Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
Cory Doctorow
Articles, speeches, stories and novels by an award-winning science fiction writer, read aloud in small regular chunks
Nimby and the D-Hoppers CONCLUSION
This week on my podcast, I conclude my reading of my 2003 Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine story, Nimby and the D-Hoppers” (here’s the first half). The story has been widely reprinted (it was first published online in The Infinite Matrix in 2008), and was translated (by Elisabeth Vonarburg) into French for Solaris Magazine, as well as into Chinese, Russian, Hebrew, and Italian. The story was adapted for my IDW comic book series Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now by Ben Templ
Apr 13, • 0:00
Nimby and the D-Hoppers
This week on my podcast, I once again read my 2003 Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine story, Nimby and the D-Hoppers” The story has been widely reprinted (it was first published online in The Infinite Matrix in 2008), and was translated (by Elisabeth Vonarburg) into French for Solaris Magazine, as well as into Chinese, Russian, Hebrew, and Italian. The story was adapted for my IDW comic book series Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now by Ben Templesmith. I read this into my podc
Apr 6, • 0:00
Why I don’t like AI art
This week on my podcast, I read Why I don’t like AI art, a column from last week’s Pluralistic newsletter: Which brings me to art. As a working artist in his third decade of professional life, I’ve concluded that the point of art is to take a big, numinous, irreducible feeling that fills the artist’s mind, and attempt to infuse that feeling into some artistic vessel – a book, a painting, a song, a dance, a sculpture, etc – in the hopes that this work will cause a loose facsimile of that numin
Mar 30, • 0:00
There were always enshittifiers
This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, “There Were Always Enshittifiers,” about the historical context for my latest novel, Picks and Shovels: It used to be a much fairer fight. It used to be that if a company figured out how to block copying its floppies, another company – or even just an individual tinkerer – could figure out how to break that “copy protection.” There were plenty of legitimate reasons to want to do this: Maybe you owned more than one com
Mar 23, • 0:00
With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It
Last night, I traveled to Toronto to deliver the annual Ursula Franklin Lecture at the University of Toronto’s Innis College. The lecture was called “With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It.” It’s the latest major speech in my series of talks on the subject, which started with last year’s McLuhan Lecture in Berlin, and continued with a summer Defcon keynote. This speech specifically addre
Feb 26, • 0:00
Picks and Shovels virtual launch with Yanis Varoufakis and David Moscrop, presented by Jacobin
This week on my podcast, I bring you the audio from yesterday’s Jacobin virtual book launch for my book Picks and Shovels, with Yanis Varoufakis, hosted by David Moscrop. You have until Monday night to order personalized, signed copies of the book from Los Angeles’s Secret Headquarters (I’m dropping by the warehouse to sign them on Tuesday, on my way to my event at LA’s Diesel Bookstore with Wil Wheaton). See the whole tour schedule (20+ cities and still growing!) here.
Feb 16, • 0:00
MLMs are the mirror-world version of community organizing
This week on my podcast, I read MLMs are the mirror-world version of community organizing, a recent post from my Pluralistic newsletter. MLMs prey on the poor and desperate: women, people of color, people in dying small towns and decaying rustbelt cities. It’s not just that these people are desperate – it’s that they only survive through networks of mutual aid. Poor women rely on other poor women to help with child care, marginalized people rely on one another for help with home m
Feb 9, • 0:00
Canada shouldn’t retaliate with US tariffs
This week on my podcast, I read Canada shouldn’t retaliate with US tariffs, a recent post from my Pluralistic newsletter. But you know what Canada could make? A Canadian App Store. That’s a store that Canadian software authors could use to sell Canadian apps to Canadian customers, charging, say, the standard payment processing fee of 5% rather than Apple’s 30%. Canada could make app stores for the Android, Playstation and Xbox, too. There’s no reason that a Canadian app store would have to c
Feb 2, • 0:00
The Weight of a Feather (The Weight of a Heart)
This week on my podcast, I’m reading “The Weight of a Feather (The Weight of a Heart),” my short story in Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions, commissioned by J. Michael Straczynski. Margaret came into my office, breaking my unproductive clicktrance. She looked sheepish. “I got given one of those robots that follows you around,” she said. She took a step, revealing the waist-high reinforced cardboard box. “Want to help unbox? I stood up and u
Jan 26, • 0:00
Enshittification isn’t caused by venture capital
This week on my podcast, I’m reading “Enshittification isn’t caused by venture capital,” the latest post from my Pluralistic.net blog. It’s about the new “Free Our Feeds” project and why I think the existence of Mastodon doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pay attention to making Bluesky as free as possible. When tech critics fail to ask why good services turn bad, that failure is just as severe as the failure to ask why people stay when the service
Jan 20, • 0:00
Picks and Shovels Chapter One
This week on my podcast, I’ve got Wil Wheaton reading the first chapter of the audiobook of Picks and Shovels, the next Martin Hench novel, which is out next month. Please consider supporting my work by pre-ordering the book as a hardcover, DRM-free ebook, or DRM-free audiobook in my Kickstarter! The year is 1986. The city is San Francisco. Here, Martin Hench will invent the forensic accountant–what a bounty hunter is to people, he is to money–but for now he’s an MIT dro
Jan 10, • 0:00
Daddy-Daughter Podcast 2024
This week on my podcast, it’s our annual Daddy-Daughter Podcast, a tradition since 2012! The kid’s sixteen now, a senior in high school and getting ready to head off to university next year, so this may well be the final installment in the series. Here are the previous year’s installments: 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023. MP3
Dec 17, 2024 • 0:00
Spill, part six (FINALE) (a Little Brother story)
This week on my podcast, I read the sixth and final installment of “Spill“, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original. Spill will be reprinted in Allen Kaster’s 2025 Year’s Best SF on Earth. I didn’t plan to go to Oklahoma, but I went to Oklahoma. My day job is providing phone tech support to people in offices who use my boss’s custome
Dec 9, 2024 • 0:00
Spill, part five (a Little Brother story)
This week on my podcast, I read part five of “Spill“, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original. I didn’t plan to go to Oklahoma, but I went to Oklahoma. My day job is providing phone tech support to people in offices who use my boss’s customer-relationship management software. In theory, I can do that job from anywhere I can sit quietly on a good Internet co
Dec 1, 2024 • 0:00
Spill, part four (a Little Brother story)
This week on my podcast, I read part four of “Spill“, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original. I didn’t plan to go to Oklahoma, but I went to Oklahoma. My day job is providing phone tech support to people in offices who use my boss’s customer-relationship management software. In theory, I can do that job from anywhere I can sit quietly on a good Internet co
Oct 29, 2024 • 0:00
Spill, part three (a Little Brother story)
This week on my podcast, I read part three of “Spill“, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original. I didn’t plan to go to Oklahoma, but I went to Oklahoma. My day job is providing phone tech support to people in offices who use my boss’s customer-relationship management software. In theory, I can do that job from anywhere I can sit quietly on a good Internet c
Oct 27, 2024 • 0:00
Spill, part two (a Little Brother story)
This week on my podcast, I read part two of “Spill“, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original. I didn’t plan to go to Oklahoma, but I went to Oklahoma. My day job is providing phone tech support to people in offices who use my boss’s customer-relationship management software. In theory, I can do that job from anywhere I can sit quietly on a good
Oct 27, 2024 • 0:00
Spill, part one (a Little Brother story)
This week on my podcast, I read part one of “Spill“, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original. Doctors smoke. Driving instructors text and drive. Dentists eat sugary snacks before bed. And hackers? Well, we’re no better at taking our own advice than anyone else. Take “There is no security in obscurity”—if a security system only works when your enemies don’t
Oct 7, 2024 • 0:00
Vigilant (a Little Brother story)
This week on my podcast, I read “Vigilant“, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Nelda Buckman and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original. Kids hate email. Dee got my number from his older brother, who got it from Tina, my sister-in-law, who he knew from art school. He texted me just as I was starting to make progress with a gnarly bug in some logging software I was trying to get running for my clou
Sep 29, 2024 • 0:00
Anti-cheat, gamers, and the Crowdstrike disaster
This week on my podcast, I read my latest Pluralistic.net column, “Anti-cheat, gamers, and the Crowdstrike disaster” about the way that gamers were sucked into the coalition to defend trusted computing, and how the Crowdstrike disaster has seen them ejected from the coalition by Microsoft: As a class, gamers *hate* digital rights management (DRM), the anti-copying, anti-sharing code that stops gamers from playing older games, selling or giving away games, or just *playing* games:
Sep 16, 2024 • 0:00
Marshmallow Longtermism
This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, “Marshmallow Longtermism” a reflection on how conservatives self-mythologize as the standards-bearers for deferred gratification and making hard trade-offs, but are utterly lacking in these traits when it comes to climate change and inequality. I’m no fan of Charles Koch, but I agree that his performance at the helm of Koch Industries demonstrated impressive discipline and self-control, and that his enormous economic
Sep 8, 2024 • 0:00
AI’s productivity theater
This week on my podcast, I read a recent post from my Pluralistic.net blog/newsletter: “AI’s productivity theater,” about the severe mismatch between the bosses who buy AI to increase their workers’ efficiency, and the utter bafflement of the workers who are expected to use the AI…somehow. A new research report from the Upwork Research Institute offers a look into the bizarre situation unfolding in workplaces where bosses have been conned into buying AI and now
Aug 4, 2024 • 0:00
Unpersoned
This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, Unpersoned>; about the enormous power that we’ve given to tech giants to determine who can participate in modern life, and why the answer to the giants’ failure to wield that power wisely is to take it away, rather than attempting to perfect their use of it. AT THE END OF MARCH 2024, the romance writer K. Renee discovered that she had been locked out of her Google Docs account, for posting “inappropriate” content in
Jul 29, 2024 • 0:00
The reason you can’t buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you
This week on my podcast, I read The reason you can’t buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you, a column from one of last week’s editions of my Pluralistic newsletter; it describes a monopoly pattern whereby companies execute a series of mergers to dominate a sector, leaving their IT systems brittle and tangled – and vital to the nation. Just like with Equifax, the 737 Max disasters tipped Boeing into a string of increasingly grim catastrophe
Jun 30, 2024 • 0:00
My 2004 Microsoft DRM Talk
This week on my podcast, I read my Microsoft DRM talk, first delivered 20 years and one day ago in Redmond, Washington. It was a viral hit in the nascent blogosphere and became a defining document in the fight against DRM. Greetings fellow pirates! Arrrrr! I’m here today to talk to you about copyright, technology... more
Jun 17, 2024 • 0:00
Against Lore
This week on my podcast, I read Against Lore, a recent piece from my Pluralistic blog/newsletter, about writing and the benefits of nebulously defined backstories. Warning: the last few minutes of this essay contain spoilers for Furiosa. In the recording, I give lots of warning so you can switch off when they come up. One... more
Jun 2, 2024 • 0:00
Wanna Make Big Tech Monopolies Even Worse? Kill Section 230
Today for my podcast, I read Wanna Make Big Tech Monopolies Even Worse? Kill Section 230, my EFF Deeplinks Blog post on the competition aspects of sunsetting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act: In an age of resurgent anti-monopoly activism, small online communities, either standing on their own, or joined in loose “federations,” are... more
May 26, 2024 • 0:00
No One Is the Enshittifier of Their Own Story
No One Is the Enshittifier of Their Own Story Today for my podcast, I read No One Is the Enshittifier of Their Own Story , my latest Locus Magazine column, about the microfoundations of enshittification: Therein lies the tale. The same people, running the same companies, are all suddenly behaving very differently. They haven’t all... more
May 19, 2024 • 0:00
Precaratize Bosses
Today for my podcast, I read Precaratize Bosses, a recent essay from my Pluralistic.net newsletter. I recorded this on a day when I was home between book-tour stops (I’m out with my new techno crime-thriller, The Bezzle). Catch me this Thursday (May 2) in Winnipeg with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, then in Calgary... more
Apr 28, 2024 • 0:00
Capitalists Hate Capitalism
Today for my podcast, I read Capitalists Hate Capitalism, my latest column from Locus Magazine. It’s a meditation on the difference between feudalism and capitalism, and how to know which one you’re living under. I recorded this on a day when I was home between book-tour stops (I’m out with my new techno crime-thriller, The... more
Apr 15, 2024 • 0:00
Subprime gadgets
Today for my podcast, I read Subprime gadgets, originally published in my Pluralistic blog: I recorded this on a day when I was home between book-tour stops (I’m out with my new techno crime-thriller, The Bezzle). Catch me on April 11 in Boston with Randall Munroe, on April 12th in Providence, Rhode Island, then onto... more
Apr 1, 2024 • 0:00
The Majority of Censorship is Self-Censorship
Today for my podcast, I read The majority of censorship is self-censorship, originally published in my Pluralistic blog. It’s a breakdown of Ada Palmer’s excellent Reactor essay about the modern and historical context of censorship. I recorded this on a day when I was home between book-tour stops (I’m out with my new techno crime-thriller,... more
Feb 25, 2024 • 0:00
How I Got Scammed
Today for my podcast, I read How I Got Scammed, originally published in my Pluralistic blog. It’s a story of how the attacker has to get lucky once, while the defender has to never make a single mistake. This is my last podcast before I take off for my next book-tour, for my new novel,... more
Feb 18, 2024 • 0:00
My Marshall McLuhan Lecture on enshittification from Berlin’s transmediale conference
Last week, I traveled to Berlin to give the annual Marshall McLuhan lecture to open the Transmediale festival. I gave the talk to a full house at the Canadian embassy, and the embassy was kind enough to upload their video of the speech. This podcast is a rip of the audio from that Youtube video.... more
Feb 5, 2024 • 0:00
What kind of bubble is AI?
This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column. “What kind of bubble is AI?” In it, I ask what will be left behind after the AI bubble bursts: You’ve got one week left to back the Kickstarter for my next novel, The Bezzle, the followup to Red Team Blues. I’m preselling... more
Jan 21, 2024 • 0:00
The Bezzle, read by Wil Wheaton (excerpt)
This week on my podcast, a preview of Wil Wheaton’s reading on the audiobook of The Bezzle, which I’m preselling through a Kickstarter campaign that I hope you’ll consider backing! MP3
Jan 15, 2024 • 0:00
The Internet’s Original Sin
This week on my podcast, I read my final Medium column The internet’s original sin, about the failure of trying to stretch copyright to cover every problem on the internet. Copyright is a regulation. It regulates the supply-chain of the entertainment industry. Copyright matters a lot to me, because I’m in the industry. But unless... more
Dec 17, 2023 • 0:00
Daddy-Daughter Podcast, 2023 edition
12 years ago, my four-year-old daughter’s nursery school let us know they’d be shutting down for Christmas a day before my wife’s office closed down, so I took the kid into my office in London to do some coloring, play with toys, and, eventually, record a podcast. It was hilarious. In the years since, we’ve... more
Dec 10, 2023 • 0:00
Don’t Be Evil
This week on my podcast, I read my Locus Magazine column “Don’t Be Evil,” about the microeconomics and moral injury of enshittification. It’s tempting to think of the Great Enshittening – in which all the internet services we enjoyed and came to rely upon became suddenly and irreversibly terrible – as the result of moral... more
Dec 3, 2023 • 0:00
Moral Hazard (from Communications Breakdown)
This week on my podcast, I read my short story “Moral Hazard,” published last month in MIT Press’s Communications Breakdown, a science fiction anthology edited by Jonathan Strahan. “Moral Hazard” is a story about inequality, fintech, and the problems of “solutionism.” I know exactly where I was the day I decided to give every homeless... more
Nov 12, 2023 • 0:00
The Canadian Miracle, Part 2
This week on my podcast, I read the second and final part of my short story, “The Canadian Miracle,” a story set in the world of my forthcoming pre-apocalyptic Green New Deal novel, The Lost Cause, which comes out on November 14. Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping. -Fred... more
Nov 6, 2023 • 0:00
The Canadian Miracle, Part 1
This week on my podcast, I read part one of my short story, “The Canadian Miracle,” a story set in the world of my forthcoming pre-apocalyptic Green New Deal novel, The Lost Cause, which comes out on November 14. Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping. -Fred Rogers, 1986 It’s... more
Nov 1, 2023 • 0:00
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... more
Oct 23, 2023 • 0:00
The Lost Cause (excerpt)
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... more
Oct 12, 2023 • 0:00
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... more
Sep 24, 2023 • 0:00
Plausible Sentence Generators
This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus column. “Plausible Sentence Generators,” about my surprising, accidental encounter with a chatbot, and what it says about the future of the bullshit wars. When I came back to the tab a couple minutes later, I found that the site had fed my letter to a... more
Sep 17, 2023 • 0:00
Enshitternet: The old, good internet deserves a new, good internet
This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column. “Enshitternet: The old, good internet deserves a new, good internet,” clarifying that our aspiration shouldn’t be to restore the internet’s former glory, but to make a new and glorious internet. The enshitternet wasn’t inevitable. It was the result of specific policy choices: the decision... more
Aug 21, 2023 • 0:00
The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (audiobook outtake)
This week’s podcast is a special one: the introduction and chapter one of the audio edition of The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation, which Verso will publish on September 5, 2023. I made my own DRM-free audiobook for this, reading it under the direction of the incredible Gabrielle de Cuir at... more
Aug 1, 2023 • 0:00
Let the Platforms Burn: The Opposite of Good Fires is Wildfires
This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column. “Let the Platforms Burn: The Opposite of Good Fires is Wildfires,” making the case that we should focus more on making it easier for people to leave platforms, rather than making the platforms less terrible places to be. Tech bosses know the only thing... more
Jul 17, 2023 • 0:00
Ideas Lying Around
This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column. “Ideas Lying Around,” about archivillain Milton Friedman’s surprisingly good theory of change, and how to apply it to progressive politics. Enter Friedman: to people reeling in crisis, Friedman insisted that the missing oil was somehow the product of unionization, pollution controls, women’s lib, and... more
Jun 11, 2023 • 0:00
The Swivel-Eyed Loons Have a Point
This week on my podcast, I read my lastest Locus column. “The Swivel-Eyed Loons Have a Point,” about the unlikely – but undeniable – common ground I share with the most unhinged far-right conspiracists. The swivel-eyed loons at the anti-15-minute-city protests point out that such a scheme constitutes a form of pervasive location-tracking surveillance, and... more
May 14, 2023 • 0:00
How To Make a Child-Safe TikTok
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Apr 17, 2023 • 0:00
Red Team Blues: Behind the Scenes with Wil Wheaton
This week on my podcast, I bring you some clips of Wil Wheaton’s recording sessions for the audiobook of Red Team Blues, my next novel, an anti-finance finance thriller starring the 67 year old forensic accountant Martin Hench, who specializes in high-tech scams. I’m currently kickstarting this audiobook, pre-selling audiobooks, ebooks and hardcovers. I have... more
Apr 2, 2023 • 0:00
Red Team Blues
This week on my podcast, I read a selection from my next novel, Red Team Blues, an anti-finance finance thriller about Marty Hench, a 67 year old hard-charging forensic accountant who’s seen every finance scam that Silicon Valley has come up with over the previous 40 years. Marty’s ready to retire, but an old friend... more
Mar 27, 2023 • 0:00
Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk
This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk, making the Luddite case against bossware and other jobs where your boss is an app. The rise of gig work produced a massive surge of “craft” workers who toiled on their own premises, most notably the drivers... more
Mar 19, 2023 • 0:00
Twiddler
This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, Twiddler, which further explores my theory of enshittification, and the factors that make it endemic to digital platforms. The early internet promised more than disintermediation — it also promised endless configurability, where users and technologists could install after-market code that altered the functioning of... more
Feb 27, 2023 • 0:00
Tiktok’s enshittification
This week on my podcast, I read my Pluralistic blog post, Tiktok’s enshittification, which sets out a kind of master theory of enshittification, illustrated by Tiktok’s platform dynamics. Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they... more
Feb 20, 2023 • 0:00
Social Quitting
This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus column, “Social Quitting, about the enshittification lifecycle of social media platforms. But as Facebook and Twitter cemented their dominance, they steadily changed their services to capture more and more of the value that their users generated for them. At first, the companies shifted value from... more
Jan 23, 2023 • 0:00
Daddy-Daughter Podcast, 2022 Edition
When my daughter Poesy was four, her nursery school let us know that they were shutting down a day before my wife’s office closed for the holidays, leaving us with a childcare problem. Since I worked for myself, I took the day off and brought her to my office, where we recorded a short podcast,... more
Dec 12, 2022 • 0:00
Sound Money
This week on my podcast, I read “Sound Money,” my latest column for Medium, which explains why money creation is necessary for a prosperous economy, despite the scaremongering of “inflation hawks.” MP3
Sep 12, 2022 • 0:00
What is Chokepoint Capitalism?
This week on my podcast, I read “What is Chokepoint Capitalism?” a recent column for Medium explaining the thesis of my new book with Rebecca Giblin, which explains how creative labor markets got rigged, and how we can unrig them. (Image: Erik B. Anderson, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified) MP3
Aug 21, 2022 • 15:52
So You’ve Decided to Unfollow Me
This week on my podcast, I read “So You’ve Decided to Unfollow Me,” a recent column for Medium describing the joys of writing to attract the audience of people who want to read what you want to write. (Image: Sascha Kohlmann, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified) MP3
Aug 8, 2022 • 17:32
View a SKU: Let’s Make Amazon Into a Dumb Pipe
This week on my podcast, I read “View a SKU: Let’s Make Amazon Into a Dumb Pipe,” a recent column for Medium discussing how interoperability could flip Amazon’s monopoly power on its head and enable us all to coveniently shop locally. MP3
Jul 31, 2022 • 0:00
Why none of my books are available on Audible
This week on my podcast, I read “Why none of my books are available on Audible,” a short audiobook I produced to be distributed through Amazon’s ACX platform, explaining how that platform’s sloppy rights verification and mandatory DRM screws over writers. MP3 (Image: Paris 16, CC BY-SA 4.0; Dmitry Baranovskiy, CC BY 4.0; modified)
Jul 24, 2022 • 31:02
Reasonable Agreement: On the Crapification of Literary Contracts
This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, Reasonable Agreement: On the Crapification of Literary Contracts, about the growing trend of standard, non-negotiable contract terms in freelance writing contracts that are outrageous in their unfairness. MP3
Jun 27, 2022 • 22:42
Monopolists Want to Create Human Inkjet Printers
This week on my podcast, I read a recent blog post, Monopolists Want to Create Human Inkjet Printers, exploring the way that med-tech mergers are bringing the ghastly inkjet printer business-model to artificial pancreases. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; Björn Heller, CC BY 2.0 (German); modified) MP3
Jun 20, 2022 • 16:22
Regulatory Capture: Beyond Revolving Doors and Against Regulatory Nihilism
Regulatory Capture: Beyond Revolving Doors and Against Regulatory Nihilism. This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, Regulatory Capture: Beyond Revolving Doors and Against Regulatory Nihilism., about the origins of the theory of regulatory capture, and the all-important, but rarely discussed difference between right and left theories of regulatory capture. MP3
Jun 12, 2022 • 22:47
Against Cozy Catastrophies
This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, Against Cozy Catastrophies, about the how the changeover from universal, state- or employer-provided pensions to market-based pensions like the 401(k) have created an inescapable, slow motion catastrophe, where the only thing worse than being one of the lucky few with retirement savings is being... more
Jun 6, 2022 • 12:00
Apple’s Cement Overshoes
This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, Apple’s Cement Overshoes, about the malicious compliance in Apple’s “home repair kits.” (Image: Conall, CC BY 2.0, modified) MP3
May 30, 2022 • 26:02