Techno-Feudalism: Power in the Digital Age

It's 2025. President Trump is back, and the richest men in tech are on stage with him. What started as a dysfunctional internet run by tech giants, and enabled by failed legislation, has morphed into something even more dangerous: what economist Yanis Varoufakis calls technofeudalism. Host Cory Doctorow traces how U.S. trade pressure dragged Canada into America's broken internet model, how shortsighted attempts to make big platforms behave came back to haunt us during the worst wildfire season in Canadian history, and offers up a solution for how to save the internet, asking: in a post-free trade world, why are we still playing by American rules?

Guests in this episode include Yanis Varoufakis, Delaney Poitras, Michael Geist, Pam Samuelson, Clive Thompson, Ed Zitron, and Emmanuel Goldstein. Archival recordings feature James Moore.