Damn that was refreshing

~7:05 "I mean ..is Trump a Comrade ?!?" :-)

Good man, this Cory.. Ah, sad that he believes the same Merican psychopaths when he speaks about Russia/Putin. Oh well, most have a few blind spots..

This seems to be the crux of his argument in his latest book, enshittification. It takes a step beyond his common complaint (DMCA) and suggests other countries ignore their version of it to circumvent US Big Tech laws. I’m all for it, but it requires European governments to understand the situation and act. We’ll see.

If only our politicians had more than 3 neurons and could focus them on the common good instead of their own greed

Loved the talk. Absolute must watch

Cory even revoked my book's return policy:

As soon as I read his trademark word I knew it was Doctorow, awesome! I'll give this a full listen sometime later.

To stop enshittification, we all need to chase away any attempt to capitalize on the internet and get back to the roots of preventing data scarcity. Anyone running an ad or promoting some product should be chased out. Their product stolen and copied and shared until these people know they're not welcome. It would have prevented all of the enshittification had pewdiepies and Joe Rogans and Mr beasts were treated as the time vampires they are. It's not just simple advertising that we could turn off. It turned into a massive machine that stole our data, built profiles, created digital addiction tools and tracked all our movements just to sell us things.

I thought that I'd listen to 30 seconds and scroll, but I'm really glad I didn't. Really solid argument, but it's got a "last mile" problem, and that's gotta be on us to figure out I think.

The question at the end where he basically ignored and didn't answer was "so how do we do this?". THAT is the question. I'd love to hear that answer.

Video on media.ccc.de

Doctorow wrote a blog post about this. It has the video and a transcription of it, so you can either watch it, read it or both.

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

He also has a book on this topic, called Enshittification (I haven't read it, yet). I believe this talk was part of his book tour for the book. You can buy it DRM-free from his webpage: https://craphound.com/shop/

Hosted on YouTube.

If you haven't read Enshittification yet, do yourself a favour and get a copy. It's a wonderful read.

just finished it, it's a great talk. i hope he's right and the countries finally start fighting back!