Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

This week on my podcast, I read my short story “Moral Hazard,” published last month in MIT Press’s Communications Breakdown, a science fiction anthology edited by Jonathan Strahan. “Moral Hazard” is a story about inequality, fintech, and the problems of “solutionism.” I know exactly where I was the day I decided to give every homeless person in America their own LLC. I was in the southeast corner of the sprawling homeless camp that had once been Seattle’s Discovery Park on a rare, dry February afternoon. The sun was weak but so welcome. After weeks of sheltering in our tents and squelching through the mud and getting drenched waiting for the portas, we were finally able to break out the folding chairs and enjoy each other’s company. Mike the Bike had coffee. He always did. Mike knew more ways to make coffee than any fancy barista. He had a master’s in chemical engineering and a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering and when he was high he spent every second of the buzz thinking of new ways to combine heat and water and solids to produce a perfect brew. I brought trail mix, which I mixed up myself with food-bank supplies and spices I bought from the bulk place for pennies. My secret is cardamom and a little chili powder. I learned that from my Mom. “Trish,” Mike the Bike said, “I wish I was a corporation.” MP3

This week on my podcast, I read the second and final part of my short story, “The Canadian Miracle,” a story set in the world of my forthcoming pre-apocalyptic Green New Deal novel, The Lost Cause, which comes out on November 14. Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping. -Fred Rogers, 1986 It’s a treat to beat your feet on the Mississippi Mud. -Bing Crosby, 1927. I arrived in Oxford with the first wave of Blue Helmets, choppered in along with our gear, touching down on a hospital roof, both so that our doctors and nurses could get straight to work, and also because it was one of the few buildings left with a helipad and backup generators and its own water filtration. Humping my bag down the stairs to the waterlogged ground levels was a nightmare, even by Calgary standards. People lay on the stairs, sick and injured, and navigating them without stepping on them was like an endless nightmare of near-falls and weak moans from people too weak to curse me. I met a nurse halfway down and she took my bag from me and set it down on the landing and gave me a warm hug. “Welcome,” she said, and looked deep into my eyes. We were both young and both women but she was Black and American and I was white and Canadian. I came from a country where, for the first time in a hundred years, there was a generation that wasn’t terrified of the future. She came from a country where everybody knew they had no future. I hugged her back and she told me my lips were cracked and ordered me to drink water and watched me do it. “This lady’s with the Canadians. They came to help,” she said to her patients on the stairs. Some of them smiled and murmured at me. Others just stared at the back of their eyelids, reliving their traumas or tracing the contours of their pain. MP3

This week on my podcast, I read part one of my short story, “The Canadian Miracle,” a story set in the world of my forthcoming pre-apocalyptic Green New Deal novel, The Lost Cause, which comes out on November 14. Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping. -Fred Rogers, 1986 It’s a treat to beat your feet on the Mississippi Mud. -Bing Crosby, 1927. I arrived in Oxford with the first wave of Blue Helmets, choppered in along with our gear, touching down on a hospital roof, both so that our doctors and nurses could get straight to work, and also because it was one of the few buildings left with a helipad and backup generators and its own water filtration. Humping my bag down the stairs to the waterlogged ground levels was a nightmare, even by Calgary standards. People lay on the stairs, sick and injured, and navigating them without stepping on them was like an endless nightmare of near-falls and weak moans from people too weak to curse me. I met a nurse halfway down and she took my bag from me and set it down on the landing and gave me a warm hug. “Welcome,” she said, and looked deep into my eyes. We were both young and both women but she was Black and American and I was white and Canadian. I came from a country where, for the first time in a hundred years, there was a generation that wasn’t terrified of the future. She came from a country where everybody knew they had no future. I hugged her back and she told me my lips were cracked and ordered me to drink water and watched me do it. “This lady’s with the Canadians. They came to help,” she said to her patients on the stairs. Some of them smiled and murmured at me. Others just stared at the back of their eyelids, reliving their traumas or tracing the contours of their pain. MP3

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, “Microincentives and Enshittification” (open access link), about how Google went from being a company whose products were eerily good and whose corporate might was more often on the side of right than wrong, to being a company whose products are locked in a terminal enshittification spiral and whose lobbying might is firmly on the wrong side of history. Let’s start with how hard it is to not use Google. Google spends fifty billion dollars per year on deals to be the default search engine for Apple, Samsung, Firefox and elsewhere. Google spends a whole-ass Twitter, every single year, just to make sure you never accidentally try another search engine. Small wonder there are so few search alternatives — and small wonder that the most promising ones are suffocated for lack of market oxygen. Google Search is as big as it could possibly be. The sub-ten-percent of the search market that Google doesn’t own isn’t ever going to voluntarily come into the Google fold. Those brave iconoclasts are intimately familiar with Google Search and have had to override one or more defaults in order to get shut of it. They aren’t customers-in-waiting who just need a little more persuading. That means that Google Search can’t grow by adding new customers. It can only grow by squeezing its existing customers harder. For Google Search to increase its profits, it must shift value from web publishers, advertisers and/or users to itself. The only way for Google Search to grow is to make itself worse. MP3

This week on my podcast, I present the prologue and first chapter of The Lost Cause, my forthcoming solarpunk novel of Green New Deal world threatened by seagoing anarcho-capitalist billionaire wreckers and their white nationalist militia shock-troops. The book comes out on November 14 from Tor/Macmillan (US/Canada) and Head of Zeus/Bloomsbury (UK/Australia/NZ/SA, etc). As with all my books, I’ve had to produce my own audio edition, because Amazon refuses to carry my work in audio form. You can pre-order the DRM-free audio and ebook and the hardcover through my Kickstarter. If you like my work and have ever wanted to say thank you, this is the best way to do so. These kickstarters don’t just pay my bills, they also provide the financial cushion that lets me produce all the free work I’ve done for decades, including this podcast. What’s more, they help me show other authors and the publishing world that when writers have their readers’ backs, readers will return the favor. MP3

Mario Zechner, Austrian technologist and expert in APIs, joins the podcast to discuss the benefits of web-scraping. He reveals how he used scraped data to expose deceptive practices by large grocery chains. Topics covered include collusion, shrinkflation, and cyclic price changes. Zechner's work prompted the Austrian government to publish a report lauding his efforts. He also emphasizes the significance of scraping in academic research and the importance of privacy laws and collective action in tackling AI challenges.

In this podcast, the speaker shares their unexpected encounter with a chatbot that transformed their letter into a threatening lawyer letter. They discuss the power of letter signals and the diminishing value of letters as a form of communication. The speaker also explores the functions and demand for chatbots in tasks like generating legal threats and creating letters of reference. They express uncertainty about the effectiveness of chatbots and discuss plans for the future.

This podcast discusses the deterioration of the internet and the need for a new, good internet. It challenges nostalgia and explores the negative impact of specific policy choices that have led to the current state of the internet. The speaker emphasizes the importance of building a new internet that is user-controlled and protected by legal constraints.

This special podcast features an introduction to the audiobook 'The Internet Con' and discusses the Kickstarter campaign. It explores the rise and fall of tech giants, the history and impact of antitrust laws, and the influence of Borg's consumer welfare theories. The podcast also dives into the concentration of power in the digital age, the importance of fixing technology, and the universality and power of computers. It concludes by highlighting the importance of interoperability and technology in activism.

This podcast explores the idea of letting platforms 'burn' by focusing on making it easier for people to leave rather than fixing the platforms, discussing the inevitability of platform collapse. It highlights the need to move people out of the danger zone and acknowledge the vulnerabilities leading to potential platform collapse.