There are a lot of similarities between the 2016 and 2024 elections, but the media ecosystem we have today is fundamentally different from the ecosystem we had in 2015-2016, during the first stage of Donald Trump’s political rise and the MAGA-morphosis of the Republican party. The Twitter and Facebook of that time are long gone, as are many of the methods of digital resistance that people employed on those platforms during the first Trump administration. The power and visibility dynamics on multiplying digital platforms, from TikTok to Truth Social, have rearranged dramatically since then, the “public sphere” is way more splintered, and our shared digital (and physical) spaces are decreasing. Moreover, the Big Tech oligarchs and private tech companies that profit from surveilling us and siloing us in algorithmically curated echo chambers have thrown their full weight behind Trump, and they will have even more power in a second Trump administration to shape our digital present and future. How are corporate, independent, and social media changing the terrain of politics today? What does digital activism look like in 2024, and can it be an effective means of resistance during a second Trump administration? TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez digs into these questions with world-renowned science fiction author, activist, and journalist Cory Doctorow. Cory Doctorow is the author of many books, including recent non-fiction titles like Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back, which he coauthored with Rebecca Giblin, and The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. His latest work of fiction, The Bezzle, was published earlier this year by Tor Books. In 2020, Doctorow was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron GranadinoPost-Production: Cameron Granadino Transcript Maximillian Alvarez:  Donald Trump is headed back to the White House after decisively defeating Kamala Harris in the 2024 general election. Like we saw in the weeks and months after Trump’s first electoral victory in 2016, a cacophonous chorus of finger-pointing pundits, politicians, and political consultants are once again frantically trying to explain how the hell this could happen and what will happen next. And commentators across the liberal and left side of the political spectrum are drawing on a lot of the same talking points from 2016 to make their case. Senator Bernie Sanders recently blasted Democrats for abandoning the working class and kowtowing to the demands of corporations and the wealthy donor class. Democratic representatives like Tom Suozzi from New York and Seth Moulton from Massachusetts say Democrats “have to stop pandering to the far left” and need to move even farther to the right, baselessly trying to pin the blame for the party’s political implosion on things like accepting trans people as people. We had these exact same debates almost verbatim in 2016 — I know, I was there participating in them. But the similarities between the 2016 and 2024 elections and the candidates and the parties involved should not obscure the fact that we are in a fundamentally, qualitatively, and experientially different reality than the one we were in eight years ago. And you can see that most clearly when you compare the mass media and social media ecosystems of 2016 and 2024. This is not the same media ecosystem we had in 2015 and 2016 during the first stage of Trump’s political rise and the MAGAmorphosis of the Republican Party. The Twitter and Facebook of that time are long gone, as are many of the methods of digital resistance that people employed on those platforms during the first Trump administration. The power and visibility dynamics on these multiplying and changing platforms, from TikTok to Truth Social, have rearranged dramatically since then. The public sphere is way more splintered, and our shared digital spaces, and even our shared physical spaces, are decreasing. Moreover, the big tech oligarchs and private tech companies that profit from fracturing our shared sense of reality and siloing us in our algorithmically curated echo chambers, that profit from surveilling us and scraping our data and from filling our feeds with misinformation and AI-generated slop, those oligarchs threw their full weight behind Trump. And they will have even more power in a second Trump administration to shape our digital present and future. If we are going to properly diagnose how we got here and how we must proceed, we need to have a clear-eyed understanding of the terrain that we’re actually on today. And too many people right now don’t seem to understand that we’re on very different digital terrain from the one we were on in 2016. So to help us understand the terrain that we’re actually on in the year of our Lord 2024 and how we can navigate it in this perilous moment, I’m honored to be joined once again by the one and only Cory Doctorow. Cory is a science fiction author, activist, and journalist. He’s the author of many books, including recent titles like Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back, which he co-authored with Rebecca Giblin, and the The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, and his most recent title, which has just been published, is called The Bezzle, which everyone should go and read because it is incredibly relevant for our times. And as always with Cory, it is beautifully written. Cory, thank you so much for joining us on The Real News Network today. I really appreciate it. Cory Doctorow:  Thank you, Max. It’s a pleasure to be on. Maximillian Alvarez:  Just wish we were connecting once again under better circumstances, but here we are and here we go. Cory Doctorow:  Yeah. When life gives you scars, you make sarsaparilla. Maximillian Alvarez:  Exactly. So let’s dive right in because you have been an invaluable voice for many years, helping folks navigate the digital wilds as they’ve been changing all around us. And I wanted to pick up from where I left off in that intro there and ask if you could tell us a little bit, from your vantage point, how we can compare the media ecosystems that we were swimming in eight years ago and the media ecosystem that we’re in now. What are some of the big key differences that you want to emphasize for folks so that we don’t just run into the fray as if this is just 2016 all over again? Cory Doctorow:  Well, I think the good news is that people are a lot more focused on the real problem with digital monopolists, which is the monopoly. The fact that tech platforms have us locked in is the right way to consider what we should do next. People often say, well, you should just leave Facebook or you should just leave Twitter. It’s morally repugnant to stay there, and so on. And what they ignore is why people are staying. To the extent that anyone historically considered why people stayed on platforms that they professed not to enjoy, you had people on the right who said, oh, well, this is just revealed preferences, which is right-wing asshole economist speak for you actually love having your privacy invaded, we can tell, because you didn’t leave Facebook. It’s a similar argument to you like your husband hitting you because you didn’t leave your husband. It’s an argument that only works if you assume that power doesn’t exist. But more progressives were captured by another idea that is, in its own way, as wrong, which is the idea that tech platforms had somehow built a mind control ray and that the reason that grampy is a QAnon is that Mark Zuckerberg did what Rasputin and MKUltra and Mesmer and the pickup artist all turned out to be wrong about: He finally built a mind control ray. And he built it to sell your nephew a fidget spinner, but then Rupert Murdoch or Robert Mercer stole it and turned your relatives into right-wing jerks. And this is something that really helps Mark Zuckerberg when one of his salesmen makes a sales call to an advertiser and the advertiser says, why should I pay a 40% premium to advertise on Facebook? He’ll say, well, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but our critics will tell you we’ve built a mind control ray. Which is a great reason to give Mark Zuckerberg extra money if you’re an advertiser. It’s far more technically correct and politically astute to note that what Mark Zuckerberg has done is locked us in with our love of each other. That if you’re on Facebook and a couple hundred of your friends are on Facebook, it’s hard to leave, not because you don’t love your friends and not because you don’t hate Mark Zuckerberg, but because all of you are there for different reasons that are hard to get unstuck from. If you’re there because that’s where the people who have the same rare disease as you are meeting, and your best friend is there because they emigrated from another country and that’s where all the people back home are, and there’s someone else who’s there because that’s where their customers are, and someone else who’s there because that’s where they organize the carpool for their kids’ little league game, you don’t have to just convince those people to leave; you have to convince all those other people to leave as well, and it just becomes exponentially hard. Now, this is a problem we’ve faced before. When Facebook first opened up to the general public, Mark Zuckerberg had quite a compelling pitch. He said, look, I know that everyone who wants to use social media already has an account on a service called MySpace, but has it occurred to you that MySpace is owned by an evil, crapulent, senescent billionaire named Rupert Murdoch, and he’s spying on you with every hour that God sends? If you come to Facebook, I will never spy on you. That was the 2006 Facebook privacy promise. And rather than make you choose between privacy and your friends, Mark Zuckerberg, or his engineers, built a bot. And you gave that bot your login and password for Myspace, and several times a day, it would go to Myspace, grab all the messages that were waiting for you there, put them in your Facebook inbox, and you could reply to them there, and it would push them back out to Myspace. You could have the best of both worlds. What Mark Zuckerberg and the other big tech platforms have done in the years since is made that kind of interoperability, that adversarial interoperability, that guerrilla warfare, they’ve made it illegal. Every pirate wants to be an admiral — And when they did it, it wasn’t piracy. When you do it, it is. And so if you tried to do that to Facebook today, they would say you violated Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, that you’d violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, you were a tortious interferer with their contracts, that if you used some ex-Facebook employees, that they were violating their non-competes or their non-disclosures, that they were accessing trade secrets, all this stuff we call IP law. And so what that’s done is it’s given these platforms a monopoly over our social graph, one that is wholly artificial and a creature of law, that it’s not about the technology. It’s not hard to build another scraper to do unto Facebook what Facebook did unto Myspace, it’s just illegal. And I think more people now understand that. That’s the biggest difference between now and 2016 is in 2016, you had all these prodigal tech bros, as Maria Farrell calls them, tearing their hair out and beating their chests and saying, I was an evil wizard who hacked your dopamine loops for the Kremlin. Now I’m a good wizard, and you should pay me a lot to come speak at your conference about how I’m going to unhack your dopamine loops for you. And instead, what we’re getting now is things like the European Union mandating interoperability for these platforms, and people really looking at what’s stopping them from going to obviously better platforms like Mastodon or Bluesky where they’re finally moving away from this my friends are too lazy to change platforms, and just understanding my friends are glued to the platform by lock-in and switching costs and that lock-in and those switching costs are legal, not technical, and to really start to demand those changes. Maximillian Alvarez:  Let me ask you about that last point, the social flow of people to the platforms where their friends are. Because I want to ask how real this premise is that we are still living on the same physical plane, like the United States as a country hasn’t physically expanded in the last eight years, but the reality planes upon which we think we’re living in have seemingly fractured. I guess that’s my hypothesis. That’s something that was really sitting with me a couple months ago when I was sitting in my grandfather’s living room as he’s dying from Alzheimer’s, looking at a TV that only plays two channels: Fox News and OAM. And seeing the world from his screen, the world that outside of his window, it was so different from the world that people who watch The Real News will see, or people who watch different news channels or follow different social media platforms will see. And it feels like more than just a perception, there is a reality fracture and a social fracture that these tech platforms are catalyzing here. Would you say that that is a fair assessment? Am I being Chicken Little about this? Cory Doctorow:  Well, I think that you’re overweighting the role of the social platforms and underweighting the role of monopoly here. That when we talk about Fox News particularly, Fox News, if you want to look at the material conditions, not the ideological conditions, but the material conditions that produce Fox News, if you watch Fox News for any length of time, you’ll see that they have no advertisers to speak of. It’s the most bottom-feeding nonsense you’ve ever seen. It’s like the Taboola ads at the bottom of a shitty blog: This person had terrible teeth implants, click here to find out more. Lots of people have made fun of this. I think John Oliver did a whole thing about the catheter ads on — I almost said Facebook there — On Fox News. So how is it that Fox News manages to survive, and even have the capital to pay Dominion Voting Systems, an $800 million libel settlement, and still turn on the lights the next day? Is Rupert Murdoch supporting it out of his pocket as an ideological project? No. What’s actually happened with Fox News is that everyone has only one cable operator. The cable operators divided up America like the pope dividing up the so-called New World. And so when you buy cable, you get the basic package, and the basic package includes Fox News. And it includes Fox News because there is a small rump of extremely vocal angry people who, if Fox News were moved out of the basic tier and into the premium tier, would go nuts, and maybe even show up with an assault rifle at the cable company. And that means that every time you pay your cable bill, Fox News gets money whether or not you turn on Fox News — But not just some money. They get about six times more money than any other show on your dial, any other channel on your dial. So what you have is monopoly begetting monopoly, where you have this monopolistic control, these effectively unregulated telecoms giants. And then an epiphenomenon downstream of them is that Fox News can have an unviable business that is subsidized by this perverse monopoly effect. One of the things our friends on the right like to talk about is market distortion. And I think that on the left, we turn up our nose at this kind of idea of a pristine market that has market forces that act. But there are some market forces. Like if you could choose whether or not you are going to pay for Fox News, Fox News would go broke. If there was a tick box on your cable bill that said save $6 and lose Fox News, everyone would tick that box. Fox News would be broke in a month. You see this all over the economy where you have monopolies that produce these weird effects that we often reach to ideological accounts for. And it’s true that the people involved are greedy, but they’re not greedier now than they were 10 years ago. They’re the same sociopaths they ever were 10, 15, 20, 30 years ago. What’s changed are the conditions under which that greed manifests. For example, we’re like, why are hospitals so terrible now? Why is the medical industry in such a pickle now? And we have all these ideological accounts of it, but what actually happened was we took the breaks off pharma monopolization. Pharma companies monopolized, they started to screw hospitals. So hospitals formed regional monopolies to get buyer power against pharma companies, and then started screwing the insurance companies. So the insurance companies monopolized so that they could push back against the hospitals. And what you end up with is a medical sector where everything: pharmacy, benefit managers, med tech, pharma, all of the incidental pieces are sewn up with these big monopolies. And the only thing loose and disorganized at either end are doctors and nurses and other healthcare workers and patients. And so you have medical workers getting paid the worst wages they’ve ever seen under the worst conditions, and you have patients paying the most they’ve ever seen and getting the worst care. And everyone in the middle has got the things sewn up and we go like, oh, it’s greed. It’s something that’s changed. It’s private equity. What it is is taking away the constraint that competition imposes on firms. And when you take away that constraint, you not only get monopolies, but you get regulatory capture. So our regulators have always been far from perfect in America, but there was a time when, for example, the Sackler family couldn’t have killed 800,000 Americans with opioids and then kept the money. And the thing that changed was consolidation in pharma that made it easier to capture regulators. The same thing happened with the FCC and the telecoms companies, which is how you get this nakedly corrupt arrangement. And so this not only creates the circumstances in which people’s lives become materially worse, it also makes them vulnerable to certain ideological accounts of what’s going on. Because if you’re Trump or one of these other so-called right-wing populists — I understand enough history to know that right-wing populism is like water that’s not wet. It’s not really populism. It’s more of a kind of conspiratorialism — But when you have these people who say elites are screwing you — Of course they are. And when they say the government is letting them get away with it — Of course they are. Now, the Biden administration had aspects of the agencies that were quite good on holding back corporate corruption: the FTC, the DOJ, even the Department of Transport got a lot better after, basically, they sidelined Mayor Pete and put Lina Khan’s chief of staff in charge of that department with him as just a figurehead. But these are long-run practices. And people, if you lost someone to the FDA’s malfeasance and curbing in opioids and then they tell you, oh, there’s someone new at the FDA, but all they manage to do is negotiate cheaper drug prices that don’t kick in until 2026, it’s easy to believe RFK Jr. when he says, hey, there’s medicines on the market that are there because pharma companies don’t care whether you live or die. And the government agencies that are supposed to keep them honest are in their pockets, that sounds very plausible. And so I think that we have an ideological dimension to what happens to people and the realities they inhabit, but that ideological dimension has this material root of monopoly capitalism that, no matter how you feel about capitalism, is very different from competitive capitalism in terms of the impact that it has on workers’ lives and people’s material conditions. We wouldn’t have had packaged good bosses and grocery store bosses doing investor calls where they boasted about how people expected inflation, and so they were able to do above inflation price rises and keep them there even after supply chain shock stopped. If there had been hundreds of SMEs in each of those sectors who were willing to eat each other’s lunch, or sell you a cheaper lunch, and move in and sell those same goods at a lower price, we wouldn’t have had the rage about inflation to the same degree. So I don’t think capitalism is going to solve our problems, but I also don’t think our comrades do a better job of fighting capitalism when they’re being immiserated by monopolies. And I think that if we can make capitalists fight each other, it gives us and our comrades a better chance of fighting them. Maximillian Alvarez:  I want to end this conversation by looking ahead at the incoming Trump administration and the role that big tech is playing both in buoying his second run for president and what they hope to get out of his next administration. So that’s where we’ll end up. But I want to hover on this point for a second because I feel like we’re talking about it without saying it, but it is, after all, a phrase that you coined, or a term you coined: the enshittification of things. I want to bring that in here first to introduce folks watching to the term, and then see if we can zoom out and talk about the social enshittification of this society under the capitalist regime that you’re talking about and the chaotic ideological effects that that prompts in people as they feel shit just collectively getting worse, whether it be the quality of service in the consumer range, whether it be the monopolization of things like their internet provider. All these sorts of anecdotal things that people tell me are signals that life is getting worse for working people. It feels like your concept of enshittification can really help us understand that. So could you just say a little bit about where that term came from and what you were applying it to when you first came up with it? Cory Doctorow:  Sure. I’ve been talking about the salience and urgency of good digital policy for like 25 years, and I work with a nonprofit called the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I’ve got their sign there. It’s hard to do this with a mirror finger. There we are. EFF there. And at the start of this, the fight was to convince people that it was important at all. There was this dismissal of digital policy questions as being like the narcissistic self-regard of sad nerds who think that the place where they argue about Star Trek matters. And then as it became more obvious that digital technology had a really critical role to play in justice struggles. And I think I owe my own sense that this would be important to an adolescence and young adulthood spent doing things like riding a bicycle around the streets of Toronto with a bucket of wheatpaste and a bunch of handbills and sticking them up on telephone poles to get people out to anti-war demonstrations, and just understanding that if your adversary has the internet and you’ve got a bicycle and some wheatpaste, you’re going to lose. And so we needed to, as I say, seize the means of computation. We needed to make sure that this would be a system of liberation and solidarity and not of control and surveillance. As people started to wake up to the importance of this, the tone changed and people started to say, oh, the reason the internet is terrible is that digital rights activists didn’t understand how bad it could get, and they were asleep at the switch. That they thought that all we had to do was give everyone the internet and everything would automatically be fine. And that techno-utopianism may have been present among some people, but not among the people involved in the struggles I was in. No one I know thought that all you had to do was give everyone technology and everything would be fine. We were all very alive to the ways that technology could go horribly wrong. That’s why we devoted our lives to it. And a few years ago, as I say, we started to really recognize the gravitas of this and start to have a serious discussion about it that wasn’t about the metaphysics of mind control and was about the material conditions of how digital networks worked, how the economics of them worked. We got past these, started anyways, to get past these foolish ideas like if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product, like respect for your human rights as a customer loyalty program, and if only you give these callow assholes some money, they’ll suddenly start treating you well, which is a thing that everyone who owns a John Deere tractor and can’t fix it for themselves already understood was not the case. That you don’t get a free ad-supported John Deere tractor. You give those motherfuckers $600,000 and then they still screw you. So as we started to get more serious about it, we started to get into the more esoteric technical parts of this discussion, and I’m just always coming up with metaphors and words and different ways of describing it. And one day I used the word “enshittification” on social media to talk about, and everyone was like, hey, I like that word. It’s fun to swear. And so I started to use it to label this complicated hairball of factors that produce it: The fact that we can see platforms have this characteristic life cycle where they’re good to their end users, then they make things worse for their end users to be good to their business customers, then they’re worse to those business customers. They take all the value for themselves, and then they turn into a pile of shit that we somehow can’t seem to leave. Although, by all accounts, and historically, that would’ve been when they died. And then I started talking about what’s going on inside, the way that digital technology is uniquely well suited to playing the shell game where that value is moved around very quickly. Uber, for example, practices this form of wage theft called algorithmic wage discrimination. It’s a term from Veena Dubal, the lawyer and activist. And algorithmic wage discrimination is that when you get a job as an Uber driver, your labor is priced at a different rate based on whether you’ve recently been picky. So if you’ve turned down jobs recently, you get a higher wage, but if you’ve accepted jobs, you get a lower wage. And the idea here is for Uber to gradually ease you, but with these higher wages, into jettisoning whatever else you do in your life that allows you to be picky, and then you have to accept the lower wage, and it’s a very effective tactic. It’s not effective because it bypasses people’s critical faculties. It’s effective because computers are good at being attentive to small differences over long time scales. And humans are trying to live their lives, right? They’re trying to figure out how to squeeze a bathroom break into an 18-hour workday. And so you get distracted, you aren’t perfectly vigilant, the computer is. And that’s not a new insight. And if the black-hearted coal bosses in a Tennessee Ernie Ford song could have screwed their workers’ wages on every shovelful of coal based on how willing or unwilling they’d been that day to work, they absolutely would’ve, and I’m sure they thought of it. They just gave up because you couldn’t fill a boiler room with enough guys in green eye shades to adjust the pay packet a million times a day. And so these are people who are as mediocre and awful and thuggish as any 18th century robber baron. They just have faster hands because the computer is giving them the speed. And if you’ve ever seen Penn and Teller do the cup and balls really slowly with transparent cups, it’s not a complicated trick. It’s just that they do it fast. If you do it fast and smooth, simple tricks can be very effective. And that’s what tech’s got going on. So I described that internal mechanism, and then I addressed myself to why it’s happening now, because these guys could have done it at any time in the last 20 years. They had computers that gave them fast hands 20 years ago. Why did they start doing it now? Why did Facebook used to show you a feed full of stuff that you’d asked to see, and now that’s dwindled to a homeopathic residue that’s left a void they can fill with crap someone will pay to show you, like boosted content and ads? And the reason they’re doing it now is they don’t face consequences. Because they used to be disciplined by competition, and the competition used to also make it possible for regulators to do their jobs, so they were disciplined by regulation. And because regulators were doing their job, the regulators couldn’t be used as proxy mercenaries by the dominant firms to attack smaller ones with IP law that shut down scrapers and alternative clients and all the stuff that stopped the lock-in: third-party ink cartridges, independent mechanics’ diagnostic tools for cars, all the things that could bust out of these technical rent extraction systems. So we lost that. We saw IP metastasize and get used to attack new market entrants, cooperatives, tinkerers, and, of course, the users that they served. And then finally, tech workers were able to hold the line for quite some time because they were very scarce and they didn’t like breaking the things that they busted their humps to make. Their bosses motivated them by saying, hey, you’re a hero of a digital transformation. Come sleep under your desk. I’m going to pamper you with a whimsical campus full of free kombucha and massages and a surgeon who will freeze your eggs so you can work through your fertile years in order to achieve our mission. And then your boss turns around and says, by the way, that thing that you missed your mother’s funeral to build, I need you to stick 100 times more ads in it. And you’re like, fuck you. The guy across the street will give me a job in a heartbeat. You can’t make me, and no one will be able to do this job except me. And so tech workers held the line, but they didn’t do that through solidarity. They did it through professional pride, but not through a union. And because they didn’t have a union, because they thought that their power was durable through scarcity, as soon as scarcity went away, they lost their power. So when tech fired 260,000 workers in the US in 2023 and another 100,000 in the first two quarters of 2024, tech workers found themselves no longer able to resist their bosses’ imprecations. And so, all of this implies a remedy: Restore competition, figure out how to reregulate these firms once they’re competitive and they’re a rabble that doesn’t have the unity of purpose that allows them to capture their regulators; Restore interoperability. Let tinkerers unilaterally alter how services work so that if the boss changes it in a way that you don’t like, you can change it back; And then unionize tech workers, which they’re going to have to do because, as you said, every tech boss in the sector lined up to kiss Trump’s ass last week. And we know how those guys treat their workers when they don’t fear them, because we see how they treat the workers in the warehouses and the workers who drive the delivery vans. These are people who don’t even get to pee when they want to. If you’re a tech worker who’s been showing up for your job at Amazon every day with a green mohawk and a black T-shirt that says something your boss doesn’t understand and facial piercings and thinking that you could just get to pee whenever your bladder is full, you just have to look at those warehouse workers to see what Andy Jassy and Jeff Bezos do when they’re not afraid of you anymore. Tim Cook got the job to succeed Steve Jobs because he figured out how to offshore Apple production to China. And the way that he did that was by getting Foxconn to operate factories in a way that was so brutal they had to install suicide nets because workers were jumping to their death after a day on the line making iPhones. That’s how Tim Cook will treat you if he’s not afraid of you. And so tech workers need a union. They are workers, even if they’ve been historically well compensated. And I think that those four forces: competition, regulation, interoperability, and worker power are our only way out of this with tech. Maximillian Alvarez:  I really appreciate you breaking that all down, and I could talk to you about this for hours, but I know we’ve got to let you go in a couple minutes, so we’re going to have to have you back on to really unpack this even more. Cory Doctorow:  Happy to do that. Maximillian Alvarez:  But what I think is so profound and important and telling about the concept of enshittification when you apply it to the same kind of historical arc of the past two to three decades, under which working people were also working longer, working harder, being more productive while their wages were stagnant, while all that new wealth was getting sucked up to the 1%, while corporate consolidation was happening in industries across the board. All of this has been compounding over the past couple decades, and I hear it in the stories of the working people I talk to. But it comes out as a woven together mix of grievances where people are picking things that have just started sucking more, whether it’s like, hey, Twitter used to be good, Musk bought it, now, it fucking sucks. Hey, the retail stores that I used to go to used to be properly staffed and have stuff shelved the right way, now I go in and it looks like bedlam, and that’s by design. Cory Doctorow:  Or it’s all locked up. Maximillian Alvarez:  Yeah, or it’s all locked up, and these companies are still making record profits. So it’s like the enshittification, if I may use it even more broadly, of the conditions under which working people are living their lives have really been catalyzing this sort of response, this malaise, this anger, this righteous anger that can be capitalized on and seized by someone like Trump and turned into a more fascistic desire for retribution and for return to a time when things didn’t seem as bad. You guys watching this can at least see how vital this kind of diagnosis is to understanding the complicated political and emotional plane that we’re on right now and how Trump has managed to capitalize on that. But as I said, we’re going to return to that when we can bring Cory back on with more time. But with the few minutes I’ve got you, Cory, I wanted to look ahead to the next four years and talk about the monstrous ball of big tech oligarchs that are really excited about a second Trump term. What role did you see big tech playing in this election, and what do you think we have to expect from the coming four years in a second Trump administration? Cory Doctorow:  Well, I think that we saw over the last four years some unprecedented antitrust action on tech firms. And so some of that has come from the public sector. So you had the DOJ winning a landmark case against Google that could still, even at this point, lead to Google being broken up. We’re entering the remedy phase now with Google, but also private cases against Google that I expect to go forward. Epic won a case against Google. There’s another one coming on ads. So we’ve had this pretty unprecedented antitrust action. Stuff that looks a little like the early days of the cases against Standard Oil at the turn of the 20th century, which were brought forward because of mass political discontent. The Sherman Act that ultimately broke up Standard Oil was passed in 1890, but Standard Oil didn’t get broken up until 1912. It wasn’t that John Sherman broke up Standard Oil, Ida Tarbell did. She was a political activist. She was the first woman in America to get a science degree. Her father was a Pennsylvania oil man who’d been ruined by John D. Rockefeller. She became an investigative journalist. Colliers paid her to write a long-running serialized history of the Standard Oil company with the very catchy title The History of the Standard Oil Company Volumes 1 and 2. It was so popular that it set the world on fire, and an otherwise reluctant Congress and administration took on Standard Oil and smashed the fortune of the richest and most powerful man in the world. So I think that we will continue to see lots of private action against it, and also state action. Ironically, GOP state attorney generals love antitrust law against giant companies from big coastal cities because if you’re committed to not raising taxes but you don’t want to convert your state highways into gravel roads, you got to get the money from somewhere, and you can only screw people with regressive sales taxes to a certain extent before that taps out. And so, one of the things you can do is get hundreds of million dollars out of “woke” coastal companies and stick it in the state coffers. I think that’s why we saw Ken Paxton, the lavishly corrupt attorney general from Texas, bringing so many antitrust cases against big tech. Partly it’s motivated by grievance, but also this very practical consideration. I think we’re going to see big tech hoping to buy off the Trump administration, and I think that the Trump administration is probably going to do a fair bit of antitrust. And they will do antitrust against companies that are guilty, because all the companies are guilty. Every merger that is being teed up for the next four years violates the plain language of the Clayton Act and the Sherman Act, and the pricing strategies violate Robinson-Patman. They’re all facially illegal. And so any company that he chooses to, he can bring an existentially threatening legal case against, and it will be a perfectly justifiable case. But he will only choose to do this to companies that challenge his hegemony. And so companies that are disloyal to him will face the full might of the US government. And there is a trap for progressives and leftists here, which is to assume that any company that Trump goes after must be a good company because Trump is going after them. This enemy of my enemy shit is going to destroy us if we fall into it. This is like when libs were like, Robert Mueller is great. I love the FBI. They’re a force for progressive power. They would never tell Martin Luther King to commit suicide again. That must’ve been a rogue agent. COINTELPRO is in their rearview mirror, it’s like a witch burning or something. It’s not something they would ever do today. So do not let yourself get suckered into thinking that the terrible criminal enterprises that Trump goes after are good merely because Trump is going after them. We have to understand that he’s going after bad companies, but not because they’re bad. He’s going after bad companies because they’re not sucking up to him and because he wants to make examples out of them. I think, globally, we’ll see a lot more happening. So the European Union has basically said, we don’t give a shit about American big tech. We don’t care if they live or die. Nick Clegg, who is the sellout deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom under the Tory coalition government of what’s his name, David Cameron. He’s now on $4 million a year as Facebook’s head of Policy and outreach in Europe, going around to his former colleagues in European governments and saying, we are going to keep Europe safe from Chinese Communist Party cyberspace, whatever that means. No one believes him. They don’t give a damn about American big tech and they’re happy to see it die. And so they’re making some pretty muscular regulations. Some of it very good, some of it not great. Again, don’t fall into the trap of thinking just because they’re going after terrible companies that they’re doing good things either. You can go after terrible companies in bad ways. Like if we say, oh, well, terrible companies have to spy on everything their users do and censor things that might be harassment, we are also saying terrible companies have to spy on everything their users do and censor anything that they don’t like. And so if you want to be able to stand up a little social media server, you and 50 of your friends or your affinity group or people who have the same rare disease as you don’t want Mark Zuckerberg spying on you when you talk about it, you don’t want a rule that says you have to spy on everyone and you’re responsible if one person insults someone else enough that they say it’s libel or harassment or whatever. That’s a terrible rule. We want to make them smaller and weaker, not more important. And so if we force them to defend their users, we have to make them more important and stronger. They still will suck at it, they’ll just be stronger and harder to fight. So the European Union is going to go after these companies. And what’s going to be really interesting about this is that these multinational companies commit the same crimes everywhere. It’s not like they have a different set of business logic in South Korea than they do in Belgium. And so when the EU won a case against Apple, the South Korean government basically translated it into Korean and successfully brought it against Apple in South Korea. And then the Japanese government translated it into Japanese and did it again. So in the same way that you have these red state attorneys general going like, yeah, I’ll happily take 300 million bucks out of Google for breaking the law, you might get Ghana saying, yeah, we’ll also take $300 million out of Google for breaking the law. And we already have the exhibits, the arguments, the discovery. It’s all sitting there in a docket in the European Commission. And so I think we might get a global set of antitrust enforcement. That will be magnified by whatever kind of trade war and xenophobic nonsense Trump gets up to. Europeans more than ever, and everyone else in the world more than ever, are going to be like, under no circumstances should our national security or our national thriving be dependent on an American big tech firm that answers to Donald Trump. And they’re not going to want Chinese tech firms either. Not because Chinese tech firms are necessarily worse, although some of them are, but because fool me once, shame on me. If you’ve already seen what happens when you let a foreign great power control your national digital infrastructure, you’d be very stupid to let a different foreign great power control your national digital infrastructure. So I think we have the space opening for open source, free software, publicly maintained, federated, decentralized technologies that have an enormous amount of global public subsidy, but that are able to be implemented on servers that are your own so that you aren’t vulnerable to the whims of distant corporations or the governments they answer to. And you can have some national self-determination on this. So in some ways, we’re entering a period where there’s a lot of tactics available to us. It doesn’t mean we’ll automatically win, but there is no reason to give up here. There’s all the reason in the world to think that other countries can pick up some of the slack. And Americans can use that code. There’s nothing that says that you won’t be able to pick up and run the software that’s being maintained by the European Union or by a coalition of nations from the Global South, or both together, and run it here as an alternative to Facebook, Twitter, and the other giant tech platforms. Maximillian Alvarez:  So that is the great Cory Doctorow. You guys need to follow Cory on every platform he’s on. You need to read everything that Cory has written. I implore you. Cory Doctorow:  Thank you. Maximillian Alvarez:  You will not have a bad experience. Every book is incredible and worth reading. Cory, I want to thank you so much for giving us so much of your time today. Cory Doctorow:  I appreciate that, Max. Thank you. Maximillian Alvarez:  I appreciate you, man. Cory Doctorow:  I appreciate it. Maximillian Alvarez:  And I guess, final 30 seconds. To the digital rank-and-file folks out there watching this wondering where the fight is and what they can do to help, any closing words to folks out there watching? Cory Doctorow:  Yeah. Tons of unions suck and union bosses are often terrible people. And that means that you have to take over your goddamn union and replace them like we did with the UAW. The worst union can be reformed and made accountable to its workers. An atomized group of workers who have no union have no opportunity to reform it and have a solidaristic impact on their employer. So if your union sucks, fix your goddamn union. We’ve got four years till the general strike, and it’s going to happen in the middle of the next election, and this is your time to get cracking.