The AI Enshittification Bubble | Cory Doctorow
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What's up everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas, and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in this episode of Hidden Forces is Corey Dachterow, a science fiction author, journalist, and digital rights activist who coined the term, Incivication, and whose recent book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, takes a harsh look at the economics of an AI bubble that he believes will prove more damaging
Hi. Nice to be chatting with you.
It's great to have you on Corey. I actually was telling I'm trying to remember who connected us, but whoever it was, I was telling them that I'd wanted to have you on for a long time actually. I'd been using your term in shitification long before I actually knew that it was you that created that term. When did you first come up with that The
first time I used it, was on vacation. We were staying in a little cabin on a mountain in a cloud forest in Puerto Rico, and we had microwave relay Internet. And really, the one thing that everyone seems to know about microwave relay Internet is it doesn't go through clouds. And we were in a cloud forest, which made it very hard to get our Internet access, and we were a couple hours from town down a hard, muddy road. And so before we go into town, we'd have a little look and see on TripAdvisor what was open. And TripAdvisor was loading about 75 trackers, and we get through about 40 of them bef
So the opening paragraph of your Wikipedia page describes you as a Canadian British blogger, journalist, activist, and science fiction author whose work includes digital rights management, file sharing, and post scarcity economics. As we've already established, you coined the term in shitification or the in shitification of everything, which the American dialect society named word of the year in 2023. It's in the Oxford English dictionary too. And also in an Australian version of And the equation,
if I'm Westerners.
Yep. Yeah. So what's the most important thing that people need to understand about you, those who are reading your work or listening to you speak for the first time, and about what motivates your work and the things that you write and speak about?
Sure. Well, I like any good science fiction writer, both very excited about the potential of technology for human thriving and very concerned about the potential of technology for human immiseration. And that comes out in lots of different ways. So I've been a digital rights activist for more than twenty five years or coming up to twenty five years. I beg your pardon, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is a digital rights group based in San Francisco that I though I was their first European director, just how I came to be naturalized as British and then subsequently as American. My
Well, I find it really useful. I enjoy talking to guys like you who were adults. I mean, I think you were born in the early 70s, so you would have just been kind of a young teenager when internet happened, so to speak, as well as people who are a bit older who were there for the personal computing revolution because they have a different perspective on this technology and the cycles and iterations. I was born in 1981, so I think I also can appreciate this and the change and how the internet has to use your terminology. I know we're here to talk about your latest book, The Reverse Centaur's Gui
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