Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com artwork

Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

184 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★★ - 74 ratings

Cory Doctorow's Literary Works

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Episodes

The Majority of Censorship is Self-Censorship

February 25, 2024 16:24

Today for my podcast, I read The majority of censorship is self-censorship, originally published in my Pluralistic blog. It’s a breakdown of Ada Palmer’s excellent Reactor essay about the modern and historical context of censorship. I recorded this on a day when I was home between book-tour stops (I’m out with my new techno crime-thriller,... more

How I Got Scammed

February 18, 2024 15:11

Today for my podcast, I read How I Got Scammed, originally published in my Pluralistic blog. It’s a story of how the attacker has to get lucky once, while the defender has to never make a single mistake. This is my last podcast before I take off for my next book-tour, for my new novel,... more

My Marshall McLuhan Lecture on enshittification from Berlin’s transmediale conference

February 05, 2024 13:22

Last week, I traveled to Berlin to give the annual Marshall McLuhan lecture to open the Transmediale festival. I gave the talk to a full house at the Canadian embassy, and the embassy was kind enough to upload their video of the speech. This podcast is a rip of the audio from that Youtube video.... more

What kind of bubble is AI?

January 21, 2024 20:46

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column. “What kind of bubble is AI?” In it, I ask what will be left behind after the AI bubble bursts: You’ve got one week left to back the Kickstarter for my next novel, The Bezzle, the followup to Red Team Blues. I’m preselling... more

The Bezzle, read by Wil Wheaton (excerpt)

January 15, 2024 02:34

This week on my podcast, a preview of Wil Wheaton’s reading on the audiobook of The Bezzle, which I’m preselling through a Kickstarter campaign that I hope you’ll consider backing! MP3

The Internet’s Original Sin

December 17, 2023 19:38

This week on my podcast, I read my final Medium column The internet’s original sin, about the failure of trying to stretch copyright to cover every problem on the internet. Copyright is a regulation. It regulates the supply-chain of the entertainment industry. Copyright matters a lot to me, because I’m in the industry. But unless... more

Daddy-Daughter Podcast, 2023 edition

December 10, 2023 20:21

12 years ago, my four-year-old daughter’s nursery school let us know they’d be shutting down for Christmas a day before my wife’s office closed down, so I took the kid into my office in London to do some coloring, play with toys, and, eventually, record a podcast. It was hilarious. In the years since, we’ve... more

Don’t Be Evil

December 03, 2023 17:59 - 20.2 MB

This week on my podcast, I read my Locus Magazine column “Don’t Be Evil,” about the microeconomics and moral injury of enshittification. It’s tempting to think of the Great Enshittening – in which all the inter­net services we enjoyed and came to rely upon became suddenly and irreversibly terrible – as the result of moral... more

Moral Hazard (from Communications Breakdown)

November 12, 2023 18:03

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... more

The Canadian Miracle, Part 2

November 06, 2023 02:59

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... more

The Canadian Miracle, Part 1

November 01, 2023 13:18

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... more

Microincentives and Enshittification

October 23, 2023 21:35

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... more

The Lost Cause (excerpt)

October 12, 2023 14:06

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... more

How To Think About Scraping

September 24, 2023 22:47

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column. “How To Think About Scraping: In privacy and labor fights, copyright is a clumsy tool at best,” about the real risks (and benefits) of web-scraping, and how to formulate policy responses that preserve those benefits while targeting the harms head-on” Scraping when the scrapee... more

Plausible Sentence Generators

September 17, 2023 21:04

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus column. “Plausible Sentence Generators,” about my surprising, accidental encounter with a chatbot, and what it says about the future of the bullshit wars. When I came back to the tab a couple minutes later, I found that the site had fed my letter to a... more

Enshitternet: The old, good internet deserves a new, good internet

August 21, 2023 18:39

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column. “Enshitternet: The old, good internet deserves a new, good internet,” clarifying that our aspiration shouldn’t be to restore the internet’s former glory, but to make a new and glorious internet. The enshitternet wasn’t inevitable. It was the result of specific policy choices: the decision... more

The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (audiobook outtake)

August 01, 2023 21:31

This week’s podcast is a special one: the introduction and chapter one of the audio edition of The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation, which Verso will publish on September 5, 2023. I made my own DRM-free audiobook for this, reading it under the direction of the incredible Gabrielle de Cuir at... more

Let the Platforms Burn: The Opposite of Good Fires is Wildfires

July 17, 2023 05:06

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column. “Let the Platforms Burn: The Opposite of Good Fires is Wildfires,” making the case that we should focus more on making it easier for people to leave platforms, rather than making the platforms less terrible places to be. Tech bosses know the only thing... more

Ideas Lying Around

June 11, 2023 15:40

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column. “Ideas Lying Around,” about archivillain Milton Friedman’s surprisingly good theory of change, and how to apply it to progressive politics. Enter Friedman: to people reeling in crisis, Friedman insisted that the missing oil was somehow the product of unionization, pollution controls, women’s lib, and... more

The Swivel-Eyed Loons Have a Point

May 14, 2023 21:58

This week on my podcast, I read my lastest Locus column. “The Swivel-Eyed Loons Have a Point,” about the unlikely – but undeniable – common ground I share with the most unhinged far-right conspiracists. The swivel-eyed loons at the anti-15-minute-city protests point out that such a scheme constitutes a form of pervasive location-tracking surveil­lance, and... more

How To Make a Child-Safe TikTok

April 17, 2023 11:58

This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column. “How To Make a Child-Safe TikTok: Have you tried not spying on kids,” about the bizarre unwillingness of considering a middle-ground between “unregulated TikTok” and “banning TikTok” – namely, prohibiting TikTok from spying on kids. MP3 (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; Vxla, CC BY 2.0; modified)

Red Team Blues: Behind the Scenes with Wil Wheaton

April 02, 2023 23:50

This week on my podcast, I bring you some clips of Wil Wheaton’s recording sessions for the audiobook of Red Team Blues, my next novel, an anti-finance finance thriller starring the 67 year old forensic accountant Martin Hench, who specializes in high-tech scams. I’m currently kickstarting this audiobook, pre-selling audiobooks, ebooks and hardcovers. I have... more

Red Team Blues

March 27, 2023 01:38

This week on my podcast, I read a selection from my next novel, Red Team Blues, an anti-finance finance thriller about Marty Hench, a 67 year old hard-charging forensic accountant who’s seen every finance scam that Silicon Valley has come up with over the previous 40 years. Marty’s ready to retire, but an old friend... more

Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk

March 19, 2023 20:18

This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk, making the Luddite case against bossware and other jobs where your boss is an app. The rise of gig work produced a massive surge of “craft” workers who toiled on their own premises, most notably the drivers... more

Twiddler

February 27, 2023 17:06

This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, Twiddler, which further explores my theory of enshittification, and the factors that make it endemic to digital platforms. The early internet promised more than disintermediation — it also promised endless configurability, where users and technologists could install after-market code that altered the functioning of... more

Tiktok’s enshittification

February 20, 2023 15:12

This week on my podcast, I read my Pluralistic blog post, Tiktok’s enshittification, which sets out a kind of master theory of enshittification, illustrated by Tiktok’s platform dynamics. Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they... more

Social Quitting

January 23, 2023 04:29

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus column, “Social Quitting, about the enshittification lifecycle of social media platforms. But as Facebook and Twitter cemented their dominance, they steadily changed their services to capture more and more of the value that their users generated for them. At first, the companies shifted value from... more

Daddy-Daughter Podcast, 2022 Edition

December 12, 2022 14:46

When my daughter Poesy was four, her nursery school let us know that they were shutting down a day before my wife’s office closed for the holidays, leaving us with a childcare problem. Since I worked for myself, I took the day off and brought her to my office, where we recorded a short podcast,... more

Sound Money

September 12, 2022 00:28

This week on my podcast, I read “Sound Money,” my latest column for Medium, which explains why money creation is necessary for a prosperous economy, despite the scaremongering of “inflation hawks.” MP3

What is Chokepoint Capitalism?

August 21, 2022 23:45 - 15 minutes

This week on my podcast, I read “What is Chokepoint Capitalism?” a recent column for Medium explaining the thesis of my new book with Rebecca Giblin, which explains how creative labor markets got rigged, and how we can unrig them. (Image: Erik B. Anderson, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified) MP3

So You’ve Decided to Unfollow Me

August 08, 2022 12:56 - 17 minutes

This week on my podcast, I read “So You’ve Decided to Unfollow Me,” a recent column for Medium describing the joys of writing to attract the audience of people who want to read what you want to write. (Image: Sascha Kohlmann, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified) MP3

View a SKU: Let’s Make Amazon Into a Dumb Pipe

July 31, 2022 23:52

This week on my podcast, I read “View a SKU: Let’s Make Amazon Into a Dumb Pipe,” a recent column for Medium discussing how interoperability could flip Amazon’s monopoly power on its head and enable us all to coveniently shop locally. MP3

Why none of my books are available on Audible

July 24, 2022 19:00 - 31 minutes

This week on my podcast, I read “Why none of my books are available on Audible,” a short audiobook I produced to be distributed through Amazon’s ACX platform, explaining how that platform’s sloppy rights verification and mandatory DRM screws over writers. MP3 (Image: Paris 16, CC BY-SA 4.0; Dmitry Baranovskiy, CC BY 4.0; modified)

Reasonable Agreement: On the Crapification of Literary Contracts

June 27, 2022 13:36 - 22 minutes

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, Reasonable Agreement: On the Crapification of Literary Contracts, about the growing trend of standard, non-negotiable contract terms in freelance writing contracts that are outrageous in their unfairness. MP3

Monopolists Want to Create Human Inkjet Printers

June 20, 2022 12:53 - 16 minutes

This week on my podcast, I read a recent blog post, Monopolists Want to Create Human Inkjet Printers, exploring the way that med-tech mergers are bringing the ghastly inkjet printer business-model to artificial pancreases. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; Björn Heller, CC BY 2.0 (German); modified) MP3

Regulatory Capture: Beyond Revolving Doors and Against Regulatory Nihilism

June 12, 2022 23:20 - 22 minutes

Regulatory Capture: Beyond Revolving Doors and Against Regulatory Nihilism. This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, Regulatory Capture: Beyond Revolving Doors and Against Regulatory Nihilism., about the origins of the theory of regulatory capture, and the all-important, but rarely discussed difference between right and left theories of regulatory capture. MP3

Against Cozy Catastrophies

June 06, 2022 03:01 - 12 minutes - 18.1 MB

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, Against Cozy Catastrophies, about the how the changeover from universal, state- or employer-provided pensions to market-based pensions like the 401(k) have created an inescapable, slow motion catastrophe, where the only thing worse than being one of the lucky few with retirement savings is being... more

Apple’s Cement Overshoes

May 30, 2022 16:06 - 26 minutes

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, Apple’s Cement Overshoes, about the malicious compliance in Apple’s “home repair kits.” (Image: Conall, CC BY 2.0, modified) MP3

About Those Killswitched Ukrainian Tractors

May 19, 2022 16:51 - 28 minutes

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, About those kill-switched Ukrainian tractors, suggesting that what John Deere did to Russian looters, anyone can do to farmers, anywhere. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified) MP3

Revenge Of The Chickenized Reverse Centaurs

May 01, 2022 18:15 - 17 minutes

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, Revenge of the Chickenized Reverse-Centaurs, about the relationship between algorithms, interoperability and worker power. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified) MP3

Big Tech Isn’t Stealing News Publishers’ Content

April 18, 2022 02:09 - 20 minutes

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, Big Tech Isn’t Stealing News Publishers’ Content, about the calls from the news industry for tech companies to pay licensing fees for quoted news-snippets, and why this both ignores and worsens the real problem: ad-fraud. MP3

When Automation Becomes Enforcement

April 10, 2022 17:53

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, When Automation Becomes Enforcement, about the debate of interoperability and end-to-end encryption in the EU’s Digital Markets Act, and how that relates to the long-running battle over who’s in charge: you, or your computer? MP3

The Best Defense Against Rubber-Hose Cryptanalysis

April 03, 2022 23:23 - 19 minutes

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, The Best Defense Against Rubber-Hose Cryptanalysis, which explores the contradiction at the heart of Bitcoin advocacy. MP3

The Byzantine Premium

March 27, 2022 23:11 - 11 minutes

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, The Byzantine Premium, which explores the contradiction at the heart of Bitcoin advocacy. (Image: Jakub-gdPL and FAMartin, CC BY-SA 4.0; Delwar Hossain, BD, CC BY 4.0; Jernej Furman, CC BY 2.0; modified) MP3

What is “Peak Indifference?”

March 21, 2022 12:32 - 9 minutes

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, What is “Peak Indifference?” in which I explain my theory of how we change – or fail to change – in the face of wicked problems. (Image: Cameron Strandberg/CC BY 2.0, modified) MP3

Vertically Challenged

March 13, 2022 20:40 - 15 minutes

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus column, Vertically Challenged, about “how and why to break up Big Tech.” MP3 (Image: Anthony Quintano; CC BY 2.0, modified; Paramount/Star Trek, modified)

All (Broadband) Politics Are Local

March 07, 2022 00:09 - 14 minutes

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, All (Broadband) Politics Are Local, about the near-miraculous shift in the political will to provide universal fiber to all Americans, and what you can do to spur this process on. MP3

We Should Not Endure a King

February 27, 2022 22:44 - 17 minutes

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, We Should Not Endure a King: Antitrust is a political cause, not an economic one, addressed to leftists who are skeptical of antitrust as a market-based solution that implictly accepts markets as the legitimate arbiter of our social relations. MP3

The Internet Heist (Part III)

February 21, 2022 15:18 - 17 minutes

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, The Internet Heist (Part III), the third and final part of a three-part series about the early days of the internet copyright wars, when Hollywood studios came within a whisker of getting a veto over all new digital technology. MP3

The Internet Heist (Part II)

February 13, 2022 21:57 - 23 minutes

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, The Internet Heist (Part II), the second part of a three-part series about the early days of the internet copyright wars, when Hollywood studios came within a whisker of getting a veto over all new digital technology. MP3

Twitter Mentions

@theyoungdoyler 1 Episode