Doctorow Talks Enshittification on Volts

I have no idea how many times I've mentioned Cory Doctorow or Dave Roberts on here, but they've never been mentioned together before. That changes today, because Doctorow was recently a guest on Roberts's Volts podcast.

The topic was supposed to be Can we avoid the enshittification of clean energy tech?, but they barely touched on the clean energy part of that. It's really just a broad-ranging discussion of what Doctorow means by enshittification and how it works. There's a lot of easy-to-understand information about economics in our current era.

I wrote down one quote from Doctorow that I thought exemplifies his attitude about the tech world's efforts to drain us all of money and wall us in:

[Phone a]pps are a locus of enshittification.... An app is just a website wrapped in enough [intellectual property] that it's a felony to modify it so it works for you and not the manufacturer.

Plus lots of info monopolies you may not know about, right-to-repair, the definition of a "Ulysses pact," bits about Robert Bork you may have forgotten or never known, and the best pitch for switching to Linux/Ubuntu I've let myself hear (lalala I'm still not really listening, she says as she types into her Mac OS).

One last thing to share from their talk: we all know that inkjet printers are a scam to sell expensive ink, but I appreciated his unusual way of putting it. Hewlett Packard ink, which Doctorow says is currently priced around $10,000 per gallon, is the same as what you'd pay for the semen of a Kentucky-Derby–winning race horse.

They end by talking about why Doctorow has not yet joined BlueSky, and what it will take for him to join. He doesn't need one more online place to be trapped in, essentially. So he's waiting for the platform to make some changes they have promised that will make it truly federated.

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2019 photo by Dominik Butzmann, CC BY-SA 2.0