The Internet Got Ensh**ified: Monopoly Power and the Fight for Digital Democracy

Matt Jordan: In the past few decades, the average legroom on a commercial flight has shrunk from 35 inches to as little as 28. And that's if you actually make it onto your flight, because now you're also contending with overbooking, delays, and sudden cancelations. Why? Because the airline industry is controlled by just a few major players and when there's no real competition, consumers get squeezed. Now, apply that same logic to the digital media landscape. If news and information flow through platforms that prioritize engagement over public interest, what happens to journalism once the public has no viable alternative besides the dominant players? What happens to democracy? To dig into these questions, we're talking with Cory Doctorow. Cory is a science fiction author, activist, and journalist who's been studying big tech's impact on society for years. His most recent nonfiction books include The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, and Chokepoint Capitalism. He also coined a term to describe how platforms degrade over time, a word so spots on it was named word of the year by the American dialect society, the Macquarie Dictionary, and New Scientist. I'm Matt Jordan, and on this special episode of News Over Noise, I'm joined by guest co-host Jenna Spinelli. Jenna hosts and produces Democracy Works, a podcast from the McCourtney Institute of Democracy at Penn State and WPSU. Jenna and Cory, welcome to News Over Noise.

Cory Doctorow: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.

Matt Jordan: The internet has become a gateway for information about democracy, and one of the first stops that people take is often Google. How have non-competitive policies degraded the information that we find there?

Cory Doctorow: Well, I think a lot of us have an intuitive sense that Google is not serving results of the same quality that we were accustomed to. And certainly, there's been some empirical work that suggests that that's the case. But understanding where that came from really only came into focus during the Antitrust trial last year, where there were some memos published detailing an extraordinary internal conflict at Google in 2019 when the company became quite alarmed that it had stopped posting the kind of growth that it had historically posted. And there was a good reason for that. Google's got a 90% market share. We already search for all the things we're ever going to search for, right? Any fool thought that comes into our head, we type it into a search box, and every search box is connected to Google. And so, they weren't going to grow by signing up more people, and they weren't going to grow by getting the people who are signed up to do more searching. So, what were they going to do to continue to post growth, please Wall Street, maintain their incredible earnings-to-valuation ratio that's such a huge advantage for them and the source of a lot of money and so on? And in the memos that the DOJ published that it acquired through discovery, we see that at that moment, two Google executives came into conflict with one another. One, Prabhakar Raghavan was the head of revenue. And the other one, Les Gomes, was the head of search. And Prabhakar Raghavan's idea, broadly speaking, was that if they made search worse so that the first time you searched, you didn't get your answer and you'd have to refine your query twice, three times, four times, that that would be more bites at the Apple, more chance to show you ads, and they could post growth this way. Gomes and Raghavan go back and forth pretty ferociously. And in the end, Gomes is sent to the hinterlands. He's running educational technology for Google now. I guess that makes him like the Chromebook czar or something. And Raghavan becomes a very important person at Google, and Google's quality starts to precipitously decline right about that time.

Matt Jordan: So, what does that do to say people ability to say, find an article, or say if they have a piece of information that they're really searching for as citizens who are trying to get a sense of how the world is going, what is that degradation then due to their ability to be informed?

Cory Doctorow: Well, I think that for a lot of us, the first effect that we noticed it was like being partially lobotomized because we stopped remembering where files were on the internet, and we just remembered which search terms we needed to type into Google to find them. And so, the first effect, I think, for people who are really engaged with this stuff, was that just a lot of our own personal touchstone references became harder to find and may just have disappeared at that point. Subsequently, you get a Google that just seems a lot more vulnerable to search engine optimization in every domain. Commercially, this has been the subject of a lot of commentary, that if you're trying to find reviews of the best air purifiers or the best new laptop or whatever, you are just going to find the people who are best at SEO, not the people who are best at reviewing technology. A lot of them affiliated with some of the very big brands like Forbes and so on, who just had this hidden constellation of services that were designed around SEO slop and generating affiliate fees. And then for people who just want to get political news, I think a lot of those SEO techniques became very useful for extremely well-funded organizations that ran public advocacy campaigns, like tech shops or like SEO shops. And it was the kind of PragerU-ification of all of our news of every kind. And you're just getting dragged into some very weird corners of the internet. Well, can I tell you one thing about Google that I found amazing? I started using a search engine called Kagi. My editor, who's like me, an autodidact and an avid researcher, I was out staying with he and his wife in Arizona, and they were like, have you tried Kagi? It's amazing. It's $10 a month. I know paying for a search engine sounds weird, but it's incredible. It's like using Google when it started, right? When we all thought it was magic. So, I tried it out and they were right. I'd never thought twice about paying $10 a month for it. And this isn't a paid endorsement of Kagi, but it's a very good service. But what blew my mind was Jason Kubler at 404 Media wrote about Guy, and he pointed out something I hadn't known, which is that Guy mostly buys its search index access from Google. So Kagi is basically an overlay to Google search results. And Kagi is a very small company with just a small handful of engineers. And if the small company with a small handful of engineers can modify Google's algorithm so that it's as good or better as Google ever was, and Google can't with trillions of dollars in valuation and a small city's worth of engineers from big tens and Ivies, this has to be a choice.

Jenna Spinelli: Yeah. So Cory, a lot of what you've been describing, the deterioration of search engines and also social media platforms, kind tech platforms more broadly seems to line up with the rise of populism around the world, and I wonder to what extent some of that behavior, some of those trends may actually just be a reaction to what's been happening in our tech environment, the PragerU-ification of our information environment, and that feeling of being partially lobotomized that you just described earlier.

Cory Doctorow: Well, I think that this is where the fact that populism has more than one meaning becomes very useful. Populism in its original sense—and I think the right sense is a kind of leftist, anti-authoritarian, anti-big business movement—what's sometimes called right wing populism, which is a little weird. It's like calling something left-wing fascism. It doesn't really make any sense. But we know what we mean when we say right-wing populism. I think has some of the same vibes as populism, historic and contemporary populism, like the sense that big business is ripping you off and that life isn't as good as it used to be. You can hear that in the MAGA right. And if you close your eyes and you don't listen very carefully, it can sound a little like a Bernie Sanders rally. And Naomi Klein talks about this in her wonderful book, Doppelganger. She talks about how often the right has these kind of warped, mirror bizarro world versions of leftist causes. And she's not the first person to observe it. As she points out, in the 19th century, they used to call antisemitism the socialism of fools, right? That if you have observed that there's a group of rich people who seem to be running the world to their own benefit, to the detriment of everyone else and you come to the conclusion, not that we live under a system that inevitably produces such an elite and that this is a systemic problem, but instead come to the conclusion that it's because there are Jewish bankers secretly running the world, you've gotten most of the way there and taken a horrible turn off the course. And so I think that when you live under conditions of monopoly, as we do with most of our sectors collapsed into just a handful of firms, a cartel, capturing their regulators, being completely unable to be disciplined by their workers, having the whip hand over them, that it's easy and I think, correct, to feel like you are living in an environment where you are the food for the machine, and also that you can't trust what anyone tells you, right? I'm not in any position to assess most of the truth claims that I need to get right in order to survive the day. I'm not going to audit the software on the anti-lock brakes on my car or whatever. And yet, I'm pretty sure that the institutions that we rely on to validate claims about what's safe and what isn't, what's good and what isn't, I'm pretty sure they're not good. And they weren't good before unscheduled, rapid mid-air midair disassembly that Elon Musk is doing now. I have chronic pain. And when I lived in the UK, my wife had a job that came with private insurance. So, I went to see a fancy psychopharmacologist on Harley Street where all the fancy doctors are. And he said, I've got great news for you, opioids are safe. You can just take opioids every day for the rest of your life, and you won't have any pain. And I did my own research, and I concluded that the pharma companies were run by evil billionaires who would murder me for $1, and that the regulators who were supposed to stop them from doing that were in their pocket. And when I heard anti-vaxxers talking about why they weren't going to get the COVID vaccine, which is something I believe in—I've had all my jabs. I get perfect 5G reception no matter where I am. I glow in the dark. I've had so many vaccines. When I hear them say, well, I don't trust the pharma companies and I don't think the regulators are keeping them honest, I don't think they're wrong. I don't think they're wrong about that. I think that's perfectly rational.And so, I think that regulatory capture and the ability to abuse, people with impunity is downstream of monopolization, and tech monopolies are one of the most prominent and harmful monopolies that we come into contact with on a daily basis. And as digital tech finds its way into other industries, some of the tech industry's favorite scams become part of the other industries. Nurses now are booked through gig apps that check their bank balance and if they owe a lot of credit card debt, it offers them a lower wage because they're willing to take a lower wage if they're financially desperate. I think that that does make people ripe for a kind of politics of rage and a politics of weaponized skepticism. Media literacy gone wrong, where everything that someone says, you say, well, you can't trust an expert, and it just leaves you in this epistemological void where you're a sucker for any con man who sounds like they know what they're saying.

Matt Jordan: Yeah. It's interesting. The early impulse of the internet was this huge democratic spur, right? I remember as a media studies guy that the early days, we would have these professors come in wearing parachute pants telling us about how the Arab Spring and the Jasmine revolution, this was the way of the world, that the internet was inevitably democratic.But I think as it's gotten captured, as it's gotten crapified, one of the things that has happened is that impulse toward search, toward finding things out without the gatekeepers, the curators, has been kind of turned on its head in this bizarro world that you're talking about.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah. And I don't think it's wrong to say that helping people with disfavored views find each other and mobilize is a big change to our democratic system. I am a person who spent his teens and 20s riding a bicycle around Toronto wheat pasting up handbills trying to get people out to street marches. If you don't think that social media is an important change in how we mobilize people in the streets, I got a bucket of wheatpaste. You spent a couple of nights out in subzero weather and come back and you tell me whether you think social media is important to organizing movements. But I agree that the capture of these platforms, which was only possible because the platforms themselves collapsed into such a small number of speech forums—when there is a lot of different speech forums that weren't all under one roof that you couldn't just lay hands on it, there wasn't one throat to choke, it was harder for states to exercise control, just as a logistical matter. There might be hundreds of similarly sized places where people are gathering to talk. But once it's all on Facebook, you just have to suborn Facebook. And once Facebook is a listed corporation and Mark Zuckerberg, although he controls the majority of the voting shares, is highly exposed to changes in Facebook's share price, more so than any other person in the world really, then there's a lot of ways to exercise leverage over those platforms. And of course, the people who run the platforms are themselves billionaires and are class allies to a large extent of the authoritarian project to make being a billionaire stable. Being a billionaire is intrinsically unstable, right? This is Thomas Piketty's idea that if there's enough inequality, eventually you're spending so much money to stop people from building a guillotine on your lawn that you might as well just build some hospitals, so they stop trying, you know?

Jenna Spinelli: Yeah. So, the idea of like, why did we go along with this for so long? Why do we continue to go along with it? And I know you write and talk a lot about interoperability and how the platforms make it difficult to really seek out an alternative, even if you wanted to.

Cory Doctorow: Well, as to why we went along with it, I think that this is part of a wider project to dismantle antitrust enforcement that's been underway for 40 years. So, while the effects of tech monopolization are distinctive and different, it's not the only monopolized sector. Eyeglasses and orange juice and all the eggs in the grocery fridge come from one company. They have 25 different brands, but it's just one company. All the beer is made by two companies. All the glass bottles are made by one company. We went along with it because this was official policy to encourage monopoly. And it happened under both Democrats and Republicans. It was the thing that was different about the Biden administration. The Biden administration talked a lot about how it was a break with the past. It did do some things that were distinct from other governments. The one that was most profound was having antitrust enforcers who did more in four years than their predecessors had in 40. It was too little. It was too late. Didn't save the Biden administration's bacon. The Biden administration didn't like to talk about it because the corporate wing of the Democratic Party was foursquare against it. We saw this when Mark Cuban and other billionaires who were sort of Harris mouthpieces went out on the campaign trail and said, well, we are going to get reelected, but we're going to fire Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission because we don't—that part's bad for America. So, it was not enough, but a lot happened. And the remarkable thing about it really was not just how much they did with what few resources they had, although they did a lot. It was that there's never been a dark money lobby for antitrust, right? This represents a genuine public groundswell of opinion. There's now a super pack that has been whispering in Congress people's ears or whipping up support for this. And this didn't just happen in the US, right? We have seen really muscular antitrust action taking off like a rocket in Canada, in Australia, the UK, the European Union, Germany, France, South Korea, Japan and China. Something has changed in the world that has alarmed people about corporate power in a way that we have not really grappled or reckoned with at all. And I think that while it's very demoralizing to watch what Trump and Musk are doing, none of that is going to weaken that view, that organic movement.And indeed, if your thesis was corporations are too powerful and they capture the government, and then you watch what Trump and Musk are doing, I think you're going to feel pretty vindicated and pretty angry.

Matt Jordan: So, one of the things that was always so fascinating about the early internet was that—there's a C. Edwin Baker, who was an early proponent of public media. He was—an interesting quote from him, "the key goal, the key value served by ownership dispersal is that it directly embodies a fairer, more democratic allocation of communicative power." So, this notion that distributed communicative power also is distributed risk, it's distributed kind of—its due diligence in a democracy allowing for deliberation to go on, that is not centralized. And it's kind of an interesting twist or turn that has happened as platforms have taken over, is that everything's become much more centralized. So, the whole regulatory structure or deregulatory structure that allowed for platforms to monopolize things is, of course, this kind of antithesis of centralization, right? Free markets are the only thing that are keeping us from becoming Stalin, right? But what has happened is that, in fact, those unregulated markets that allow for monopoly and monopsony power have created a centralized, non-distributed communicative environment. That means we have less opinion, less experience to draw from. We have less information as a democracy.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah. And you said it's deregulatory and then you said, it's regulatory, then you said it's deregulatory, and the reason for that is it's all of the above, right? It's not just that we deregulated mergers and allowed these companies to merge to monopoly and so on.It's that a lot of our regulatory response to the obvious, undeniable, and often very urgent pathologies of these monopolistic platforms has been regulation that itself started from the assumption, really, that the monopolies were natural and permanent, and that anything that created a compliance burden that would stop someone from entering the market was tolerable because no one was going to enter the market anyway. The internet was fully cooked.And also gave the platforms ammunition to use in policy forums and in the court of public opinion to argue that we shouldn't encourage more competition because they've been asked to step in and fill a kind of safeguarding role in respect to their users. So all these rules about hate speech, harassment, disinformation, and so on that each of them amount to a mandate for platforms to observe, surveil and intervene in the communications of billions of users really cut against any effort to for example, say oh, well, you also have to have an API, like a programmatic gateway so that someone who leaves Facebook can go to a small platform run by a community group, but they can still communicate with the people who didn't leave Facebook.If you do that, Facebook—as the European Union has said they're going to do with the Digital Markets Act, Facebook will say, as they have, how are we going to police hate speech if we can't observe all the people on our platform? We have to be able to do things like not just observe what people say, but we look at things like, well, there's a group of people who gather over here and have a private conversation, and then they disperse across the platform and have a series of public conversations. And this is the characteristic conduct of a troll farm or a troll army who are getting together, planning a kind of strategy, maybe for victimizing trans people or women or leftists or if you're in Cambodia, enemies of the government. And if we can't do NSA style signals intelligence on everything everyone says to everyone else, how are we ever going to stop the hate speech? And so, what we did was we created the environment in which the platforms would amass gargantuan amounts of power, and then we made rules to force them to use that power wisely. And those rules have been a disaster. They have not worked. The platforms do not use their power wisely. But those rules require that the platforms stay big, and they cut against rules that make the platforms less important. You can either make the platforms the first line of defense, or you can make it so that you can leave the platform, right? But you can't do both. If they're going to be a fortress, they have to have tall walls. And once the walls are tall enough, users can't leave. And so now we see a kind of movement from one to the other. I mentioned before the Digital Markets Act in the European Union. It's got an accompanying piece of legislation called the Digital Services Act. And broadly speaking, the DMA is about dismantling platforms, and the DSA is about forcing platforms to behave themselves better. And they really work at cross purposes in many ways. And I call this the lungfish, right? It's a creature that's half of the sea and half of the land, and it doesn't know which one it wants. And it is encouraging to see that we're moving towards a radical and I think, much better regulatory stance, but we haven't quite let go of making the platforms behave themselves rules.

Jenna Spinelli: Yeah. So, Matt mentioned democratic deliberation, and there are lots of nonprofits and universities and even some companies that are trying to figure out how to bring democratic deliberation online, realizing that a lot of the behaviors that the internet has brought to us, it's that genie is not going back in the bottle. We're not going to go back to our town hall and have deliberations exclusively in that forum. I guess I wonder if you see a path forward there, if you think that the internet and democratic deliberation are fundamentally compatible in some way.

Cory Doctorow: I think they absolutely are. And I think that even the internet is currently constituted as fundamentally compatible with democratic deliberation. I spend a lot of time talking to my local political activists and my local representatives, also people around the world who are involved in causes like mine. I'm a member of Yanis Varoufakis’ DiEM25 movement.I think that there's lots of democratic deliberation around. And when you look at things like that Audrey Tang—the CTO of Taiwan, has done with deliberation tools that try to surface areas of consensus rather than areas of difference and discussion boards and so on, it's been really effective. Here in the US, One platform I would call your attention to is Vermont's front porch forum. I don't know if you're familiar with this. It's a really exciting place where you get to post, I think it's once a day. Each person gets to post once a day. And by default, you only see the post from your immediate neighborhood. And it's really effective at rallying people, at addressing local issues. It's very civil. People on all sides of the political spectrum participate in it. It's become very central to life in Vermont. So, it's clear that the fact that the sunshine can't reach the forest floor is choking out a lot of these things like front porch forum, but also that where light does penetrate the canopy, you do get all kinds of super interesting things popping up that they may not be stable in a long term configuration, right? It may be that what works for front porch forum in 2025 won't work in the political environment of 2030 or 2050. That's fine, right? We don't have to use the same tools over and over again. But one of the things I know from being in political movements all my life, is the fact that you did have a community with other people at some point in the past means that in the future, it's easier to return to those people. And actually, far right movements have their own version of this. There's a great scholar called Catherine Ballou. I believe she's at the University of Chicago, who studies far right movements. And one of her areas of research is this group of neo-Nazis who were radicalized in Vietnam in the military. And when they came back, they published zines that they made with nickel photocopiers at grocery stores. But it was very inefficient. And one of them got an Apple II Plus, and they realized that they could use BBSs to spread and network with other neofascists.And they formed an armored car robbery gang, and they robbed armored cars to buy Apple II Pluses for every pencil-neck Hitler wannabe in the country and gave them all computers and modems. And when you look at the contemporary fascist online presence, inevitably the longest tenured members of those forums who are the ones who are setting the norms and so on, they were all fascist kids on that message board in the 1980s. And they have spread out like people who saw the Velvet underground all starting a band, right? Nazis who were on this message board in the 1980s all started some grotesque Nazi forum. And they're able to work together because they have these personal ties from this moment where they were all in a movement together.

Matt Jordan: It's interesting. One of the things we associate with democratic deliberation, though, is the notion of a public, right? And one of the things that internet affords are these kind of not exactly public places, right? Where people who are like minded can find each other and can say things without having to be accountable as one has to be in public. And that's a feature, I think, that we haven't quite figured out how to manage. You can hide behind the anonymity. You can amplify your stuff with a trillion bots that will act as if they're people, right? So the idea of having something like you're describing with the Vermont platform, you get one person to do something per day. And it seems like something like that really requires a notion of authenticating what an authentic user is like and showing yourself to be part of a community and all of those things that we would say are really important. And so there's always a question for me in terms of the internet is how do you scale those things? Or is scale really the enemy?

Cory Doctorow: Do you need to scale those things? Look, anonymity has played a really important role in democratic deliberation as well. This is the home of the Federalist Papers here in America, right? There's always been a place for anonymous speech in this. And anyone who's read about the red scares and so on knows that the simplistic formulation that if you're not willing to sign your name to your political views they're not firmly held really doesn't understand how movements change. And we were talking earlier about Snowden. And after the Snowden leaks came out—I'm a privacy advocate, and I ended up spending a lot of time talking about what Snowden's leaks meant. And I would tell people that we live in a world today, although it's changing again, but we live in a world today where things that were illegal in living memory, like so-called interracial marriage or consuming cannabis or being gay, that those things are not just legal but are widely accepted. And we view the fact that it used to be unlawful to be those things or do those things. We view that as like a stain on our national conscience. And unless you think that all the social progress we're ever going to make has been made and there's nothing else to change about our mores, then you should assume that someone in your life, statistically, who matters to you and whose your happiness can never be complete without theirs, that someone in your life has never told you who they really are and has never opened up to you. And unless there's a space where they can privately deliberate with you, where you and they can have a conversation together, they may never do that. They might go to their grave with this huge sorrow in their hearts because you never really knew who they were. And they loved you and you loved them, right? And so that's a really strong case for democracy emerging not just out of public, but out of private forums and the solidaristic energy that comes from being in a private space and discussing things. After all, the way that we got homosexuality legalized was not by putting a pink triangle on the sleeve of every person who was gay, right? It was about people who were gay choosing the time and manner in which they came out to other people to recruit them as allies. You tell your dad about it when you're on a fishing trip with them, not when you're at the Christmas table with your racist uncle who's going to freak out. And that is how these big alliances got built, and that's how they changed our world. I would put hiring a million bots to amplify your message and a completely different bucket from having private places or anonymous places. And speaking of anonymous, the Anonymous Movement, which played a really important role in the Arab Spring and a really important role in revealing the activities of cyber mercenaries who are working for wealthy, corrupt individuals and authoritarian states and so on, they not only operated anonymously, but they had an extremely democratic form of deliberation. They had no way of compelling one another to act. The only way that they could act is by convincing each other. It's a bit like if you've read Graeber and Wengrow's Dawn of Everything, where they talk about the fact that Indigenous war chiefs in the forest tribes in the Northeast, that they didn't have the power to draft warriors. They had to talk them into going to war. And so the greatest rhetoricians of Indigenous societies were these war chiefs. And there were volumes and volumes of debates between these guys and monks, Jesuits, that were best sellers in France, where they'd just argue circles around them. And it was this that the Enlightenment scholars picked up. This is the origins of the enlightenment were these incredible debates, this deliberation between these people. So, like, that's the modus operandi of anonymous, right? When you don't know who these people are, you don't know how to find them. You only get to talk to them if they show up to listen, and you all get together and decide, OK, we're going to hack the Church of Scientology and dump all their documents, then we're going to do the same thing to HBGary. We're going to help bring down the Tunisian government and go in solidarity with the people in the streets. That's all happening through anonymous deliberation, and it was hugely important to movements that were about human rights and democracy.

Jenna Spinelli: Yeah. So, let's talk a little bit more about coalition building. You talked a little bit in your lecture here at Penn State about some of your work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and your work building coalitions there to work on various issues. There's a lot of that happening in the democracy world right now—people working on various causes—getting money out of politics, reducing gerrymandering and on and on down the line, trying to figure out who makes sense to be part of this group, who's in, who's out, those kinds of things. And we might not agree on everything, but can we still have you as part of this movement? So, I wonder what lessons you might have for people out there sort of in the trenches of that work right now.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah. It is a really hard call because often coalitions that are effective—in fact, almost always coalitions that are effective involve putting together groups of people who disagree about most things because that's how you reach the broadest public. That's how you make the most political impact, right? It's not by capturing 100% of progressive legislators but capturing maybe 50% of progressive legislators and 50% of conservative legislators. And then all of a sudden, you've got an unstoppable movement. And, for example, I think the privacy movement has the potential to really do this. The privacy is so out of date here. We haven't updated American privacy law at the consumer level on the federal level since 1988 when Congress made it illegal to tell newspapers which VHS cassettes if you were a video store clerk.We are really overdue for this stuff. And there's a lot of people on the right who don't like the fact that everyone who was a January 6 rioter had their location revealed by Google to the DOJ because Google spies on your location and gives it to any cop who wants it. There's a lot of people on the left who are really angry that that happened to Black Lives Matter demonstrators too. If you can get together and all hold your nose and work together, you might be able to make a change there. And the question is, when your coalition partners have goals that involve something on a continuum, with the literal extermination of you and the people that you love, how much can you hold your nose to do it? And in particular, if you are a person who individually being in company with these people, revives some trauma that you've lived through and so on, it can be really, really hard. And I'm not going to tell anyone who's experienced traumatic events that I've never experienced that they have a duty to hold their nose or to suck it up and sit down next to those people. But I will say that if you want to make these changes that will have a big material effect on the rest of your life and you can muster the fortitude attitude to be in the same room or have your signature at the bottom of the same sheet of paper as people who make you miserable and afraid all the time and you worry would like to literally exterminate you and your friends, if you can find some way to find some part of that coalition and make it some part of your coalition, at least for a little while to get some instrumental gain that you're hoping to get, you will get a lot done. It's not easy, right? But I think about things like Bernie Sanders going on Joe Rogan. I think that was tactically very sound. I think people who say that he shouldn't have done that really don't want to win. And that's what matters, right? It doesn't matter how pure you are on the way to the collapse of civilization, right? If you remember, after Labor took a pasting in the UK under Keir Starmer—oh, no, it was actually under Jeremy Corbin when he completely flubbed that general election. And he said, well, I think we won the argument. I don't care if you won the argument, right? We got Boris Johnson and Liz Truss out of that. Go ahead and win the argument. I want to win the fight, right? And so, winning the argument is not as good as winning the fight.

Matt Jordan: How much of the bad stuff that's on the internet could be fixed by better privacy laws?

Cory Doctorow: I think a lot of what's wrong on the internet has some nexus with it. It may not be all that we need to do, so it may not be sufficient, but it is necessary. So, you think about things like deepfake porn, which is a huge problem in elementary and secondary schools now, right? Where classmates are tormenting each other. And it's obviously very gendered and really just in a way that as a parent, I just can't imagine what it would have been like if my daughter, who's a senior now, but if she'd been in middle school when everything was really hard, if there had been like a Vogue for making deepfake porn of your female classmates just would have been unbearable. And I don't know that you could have stopped people from doing it outright by having a privacy law, but it certainly would have made it harder. For one thing, it would made the firms that offer these tools and not as general-purpose tools but are specifically designed as deepfake porn tools and marketed as deepfake porn tools, it would have made it a lot harder for them to raise capital. It would have made it a lot harder for them to operate onshore. It would have made it a lot harder for them to buy ads on Instagram and other platforms. They just would have been in a much worse place. And I think that the evidence about how social media affects young people is a lot muddier than someone like Jonathan Haidt would have you believe. I think Jonathan hates books and work. He cites a lot of research that is objectively very low quality, small sample sizes, poor research methodology and so on. And I think that the more robust analysis says that it's a complicated picture—it helps some people, it hurts other people, whatever. But I think we can all agree that to the extent that there are harms that we're worried about that arise out of algorithmic targeting, like, if you think that being exposed to anorexia content is making your kid anorexic, which seems like a pretty reasonable hypothesis to me, removing surveillance advertising from the ecosystem means that maybe you'll get algorithmic amplification of pro-anorexia content if your kid searches for it, but they're never going to have it shoved down their throat through just a kind of surveillance based algorithmic amplification. And that would be really important. We have a lot of racial inequality in this country. It's obviously getting a lot worse now. We're not going to solve it merely by eliminating things like algorithmic bias in hiring, lending, housing and so on. But if we do take surveillance and algorithmic filtering out of finance approvals and finance advertising and finance product matching out of jail and bail, out of child protective services and so on, all these things where they're fed by the commercial surveillance sector and then they emerge as the determinants of policy outcomes, let's just take that stuff out. It's going to be harder to do racism at scale. We built a racism machine, right? Getting rid of the racism machine isn't going to stop people from being racist, but they'll have to do it by hand, right? And that is a superior outcome than being able to automate it and doing it at scale.

Matt Jordan: Right, right. Yeah. I'm. Interested too—I mean, a lot of the things that you write about and talk about that have to do with targeting, right? With nudging people, that psychology of that, a lot of that does have to do with finding out all this data stuff. You gave an anecdote in the lecture last night about these apps that nurses get gig work with and where all of—without that surveillance data about their credit loads, they couldn't coerce them, right? So, democracy is always predicated on this kind of non-coercive lifeworld, right? And so much of the apps and platforms require that surveillance data in order to be able to coerce, which they might use the word "leverage" for in order to make them more profitable.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah. Personalized pricing, which I think when we hear pricing, I think we often think about the buy side. So, the price of eggs went up because they figured out that you can pay more, but it's also labor pricing, right? It's the sell side. So, the wage you're offered for your labor is increasingly personalized as well through algorithmic wage discrimination in the gig economy and elsewhere. That personalized pricing nominally could be used to offer you a lower price based on your ability to pay less, right? The fact that you don't have enough to pay full freight. And you can imagine like an airplane where they know that there's an empty seat and they're just going to fly it empty if you're not in that seat and they know that you don't have enough money to pay the full fare, and so they offer you a discount. In practice, in a non-competitive environment, that's not how this works, right? In practice, personalized pricing is used when you factor power into your analysis. And when you have a powerful group of extremely wealthy firms and individuals, personalized pricing just becomes a way to pay you less and charge you more. And the instantaneous refactoring of prices from moment to moment isn't used to make the lettuce $0.10 cheaper per pound because it's been on the shelf all day. It's used to figure out, as you walk in the grocery store that you can afford to pay more, and it jacks the prices up on all the electronic shelf tags. In Norway, where electronic shelf tags are now normal, they change prices 2 to 3,000 times a day.

Matt Jordan: Wow.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah.

Jenna Spinelli: So given the conversation we've been having for the last 40 minutes or so here, it can be easy to feel down, or things are never going to change. They're never going to get any better. They're going to continue to get worse and worse and worse. And I love your fiction writing. In particular, I'm thinking about your book The Lost Cause, which I just finished, about a way to imagine a different world. Science fiction as a way to imagine a different set of circumstances than the ones we currently find ourselves in. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the Burbank you created in that novel, and maybe lessons for how people who are out there fighting for various causes, whether it's democracy or strengthening our media can think about some of those principles as they're imagining what their work looks like moving forward.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah. So, The Lost Cause is a utopian environmental novel I wrote. And I call it a complicated utopia because it's not a novel where everything's going well. It's a novel where we're rising to the challenge. I think that's a better utopia. I think imagining nothing will ever break down doesn't make you optimistic. It makes you a danger to yourself and others, right? That's the attitude that says, oh, why would we need lifeboats on the titanic? It's unsinkable. So, in that novel, in Canada, they have had a political revolution. I'm from Canada. And it happens quite by accident, as often is the case when you see an upheaval in politics. There's a third party in Canada; the perennial third social democratic party called the New Democrats. And they go into an election with a firm belief that there's no way they can win. And so, in classic glass ceiling or glass cliff approach, they let an Indigenous woman lead the party into the election. And then the other two parties implode because of their own internal scandals, having nothing to do with the NDP. And she becomes prime minister just as a flood washes Calgary off the map. This happens routinely in Calgary. It's built in a floodplain, just like Houston. And she says, we are not rebuilding Calgary in the floodplain. We are rebuilding Calgary somewhere else.And it breaks a dam, I guess figuratively, in Canadian political sentiment where people are like, oh, wait, we can do stuff. We don't have to just set ourselves up to get kicked in the teeth by climate change every year. We can do a thing that will change stuff. And this unleashes a network of high-speed rail that replaces the main air corridors and housing rebuilding and resilience work, and just all kinds of really big muscular things that prepare the country for the coming disasters. And this sparks a global movement. And in America, this results in the election and two terms of a president who transforms America as well. And that's where the action opens. It opens in Burbank after this president has served two terms. Her vice president serves a term and is as bad at his job. And now a reactionary sort of Reagan or Trump type has taken office, and they're going to dismantle everything. And the people in Burbank, these young people, they semi sarcastically call themselves the first generation in a century that doesn't fear the future. And all of a sudden that's being taken away from them. And this is a story about what they do in that moment, in a moment where they've done solidaristic work, where it's considered quite normal that what you might do after high school for four years is help relocate all the coastal cities of California 20 kilometers inland, a project that's going to take two centuries and cost billions of dollars but which will ultimately save those cities, even if it means like moving the old missions stone by stone and rebuilding them up the hill. And they have to fight for what they have, and they have to fight against overwhelming odds and overwhelming wealth to recover it. It was a very pleasant world to inhabit while I was writing it. And many people have written to me and said that they really love it. Bill McKibben called it the first great [inaudible] novel, which made me really happy.

Jenna Spinelli: Yeah. That's great.

Matt Jordan: Just to maybe a final question is along those notes of optimism. There's a lot going on in the world that seems fracturing, right? That it has us worried about the state of things. But you you've talked about how this also presents a lot of opportunity. So how might some of the things that we're seeing today provide an opening for fixing some of the problems?

Cory Doctorow: Yeah. Well, let me tell you about something extremely anti-democratic first that's been going on in plain sight for decades. Since the WTO and even before, the US Trade Representative has gone all around the world and insisted that countries that wanted to trade with America would have to adopt laws that were favorable to large American firms, and that this was a precondition for tariff-free access to American markets. And in particular, a lot of these laws that were instituted at the behest of the US Trade Representative are IP laws that make it illegal to do things like reverse engineer a printer so it takes third party ink, or reverse engineer an iPhone so that you can use a domestic app store. Apple takes $0.30 out of every app dollar that's spent everywhere in the world. And so that means that if you're like a newspaper in Canada and your subscribers buy their subscriptions through the App Store, 30% out of every dollar goes to Apple to process that payment. The normal payment processing rates in North America, which are considered usurious in the rest of the world, are 3%. In Europe, it's like half to 1%. And Apple's charging 30%, making tens of billions of dollars off of it.It's against the law to jailbreak a Tesla so that all the subscription features that you have to buy every month and that you don't get to transfer when you transfer the car so that you could just buy them once and they would be yours and when you sold the car, your car would be worth more because it had autopilot turned on and all the other features that you have to pay every month for. Well, if Canada, Mexico, Europe, the whole Global South, if we all got on board with these laws that prohibit us from competing head-to-head with American firms—and not just any American firms, the largest American companies that are single handedly holding up the S&P 500. You take them out and then for a decade, the S&P 500 has been in decline. And to compete with them directly in the lines of business that make them the most money, the highest margin, highest dollar lines of business, and to destroy those rackets everywhere in the world all at once, to bring the dollar value of those rackets to 0 for these large American firms that are funding the dismantling of America, creating software products that give people more control over their own digital lives that will be impossible to prevent leaking over the border into the US, right? I would say Canada doesn't have to stop at exporting reasonably priced pharmaceuticals. We can also export the tools of digital freedom to Americans. This is a really interesting possibility, and it is a recovery of something important and democratic, which is laws that are set up by people voting for what's best for themselves and not by deliberation that takes place behind closed doors in these multilateral and bilateral trade bodies. And it's not just the IP laws, although that's an area that I'm very interested in. You've also got stuff like investor state dispute settlement agreements that come about as a result of these free trade agreements. That's where large companies can sue governments for enacting labor, environmental or safety standards laws if they erode their profits. You have tobacco companies suing Australia over plain packaging laws for cigarettes. That sort of thing, where those ISDS agreements, they're also part of these trade packages. So, if Trump's going to unilaterally dismantle the global system of free trade, the global system of free trade, yeah, it gets us some things I like but holy moly has it been a way to export some of the worst, most anti-democratic policies the world has ever seen. If we're going to get rid of it, well, let's seize the moment.

Jenna Spinelli: I think that's a good place to end.

Matt Jordan: Yeah.

Cory Doctorow: Thank you.

Matt Jordan: Cory, thanks so much for joining us.

Cory Doctorow: Oh, it's my pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

Matt Jordan: That's it for this episode of News Over Noise. Our guest was Cory Doctorow, a science fiction author, activist, and journalist. To learn more, visit newsovernoise.org. I'm Matt Jordan. Until next time, stay well and well informed. News Over Noise is produced by the Penn State Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications and WPSU. This program has been funded by the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost at Penn State and is part of the Penn State News Literacy Initiative.

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