Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com - The Lost Cause (excerpt)

The Lost Cause (excerpt)

10/12/23 • 122 min

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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.

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Previous Episode

How To Think About Scraping

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 suffers as a result of your scraping is good, actually.

Mario Zechner is an Austrian technologist who used the APIs of large grocery chains to prove that they were colluding to rig prices. Zechner was able to create a corpus of historical price and product data to show how grocers used a raft of deceptive practices to trick people into thinking they were getting a good deal, from shrinkflation to cyclic price changes that were deceptively billed as “discounts.”

At first, Zechner worked alone and in fear of reprisals from the giant corporations whose fraudulent practices — which affected every person in the country — he had revealed.

But eventually, he was able to get the Austrian bureaucrat in charge of enforcing competition rules to publish a report lauding his work. Zechner open-sourced his project and attracted volunteers who started pulling in data from Germany and Slovenia.

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(Image: syvwlch, CC BY 2.0, modified)

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Microincentives and Enshittification

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.

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