Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com Enshittification With Lina Khan at the Brooklyn Public Library
45 snips
Oct 11, 2025 
Lina Khan, former Chair of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and a leading voice in antitrust, dives deep into her concepts of 'Enshittification'. She and Cory discuss how digital platforms worsen over time due to systemic policy failures. They explore the harmful surveillance business model and its implications for privacy law. The duo emphasizes the necessity of coalition-building for privacy reform and compares current regulatory landscapes with European standards. Khan also examines AI's role in exacerbating these issues, posing risks while presenting potential remedies.
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Policy, Not Just Greed, Drives Decline
- Inshittification is a systematic business strategy where platforms lock users, then worsen services to extract more profit from captive customers and business partners.
- Cory argues the root cause is policy choices that removed market and regulatory discipline, not merely greed or consumer mistakes.
Concentration Enables Surveillance Economies
- Lack of competition and regulatory capture erode firms' incentives to protect user privacy and service quality.
- Cory links market concentration to weak privacy laws and explains why incumbents block meaningful regulation.
Ad Surveillance Is Overclaimed
- Surveillance economics overstates ad efficacy; ad performance often fails to justify massive data collection.
- Cory cites Procter & Gamble cutting ad spend with no sales loss as evidence of advertising wastage.
