Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

This week on my podcast, I read Swapping money for expertise, a recent essay from my Pluralistic blog about the political economy of “AI” based on theory-free inference. The need to understand and describe a thing before you could apply “AI” to it is a bottleneck, because it requires programmers to understand how a thing... <a href="https://craphound.com/podcast/202...

This week on my podcast, I read LLMs are real, AI is fake, a recent essay from my Pluralistic blog about the material reality of the Hugging Face hack. Here’s how that works: the Python program starts by prompting the chatbot with the nature of the challenge: “I’m participating in a hacker capture the flag... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2026/09/27/llms-are-real-ai...

This week on my podcast, I read Technopolitics, my latest Locus Magazine column, about the degree to which AI’s politics are baked in or historically contingent. These sins are baked into this kind of AI production. There is no way to raise trillions in subsidies that allow AI companies to sell computation at a subsidy... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2026/09/20/technopolitics/...

This week on my podcast, I read Why businesses lie about AI, a recent essay from my Pluralistic newsletter that breaks down Nikhil Suresh’s essay describing the total absence of any proof that any business is benefiting from AI deployment. One person who’s had a lot of opportunity to observe the shear between the stated... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2026/08/09/why-busi...

This week on my podcast, I read Post-political, a recent essay from my Pluralistic newsletter, about the material, irreconcilable differences between leftism and other political beliefs. But when it comes to a “post-politics that is neither right nor left,” the definition I turn to most often comes from science fiction writer Steven Brust, who once... <a href="https://craphound...

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, Hell Is Other People, about the solipsistic fantasy underpinning the AI bubble. Sartre was (arguably) an optimist. It’s not that other people are unpleasant: quite the contrary! There’s nothing that makes the day (or, pointedly, the night) sweeter than agree­able human companionship. And... <a href="https://craphound.com/news...

This week on my podcast, I read Zuckerberg’s increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers, about Mark Zuckerberg’s campaign of terror against the whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams. More than a decade ago, a group of young, internet-connected Belarusian dissidents launched a series of increasingly high-stakes, increasingly surreal confrontations with the corrupt, authoritarian government...

This week on my podcast, audio from Sunday’s launch in Menlo Park for The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI at Kepler’s Books with Angie Coiro. Catch me next tonight in Toronto at Osler Records, tomorrow in NYC with Jonathan Coulton at The Strand, Thursday in Philly with David Williams and Friday in Chicago... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2026/06/23/the-reve...

This week on my podcast, I read a recent post from my Pluralistic newsletter, “The World Has Moved On,” which analogizes Stephen King’s Dark Tower series to the Enshittification hypothesis. In the Dark Tower novels, we crisscross a fallen world in which decay is all around us. The buildings are rotten, the machines have stopped... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2026/...

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, “The Age of Vapor,” about the role science fiction imaginaires plays in fueling high-tech investment bubbles. It’s one thing to make everything about imaginary technology when you’re writing SF. The point of those imaginative exercises is to illumi­nate: To provoke reflection on our... <a href="https://craphound.c...

This week on my podcast, I read AI and a world without migrants, a recent essay from my Pluralistic blog, which psychoanalyzes the sociopathic fantasies that are driving the AI investment bubble. I don’t care who you are, there will always be times when hell is other people. Not because other people are horrible –... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2026/05/31/ai-and-a-world-witho...

This week on my podcast, I present an hour-long excerpt from the audiobook for The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, which is currently on pre-order through my latest Kickstarter campaign: A short, provocative guide to what’s good, bad, and stupid about AI and the discourse around AI, by the author of Enshittification. In... <a href="https://craphound.com/podcast/2026/0...

This week on my podcast, I read Comrade Trump, a recent column from my Pluralistic newsletter, which will be syndicated in The Nerve. All of which means that my experience of the Trump years is decidedly weird. On the one hand, I exist in a near-perpetual state of anxious misery, as Trump and his chud... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2026/05/03/comrade-trump/" class="more-l...

This week on my podcast, I read Not Normal, my latest Locus Magazine column, about the surreal and terrible world we’ve been eased into thanks to anti-circumvention laws. If you were paying attention in 1998, you could see what was coming. Computers were getting much cheaper, and much smaller. From cars to toast­ers, from speakers... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2026/04/05/not...

This week on my podcast, I read All laws are local a recent post from my Pluralistic.net blog, about the ephemerality of our seeming eternal verities. In other words, things that seem eternal and innate to the human condition to you are apt to have been invented ten minutes before you started to notice the... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2026/02/08/all-laws-are-local/" class=&q...

This week on my podcast, I read “Threads’ margin is the Eurostack’s opportunity,” a recent post from my Pluralistic.net blog, about the tactics that digital sovereignty advocates can deploy to counter Meta’s (further) enshittification of Threads. The funny thing is, the OG App creators were just following the Facebook playbook. When Facebook opened up to... <a href...

This week on my podcast, I read “Code is a liability (not an asset),” a recent post from my Pluralistic.net blog, about the bad ideas behind the drive to replace programmers with chatbots. Code is a liability. Code’s capabilities are assets. The goal of a tech shop is to have code whose capabilities generate more... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2026/01/19/code-is-a...

This week on my podcast, I play the audio from (Digital) Elbows Up: How Canada Can Become a Nation of Jailbreakers, Reclaim Our Digital Sovereignty, Win the Trade-War, and Disenshittify Our Technology, a speech I delivered on November 27, 2025 at OCADU in Toronto, Canada (video here, transcript here). I recognize that this is all... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2026/01/12/digital-el...

This week on my podcast, I play the audio from A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, a speech I delivered on December 28, 2025 at 39C3, the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Germany (video here, transcript here). Trump has staged an unscheduled, midair rapid disassembly of the global system of trade. Ironically, it is this system that... <a href="https://craphound.c...

This week on my podcast, I sit down with my daughter Poesy, for our annual Daddy-Daughter Podcast, a tradition we’ve had since she was three (she’s 17 now!). This year, Poe recaps her graduation, her triumphs with her dance team, and her life at college! She offers us a tutorial on playing Egyptian War, and... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2025/12/14/daddy-daughter-podcas...

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, “Show Me the Incentive, I’ll Show You the Outcome,” about the process by which we ended up with an enshittogenic policy environment: The whole point of the conservative project is to take away choices, and corral us into “preferences” that we disprefer. Eliminate... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2025/11/23/s...

This week on my podcast, I’ve got the audio from last week’s Enshittification book-tour event with Ed Zitron and Whitney Betran at the Seattle Public Library (you can watch the video here). I’ve got many more cities to go on the tour – I hope to see you at one (or more) of them! MP3

This week on my podcast, I’ve got the audio from last week’s Enshittification book-tour event with former FTC Chair Lina Khan at the Brooklyn Public Library (you can watch the video here). lI’ve got 24 more cities to go on the tour – I hope to see you at one (or more) of them! MP3

The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh This week on my podcast, I read “The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh,” a recent column from my Pluralistic newsletter; about the looming economic crisis threatened by the AI investment bubble: A week ago, I turned that book into a speech, which I delivered as the annual... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2025/10/06/the-real-ec...

This week on my podcast, I read “By all means, tread on those people,” a recent column from my Pluralistic newsletter; about the way that the American descent in fascism is connected to its abandonment of the rule of law more broadly: Just as Martin Niemöller’s “First They Came” has become our framework for understanding... <a href="https://craphound.com/podca...