Cory Doctorow on “The Internet Con”

Episode notes

(Photo: Verso Books)

Content warning: This episode contains unbleeped obscenities.

Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter (now X) aren’t what they used to be. If you used just about any social media platform for any extended amount of time, you can probably attest to this. The platform isn’t as fun or as easy to use as it once was. Maybe it’s changed so drastically, it’s barely recognizable.

In 2022, writer Cory Doctorow put a word to it: “ens**tification.” He defined the demise of platforms pretty succinctly in that blog post for Wired:

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 abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.

Doctorow tapped into something. The word caught on fast, gettting used more and more. It was eventually named the 2023 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society.

Cory doesn’t frame the process as inevitable or irreversible, though. In fact, he wrote a whole book filled with solution to make the internet a better, more rewarding place. Cory joins us to talk about The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, and what we can do when platforms change.

In this episode...

Jesse Thorn

Host

Kevin Ferguson

Senior Producer

Jesus Ambrosio

Producer

Richard Robey

Maximum Fun Producer

Daniel Huecias

Maximum Fun Production Fellow

Daniel Arón Speer

Video Editor

Guests

Cory Doctorow

About the show

Bullseye is a celebration of the best of arts and culture in public radio form. Host Jesse Thorn sifts the wheat from the chaff to bring you in-depth interviews with the most revered and revolutionary minds in our culture.

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