Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

The Post-American Internet (39C3, Hamburg, Dec 28)

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 prevented all of America’s trading partners from disenshittifying their internet: the US trade representative threatened the world with tariffs unless they passed laws that criminalized reverse-engineering and modding. By banning “adversarial interoperability,” America handcuffed the world’s technologists, banning them from creating the mods, hacks, alt clients, scrapers, and other tools needed to liberate their neighbours from the enshittificatory predations of the ketamine-addled zuckermuskian tyrants of US Big Tech. Well, when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. The Trump tariffs are here, and it’s time to pick the locks on the those handcuffs and set the world’s hackers loose on Big Tech. Happy Liberation Day, everyone! Enshittification wasn’t an accident. It also wasn’t inevitable. This isn’t the iron laws of economics at work, nor is it the great forces of history. Enshittification was a choice: named individuals, in living memory, enacted policies that created the enshittogenic environment. They created a world that encouraged tech companies to merge to monopoly, transforming the internet into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four.” They let these monopolists rip us off and spy on us. And they banned us from fighting back, claiming that anyone who modified a technology without permission from its maker was a pirate (or worse, a terrorist). They created a system of “felony contempt of business-model,” where it’s literally a crime to change how your own devices work. They declared war on the general-purpose computer and demanded a computer that would do what the manufacturer told it to do (even if the owner of the computer didn’t want that). We are at a turning point in the decades-long war on general-purpose computing. Geopolitics are up for grabs. The future is ours to seize. In my 24 years with EFF, I have seen many strange moments, but never one quite like this. There’s plenty of terrifying things going on right now, but there’s also a massive, amazing, incredibly opportunity to seize the means of computation. Let’s take it. MP3

Daddy-Daughter Podcast, 2025 Edition

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 we sing Jingle Bells! MP3

Show Me the Incentive, I’ll Show You the Outcome

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 no-fault divorce, suppress the vote, gerrymander the electoral map, cram a binding arbi­tration clause into every terms of service and a noncompete into every labor contract, buy up all your competitors, DRM-lock all the media, ban contraception and abortion, and you’ve got a world of partners you can’t divorce, politicians you can’t vote out, companies you can’t sue, jobs you can’t quit, services you can’t leave, books and music you can’t move, and pregnancies you can’t prevent or terminate. And after you are relentlessly corralled into all these things you hate, you will be told that you don’t hate them after all – because you revealed your preferences for them. Consumerism is a terrible way to make change at the best of times, and it gets less effective by the day, as authoritarianism and market consolidation shrink the world of possibilities to an endless Pepsi Chal­lenge, where “choice” is narrowed to which flavor of sweetened battery acid you hate the least. I don’t think that end users are to blame for enshittification. MP3

Enshittification With Ed Zitron at the Seattle Public Library

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

Enshittification With Lina Khan at the Brooklyn Public Library

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