Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
Received — 11 October 2025 Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
Received — 6 October 2025 Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh

6 October 2025 at 14:30

The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh

A Zimbabwean one hundred trillion dollar bill; the bill's iconography have been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' and a stylized, engraving-style portrait of Sam Altman.'

This week on my podcast, I read “The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh,” a recent column from my Pluralistic newsletter; about the looming economic crisis threatened by the AI investment bubble:

A week ago, I turned that book into a speech, which I delivered as the annual Nordlander Memorial Lecture at Cornell, where I’m an AD White Professor-at-Large. This was my first-ever speech about AI and I wasn’t sure how it would go over, but thankfully, it went great and sparked a lively Q&A. One of those questions came from a young man who said something like “So, you’re saying a third of the stock market is tied up in seven AI companies that have no way to become profitable and that this is a bubble that’s going to burst and take the whole economy with it?”

I said, “Yes, that’s right.”

He said, “OK, but what can we do about that?”

So I re-iterated the book’s thesis: that the AI bubble is driven by monopolists who’ve conquered their markets and have no more growth potential, who are desperate to convince investors that they can continue to grow by moving into some other sector, e.g. “pivot to video,” crypto, blockchain, NFTs, AI, and now “super-intelligence.” Further: the topline growth that AI companies are selling comes from replacing most workers with AI, and re-tasking the surviving workers as AI babysitters (“humans in the loop”), which won’t work. Finally: AI cannot do your job, but an AI salesman can 100% convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can’t do your job, and when the bubble bursts, the money-hemorrhaging “foundation models” will be shut off and we’ll lose the AI that can’t do your job, and you will be long gone, retrained or retired or “discouraged” and out of the labor market, and no one will do your job. AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations.

The only thing (I said) that we can do about this is to puncture the AI bubble as soon as possible, to halt this before it progresses any further and to head off the accumulation of social and economic debt. To do that, we have to take aim at the material basis for the AI bubble (creating a growth story by claiming that defective AI can do your job).

“OK,” the young man said, “but what can we do about the crash?” He was clearly very worried.

“I don’t think there’s anything we can do about that. I think it’s already locked in. I mean, maybe if we had a different government, they’d fund a jobs guarantee to pull us out of it, but I don’t think Trump’ll do that, so –”

“But what can we do?”

We went through a few rounds of this, with this poor kid just repeating the same question in different tones of voice, like an acting coach demonstrating the five stages of grieving using nothing but inflection. It was an uncomfortable moment, and there was some decidedly nervous chuckling around the room as we pondered the coming AI (economic) apocalypse, and the fate of this kid graduating with mid-six-figure debts into an economy of ashes and rubble.

MP3

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

Received — 1 October 2025 Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

Announcing the Enshittification tour

1 October 2025 at 18:13

A hobo with a bindlestiff, walking down a lonely train track. His head has been replaced with a poop emoji with angry eyebrows whose mouth is covered with a black bar covered in grawlix.

Next Monday, I’ll be departing for a 24-city, three-month book tour for my new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Went Wrong and What To Do About It:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

This is a big tour! I’ll be doing in-person events in the US, Canada, the UK and Portugal, and a virtual event in Spain. I’m also planning an event in Hamburg, Germany for December, but that one hasn’t been confirmed yet, so it doesn’t appear in the schedule below. You’ll notice that there are events that are missing their signup and ticketing details; I’ll be keeping the master tour schedule up to date at pluralistic.net/tour.

If there’s an event you’re interested in that hasn’t had its details filled in yet, please send an email to doctorow@craphound.com with the name of the event in the subject line. I’m going to create one-shot mailing lists that I’ll update with details when they’re available (please forgive me if I fumble this – book tours are pretty intensive affairs and I’ll be squeezing this into the spare moments).

Here’s that schedule!

Received — 8 September 2025 Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

By all means, tread on those people

8 September 2025 at 02:51

The Gadsen 'DONT TREAD ON ME' flag; the text has been replaced with 'THERE MUST BE IN-GROUPS WHOM THE LAW PROTECTS BUT DOES NOT BIND ALONGSIDE OUT-GROUPS WHOM THE LAW BINDS BUT DOES NOT PROTECT.'

This week on my podcast, I read “By all means, tread on those people,” a recent column from my Pluralistic newsletter; about the way that the American descent in fascism is connected to its abandonment of the rule of law more broadly:

Just as Martin Niemöller’s “First They Came” has become our framework for understanding the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany, so, too is Wilhoit’s Law the best way to understand America’s decline into fascism:

In case you’re not familiar with Frank Wilhoit’s amazing law, here it is:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

The thing that makes Wilhoit’s Law so apt to this moment – and to our understanding of the recent history that produced this moment – is how it connects the petty with the terrifying, the trivial with the radical, the micro with the macro. It’s a way to join the dots between fascists’ business dealings, their interpersonal relationships, and their political views. It describes a continuum that ranges from minor commercial grifts to martial law, and shows how tolerance for the former creates the conditions for the latter.

MP3

Received — 28 August 2025 Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

Enshittification (episode 500!)

28 August 2025 at 22:46

A poop emoji with a grawlix-covered black bar across its mouth.

It’s the 500th edition of my podcast, and to celebrate, I’m bringing you an hour-long excerpt from the audiobook of my forthcoming book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It (Farrar, Straus and Giroux US/Canada; Verso UK/Commonwealth).

Because Amazon won’t carry my audiobooks (or any DRM-free audiobooks), I have to produce my own books and pre-sell them on Kickstarter campaigns. The Kickstarter for this one is underway and going great.

I hope that listening to this long sample will convince you to pre-order your copy! I don’t ask for Patreon donations, I don’t put ads on my work – these Kickstarters are a big part of why I’m able to pursue my open access, enshittification-free publishing program, and I really thank you for your support.


MP3

❌