The Enshitification of Big Tech: A Conversation with Cory Doctorow

Matt: [00:00:00] One of the things that I think is very weird about the current moment is that the left and the right don't really make sense in the context of monopoly, monopoly power. And one example of that is in 2011, Steve Jobs died. And at the same time as he died, Occupy Wall Street was going on and Occupy Wall Street actually set up a memorial.

to Steve Jobs. Like, I was in Zuccotti Park, they had a memorial, people were tweeting about it. You know, and today we would be like, well, that's really embarrassing, right? Because Apple is this gross monopoly, Steve Jobs is obviously a monopolist. But there was this, you know, there is this ideology to Silicon Valley.

The politics of Silicon Valley have changed.

NEWS: Rest in peace, Steve Jobs. So ironic, great minds die, while Wall Street expletives are still alive. Uh, so

David: Yeah, I mean, in some ways you can see the whole Occupy Apple [00:01:00] synergy making. Some sense. I mean, the initial stirrings of the Internet had this very utopian vibe to it. The Internet, through its communication devices, was going to connect the whole world and liberate us from the forces that were trying to keep us apart.

Uh, you see this in the Arab Spring.

News: In fact, following its pivotal role in Egypt, Facebook pages and Twitter groups are now popping up in at least 10 countries, rallying anti government sentiment from Morocco and Algeria to Syria and Bahrain.

David: And, uh, you've seen it really from the very beginnings of, uh, internet culture, that we were the radicals, we were, we were the people who were going to disrupt the system.

Matt: Right, even, even Mark Zuckerberg's make the world more open and connected, uh, Googles don't. You know, don't do evil. Um, these are, these are statements about ideology, like their statement. I mean, amusingly, Amazon was always just, we're greedy. [00:02:00] 

David: They didn't, they didn't bother, but they're almost, uh, uh, refreshing in their honesty.

Somewhere along the line, that very utopian vision became a very sort of personal self aggrandizement vision of, uh, you know, making these, these tools, uh, work for a small group of powerful people.

Matt: The question is really, liberty can cut both ways, right? It can be liberty for the individual against governments, large corporations, dominant firms, or it can be liberty for the dominant firm to exploit.

The individual and those forms of liberty kind of sound very similar. And I think they were always conjoined in Silicon Valley. And now they're getting teased out. We brought on somebody who could talk about it. A great thinker, writer, Cory Doctorow, uh, who is a novelist, who is an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation because the Electronic Frontier Foundation was this think tank and law [00:03:00] firm and advocacy group.

That was arguing for digital liberation and the tensions that implies.

David: We're really thrilled to have him to talk about this and to talk about his new book, which actually is set kind of in the beginnings of, uh, the internet era in Silicon Valley. Uh, it's called Picks and Shovels, and he'll talk about that later on the show, but, uh, we're excited.

Cory Doctorow here on Organized Money.

I'm David Day.

Matt: I run the American Prospect Magazine. And I'm Matt Stoler. I write about monopolies in a newsletter called BIG, and I'm the research director for a think tank called the American Economic Liberties Project. On

David: Organized Money, we're going to go beyond supply and demand curves and odes to visionary entrepreneurs and tell you how the business world really works.

Matt: We'll talk to business leaders, journalists, policy makers, people on the front lines who are dealing with monopoly [00:04:00] power, competing with it, winning, losing, but ultimately fighting back.

David: It's a podcast about all the money and power. And

Theme: we know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.

Cory: Welcome, Corey. Thank you very much. What a pleasure to be on the show. As I was saying before we started taping, it's, I think my favorite show of the last year. My favorite new show.

Matt: Oh, that's so nice of you.

David: That's very nice to say.

Matt: So we're going to brag about you first, uh, the, the, what we call the Jewish mother part of the show.

I have known, uh, I guess I will call you a techno futurist and activist and author Corey [00:05:00] Doctorow for a few years, but I've been an admirer of him long before I knew him. So I like, I think. Many people, my generation, I read his blog, Boing Boing, which spanned the moment in the late 1990s to the 2000s when we stopped saying zine and started saying blog.

He defined the phrase famous on the internet before we realized that just meant famous. He has written 32 books, a lot of science fiction, techno thrillers. Also, he writes essays at his site, uh, Pluralistic. His latest novel is Picks and Shovels. And he, uh, he publishes books using a variety of copyright regimes and distribution outlets.

And he regularly tangles with Amazon and its control over Kindles and, um, and audiobooks. That's a good, it's a good introduction. I'm, I have a warm glow. I will also say I find him very annoying. I actually find you very annoying. I'll say it's your face. You write a lot. Uh, and it's all very good and [00:06:00] I'm a deeply resentful and petty little man, but you're a key thinker behind the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

You've orchestrated fights over problems like copyright, digital rights management, right to parents, so forth. Um, of late, uh, you have become a kind of a must read in the anti monopoly movement. And I would, I would characterize your politics. As the right of all of us as a society, as individuals, as communities to create, to create art, technology, products, ideas, phrases, everything, but more innovative jailing technology.

He also, he also coined the term, uh, in shitification, which was the 2023 word of the year, which is chosen by the American dialect society. Okay. Now I'm done. That's it. You've got Thank you, Matt. You're, you're basically, you're better than me. You're better than Dave. You're better than everyone listening on this podcast.

But I'm But I'm

Cory: also riven by insecurity. So there is that.

David: We're trying to fix that. I mean, maybe we'll start on the The last thing and work our way backwards, um, [00:07:00] in terms of in certification, I'm sure you've described this on a million different podcasts and interviews, how, how did you get to the point where you felt like you needed to coin this and, uh, and, you know, what was the impulse?

And also

Matt: what is

Cory: it? Yeah, I can do both of those things. So I'll say that, you know, I've been at the Electronic Frontier Foundation for 23 years and that has been a near quarter century of trying to get people to care about things before it's too late to do something about them, where those things are very complicated and technical and abstract and hard to really feel urgent about until it's too late to do something about them.

You know, I think this analogizes neatly to something like climate change where, like, eventually everyone's going to care about climate change, but it's going to be because their house is on fire and, you know, ideally we'd like to get people to care about climate change before then. I feel the same way about tech policy.

And so I have come up with any number of metaphors, critiques, funny words, uh, different ways of talking about this stuff, uh, at different [00:08:00] moments to try and, uh, get. Whatever audience we're trying to get engaged in this to care about it. And so like the, the, the long answer to where in shitification came from is it's just the latest, but it's stuck.

You know, I, I came up with the word while we were on vacation, uh, we were, um, staying in a, in a cloud forest and a cabin in Puerto Rico. And we had microwave relay internet. And if you know anything about microwave relay internet, it's that it doesn't go through clouds. And I remind you, we were in a cloud forest.

Wait, what is it? What's sorry, what's a cloud forest? It's like a rainforest, but cloudy. It's like higher up. It's higher up. It's high altitude.

Matt: Okay, it just sounded, it sounded way cooler than it actually is. Yeah,

Cory: it's, there's no Ewoks involved. It's not Endor or anything. And so we're trying to get on TripAdvisor and literally all I could load was like 50 of the 200 tracking track, trackers, you know, the privacy trackers, and, and, The, the, the favico, the little icon that goes in the, in the bar, which would render just as a full screen vector graphic.

And [00:09:00] after a while, this got so tedious that I tweeted, the most inshittified service I've used this year is TripAdvisor. Has anyone at TripAdvisor ever been on a trip? And people thought the word was funny, right? You know, they came back and they, like, they're, you, you know, this is a nice thing about Twitter is you can try out material on it and you kind of get a, an immediate sense of whether it plays.

And so that just sort of stuck in my mind because a bunch of people were like, ha ha, that's a funny word. Many, many months later, I was describing something that Amazon had done. I think it was in relation to its, um, pay for play search placement, and I described it as inshittification. And then later that week, I wrote something about TikTok, and I proposed a kind of formal definition of inshittification.

And that's kind of where it took off. And then, you know, David, to answer your question, the formal definition is That enchitification is a three stage process of platform decay in which platforms start off in phase one by being good to their end users to tempt them in, but also lock them [00:10:00] in. And then once they're locked in and it's hard for them to leave, the platform makes things worse for them in order to make things better for business customers.

And once they're locked in, it makes things worse for them. Harvest all of the. Residual value and turns into a giant pile of shit. And you know, one of the things that I would distinguish this theory from other theories is that it doesn't suppose That the original sin of the internet was like unrealistically wanting things for free And that if you're not paying for the product, you're the product because it points out that the people who pay for the product also get shafted in this process Uh, you know, the advertisers are not having a good time on Amazon either, uh, or on Google.

Uh, I, neither are the publishers and so on. I mean, I don't have to tell you guys about monopsony and, and how, you know, a monopolist is usually also a monopsonist.

Matt: Well, wait, why don't you tell, why don't you tell, you tell us, but you might have to tell our listeners. Okay, sure. So what is monopsony aside from an annoying way to say monopoly?

Cory: Yeah, so monopsony is, if a monopoly is a [00:11:00] powerful seller who can set prices, uh, a monopsony is a powerful buyer who can set costs. And so, you know, one way that we're very familiar with that is monopsonies over labor. So if you live in a company town, you know, Tennessee Ernie Ford might write a song about the fact that there's only one employer in town and they get to tell you what you're going to make and if you don't like it you can Dig a grave, you know, climb inside and pull the dirt down on top of yourself.

So there are a lot of labor monopsonies. If you're a writer, we have a pretty important supply monopsony in the form of Amazon, which is the, basically the, the most important buyer for our, our output. And one of the things about monopsony is that, uh, it's, it's pretty easy to acquire. So, you know, Um, monopolies, we know, and when I say monopoly and monopsony, it isn't necessarily just one buyer and one seller.

It's just that like oligopoly and oligopsony, they're just like too much to say.

Matt: Anti monopoly is full of really annoying ways to say really simple, simple [00:12:00] things. That's right.

Cory: Yeah. Powerful buyers, powerful sellers. So, so, you know, in monopoly you have this powerful seller. Oftentimes there's ways that other sellers can kind of creep in and offer a substitute good.

So, you know, my favorite example of this, uh, is, uh, like people who smuggle in food to theme parks and, like, sell it to other people, you know? Uh, like that's a, which I have, uh, in fact witnessed, uh, when we were in China and visiting a bunch of theme parks. Uh, it's like, it's like an actual problem. So, uh, or, or depending on your perspective, a solution.

But monopolies are relatively hard to maintain because there are lots of ways that sellers can creep in around the edges and get at your customers. But monopsonies, they're pretty significant because there's not many businesses that can afford to lose say 10 or 20 percent of their sales overnight. So if you have a single customer, that's like 20 percent of your market.

And they turn up and they say we demand some unrealistic concession that, you know, you're going to lose money on. You might give it to them because the [00:13:00] alternative to losing a little money on every sale is going out of business tomorrow. Maybe if you lose a little money on every sale, you can find other customers and spread the business around.

Whereas if, you know, you, you lose 20 percent overnight, your bank It won't give you another loan. You might not be able to make your payroll or your, your rent on your facility and so on. And that could be the end of the business. So, monopsonies are much more common, uh, and, and weirdly less well known. So, this is a theory about both monopoly and monopsony, and there's a whole other dimension to it that maybe we can get into if you want to, uh, about, How it works, like, how it is that this is all happening right now, and why this is, uh, distinct to digital platforms.

You know, there are other platforms that have gotten worse, but digital platforms have unique characteristics.

David: I do want to ask about that, because, um, what I find so interesting about the inshittification Life cycle is that it really does have this parallel [00:14:00] to life cycles throughout, you know, non digital spaces mean, uh, as long as a monopoly gathers a large amount Dominant portion of a market, they no longer have to worry about product quality, or at least that doesn't seem like what they're worried about.

And, uh, so maybe you could talk about the, the particulars of the plat, how this works in platform monopolies, but I do think it it's, it's, it's a way to think about monopoly more broadly.

Cory: Yeah, I'll, I'll try and square that circle. Uh, so. I think that, um, what you're talking about, broadly speaking, is maybe what economists would call, like, a source of discipline.

Digital firms have two sources of discipline that are sui generis, that are distinct to digital technology of the last 20 years. The first one is a technical source of discipline, and it's something that you need to have a bit of a background in computer science to understand. One of the things I [00:15:00] like about your, your, your podcast is that you don't shy away about digging into these technicalities, right?

Like, how do, what is the underlying technical mechanism? I often find when I talk to people about, about insidification, there's a kind of dismissive thing where it's like, Oh, you're just describing capitalism! You know, this is, this is a form of failures under capitalism, but it, techno capitalism has some unique properties.

So, One of them is something called interoperability. Interoperability, it's a deceptively simple idea. It's the idea that you can make one thing work with another thing. You can put any lightbulb in your light socket. You can wear anyone's shoelaces in your shoes. Uh, you can pump anyone's gas in your gas tank.

Um, With digital technology, you get a lot more opportunities to do interoperability without a lot of cooperation. Like if you want to make a light bulb that works in a light socket, then everyone who makes light sockets and everyone who makes light bulbs has to agree on like wattage and amperage. They have to agree on like the threading characteristics of the socket and so on.

[00:16:00] But if you want to make an ad blocker that works with a web browser, you don't have to agree with anyone else. Right? You can just like, we have this open platform, and you can just modify it after the fact. Uh, and all of the things being equal, you can always write a program that undoes what some other program is trying to do.

And so if Apple has a program that says you can't run an app unless you bought it from the app store, you could write another program that says, fuck that, right? It's my phone. I get to use whoever, I get to use whoever's programs I want on my phone. That's what it means for it to be mine. Uh, and so, um, that source, that interoperability represents a, a very important source of discipline.

That I think is underappreciated by non technical people. Because once someone severs the relationship with the firm that sold them something, it, they often don't go back. You know, if you can imagine like we're having a meeting to discuss, uh, the ads on our website. We're having like a product planning meeting.[00:17:00] 

Person running the meeting might say, you know, I've been thinking about this hard, we've done some research, and we think if we make the ads like 20 percent more invasive and obnoxious, our ad revenue will go up by about 2%. And, you know, that's our KPI, that's our Key Performance Indicator. We all get a big bonus if we can hit that number, so let's do it.

And someone who's sitting around the table, who doesn't care about, like, users well being or sanity, still might put their hand up and say, like, I love how you think, Elon, but has it occurred to you that if you make the ads 20 percent more invasive and obnoxious, 40 percent of our users are going to install an ad blocker?

And when they do, the revenue from those users falls to zero forever because no user ever uninstalled their ad blocker. Right? And so you have this, like, once, once you've figured out how to put third party ink in your printer, you're never gonna go and get first party ink for your printer again, right? It works.

It's half the price. Why would you do it? Once you figure out that the mechanic on the corner can fix your car more cheaply than the dealer. So, um, that, that is a source of discipline. It makes companies that [00:18:00] might otherwise want to do things that are adverse to your interest to benefit themselves, check themselves.

Uh, and, and behave themselves better. And one of the things that we've seen over the last 20 years, with the rise of the internet, is a rise of IP laws that make that kind of interoperability illegal. And I'll give you just one example of that. There's, there's a law that Bill Clinton signed in 1998 called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

It's a big, gnarly hairball of a law. In section 1201 of the DMCA, establishes a new felony for trafficking in a circumvention device for an access control, which means that if I give you a tool to remove a digital lock, I can go to prison for five years and pay a 500, 000 fine for a first offense, even if no copyright infringement takes place.

So, Matt, you mentioned that I, um, uh, tangle with Amazon about audiobooks and e books and so on. This is the origin of my tangle here, because Amazon insists that anyone who sells an audiobook on their Audible platform, [00:19:00] which in the genre that I write in, in science fiction, is 90 percent of the market, that we have to consent to having our work wrapped up in what they call digital rights management, a wrapper that satisfies this legal requirement to make it a crime to remove it.

Which means that every time I sell you an audiobook on Audible, say they're 25 each, that's 25 you would have to forfeit if I left Amazon and convinced you to come with me to another platform. Because you can't legally avail yourself of a tool to convert those files to another format. And if I provide you with the tool, even though it's my copyrighted work that the tool is acting on, I commit a felony.

Right, so this is a copyright for intermediaries that it, that, uh, is more salient and has higher priority than the copyright that goes to creative workers. And so, this is, this is a, a really significant change in our disciplinary environment. And as microchips have gotten cheaper, these little, you know, 26 cent system on a [00:20:00] chips, it's been easier to put a copyrighted work into more and more things.

So now your printer cartridge has got a system on a chip that like costs a quarter, and has 50, 000 lines of code in it, is definitely a copyrighted work, right? And that chip exists to do a little cryptographic handshake to prove that it came from HP. And HP now knows that they can use the state to destroy anyone who steps in to offer you a refilled cartridge or a third party cartridge.

And that means that they can raise and raise the price of ink, especially because they've acquired so many of their competitors, and the remaining competitors all do the same thing. And so, Ink is now 10, 000 a gallon, right? It's the most expensive fluid you can buy as a civilian without a permit. You pay more for the colored water.

that you use to print your grocery lists than you would to buy the semen of a Kentucky Derby winning stallion. You can see how when you invite firms to just kind of put a, like a one molecule thick layer [00:21:00] of, of digital lock around any product. which then makes it a felony to use it in a way that they don't like, how firms would avail themselves of that and use it to stop you from getting your car fixed by anyone, your tractor fixed by anyone, or to, you know, link your, um, continuous glucose monitor with your insulin pump to make an artificial pancreas unless you bought both of them from them.

Right.

Matt: I actually want to situate you historically. The anti monopoly movement is relatively new and Like all social movements, it didn't come out of nowhere. There are conservative elements to it that are kind of newer, that, you know, have to do with sort of Trump getting deplatformed and a couple of things happening a few years earlier.

There's a big part of it that came from the Elizabeth Warren tradition. I know that's a little bit where Dave and I came from, sort of work on the 1990s on bankruptcies and then the financial crisis of Too Big to Fill. Firms, banks, and then there's part of it that came from the anti war [00:22:00] movements of the two thousands, um, that bled into anger at the media and fights over net neutrality, things like that.

But there's a strong part of the anti monopoly movement that actually calms out the liberation rhetoric of the personal computing and telecom world of the 1990s. So, I brought this up to you before, this is this historian at Stanford named Fred Turner, and he wrote a book called From Counterculture to Cyberculture.

So, so essentially, Turner argues, like, the, the Silicon Valley is hippies plus the military industrial complex in Northern California. You take those two things together and it equals the internet, right? So would you agree with that? Is that your tradition? And then how did you get into anti monopoly politics?

So to kind of walk us through your political, your politics.

Cory: Yeah. So I think that's, that's true. And it's funny when you say that, I think there's other. groups that have the same constituency. So, I also was a tabletop role playing game aficionado. I was a D& D kid. It's the same composition, right? It's like, [00:23:00] this was the place where people like me, I grew up in the political left, anti war, anti nuclear proliferation.

My mother was a really key activist in legalizing abortion in Canada. So, I grew up in these, in these leftist circles, but like, it was Dungeons and Dragons where I was hanging out with people who were either ex military, active military, reserve, you know, we were all like getting together to play D& D. So it's funny because I think that that the internet and D& D there's a kind of overlap there.

They both start around the same time like the consumer access to modems and Dungeons and Dragons take off at the same moment as well. Just as you said that it made me think of it in part, I think because one of my rabbis of Trust busting is Tim Wu, who I have known since I was nine years old when we went to elementary school together and played a lot of D& D together.

Oh, really? So, there's something, there's something there, I think. Just a background, Tim Wu

Matt: is, was, is a very, is a famous antitrust scholar, law professor. [00:24:00] He ran competition policy under the Biden White House, just to give some context. That's right. And you

David: know what's, you know what's funny? There's like, there is a D& D monopoly sidebar here because it was vicious.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. By Hasbro. Yeah. And, and they, and they started

Cory: inshinifying it, right? They sure did. Yeah. They sure did. And there was even an open licensed version of D& D, the D20 system, that created a kind of open platform. that has been the source of Fantastic Ferment, where all kinds of different games have been built on top of it, that Hasbro has ever since been trying to destroy, right?

It's, it's, it's like you, it's, it is a, it is quite a great little microcosm. I'm not going to say it's the most consequential thing in the world, but I bet there's a lot of overlap in there.

David: I certainly played D& D when I was a kid, and, uh, I

Cory: hadn't thought of

David: that connection, but, uh,

Cory: And, you know, I think D& D touches, like, fanfic, and fanfic is one of the, uh, Places where normies become copyright activists, you know, like it's it's there's [00:25:00] there's a lot of uh, there's a lot of stuff going on there, I think.

Um, so I got involved with the Electronic Frontier Foundation by starting a peer to peer software company during the dot com bubble and then having our investors flip out when the record labels named Napster's Limited Partners as parties to the lawsuit against Napster, uh, and then Our VC's limited partners went, wait a second, do you have any of these companies that might attract belligerent legal claims that will seek to attach the assets of our like insurance company, our pension fund?

Uh, and so, uh, we had hired a bunch of programmers from Cult of the Dead Cow, which was this great kind of hacktivist group. And when we needed specialized legal advice of the sort that like white shoe firms were incapable of giving, because they knew nothing about cyber law, it was so new. They put us in touch with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

And I pretty quickly realized, as John Perry Barlow once put it about Dan Gilmore, that I was more of a org guy than a com guy, uh, [00:26:00] and before long. I, I, uh, I quit. I quit the company I started and, and went to work at EFF. We had actually, they'd gotten, they'd lost their lease in the dot com bubble. Their landlord had, like, illegally kicked them out to rent to a bunch of people like me.

But we had an extra room at our office, so I moved them in with us. And then basically I just said, yeah, so I just basically moved my desk over there. Uh, and became an EFF, uh, contractor, or I think I was an employee then. I'm, I'm a contractor now. So, uh, I've worked with them now for 23 years. I was their European director and so on.

And at a certain point in our work, it became really clear that the composition of the tech industry as it concentrated became more, uh, likely to brief for harming users. And less likely to stand up for users against other industries, like the entertainment industry, say, which wanted the right to disconnect people from the internet on the basis of an accusation, [00:27:00] permanently disconnect whole households, or from states, right?

We, we, you know, among other things, litigated a lawsuit against the, uh, against the NSA that established that civilians have the right to use cryptographic tools that, uh, We'll keep secrets even from governments. So, you know, these, the, the, as the sector became more concentrated, it became really clear that like A sector of just a dozen or so companies didn't really worry that one of them would defect by being a good guy, uh, and steal the other one's business.

And instead they were, all of them kind of very easily able to maintain the discipline of saying, no, we all think the internet should be wiretapped or no, we all think that you should need a license to make a website or whatever, right?

David: I mean, I mean, that's interesting though, Corey, because yeah, you know, EFF and the entire sort of spirit.

Of, of that side of, of activism was about the computer being a force for liberation, the computer [00:28:00] being a force to connect disparate people, disparate cultures, and, uh, and taking on, uh, a lot of the, uh, forces of power in, in the country and then in the, in the world. And what you're saying is that the shift, once the concentration happened is that the computer now becomes a force for control and

Cory: yeah.

Yeah. I would say that everyone at EFF was alive to that possibility, right? You don't start EFF or, you know, devote your life to it and, you know, every single one of us could have gotten a tech sector job that paid one to two orders of magnitude more than we were making, right? So you don't take, it's not exactly a vow of poverty, but like a vow of comfortable middle class livelihood as against the possibility of becoming a tech millionaire.

You don't do that if you think everything's going to be fine. Right? You, you have to, you have to really think that it could go horribly wrong. But also be excited about the possibility if it goes well. I don't think we were ever like starry eyed. I don't think we ever thought, you know, let Mark Zuckerberg give [00:29:00] everyone an, uh, a Facebook account and the internet will be, uh, the world will be good.

Right? We, we always understood that things could go horribly wrong. And, you know, from the beginning we, we, had both firms and state actors who were adverse to what we saw as the public interest that we fought.

Matt: this.

You, you have this sort of liberation background, right? Which I think a lot of us did. Right. And then you eventually [00:31:00] find your way and you get into the anti monopoly. When did you notice that Silicon Valley was getting consolidated? And when did you sort of flip and say, Oh, this is a monopoly issue?

Cory: So it was a process, right?

There were, there were fights that Um, we lost, you know, or that were harder to win than they should have been. And I would say the part where I just actually sat down and went, Oh my God, it's cooked, was, uh, when the worldwide web consortium, the W3C who make the standards for browsers, a nonprofit founded by Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the web, announced that it was going to standardize a way to restrict videos in browsers, digital rights management for browsers at the insistence of, uh, Netflix, Disney.

Uh, Sony, uh, Werner, and then the, um, the dominant platform. So, uh, uh, Google, Facebook, Apple.

Matt: When was this roughly? What year?

Cory: Started about 2012, and I think it concluded in 2019. 2019 is when we resigned from the W3C over this. So, [00:32:00] spoiler alert, right? Um, and so, you know, you have to understand that the ethos of the open internet Was grounded in what are called open standards and an open standard is a standard that anyone can implement without anyone else's permission.

So the W3C was groundbreaking in this regard. They said you can only join the W3C if you agree not to enforce patents against people who implement our standards. So, like, basically, if you want to have any say in what the shape of the internet is, you cannot use your patents to lock down or extract rent from infrastructure, from these standards.

Which is gigantic. I know this sounds abstract and abstruse, but like, you know, this is the way people make billions of dollars. The idea of putting in a digital rights management, uh, package as part of the, the definition of a browser, of what made a browser compliant with the standards, it meant that you had to license the DRM technology from someone.

Um, so you could [00:33:00] no longer make a browser unless you licensed DRM technology. And there's sort of one and a half of these DRMs. Uh, the big one is, is Widevine, which is owned by Google. So basically what they were saying is you can only make a browser if Google lets you. Uh, and this was, this was just catastrophic.

And not only that, but the, um, the law that I referenced before, Section 12. 1 of the DMCA, which criminalizes bypassing an access control. Well, this Digital Rights Management for Video, it's an access control. And so it means that if you want to investigate a browser implementation to fig figure out whether or not there are any Bugs in it that might expose the user to risk, right?

That might allow someone to, you know, remotely operate your camera or steal your passwords or, you know, invade your privacy and get your email or, you know, run a, a botnet off your computer, whatever, if you want to investigate that, the act of removing the encryption wrapper, so you can look inside the code and see how it works becomes a felony.

And we know that security researchers do not investigate DRM. [00:34:00] locked technologies at anywhere near the rate of technologies that you don't go to prison for talking about if you find a defect in them. You know, so, so this law, section 12 under the DMCA, it's not just a way to like decide how your customers must use your product.

It's also the right to put people in jail for reciting true facts about defects in your product. And we brought this to the W3C and we said, this is, this is. Uh, a complete betrayal. And they said like, well, our members require it of us. You know, and it's like, but it's like seven of your members. You have like 700 members, but then, you know, they're funded on a sliding scale.

And if you are a blue chip, you're paying, I can't remember how much, call it a million dollars a year. And we at ff we're paying $3,000 a year and they gotta pay the salaries. Right. And it used to be when the web started, there were hundreds of equally sized companies in the W three C. And it wasn't that none of them were interested in, uh, like embedding some pro.[00:35:00] 

You couldn't solve the collective action problem of getting a kind of conspiracy together big enough to like win a vote to do

Matt: this thing. I want to highlight that's really interesting because it, you're talking about inequality but in a different way. So we talk about inequality as kind of like, Oh, you know, you don't, you know, as a worker versus a CEO or whatever, but you're actually just saying having a lot of Uh, of equally sized, medium sized or even big companies creates a different power dynamic than having a few giants and then the rest of them small, right?

Which is just a corporate inequality thing. A hundred

Cory: firms is a rabble, uh, uh, uh, a cartel of firms is a conspiracy.

Matt: That's yeah. So it is actually, you know, it's like pretty standard if you're an antitrust lawyer. If you have three firms in an industry, it's easier to fix prices than if you have 20.

Cory: Yeah, of course.

Because you don't have to worry about defectors. Right.

David: But I think the interesting thing in there, like you brought, you brought Google up and, uh, Google in many ways was the, the, the firm that instilled [00:36:00] some sort of order on the chaos that was the internet. We're, we're going to be your curator. We're going to, we're going to index it.

We're going to get you the information you need. You know, they, they started with the very long mocked, uh, uh, uh, you know, quotation of don't be evil. And, uh, gradually that, that changed to where they were one of these big firms that were throwing their weight around on the internet. How did you, uh, uh, you perceive them becoming.

Uh, a bigger problem in this in that it wasn't just about, uh, sure, you know, in instilling order on the internet, but instilling, you know, their particular, uh, desires

Cory: Google when the markets were competitive, right when they hadn't cooked, when they hadn't been cooked, uh, Googlers who were I knew, to be honest, brokers, right, who I was personally acquainted with, who were friends of mine, who I'd known before they went to Google, maybe, or I'd known for a [00:37:00] long time at Google.

Googlers who had their users back won the argument. And one of the reasons they won the argument, it wasn't because, like, Larry and Sergey were nice, right? It was because, although, you know, they, they sometimes did things where they cared about their users, too. But it was because like you could show that if you did the bad thing, you would lose market share.

Like it came with a price. So I'm sure you two read the, um, part of the DOJ case against Google about, uh, Prabhakar Raghavan and Les, uh, uh, Les Gomes, the, the guy who ran search and the guy who ran revenue, uh, and how at a certain point they, their, their growth was tapped out because. Everyone who was ever going to search already had a Google account and that's where they were searching and everything they were ever going to search for, they were already searching for on Google.

And so there was just like nowhere for them to grow. And so the guy in charge of revenue, this guy, Prabhakar Raghavan, who was, uh, he was an engineer, but like he came out of McKinsey and his previous job had been like overseeing Yahoo [00:38:00] search and the time when it went from 90 percent to 0 percent who is now in charge of Google ad revenue, he shows up and you can read the memos that describe this.

He shows up and he says, we're going to make search worse. Because if you make search worse, then you're going to have to search more than once to get your result. So they're going to do things like, uh, like, like curtail, um, what's called query stemming, which is like if you search for trousers, it does a sort of shadow search also for pants, right?

So it's got like a little, little thesaurus to try and like get you your result faster. Um, they, they dialed down the spell checker. So if you made a typo or a spelling error, your search results would be worse. You'd have to like look up the spelling, you know, like just stuff that just made you like, just, you remember when, when news sites started breaking up their articles into like seven pages so that they can show you seven loads of ads.

Uh, you know, it was that, right? It was that, but for search, it was just like, you have to type in your search query, some variations on your search query before you find what you're looking for, which means they get seven shots at showing you ads and that makes them a lot of money, right? And so, [00:39:00] you know, I, as, as the Googlers inside who I knew to be honest brokers lost the argument in the same way that at the W3C, we were losing the argument.

Right? Uh, you know, the W3C vote on, on this DRM standard, which is called Encrypted Media Extensions, was the most contentious vote in W3C history. It's the only time the director, Tim Berners Lee, actually had to intervene to override a vote. And just carry something forward over the objections of the members because as a, as a body, the members objected to it, but when you added up the dollars, those members represented, it wasn't enough.

And so, you know, once you're like, you know, going back to monopsony, once you're dependent on one customer for 10 or 20 percent of your revenue, right? If that's, if you've got 150 employees and Google is responsible for paying 10 of their wages, you know, 15, 15 of their wages, got to fire 15 people if Google pulls out.

David: Yeah.

Cory: So.

David: And it seems to me though, that you have a particular view into this [00:40:00] because you happen to be a writer and that you were using the distribution tools of the internet to sell bundles of paper, like physical objects. And because of that, you were up against a different company, uh, Amazon's way of doing business.

And in a way that other techies might not have understood. That because they weren't trying to sell bundles of paper. Um, so do you think that informed some of the ways in which, Oh, I'm seeing things in just trying to sell my books that aren't available to some of these other people who, you know, aren't trying to do that.

Cory: Well, sort of. I would say that, you know, Amazon, there's a bit in, I think it's your book, David, in Monopolize, where you tell the story of the medical industry that starts with like pharma monopolization, that raises prices, that results in hospital monopolization to resist pricing power, but then they put the screws to the insurers and so on.

Yeah,

David: concentration creep, uh, is what they're talking about. [00:41:00] You get big on one side of the transaction, you have to get big on the other side.

Cory: That's right. And when I was a baby writer, there were 30 major trade publishers in New York and there were 300 mass market distributors in the country, right? So mass market is books sold outside of bookstores.

That's where science fiction is mostly sold or was right in, um, grocery stores, pharmacies, and so on. Today, there is one trade distributor in the country, uh, or mass market distributor rather in the country. And there are five major publishers. And I watched that happen. I watched the number of chain bookstores go from like two really big ones and three reasonably sized ones to one.

Right? I watched, uh, the number of publishers collapse. I watched the number of distributors collapse. I watched the agencies consolidate. I watched talented editors I knew get forced out. And I think there's like an underappreciation of the class alliances between people who sell things to a concentrated sector and the people who work at that concentrated sector.

Cause we, like, we have a common enemy and you're our boss. Right. Uh, and, and so, you know, I watched all of that stuff happen and I'd been a [00:42:00] bookseller and I'd been a library worker and, and I could see all this stuff going on. And part of that was Amazon. But Amazon was just like the end run, the end point of a long process.

And I think you can analogize to what happens in newspapers where you had private equity roll ups and they looted the newspapers, sold their, their physical plant, fired their local sales forces, consolidated ad sales and central offices, got rid of their foreign correspondents and so on. And then Craigslist came along and a lot of people tell this story starting with Craigslist, right?

And it's like, well, you know, newspapers figured out how to like cope with like the telegraph, the radio, the telephone, TV, cable, satellite. What was different between newspapers before then and, and the internet? Well, maybe the internet was like more disruptive, but it didn't help that they didn't have any money in the bank when it happened because it had all been sucked up for special dividends.

Matt: [00:43:00] So far, we've had kind of a grim discussion of things that are wrong, right? You're also an, I think an optimist. I'm an optimist. How do we stop in shitification? Are there examples where that's happened? Like, give us some hope.

Cory: Yeah, so I, uh, as I say, there were four sources of discipline for the tech sector.

Competition, regulation, interoperability, and an empowered workforce. And those all went away, more or less because we decided to let monopolies in the door, right? And so that gets rid of competition, which leads to regulatory capture. Regulatory capture involves the passing of these draconian IP laws. And then eventually you see the back of the tech worker sector being broken.

Quarter million layoffs in a couple of years. And that's just kind of the, the, all the tech worker power goes away. And so if you want to reverse that process, you reestablish those constraints, because I don't think it was our imagination that like Google was good and Facebook was fun to use and the web was nice and Twitter was a lot of fun, right?

It's not like we [00:44:00] missed, we were mistaken about that. Uh, It was that, um, the same people in, in many cases who were running those firms then and are running them now, in the absence of discipline, were able to go off and do bad things. So we need to restore discipline. And one of the areas where I think we have a unique opportunity to restore discipline right now is, uh, in interoperability.

So every government in the world to a first approximation, has enacted a law that looks a lot like section 12 1 of the DMCA, which criminalizes bypassing an access control. And the reason they did that is because the U. S. trade representative said, if you want tariff free access to American markets, you need a law like that.

And while other firms in other countries make some peripheral use of these kinds of digital locks in their rent seeking, uh, the major beneficiary of this is American firms. And, uh, now that tariff free access is off the table for, uh, America's trading partners, there's not really any reason to keep this law on the [00:45:00] books, right?

It's, it's, uh, an attractive nuisance at best, and at worst it's a way of, like, allowing American firms to pick the pockets of people who live in your country while you get nothing in return. You know, there's no reason why a Canadian company couldn't go into business. Writing a little software package that modifies your printer to take anyone's ink and selling that to ink refillers, right?

Like so that so as we used to say a b2b play Where the all the people who are refilling printer cartridges in like on a folding table in the back of your dry cleaner Would buy a monthly license to this software that came with a phone number. You could call for support And Canada could have the relationship to printer ink that Finland had to mobile phones, right?

We could just like take the margins of HP to zero by establishing competition. And it'd be a great piece of domestic policy. Um, you could do this for all of these firms, right? You can have third party app stores for the Xbox for. the iPhone for [00:46:00] Android, uh, along with all the support and kind of guff that goes along with that, that makes it useful for normies.

David: And Corey, you've talked about doing this in, in one sense, uh, regarding Tesla.

Cory: Yeah. So Tesla is an interesting case because we know they've got this crazy PDE ratio, right? Uh, and, um, Well, for now it's, it's starting to go away.

Matt: We're taping this on March 11th.

Cory: Right. Yeah. Right.

David: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They might be down 20 percent by the time this comes out.

Cory: That's right. But, but, you know, in part those very high P to E ratios, which you see across the board, you see them in lots of tech firms, not as high as Tesla's, but you see them in lots of tech forums. It reflects a, um, a bat on recurring revenue and growth as a source of, uh, or recurring revenue as a source of growth.

Right? And so Tesla, very famously, doesn't sell you the upgrades. It either, uh, leases them to you or rents them to you. So you either pay once for it, but then when you change, when your car changes hands, uh, they delete all the software upgrades that you paid thousands of [00:47:00] dollars for. Or you pay every month, and if you stop paying, you lose access to it.

There's no reason that, like, Mechanics in Mexico couldn't be offering service where you show up, they jailbreak your Tesla, you get all the downloadable services for one price, right? Really kick Elon Musk in the dongle. And, you know, this is like a way to resolve the terror fight that is And I started this whole conversation by saying tech is different, right?

This is one of the ways in which tech is different. That it creates new moves. Right? So we have this new move we can do that we couldn't do in previous tariff wars. And it's one that makes everything cheaper for the country that is on the other side of the tariff.

David: This is like the tech version of, uh, the prime minister of Ontario, uh, saying he's going to cut off electricity to, uh, you know, Wisconsin and Michigan.

Cory: Although I'm at pains to say that Doug, yeah, Doug Ford is not the prime minister of anything. He's the premier. Thank God Doug Ford is not the prime minister. He will never be prime [00:48:00] minister of anything. Thank God. What a terrible man he is.

David: But the point is that, um, What you're saying is that these other countries have the means to play hardball and they have the means in the

Cory: very tech infrastructure.

Yeah, but it's even better than cutting off electricity because cutting off electricity in the U. S. lowers revenues to Ontario Hydro, which is the utility, right? Right. Instead of imposing a 25 percent tariff on American goods as they come across the border, which just makes them more expensive for Canadians, it's like punching yourself in the face so hard that you hope Americans say ow, right?

We could instead drop all tariffs and formalities for all American exports into Canada, send us your poor, your tired, your iPhones yearning to breathe free, jailbreak every fucking one of them, take the largest, most profitable line items out of the, out of the, um, uh, balance sheets of the most [00:49:00] profitable companies in the United States.

The companies that are single handedly propping up the S& P 500 and transfer that, a pure transfer to Canadian consumers. And Canadian SMEs that sell and support the jailbreaking software, which they can then export to every country in the world, including gray market exports to America, which makes things cheaper for Americans too, so that Canada doesn't have to confine itself to like exporting, you know, reasonably priced pharmaceuticals to Americans, we can export the tools of technological self determination to Americans and the first country that does it gets a durable advantage.

And so if you're thinking about it in your country, you better do it. Quick, because there's going to be a race to the top.

Matt: You meant you brought up John Perry Barlow, who's a really interesting figure. He was, well, he was a member of the Grateful, wait, was he? He was like a junior lyricist for the Grateful Dead.

Right. And so he kind of talked about Fred Turner. There's the Grateful Dead, but that comes, you know, there's a whole. He's got that, like, Mary Prankster's vibe and, [00:50:00] and, then he was also a Dick Cheney's campaign manager when, when, when he ran for Congress, kind of a libertarian, but he wrote, he wrote something called the declaration of the independence of cyberspace in 1996 at Davos.

Right. Which is this essay being like, you know, we're in. We're in cyberspace and you're like meat space laws don't apply to us, you know? And I kind of, it seemed very like liberate, like I didn't read it at the time, but I read it a few years later. I was like, wow, this is kind of amazing. And then I read it and I'm like, well, that.

That doesn't, I mean. You think it aged like milk, huh? What do you think? I just wanted to ask you, because this is your Okay, well I'll tell you,

Cory: first of all, as a writer, hats off to Barlow. Uh, that is a remarkable piece of writing. It is a, it is a genuine, as you say, right, it stirs you. Um And I don't agree with everything in it.

I don't think that, uh, superior technology makes laws irrelevant. [00:51:00] Uh, would that they did, right? There are lots of things where I would like to make technology make laws irrelevant. And there are instances where, uh, technology does. to a certain extent obviate certain laws. So for example, working encryption is amazing.

Uh, you know, with the encryption systems that we have today, you can take your distraction rectangle out of your, out of your pocket, you can aim the camera at something, press the shutter button, and in less time than it takes for your finger to release off the button, That image has been captured and scrambled so thoroughly that if every hydrogen atom in the universe was a computer and it did nothing until the end of the universe, but try and guess what the key was to, to, to scramble it, you would run out of universe before you ran out of keys.

And so countries can pass laws saying it's against the law to have a secret that the Secret Service can't look at. Uh, but as a practical matter, there's no way to do that unless you're prepared to say, we are also not going to have. Uh, [00:52:00] computers that can keep secrets from the mafia or from foreign spies or from corporate espionage or from griefers or whatever.

And so this like, again, like this changes the landscape, right? Like this is something new under the sun, right? The ability to have a secret that can't be, uh, that can't be known except by the consent of the parties involved. Uh, uh, with the exception of like kidnapping someone and, and, and beating them up until they tell you.

I was going to

Matt: say that there is like a, what was that, that cart, that internet cartoon that's like. The guy's just like, give me your password or I'll break your hand. Yeah, that's XKCD. Yeah, XKCD.

Cory: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can solve this password with a, you can break this password with a 5 billion supercomputer or a 5 wrench.

Yeah. Right? And, and we actually have a name for that in, in cryptography circles. We call it rubber hose cryptanalysis, right? You tie someone to a chair and you hit them with a rubber hose until they tell you your password. And so I, you know, rubber hose cryptanalysis, uh, tells you that the rule of law is not obviated.

By cryptography, right? That, that, you know, the, it [00:53:00] doesn't matter how many, uh, bits you add to the key, it doesn't make rubber hose cryptanalysis harder to do, but it is absolutely the case that if you have access to working encryption, you have the ability to organize movements to demand the rule of law in a way Movements that, uh, came before could not do.

And so I would say as a kind of reformed Barlow Wite, uh, as a, uh, as a, like a, a Lutheran Barlow White , that I think that there is a role for the state, right? And that, and that in fact there's a, a role for the state that is not just beneficial, but desirable and even essential that the only way. You stop someone from tying you to a chair and hitting you with a rubber hose is to have an accountable democratic state.

And so as much as I think cryptography is amazing and, and, you know, one of our, one of the things we did at EFF. Actually, you know, our defining fight in 1992 was about civilian access to cryptography. And it's funny the way that that went, because it really makes your point there, Matt, about [00:54:00] governments and, and, and technology.

So, the government wanted to ban encryption, right? That was, that was, um Bill Clinton and the Clipper chip. And, uh, they said, we have this cipher, it's called DES 50, the Defense Encryption Standard, with 50 bit long keys. And we think it's so strong that no one will be ever able to break it, but the NSA can get into it if they need to.

But, like, foreign spies, criminals, whatever. So we argued with them at great length about this. And John Gilmore, who co founded EFF with Mitch Kapoor and who's the creator of Lotus123, and John Perry Barlow, he built a computer called Deep Crack that is sitting next to me as I speak to you, because John got tired of having it in his garage.

It cost a quarter of a million dollars. And in two hours, it could brute force all of DES 50. And so, we brought this into, like, Congress, and into regulators, and into, uh, you know, the DOJ, and we said, for a quarter million dollars, the mafia can break into every bank in America. And the [00:55:00] Chinese can, and the Russians can, and, you know, so can kids, right?

And, uh, they said, eh, we don't think so. Right? We don't care. Uh, and then, after various rounds of this kind of, uh, suasion, we dragged into court a grad student from UC Berkeley called Daniel Bernstein, who was publishing the source code, the program, for encrypting data in a way that was more thorough than DES 50.

And we said, Dan Bernstein has the First Amendment right to publish code because it is a form of expressive speech. And that was what won the day. And the reason you can get an update for your pacemaker or your antilock brakes without having to worry that it's been tampered with in transit is because we won that court case.

And we didn't win it by making better math. We won it by appealing to the rule of law. And so even in the earliest days, and you know, Barlow was, was a strategist on that case and you know, lauded it and it was one of his most proud accomplishments. [00:56:00] Even in those days, no one thought that the path to glory did not run through a responsible state.

Matt: Last question, and because I just read, uh, I really want to have, have you want to talk about Picks and Shovels, your latest book, because, you know, it takes place in 1986 in Silicon Valley. I just read it. I had a really good time with it. You know, it's all about the personal computer revolution, but there's also like Reaganomics is part of it.

AIDS is a big part of it. Gay liberation is, you know, feminism. It's fascinating. So why don't you just give us a quick snapshot of what it's about and, you know, then we'll Then we'll close. I'll also write to repair. There's a bunch of anti monopoly stuff in there, but it doesn't like. It's not annoying, right?

It's a fun book. I like it. It's a

Cory: cracking adventure story. Yes. A historic techno thriller. Right. So, this is a novel starring my recurring character, Martin Hench, who's a forensic accountant, who spends 40 years in Silicon Valley unwinding tech scams. And they're meant to be read in any order. This one is his [00:57:00] first adventure.

It starts with him as a prototypical MIT screw up at who's failing at a computer science because he spends too much time programming computers, uh, and he ends up getting a, uh, a, uh, a chartered accountant's ticket because, um, they've got a lab full of, uh, high end Apple two pluses and he really wants to play with those computers.

And so he becomes a, uh, an accountant and he follows his genius programmer roommate out to Silicon Valley where the weird. PC bubble is kicking off because the PC bubble wasn't just a bubble. It was a weird PC bubble. No one knew what PCs were for, what shape they were supposed to be. It was supposed to buy them.

Who's supposed to sell them. And the weird PC company at the heart of the story is a company called Fidelity Computing run by a Mormon Bishop, a Catholic priest, and an Orthodox rabbi. And that sounds like the setup for a joke. Walk into a bar. That's right. They walk into a scam because the punchline is that it's a Ponzi scheme.

It's a pyramid selling scheme, and they are preying on parishioners within their faith groups [00:58:00] and getting them to hustle each other these computers they make that are not just any computers, but they're computers designed to drain your wallet for so long as you use them and to be hard to To stop using.

So all your data is locked up in proprietary formats, but even things like the printers have been re sprocketed. So the fan full paper has to come from them because they're just slightly wider. The little holes are slightly wider and they charge you a 500 percent markup. Same with the floppy disks. And there's another company.

That is a rival firm that was founded by three women who were sales managers at Fidelity Computing. One's a nun who's left her order because she got involved in liberation theology. One is an orthodox woman who's been kicked out of her family because she came out as a lesbian. And one is a Mormon woman who's left the faith over opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment.

And these three women have started a computer company called Computing Freedom that is uh, repenting of the sins they committed, and, and luring all these people into temptation, and giving them the tools to liberate themselves. Ways to export their data, ways to use anyone's printer [00:59:00] with their paper, anyone's paper with their printer, and so on and so on.

And Marty Hench gets involved with them and quickly realizes that, um, He's working for the good guys now, but that the kind of, uh, monsters who would prey on the, uh, or, or exploit their relationship as faith leaders to steal millions of dollars from their parishioners are not above spectacular acts of violence to maintain their scams.

And so what starts as a commercial war becomes a shooting war. And as you say, Matt, it's against this backdrop of this moment where You know, people are leaving Massachusetts to go to San Francisco because, um, Boston's got anti, um, uh, non compete laws and California doesn't. So if you work for a bad startup and in Boston, you can't work in the industry for three years, but if you go out to California, you can, uh, you know, they're doing predatory pricing, they're doing all kinds of stuff that today we recognize as being, uh, you know, the, the, uh, sources of so much mischief, but then we're quite novel.

Great.

David: Cory

Cory: Doctorow, thank

David: you so [01:00:00] much for being on Organized Money. I've learned so much. Uh, uh, we really appreciate it.

Cory: Well, I learn so much every week when I listen to you guys. It's such

David: a great show. Aww.

Cory: Thank you. Thanks.

Matt: One of the things that I think is interesting about where you and I come at it is I was always, you know, interested. But adjacent to that Silicon Valley stuff, I was never in Silicon Valley. I was always kind of interested in computers. I mean, the funny thing is,

David: I, I was, I was in San Francisco for dot com one.

I was working at a television station that covered technology and I would leave. I would leave my office every day and there'd be a Ferris wheel because somebody was doing a launch party. So, you know, there was just a Ferris wheel in the middle of the street every other day because some other, you know, Pets.

com company was doing a launch party [01:01:00] and Uh, it was it was just weird and I saw that entirely crumble and it ruined the television network I was working for Um, so I was kind of at that moment I, I, I kind of seen that, I kind of saw that all fall apart.

Matt: Right, there was, I remember the site fucked company.

Yes. The website Fast Company and then Fucked Company when they were, when I remember I was, I graduated from college and the dot com bust was starting, but what, but you and I both kind of were interested in these things, but, but came up really, our politics was, was through the liberal blogosphere in the two thousands and then the financial crisis.

And I think the financial crisis is what turned both of us into. Anti monopolist. Like I was always an anti monopolist. I just didn't know what it was.

David: I would agree with that. And what I think is so interesting about Corey is he comes at it from a completely different place, but. It, it, it makes all of this internal sense and he gets around to the [01:02:00] same kinds of ideas that the anti monopolist movement has kind of in a different way through, you know, the sort of, uh, the, the, the way in which EFF and some of these other, um, uh, techno futurist kind of, uh, movements, um, really, uh, you know, at least for Corey's perspective, stressed the importance of individual liberty.

Matt: He told the story. Where he said the development of the term, uh, the ecology movement, where, you know, it was like some people who were interested in ozone, you know, the ozone layer and other people who were interested in the spotted owl never realized they had the same view, that they were part of the same thing.

Because what is it, you know, someone that's interested in sort of weird birds versus somebody that's interested in certain gases, gases in the atmosphere wouldn't intuitively say, Oh, we're. You and I are like, but then some by creating the framework of ecology, they were like, Oh, actually we have, we're part of the same [01:03:00] thing.

And I think that's what the anti monopoly framework is about. There's all sorts of people. Some of whom are interested in better ways of doing business. Some of whom are interested in liberating the computer. Some of whom are interested in, you know, uh, inequality. Or, you know, better healthcare or whatever it is, um, political corruption.

Like they all, they all are sort of realizing, Oh, we're actually all part of this thing that where we don't like concentrated financial power.

David: Yeah. And we kind of found each other, uh, wherever we came from. Um, it was great interview. Uh, I really, really appreciated having him on, uh, next week we will have even more interesting stuff for you on organized money.

Matt: We'll see how Tesla stock is doing.

David: Organized Money is a production of Rock Creek Sound, executive producers Ellen Weiss and Ari Saperstein. Our senior producer is Benjamin Frisch, who also does our sound design, all the mixing, and [01:04:00] our artwork. Todd Mensch does our video. If

Matt: you love this topic as much as we do, and want to learn more, you can follow my Substack newsletter, Big, At thebignewsletter.

com. And follow me on Twitter at Matthew Stoller.

David: And you could definitely check out my magazine, The American Prospect. That's at prospect. org. And I'm on Twitter at ddayen, D D A Y E N. We're

Matt: a new podcast, and the best way to help us get discovered is to leave a five star review wherever you get our show.

And tell your friends. I'm David Dayen. I'm Matt Stoller. See you next week.