Enshittification and the Rot Economy: A Deep Dives Conversation with Cory Doctorow and Ed Zitron

Well, it's my floor now. Well, welcome everybody. Again, thank you for hucking it out on this Wednesday night. We're really excited to have you all. The energy in the room is great. We're all here to talk about what is happening to us and seems to be spinning wildly out of our control, and what it is, and how it's gonna affect us, and what we can possibly do about it.

Future-facing. I have two really, really illustrious guests with me tonight, Cory and Ed. I did my research beforehand and watched all of their other interviews with other people. I'm not going to do as good of a job, so I'm really counting on them to shine. But for those of you who maybe just showed up by accident, I would love for first Corey and then Ed to do a brief introduction of themselves before we launch into this really incredible topic. So Corey, why don't you go ahead.

Hi, I'm Cory Doctorow. I have worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, for a quarter of a century now. I've been an activist and a journalist and a writer. I'm a recovering library worker and bookseller and a Clarion West instructor every now and again, and I'm very pleased to be back here in Seattle to talk with you folks.

Okay, so we're just gonna have like a little bitty five minutes on the basics before we launch into the complexities of the situation we're in. I'm gonna start with an anecdote, which is one day I woke up and Google sucked. I don't know what happened, but one day I was looking for a thing and I'm like, this is so much worse than I am used to. And that tripped me into a world of, it sucks on purpose, here's why. And I would love for Ed and Corey to tell me why Google sucks. Do you want to start by talking about Prabhagar Raghavan?

I do have an honorary PhD in computer science. So, Ed has got this way of talking about the ideology that says let's make Google worse in order to increase profits. And you have to understand, you know, when Google hit this code yellow, they had a 90% market share in search. So, of course, query growth had slowed, right? How do you increase query growth when you have a 90% market share? You can raise a billion humans to maturity and make them Google customers. That's a product called Google Classroom, but it doesn't work quickly. And so they needed something else to goose growth, and they came up with this idea, let's make Google worse in order to make more money. And you see in these documents that had surfaced this ferocious debate between technologists who want to do the right thing in the form of Ben Gomes, and business people who want to do the wrong thing in the form of Pragevar Raghavan. What's interesting about this is that, although for many years you can imagine fights like this played out at Google, where the side that wanted to make things better won out against the side that wanted to make things worse, in this case you see this guy losing. And he's losing because his argument consists of, if I made Google worse, I would feel bad about my work and my life. And Prakabar Raghavan's argument is, if we make Google worse, we'll make a lot more money. And there's one other thing as well, Jerry Dishler, who's now the head of ads. One of his things was, look, I'm not saying that revenue needs to control ads. However, we all have a shared reality. Basically what he said, it's fucking insane. When you read these things, it's chilling and makes you think of things you can't say in public. So you have to wonder, what is it that created this environment? Ed calls the mindset that says, well, if you can, you should worsen things to make money, the rot economy. And I think it's a very apt phrase. And the question that I try to interrogate in Shittification is what gave rise to it, right? What created the inshittasine? And my conclusion is it wasn't because you shopped wrong, right? It's not because, oh, you didn't pay for the product, so you became the product. You know, farmers who buy half-million-dollar tractors are exploited by John Deere, which won't let their repairs go live until they pay a $200 call-out fee for a John Deere person to come out and type an unlock code into the keyboard. Now that is not a free ad-supported tractor, right? That's a tractor they paid, you know, six large for and it won't work until they pay ransom money. So it's not because you shopped wrong. It's also not because these guys are the wrong guys to be running the company. They are terrible people. But the reality is that these Zuckermuskian mediocrities that run these companies are not smart enough to be causes. They must be effects, right? They're responding to an inshittogenic environment created by policy. And that policy, in the case of Google, is the policy that oversaw for decades Google's serial acquisition of both vertical and horizontal competitors, so that a company that had only made one really successful consumer-facing product, which they made a millennium ago, their search engine, and that had almost, with that exception, failed to launch anything internally, except for things they bought from other people, anti-competitive acquisitions to the point where they bought all the shelf space, right? Nowhere else a search engine could take root. They're bribing Apple to the tune of more than 20 billion dollars a year not to enter the search market and have a direct competitor that would erode their margins, so they become too big to care. And this is really my thesis, right? That it's as much as Ed is right to be angry at Prabhakar Raghavan. There are people alive today and not so recently dead who presided over shifts in our policy environment where they were warned at the time that the decisions that they were contemplating would have the absolutely foreseeable effect of rewarding firms that did bad things to us, who took those decisions anyway. And today are like hanging around, polishing their fake Nobel Prizes in economics and collecting six-figure consulting fees working for blue chips and not being held responsible at all, much less worrying that when they go out abroad amongst us that someone might be sizing them up for a pitchfork. And so that's the thing that I want to recover in this book.

I'm going to jump in here. Oh, my bad. That's OK. So this is Seattle. And collectively, as Seattleites, we tend to have certain feelings about capitalism. Would you say, either of you, that this phenomenon, this rot economy, is just an inescapable fact of capitalism, or is there real policy change? Is there some other way we could do this, that we could eschew this rot economy and actually still have functioning capitalism in some way, and the things that we want, and improved lives?

Yeah, I mean, I think Ed makes a really good point here. And look, I'm not someone who believes that markets are the best or only arbiter of how we allocate resources. I think that there are other ways that we can do things. But even if you are the kind of Elon Musk adult libertarian who can't open your copy of Atlas Shrugged anymore because the pages are all stuck together. And you think that the only thing that our government should ever do is enforce contracts? You still want them to enforce contracts, right? And for the referee to referee the game adequately, they have to be more powerful than the players on the field. So I tell my libertarian friends, look, the smallest government you can have is determined by the largest corporation you're willing to tolerate. And the decision, which was taken in the late 1970s, first under Carter and then accelerating under Reagan and through the rest of it, and really co-terminal with the tech industry. So remember, Ronald Reagan went on the campaign trail the year the Apple II Plus went on sale. The tech industry grew up, and as it got bigger, antitrust got smaller. It's really the first post-antitrust industry, which is why it looks the way it does. And when we decided that we would no longer enforce anti-monopoly law, we really did set in motion these very foreseeable outcomes. And you know, the people responsible for it, they insist that their pro-monopoly posture, which boiled down to this, that monopolies are efficient. That when you observe a monopoly in the wild, what you must be seeing is a company that is very pleasing to people. Because if a company isn't pleasing to people, then other people will enter the market and take away your monopoly. And so any monopoly that you find, tautologically, by circular reasoning, must be a good company. And so if Apple is controlling all of the app market, if Google is controlling 90% of the search market, what you're observing is a firm that is so pleasing that everyone is voluntarily using them. And if they weren't, then they would be out-competed. And so they said, well, let's tolerate monopolies as efficient. Let's not engage in this perverse labor of punishing companies for pleasing the people who've elected us to represent them. Let us celebrate these new efficiencies. And you do that for 40 years and suddenly every sector becomes a cartel. We have this in glass bottles, vitamin C, eyeglasses, intermodal shipping, rail, the internet. As Tom Eastman says, it's five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four. We have it in semiconductors. We have it in professional wrestling. We have it in plastic bags filled with sterile saline. And one company controls not just the hospital beds, but also the coffins. Think about that for a minute. So this rampant monopolization did ultimately give rise to this world where firms didn't have to worry about being disciplined by markets, but it also meant they didn't have to worry about being disciplined by governments. Because when you boil a sector down to just a handful of firms, it's very easy for them to decide what line of bullshit they're going to feed to their regulators. And because they are so a slosh in money, because they don't compete head to head. For Google, $20 billion a year to Apple not to enter the search market is a bargain, because the erosion of both of their margins, if they were competing head to head in these markets that they've actually divided up amongst themselves, like the Pope dividing up the New World, would cost them both far more than $20 billion. They'd have to hire each other's employees and pay them more, they'd have to offer us cheaper things, they'd have to be better to advertisers, they'd have to be better to publishers, and that would erode their margins. And so you end up with this moment where they have all of this money, they find it very easy to come to a single position, and their regulators do as they're told. And so we end up with both regulatory capture and market capture arising out of this same set of policy choices. And so two of the most important forces that we count on to punish companies that do bad things, to ensure that when Pragebar Raghavan and Les Gomes are fighting, that Les Gomes can say more than, this would make me feel bad about my life's work. He can say, and we're going to have our lunches eaten by someone smarter than us, or we're going to get smacked around by a regulator that at that moment he's going to lose that argument. And so this is how you end up with the devil of your worst nature on your left shoulder whispering in your ear and winning the argument over the angel of your better nature on your right shoulder telling you to do the right thing.

So on that note, our regulators are not really regulating right now in general. And for us, the average person, this is all really over our heads power-wise. We as individuals don't really have power to do anything about getting Google to behave. But what do we do in our personal lives when we're affected by this? I work in video games, I'm working on cyberpunk too. And I feel the effects of the rot economy and shittification on my job every day. It's very, very, very stressful. I was talking to a woman earlier, her name's Carolyn, hi Carolyn, about AI's effect on higher ed. So for us, for the people in this room, do you have any ideas or guidance for how do we live our lives now? What do we do?

You know, when the early reviews started to come out for Shittification, there was a kind of common theme that emerged from some of these reviews. It was, I found this book very exciting and interesting. It gave me a way to attach a handle to something that had been kind of big and diffuse and frustrating to me that I couldn't make sense of. And now that I've got this handle on it, I feel like I can do something with it. And I read all of these, you know, suggestions for how we can make policy at the end and what that would do in order to forestall or roll back in shittification and make a better world. But there wasn't anything I could do personally in my life as a consumer. And, you know, they're right. They're right. I don't think your personal consumption choices really play a role in changing our systemic problems. Now, by all means, like, if there's like a business you want to support, go to Third Place Books instead of Amazon in order to get your books because it'll make their lives better and you'll have a bookstore in your community. But don't kid yourself that it's going to fix the structural problem of Amazon. The structural problem of Amazon is that regulators allow them to buy all of their competitors, such that they were able to corner markets and then they were able to lock people in. Am I too quiet? Is that the issue? All right. And then they were able to lock people into their platform through getting them to pay in advance by a year for their shipping with Prime, such that merchants found that they couldn't sell anywhere else. And then they were able to lard onto those merchants 45 to 51% junk fees on every dollar they brought in. And then they were able to hit them with this most favored nation deal that says that if you raise your prices on Amazon to recover some of those 45 to 51 percent junk fees, you have to raise your prices everywhere else at Target and Walmart, mom-and-pop stores, in your own warehouse store, so that Amazon started to impose a worldwide tax on all consumption, right? And that's not a thing you solve by changing your own consumption habits. You know, by all means, if you feel that Twitter is bad for your mental health, and it probably is, and you want to go to Blue Sky, you want to go to Mastodon, sure, but just don't fetishize that as the thing that's going to make a systemic difference, right? The thing that makes a systemic difference is intervening not as an individual, but as a polity. So, as I've mentioned before, I work at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We have a national network of grassroots groups, including several here in Seattle, called the Electronic Frontier Alliance. If you go to efa.eff.org, you can find some of these local chapters, and they work on things like limiting police use of facial recognition. It's getting involved as a polity that makes a difference. I know it's easy to despair if you think you can't solve things individually through your own consumption choices. We've been told this for 40 years, that you have to vote with your wallet. The reason rich people want you to vote with your wallet is they have thicker wallets than you. You are always going to lose that election. Don't vote with your wallet. Be a citizen. Someone in the reception before this asked me about what advice I would give to tech workers. Statistically, a bunch of you are probably tech workers. The tech workers did have this chance to consolidate their power, and they missed it. For a long time, one of the forces that constrained was workers themselves. Because tech workers are this uniquely constituted workforce historically. The tech sector has always had very low union density, but an enormous amount of worker power. And that's because tech workers were both very scarce and very, very valuable. The National Bureau of Economic Research estimates that the average tech worker in Silicon Valley and Seattle was adding a million dollars a year to their employer's bottom line. That's why they gave you free kombucha and massages and why they'd hire a surgeon to freeze your eggs so you could work through your fertile years. It wasn't because they loved you. It was because they were afraid of you getting a job across the street. Now, we know how tech bosses treat the workers. They're not afraid of losing. That's the Amazon driver who's got the AI camera that takes points off if they look away from the road to check something to one side or the other and it decides that their eyeballs were in the wrong orientation. It's the warehouse workers that are injured at three times the rate of other warehouse workers in the sector. It's everyone who pees in a bottle. It's people who assemble iPhones in China and have suicide nets around the factory. That's how they treat the workers they're not afraid of. So there was this opportunity at one point for tech workers to use that power and consolidate it through a union. And they missed it, right? Because tech workers thought that they were temporarily embarrassed founders. They didn't think that they were workers. And they thought that because their bosses would meet them in monthly town hall meetings where they could ask impertinent questions about corporate strategy, that their bosses thought that they were peers. But your boss didn't think you were a peer, your boss thought you were a problem to solve. And after half a million layoffs in the tech sector, they're not afraid of you anymore. There's other workers who will take your job. You can no longer say, I refuse to shittify that thing I missed my mother's funeral to ship, and you can't hire someone else to replace me, because they'll just fire you and hire someone else to replace you. And so now is the time to unionize.

And so, you know, it might feel like a bad time to be unionizing because we no longer have the National Labor Relations Board as it was constituted under Biden. In fact, it's been so illegally denuded of commissioners that it can no longer form a quorum and investigate unfair labor practices. So it can feel like this is a bad time. But here's the category error Trump is making. Trump thinks that the reason we have unions is because we have the National Labor Relations Act. It's backwards, right? Long before unions were legal, we had unions, right? And the union piece represented by the National Labor Relations Act was brought about because bosses were scared of what their workers were doing to them at that point, because militancy had gotten so intense that they sued for peace. And that peace came in two parts. Part of the National Labor Relations Act describes what your boss can't do to you, but a lot of the National Labor Relations Act is about what you can't do to your boss. And one guess which half of the National Labor Relations Act has been most vigorously enforced. So Trump thinks that we fired the referee and so that means all the players have to leave the field. He's wrong. When you fire the referee, it means there's no more rules, right? And there's a reason that fascists attack unions first. It's because the opposite of fascism is solidarity.

Yes, excellent answers all around. And just to summarize, what I heard was don't vote with your wallet, unionize. So take that out the door. And efa.eff.org. Plug it. Okay, my next question for you is one that a lot of people have been thinking about, which is the bubble. The bubble is coming. We've all heard about the bubble. Is the bubble real? This is Ed's department. What is going to happen? If we are tiny investors that have our 401K and index funds, what the fuck do we do? Buy long poles to dig through rubble with canned goods. Let's try again. Ed?

So let me advance a theory of the less bad and more bad bubble, if not a good bubble. That would be nice. So some bubbles have productive residues and some don't, right? So Enron left nothing behind, right? Now WorldCom, which was a grotesque fraud, some of you will remember, right? They raised billions of dollars claiming that they had orders for fiber. They dug up the streets all over the world. They put fiber in the ground. They didn't have the orders for the fiber. They stole billions of dollars from everyday investors, people who just wanted to go through their old age without starving to death or not having a roof over their head. The CEO died in prison and it was good riddance, but there was still all that fiber in the ground, right? So I've got two gigabit symmetrical fiber at home in Burbank because AT&T bought some old dark fiber from WorldCom because fiber lasts forever, right? It's just glass. So, once it's there, it is a productive residue, right? So, what kind of bubbles are we living through? Well, crypto is not going to leave behind anything. Crypto is going to leave behind shitty Austrian economics and worse JPEGs, right? AI is actually going to leave behind some stuff. So if you want to think about like a post-AI bubble world, and I just got edits from my editor. I wrote a book over the summer called The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI. And if you want to think about a post-AI world, imagine what you would do if GPUs were 10 cents on the dollar, if there were a lot of skilled applied statisticians looking for work, and if you had a bunch of open source models that had barely been optimized and had a lot of room at the bottom.

So, I take your point. I think that there's going to be a lot of firms in receivership, right? I don't think that private equity bosses' preferences are going to enter into it. I think that there's going to be a lot of firms in receivership, and I do think that when you contemplate intersection of optimization of existing open-source models, you know, think about what happened when DeepSeek entered the market, right? You've got Chinese firms that are prohibited from using the more advanced GPUs, so rather than doing this sort of display of how serious they are about AI by spending as much money as they can, they went and they said, okay, well, what can we juice out of, you know, previous generations of GPUs? And then they got some pretty impressive results.

So my point is not about the market realities, the material reality. So I'm talking about what happens after the market pops, right? So, you know, I have seen people do interesting and useful things with AI. I think you've probably seen people do some useful and interesting. I'll give you an example. I was writing an essay. And I couldn't remember where I'd heard a quote I'd heard in a podcast. I couldn't remember which quote it was. So I downloaded Whisper, which is an open source model from OpenAI, to my laptop, which doesn't have a GPU, right? A little commodity laptop. Through 30 hours of podcasts that I'd recently listened to, I got a full transcription in an hour. My fan didn't even turn on.

Yeah, so I know tons of people who use this, and the title of the book, Reverse Centaur, refers to this idea from automation theory, where a centaur is someone who gets to use machines to assist them, a human head on a machine body, right? And so, you know, you're riding a bicycle, you're using a compiler.

Yes, and a reverse centaur is, that's right, a machine head on a human body, right? It's someone who's been conscripted to be a peripheral for a machine, right? And when I, you know, I should say, you talked about good cancer, I have the least bad kind of cancer. I've got a very treatable form of cancer, but I'm paying a lot of attention to stories about cancer and, you know, open source models or AI models that can sometimes see solid mass tumors that radiologists miss. And if what we said was, we at the Kaiser Oncology Department are going to invest in a service that is going to sometimes ask our radiologists to take a second look to see if they missed something, such that instead of doing 100 x-rays a day, they're going to do 98. Then I would say, as someone with cancer, that sounds interesting to me. I don't think anyone is pitching any oncology ward in the world on that. I think the pitch is, fire 90% of your oncologists, fire 90% of your radiologists, have the remainder babysit AI, have them be the accountability sinks and moral crumple zones for a machine that is processing this stuff at a speed that no human could possibly account for. Have them put their name at the bottom of it and have them absorb the blame for your cost-cutting measures. And so, you know, when I hear people talk about AI, right, I hear programmers talk about AI doing things that are useful. Like one that I've heard many programmers say is, I had one data file in a weird format that for one, as a one-off, I needed to get into a different format, and I had ways that I could check it and tell what was going on. And so I asked, I one-shotted it with an AI, I did some checksums, and it was great, and it saved me an hour. That's a centaur, right?

I'm going to put my fingers between the tigers here. I really want to squeeze out one more example here. It's a really good one because it's about a non-profit people should be supporting as well. There's a non-profit called the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, HRDAG.org. It's run by some really brilliant mathematicians, statisticians. They started off doing statistical extrapolations of war crimes for human rights tribunals, mostly in The Hague, and talking about the aspects of war crimes that were not visible but could be statistically inferred from adjacent data. They did a project with Innocence Project New Orleans, where they used LLMs to identify the linguistic correlates of arrest reports that produced exonerations, and they used that to analyze a lot more arrest reports than they could otherwise, and they put that at the top of a funnel where lawyers and paralegals were able to accelerate their exoneration work. That's a new thing on this earth, right? It's very cool. And I'm like, okay, well, if these guys can accelerate that work with cheap hardware that today is out of reach, if they can figure out how to use open source models but make them more efficient because you've got all these skilled applied statisticians who are no longer caught up in the bubble, then I think we could see some useful things after the bubble. That's my argument for this is fiber in the ground and not shitty monkey JPEGs.

Thank you both. We got there. So what I think I heard was we feel like the GPU infrastructure is just kind of fucked. That's not going to be useful afterwards. But also, the actual technology itself could possibly be useful in a number of use cases that could be socially just. If workers get to decide how they use their tools, they generally will be able to make some good decisions about it. And new tools for workers who are skilled and get to decide how they use them, that's great.

You know, look, I met a video editor who changed the eye lines of 200 extras in a crowd scene, right, using a deepfake. And he was like, yeah, I was sitting over with the director. We thought, wouldn't this scene be really interesting if they were all looking that way instead of this way? And they were able to do it. And I'm like, okay, that's a new tool on this earth.

Yeah, it's a deepfake, right? They just move the eyeballs.