The Majority Report with Sam Seder - 3591 - Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse w/ Cory Doctorow

Episode Date: September 29, 2025

It's Fun Day Monday on the Majority Report On today's show: Hundreds of masked federal agents from unknown departments have been deployed to downtown Chicago to stand around. The Feds in Chicago fail miserably at chasing down a food delivery person in a hilarious display of poor physical health. A CBP agent is recorded via bodycam describing immigrants as "literal street rats" that will "eat our children". Cory Doctorow, author of Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to do About it joins the show to discuss his book. Enshittification comes out next week, pre order here. For an audiobook version go here. Also check out Cory's great work at the EFA-EFF. In the Fun Half: Chuck Schumer unveils a two-pronged attack to resist Trump. First, we'll hope that GOP members will come to their senses and work with Dems. Secondly....social media??? Stephen Miller details the "all government" effort to dismantle alleged organized, leftist violence as Trump signs memorandum. ICE Agents swarm a small number of demonstrators in front of their facility in Illinois and pepper spray, beat and detain the peaceful protestors. Former Chicago Bears star Charles 'Peanut' Tillman who has been working as an FBI agent for the last 8 years has quit the agency over Trump's immigration policy. Adam Mockler from Meidas Touch torches Scott Jennings about Trump's role in getting the U.S. to this volatile place. Michigan gubernatorial candidate and current Lt. Governor Garlin Gilchrist tells folks at Arab Con in Dearborn, MI that Israel is committing a genocide and will not take a cent from AIPAC All that and more Checkout our very own Matt Lech tonight on the Socialist Cash Takes Out Capitalist Trash! stream. Become a member at JoinTheMajorityReport.com: https://fans.fm/majority/join Follow us on TikTok here: https://www.tiktok.com/@majorityreportfm Check us out on Twitch here: https://www.twitch.tv/themajorityreport Find our Rumble stream here: https://rumble.com/user/majorityreport Check out our alt YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/majorityreportlive Gift a Majority Report subscription here: https://fans.fm/majority/gift Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! https://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: https://majority.fm/app Go to https://JustCoffee.coop and use coupon code majority to get 10% off your purchase Check out today's sponsors: PROLON: ProlonLife.com/majority Get 15% off sitewide plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe to their 5-Day Nutrition Program CURRENT AFFAIRS: Use code MAJORITYREPORT for 30% for a year on any @CurrentAffairsMag subscription of your choice. Go to https://currentaffairs.org/subscribe and enter the code MAJORITYREPORT at checkout. The offer expires October 31st. SMALLS: For a limited time only, get 60% off your first order PLUS shipping when you head to Smalls.com and use code MAJORITY SUNSET LAKE: Head over to https://SunsetLakeCBD.com and use the code FlowerPower25 to save 40% on all their sun-grown flower, prerolls, and even cartridges. This sale ends September 28th at 11:59 PM Eastern. See their site for terms and conditions. Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattLech Check out Matt’s show, Left Reckoning, on YouTube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Check out Matt Binder’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon’s show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Check out Ava Raiza’s music here! https://avaraiza.bandcamp.com/

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And now time for this show. Report with Sam Cedar. It is Monday. September 29, 2025. My name is Sam Cedar. This is the five-time award-winning majority report. We are broadcasting live steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, USA. On the program today, Corey Doctoro.

author of insidification why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it. Also on the program, Trump meets with Schumer as the shutdown looms. Meanwhile, Supreme Court gives Trump to unilaterally rescind congressional appropriations. This via foreign aid. But why even sign a budget if he can just rescind it? Trump to meet Netanyahu as Trump organization inks a new $1 billion deal in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. That's a coincidence. Cash Patel corrects Trump says the FBI agents were called to the capital.

for crowd control after the riots started. Trump sends 200 National Guard to Portland, Oregon. No one knows why. I mean, they know why. This as ICE, a march in Chicago. Trump to speak at the Hegsith convened military loyalty oath meeting tomorrow. Senator Thune calls for U.S. farmers to be bailed out as the administration decides to bail out Argentina. Trumps ask Scotis for birthright citizenship ban.

And Eric Adams drops out of the New York mayoral race. Unclear which real estate developer he'll end up being hired by. Finally, at least four killed in an attack on a Mormon church in Michigan by a vet who thought Mormons to be the Antichrist. All this and more on today's Majority Report. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks so much for joining us. Fun Day, Monday. Fund day, Monday.

That's what we call it here. It's nice to have these legacy nicknames for days. that remind us of what was back in the day. A lot of news obviously over the weekend this thing in Michigan again horrific. I mean

it seems like a weekly event where we have someone with weapons in this instance a guy drove his truck into a Mormon church shot up people you will not hear much of it because it does

not fit into the rubric of of what the administration wants to push right now. We'll talk about this later at the beginning of the weekend. I guess it was Friday. Stephen Miller was out there basically talking, you know, this is, what is it, step two of the Reichstag fire plan. And we're going to see more of this. It's just going to get worse.

There is no returning to an era where we don't have. have fascism before it gets worse? I mean, just anticipate, like, when we see how bad things are right now, the economy is not going to improve in the short term at the very least. And I anticipate more of these authoritarian actions by the administration as a way to combat that and combat dissent. And Ken Clippenstein, we'll get to it later, but had great reporting on this. They are going to be monitoring.

It seems to be the case. anti-capitalist, anti-Trump administration dissent, and using that as a way to justify surveilling them and cracking down. And so it's not going to just be immigrants as some people anticipated, as if that wasn't bad enough. Well, I mean, there's an old poem about this, right? First they came for. I mean, listen, and this is going to be the, they're claiming they're sending 200 troops to Portland to fight against riots or out of control protesters. And, of course, what's going to happen is the injection of these people is going to cause protests, and then that's going to become the rationale.

I'm in no way suggesting don't protest, but what I am suggesting is you watch this dynamic. and um because the more it is anticipated the less of uh effective it is that's it in the meantime here are uh in uh chicago they have um injecting and we don't know who these people are these guys could be you know some combination of FBI incidentally the lowest amount of drug apprehensions in the like in years by the FBI over the past a couple of months because they've all been pulled off of actual police work and now are in charge of marching through cities same with the traffic human trafficking stuff of course and so these are federal police we don't know really what agency they come from some could be FBI some theoretically could

could be DEA, some could be prison guards, some could be newly, newly hired ICE agents, but they're marching around in Chicago in a show of force to, I guess, people who are visiting the city, tourists are working, or living in the city. Oh, pause it. Just in case, pause right there. Just in case you're wondering why they're in almost full military gear. There's a couple of brave ones who are just wearing cowboy hats. But the rest of them are wearing full tactical gear.

And of course, and of course, 90% of them are masked. as we've seen that's generally when we watch fascists march through a city uh we saw this the other day in iowa the 90 percent of them are masks i guess mass are okay when you're harming other people as opposed to protecting other people well i maybe they're concerned about catching covid which is legit diapers which is legitimate but um they're probably wearing them for the same reason i would imagine when other militia uh fascist militia march through cities um they don't want to be recognized they're embarrassed by what they're doing and you know i guess some measure of credit goes to these people that they know they should be embarrassed yeah here is um a guy caught on a body cam

of a this is a ice uh official caught on on camera by um somebody else's body cam maybe it was a cop a local cop i'm not it's unclear but listen to what this guy up in cato new york this is um kato new york is like up near uh uh the uh i think it's like north of syracuse somewhere up in that area rochester Syracuse area near Lake Ant, Ontario, but, you know, so relatively close to the border, I guess. And you should know, 100 miles from the border in is where ICE can operate. So, which is like 70% of the population in this country. But here he is, listen to the way that he speaks of immigrants. There's countries like Brazil and other places where they're literal street rats at a very young age

and they're committing crimes and then they come here. I don't know if you have kids, but they'll eat our kids for breakfast. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. They're street rats and they'll eat our kids for breakfast. They're basically, he's calling them, yeah, thugs and criminals and cannibals almost, vermin, barely human. In fact, they are less than subhuman in that essence.

because a dog can be your companion or a cat, they're actually an active threat to your children. Let's look at one of these very crafty individuals. We don't know the origin of this person, but it's unclear to me what he's going to get, but he's a delivery guy. This is in Chicago. And this is just fun because it gives you an opportunity to see our, boys in camo operate tier one operators oh man they're uh salute some of them are border patrol uh of course they're wearing masks and they're in chicago which incidentally not a border town uh but nevertheless they're here to protect you and get those bad delivery guys ready go

Oh, I like that guy wasn't. Hold on. I want you to do this. Yeah, you go back there. Now, let's a slow-mo right here. And can you play it on slow-mo? Okay, I go. Watch this.

Look at this guy chasing him. Now, watch. He has to, he's so out of breath. He runs around. the white thing there those white things are like they flop and he has to go around

it like he's in like some type of obstacle course yeah exactly or he's doing a cone drill he would not have made varsity oh not do that he did play that one more time and I'm going to just go like this ready we have a soundtrack and go

watch out push out watch out What did the guys in the back think they were going to do? This is my one chance to show effort today. They don't want to be on tape, not hustling. Exactly. Oh, no, look at me.

It's like looking busy. Oh, God, I love that that guy made them look like a bunch of home alone things. Wow, that was... That guy was fast. What kind of bike was that? Not a single runner. Hired like 50,000 guys that can't do like two minutes of running. They're all wearing cowboy boots too.

And there's like, oh, they got some blisters. They're already out of shape and now they're like in like 100 pounds of body armor. Dressed for flusia. Right. Right. Like that delivery driver has to do cardio all the time on that bike. you thought you were going to outrun him. All right, come on.

His calves are better than Sam's back in the day. Well, let's not get carried away. All right, let's go back. Let's go back. One, two, and three. Bye-bye. That's the favorite part, too, where they all, like, sort of run into each other.

All right, well, we tried. Well, what are you going to do? Um, we're going to put out at all. A. P.B. out on that guy. We're going to get. Who do I think? I think it was that chicken parbs sandwiches in there. Oh, yeah.

APP is like, I don't understand you. Can you please? Again. I'm going on. Who's the ride on a bike? Okay. Well, I'll have a ventilator. Let me just.

five minutes oh my god all right in a moment we're going to be talking to corey doctoro author of and shitification why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it uh first couple words from our sponsors one of our sponsors today long week at work weeks busy weekends can have you feeling and looking depleted really do tell um but prolon has has a five-day fasting-mimicking diet that works at the cellular level to rejuvenate you from the inside out. They provide real results that include fat-focused, sustainable weight loss with no injection needed. Now they're up in their game with the next generation five-day program delivering the same science-backed benefits in a cleaner, more convenient, and more flavorful format. Prolon is a plant-based nutrition program.

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Again, check our podcast and YouTube description for more information. Quick break. When we come back, Corey Docterow, his new book is out, or I think it's coming out in a day or two. October 7th. in a week in shittification why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it. We are back.

We are back. Sam Cedar. Emma Viglin on The Majority Report. It's a pleasure to welcome to the program. Corey, Doctor, author of Inshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About it. Corey, welcome back to the program. Oh, it's a pleasure to be back on. Thank you so much for having me. And congrats on the new book. It is, I had an advanced copy, and it is awesome. And I have to say, like, the concept of insidification you've been writing about for a long time. and it is or it feels like it maybe i have no sense of time anymore and it feels like people

really understand this almost like um inherently or at least they've they're aware of the experience but walk us through sort of the process of insidification and this i mean walk us through this but you can see this in in not just online stuff it feels like but this is where it's sort of really almost art form Sure. So, you know, as you may recall, I've spent most of my adult life 24 years now working for the Electronic Frontier Foundation on what you might broadly call digital human rights. And getting people to understand those issues, it's kind of an uphill battle, it's very abstract. So I coined this term in shittification. And it turns out they're giving people like a minor license to be slightly profane is what it takes to get people to care about these very complicated technical issues. So in shittification proposes a kind of theory of platform decay. what it looks like when they go bad, why they're going bad at once now and why it's so hard for us to leave them

even after they turn bad? And then finally, what we can do about it. And yeah, sorry, go ahead. No, no. Well, you know, like, I know that this happens sometimes with restaurants. Like, you know, the people don't come in. They start to cut back on quality of stuff and it starts the demise.

But in this instance, this is almost like, this is the plan. As opposed to like a restaurant, You know, sort of like that's when there is struggling. This is the plan of, of the, essentially, this is the business plan. Well, I would say it's not so much the plan as the playbook, because I actually reject the idea that these guys had the executive function or forethought to lay in wait for us so long, leaving a platform that was good for a while. Maybe I should say, you know, the characteristic pattern of insidification is you have platforms that are good to their end users, find a way to lock those users in, then, make things better for their business customers, find a way to lock their business customers

and make things worse for them and then turn into a pile of shit. That's the insidification thesis. And I don't think they have the, I don't think they have the long-term forethought. I think they're like two ketamine-addled and ADHD to do this. I think what happened was we used to have constraints where when these people got a bad idea about how to make things worse for us to make things better for them, they either realized or someone else convinced them that if they did it, they get punished, that competitors would swoop in or that hard-to-replace employees would leave, or that regulators would clobber them, or that new technology would be developed, something that made up, you know, 11-foot ladder to go over the 10-foot pile of shit they just thought

of. And what happened was over decades as we got rid of all those constraints, the punishments that these completely mediocre, terrible people used to worry about or that used to stay their hand or that used to punish them if they didn't worry about it enough and they went ahead with it, then what happened was that these guys were able to yield to their worst impulses and things just got better for them and worse for us. Does it have to do with the structure of big tech and the move-fast break things period

where there was so much investment money, there was an attempt to grow the economy through the tech sector and these tools whether it be social media or what have you weren't straightforward in how they were going to make money for for these guys so they created and like created these tools raise a shit ton of money and then they have to work backwards from that like that's what it feels like more than anything it's a failure of our government to catch up to these new technologies but even more so it's a function of speculative capitalism? See, I actually completely disagree. I think it's the regulatory environment. So, you know, look at Google. Google wasn't like not making money, right? It wasn't like Google was like getting an investor subsidy like OpenAI is now and then just

had to figure out how to turn the screws to make money. Google was the most profitable company in the history of the world. And then they made things worse. And so it wasn't because of an overinvestment trying to catch up. It's because policymakers, far from failing to keep up with technology, took decisions, right? Like we decided to stop enforcing antitrust law. So you have Google, which is a company that had one good idea in the previous millennium when they made a really good search engine and has had no good ideas since.

Everything they've done successfully since then was a company they bought in defiance of antitrust law through forbearance for predatory acquisitions. and, you know, their internal measures are all things that failed. And we also let these companies invade our privacy. Again, that's not Congress failing to anticipate this. This is Congress just not acting. The last time Congress gave us a new federal privacy consumer law was in 1988 when Reagan banned video store clerks from telling the newspapers which VHS cassettes you have.

That's why Google spies on us. It's not because they fail to catch up. It's because we let them merge to monopoly. we let the internet turn into five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four. When you have a cartel or a monopoly or duopoly, they capture their regulators. Their workers were too short-sighted to unionize

when they had a ton of power. And so to the extent that they were able to hold the line by saying, no, I'm not going to insidify that thing. I missed my mother's funeral to ship on time for you. And the guy across the street will give me a job if you fire me and try and make me do it. That, you know, went away. As soon as supply caught up with demand,

We've had half a million tech layoffs in the last three years, and we saw the monotonic expansion of IP law that makes reverse engineering, ad blocking, interoperable clients, alt clients, things that, you know, would allow technologists, whether working for startups or co-ops or individuals to check those bad impulses, we saw them go away. So if I can give one little example here, in 1998, Bill Clinton signed the digital millennium copy. Act. It's a law that bans reverse engineering. It carries a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. And what that means is that if you just design your product so that it doesn't have an open way to alter its behaviors so that you have to reverse engineer it to change how it works, then it just becomes illegal to change how it works. This is how we ended up with like printer ink where you can't just install generic ink. It's not that it's hard to overcome the thing that checks for generic ink. It's just a crime, right? So imagine like we're in a product planning

meeting for our website. And the guy running the meeting, he says, I got an idea, we're going to make the ads 20% more obnoxious and invasive. We'll get a 2% increase in top line ad revenue. That's our big KPI. Everyone's going to get rich. Someone who doesn't care about user welfare is going to stick their hand up and say, you know, Elon, I love how you think, but has it occurred to you, we make the ads 20% more obnoxious. 40% of our users are going to install an ad blocker because you don't need to reverse engineer an ad or web browser to put in an app blocker. 51% of web users have a installed an ad blocker. It's the biggest boycott in human history. Meanwhile, it's illegal to do that for an app because you have to reverse engineer the app to do it. So when we say, okay, well, how obnoxious are we going to

make the ads in the ad blocker, in the app, rather, that same person's going to say, oh, no, you should make them like 100% more obnoxious, get a 10% increase in revenue. And it's not like we didn't warn that this would happen when this law was passed. The guy who was responsible for this law, Bruce Lehman, Bill Clinton's IPs are, he was laughed out of Al Gore's information super highway hearing. he was chased to Geneva where he made it a wipeout treaty at the UN and then Congress was worn when they passed it these are like totally foreseeable outcomes it's not that these guys are so smart they're running circles around Congress it's that Congress created the inshidogenic environment and then we got inshidic scene and in that environment is that

created simply because of the sort of like move away from the prior existing antitrust sort of perspective, I mean, which we saw a return, brief as it were it was during the Biden administration. That's when a lot of these cases, some of the cases were actually started during the Trump years, but a lot of these cases in terms of Google in particular. And, you know, I suppose we could debate as to whether or not the judges understand the political environment they're in. We just saw the remedy part of one of the Google cases was a joke. I mean, just an absolute farce. So what, and I know you write about this, obviously, in the book, but this impulse is just

simply always to like water flowing downhill in terms of a pursuit of whatever small profit increase there can be. And if there's no dam there essentially or obstacle, they're just going Go. Yeah, that's right. I mean, these guys, they get up every morning and they go grab the giant lever yanked in shitification in the C-suite. And it used to be that stuff used to stop the lever, right? They had to worry about competitors and regulators and workers and other technologies. And they don't have to worry about it. So the lever has been sort of lubricated and it moves really freely. You know, you mentioned that the judge failed in the Google case. And boy, did that judge, Judge, I mean, it might ever fail. But, you know, it's not like the judges got a mind virus or something. Like, we even know how the judges lost track of how antitrust law works. So, you know, there was this like fringe guy, Robert Bork, who was a, you know, arch-conservative Nixonite criminal, failed to be appointed to the Supreme Court. And he had this idea. He was Bork. He was Bork. That's where the term Bork comes from. And one of the ways he got borked, by the way, was that his video rental history was leaked, which is why Ronald Reagan signed

the last privacy law we ever got. Turned out, the best thing you could say about Robert Bork is he had pretty good taste in movies. But I think Congress were like, oh, no, when they leak my video rental history, it's going to be bad. Oh, they moved to ban it. So, you know, you had this fringe guy, Robert Bork, and he had these bad ideas that antitrust was, you know, a fool's errand that when you saw monopoly, it was because, like, companies were good, right? If 90% of the world uses Google search is because it's the best search, and it would be really perverse to punish Google for making a product. we all love. And so, you know, they put a lot of money behind that project. They convinced Jimmy Carter to start with the agenda. Reagan really picked it up. But here's the thing. They played an

inside outside game because judges have to go for continuing education courses, just like any other professional. And they funded this thing called the Mann Seminars, M-A-N-N-E. They're these luxury junkets in Florida, all expenses paid. 40% of the federal judiciary graduated from it. And it was just a session where you would learn about how antitrust was bad and monopolies were efficient. There's good empirical work from Princeton researchers showing that judges who attended the manned seminars went on to rule differently, to rule in favor of monopolies. And it wasn't just those judges that were affected because they created an edifice of precedent, right? So this was just like concentrated wealth, right? Like again, it's tempting to think of this as like the

great forces of history or an intrinsic function of capitalism or the iron laws of economics. These just like a bunch of guys whose names we know who did stuff that would have this predictable outcome. And many of whom are like still alive and walking around today and not worrying that someone's going to size them up for a pitchfork. And we like kind of let them off the hook when we say, oh, well, Congress couldn't keep up or, you know, it's because of VCs. VCs want as much profit as they can get, but they don't want to do things that aren't profitable. Like when I used to run a website with some friends called Boing Boing Boing, still around. I'm not involved in it anymore. And in the early days of the web, pop-up ads were everywhere,

and not these like wussy pop-up ads you get now that are like a box inside your browser. It was a whole other browser window. It was one pixel square. It auto-played music. It ran away from your cursor. And we would try to tell our advertisers, you know, like everyone hates these. We don't want to put them in our website. And they'd be like, well, then we don't want to pay for ads in your website.

But as soon as ad blocking was turned on by default in the major browsers, we just went to them and said, here's our log files. 90% of our users never see a pop-up ad. And all of a sudden, this thing that they were absolutely demanding with no exceptions possible became a thing they didn't give a damn about. VCs only want the things that will make money for them. And the policy environment determines what the rest of us do when they insidify the products we like. You know, when Mark Zuckerberg was tempting people off of MySpace, he didn't rely on them leaving MySpace going to Facebook and then waiting for their dumb friends to join them. He knew that they liked their friends more than they hated Rupert Murdoch.

so he gave them a bot it had a login in a password field you'd go to it would go to myspace several times a day would grab everything waiting for them there put them in their facebook inbox and you can reply to one Facebook push it back out to my space and um he just bled off their users but you know the expansion of IP law over 20 years means that if you do that to mark Zuckerberg he will nuke you tell you clow and so like again we told the people who made these policies that this was going to happen they were like oh you're being hysterical and here we are the world's most mediocre billionaires in charge of four billion people's social media lives once that original sin is committed right where they think like oh you'll be you're exaggerating

we need to let this to be a fertile ground for for growth blah blah blah it be is it that much harder to get it back i mean a lot of what you talk about in the book is like you know the the mass movements that we need to uh reverse things but the but it's that much harder now too i mean on some level, right? Because Zuckerberg's spending a lot of money to, you no longer has to convince people as much. And I got to say that man thing,

I did, had no idea about that professional. Like, I know that world in terms of lawyers, but that makes total sense. Somebody's funding that thing. It's like, it's like what happened with OxyContin. It is exactly what I have with OxyContin. It's just marketed to the, the tastemakers, essentially.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's exactly what happened. So, I mean, I think that that, sorry, I lost, I lost the question. Well, I didn't, let me rephrase it. Let me phrase it. No, no, no, no. It just, just refresh me.

Well, it was, it was like, you know, the obstacles that were faced in reversing it are far later than maybe in the first place. I remember now, yeah. Let me just add to that in that the environment we're going to be dealing with if we get to a post-Trump era, like, is going to have to be much more radical change? Like, there's no returning back to where we were. That's right. That's right. Do you mean, talk about like... Sure. So, yeah, look, the people who created our antitrust laws, right? The first one was like Senator John Sherman, brother of Tecumseh Sherman, you know, the guy who burned Atlanta. You know, they said,

if we wouldn't allow a king to rule the country, you shouldn't allow an autocrat of trade. And they understood that, that, you know, people like John D. Rockefeller were more powerful than most state governments and arguably more powerful than the U.S. government. It was a real uphill slog. And one of the things that laws like the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act take aim at is something called insipiency. So it's not like a merger that will create enough power to take over the government, but a merger that will create enough power to create another merger to create another merger to take over the government. This idea that you want to stop these roll-ups like we see with like private equity where they buy one funeral home at a time.

but eventually all the funeral homes in your neighborhood are owned by one private equity fund. And when you die, you're going to pay rent to them. So the decision not to enforce antitrust law created these monopolies that were very hard to budge. In 1970, the DOJ sued IBM. And that lawsuit went on until 1982 for 12 consecutive years. They called it antitrusts Vietnam. IBM spent more on lawyers to fight the DOJ antitrust division than all the lawyers. in the DOJ Anti-Trust Division cost the U.S. government.

They outspent the U.S. government for more than a decade. They ran out the clock. Reagan got elected, and he halted the case, and so they won. And so you can see why it's, like, much better to prevent monopolies while they're forming than it is to wait for them to become mature, to become bigger than governments. And I tell this to libertarian friends, I'm like, guys, you think that the only role for a government is enforcing contracts? All right, then, well, the referee is certainly going to have. have to be more powerful than the players on the field. The smallest government you can have has to be

bigger than the largest corporation you're willing to tolerate. Otherwise, they're not going to do the job you think that they should be doing. And with all that said, and it is very dispiriting. And like all the best Americans, I'm Canadian. And I'm reminded at times like this of this Canadian aphorism from down east that if you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here. And with all that said, something I think that's like quietly miraculous has happened since the late 2010s that a lot of progressives and leftists have not noticed, which is that all over the world, we've seen a surge of antitrust action. Yeah.

In Europe, I was about to ask you about that, Corey. They're the kind of leading the charge on antitrust with big tech, if you don't mind expanding on that. They sure are. Yeah, the Digital Markets Act, the Digital Services Act, I'll give you an idea of how muscular and far reaching the Digital Markets Act is. Apple is just threatened to stop selling iPhones in Europe, right? is like, not going to happen, right?

You know, like, we fetch about how shareholders are short term, but like, this is one place where it works in our favor, you know, Tim Cook going to his shareholders and saying, sure, we're not going to sell phones to 500 million affluent consumers right now, but eventually the EU will capitulate and they'll be like, no, no, no, no, no, we want money in the next quarter. Forget that, right? So it's not just Europe, though. So Canada has had a very weak competition regulator through most of its history.

our Competition Bureau in its history challenged three mergers and was successful zero times. But in 2024, a guy who's kind of a corporate licksbiddle, Justin Trudeau led a three-line whip for his MPs and passed the most muscular, big, aggressive antitrust law in Canadian history. Now the Competition Bureau is one of the most powerful in the world. We've seen antitrust action in the UK under a series of like extremely shambolic, far-right, terrible prime ministers, and not only that, but tech antitrust for the digital markets unit was the largest technical antitrust unit in the world, 70 full-time engineers on HMG's payroll, but we saw it in Australia. And we saw it in China. The Chinese

cyberspace directive bans Chinese tech companies, the big ones, from blocking little ones from competing with them. Because I think Xi Jinping really believes that these companies are not an arm of Chinese soft power abroad, that they're a competitor for Chinese state power at home. And so even he's, you know, reached the end of his rope with these guys. And, you know, political science, there's, there's like big studies of, you know, the Princeton study of thousands of political outcomes that concluded that the preferences of the public are effectively irrelevant, you know, if billionaires want something, it happens. If billionaires don't want something, it doesn't, it doesn't matter how popular, unpopular it is with the public. This

is like defying all political logic this is water flowing uphill right the law of gravity has been repealed all over the world no one really knows why and i was just going to ask you like what do you why why do you think that's the case and i know you you have a hard out is it it's at 1255 yes uh yeah yeah that's right in eight minutes i've got to go my next um but um why do you think that is or is it just like an awareness of is it just that it's become so excessive and obvious. I mean, in this country, it's quite clear that we can't even, to the extent that we're going to be getting economic numbers anymore out of this administration, the economic numbers that have ostensibly told a story in the past are no longer actually telling the story

they purport to because we have such a concentration of wealth that it's almost like a far more smaller group of people can change what the economy looks like from 30,000 feet. When you get closer to the ground, it's a very different story. Yeah, the consumption numbers just tell you what billionaires are spending and everyone else is like, you know, sitting on a mountain of credit card debt and stuck in place. So I think, you know, there's a lot of different factors coming together here. So, you know, Stein's law out of the finance sector says anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. And I think that's sort of what you were just describing, that people have really reached the end of their tether. But there's also this idea that, like, political

changes downstream of coalition formation, right? You know, the reason the Trump coalition is so powerful is because a bunch of people who hate each other agree to work together, right? And you have, like, Christian dominionists and, like, Hindu nationalists and, you know, isolationists and imperialists all under the same umbrella, right? That's very weird, right? It's a, it's like it's, and you see that it's very powerful when it happens. My friend James Boyle, he talks about this in the context of the environmental movement. He says that before the term ecology entered our lexicon in the 70s, people didn't know they were on the same side. You know, you care about owls.

I care about the ozone layer. It's like what's charismatic nocturnal avians have to do with the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere? We're not really on the same team, but you can weld a team together by creating this conceptual framework for it. And I think there's a sense that concentrated wealth is the source. of so many of our problems. And while people are like not super offay with antitrust law because it's been in a coma for 50 years, there is this, I think, like, inchoate understanding that anti-monopoly is anti-wealth concentration.

Like literally, that's just what it means. And, you know, maybe like generations and playing a terrible board game in our living rooms have taught us what a monopoly is at least, right? And so when you say, we're going to fight monopolies, People may not have a sharp connection between that and the problems that they're facing. But they do know that, like, this wealth concentration stuff is what's poisoning everything else. And I think that's true on the right. I think that's why you get populist right-wing figures like Mac Gates of all people who call themselves a conservative for Lena Kahn.

You know, there's like, I think those people are waiting to be picked off by us, frankly, you know, because the conservatives are not going to deliver on their anti-monopoly promises. You know, Trump is just going to use monopoly law to extract settlement payments from and concessions from companies, you know, to make companies, you know, give him all kinds of favorable media attention in exchange for letting Larry Ellison buy every media outlet in America, you know. Right. It's an umbrella for essentially for bribes.

Yeah. But there still has to be at least some. pretend, I think, sort of like support of the broad concept. Yeah, lip service. Yes. And I guess, you know, ultimately maybe that lip service ultimately can be exploited. What can people do? Is it even, like, is there any value in the short term of, like, particular habits at this point to push back?

Or is it ultimately, we need place? political movements to get real change? Well, I don't think it'll surprise you to hear that I'm skeptical of changing your consumption habits as a way of changing the world. I don't think that you're going to like shop hard enough to make monopolies go away in the same way that it doesn't matter how many buckets you sort your recycling into. It's not going to end the climate emergency, right? Right.

But, you know, that's not to say that there aren't good reasons, personal reasons, to change what you do. If, like, Twitter is ruining your mental health and you think, blue sky'll be better, by all means join Blue Sky or Mastodon, not because like it's going to hurt Elon Musk, but because it might help you. And, you know, if there's like a vendor you like or like an artist or a performer and you support them, that's great. You know, by all means, it's like helping someone put groceries on their table and a roof over their head to do something that makes you happy. Sure, right? But it's not change. Change comes from, as you say,

political movements. It's a systemic problem. I, as I mentioned, I've worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation for going on 25 years now. We have a national network of community and regional activist groups called the Electronic Frontier Alliance, EFA.EFF.org, Electronic Frontier Alliance from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

And they work on local stuff, things like facial recognition ordinances, limits on landlords colluding to raise rent using price-sharing platforms, state laws on right to repair, all kinds of issues that are really striking at the way that monopolies insert themselves into your life personally, right? And there's a lot of room at the state level and at the local level to do this stuff. One of the interesting factors about today's

tech monopolies that makes them different from, say, John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil is that they do the same bad thing to everyone everywhere in the world. You know, John D. Rockefeller had a bunch of monopolies over like oil wells and pipelines and refineries in America and over ports in Germany. And when trust busters in Germany and trust busters in America talk to each other, they had nothing really to say, except they didn't like this Rockefeller guy. But it wasn't like they could help each other with their case. Whereas now we get British tech regulators writing reports on abuses in the mobile payments market. You have European regulators turning those into laws and court cases. And you have those court cases being copied, translated, and

pasted into successful cases in South Korea and Japan. And what we're doing in America with the Electronic Frontier Alliance is we are replicating the successes against flock, against Real Page, against predictive policing companies across different territories within the US because it's the same scam everywhere, right? And so the thing that works in one place works somewhere else. Well, we will put a link to that. And it's also, I imagine, a great place to go and build a larger movement because you're bringing people in there from multiple ideologies. Corey, where can people find in shittification? I mean, the book.

Yeah, any bookstore will have it. It's published by McMillan by their Ferresteress and Giroux imprint, and they're one of the big five, so they're distributed nationally. You can go to bookshop.org if you don't want to buy Jeff Bezos and other penis-shaped rocket. it. And, you know, the one tricky part of my sales channel is that Amazon won't carry my audiobooks because they're not locked to Amazon's platform. I refuse to do that. So you can't get them on Amazon, you can't get them on Audible, and you can't get them on audiobooks.com. You can get them

everywhere else, though. Libro.fm carries them downpour, even Google Play, because they don't have this lock-in stuff for audiobooks. They have lock-in for other stuff. And you can get my e-books and audiobooks for me too. I have an e-book and audiobook store, crapphound.com slash shop. And it is the only place I know of in the world where you can buy an e-book from a major publisher that is a sale and not a license. You own it. You can sell it to someone else. You can give it away. You can lend it out. If you and your partner divorce, you can divide it up in the estate. You can leave it to your kids. So crappound.com slash shop. All right. We'll put a link to that as well. Corey, really appreciate your work always and thank you so much for coming on talking i appreciate having me on

we'll have to do this again we have more time i got to get on my next call all right lovely chatting with you guys thanks emma thanks sir thanks cori bye bye all right folks yeah that's it for us uh today in the free half of the show we're going to head into the fun half of the program where we've got a lot more to talk about but uh check out that uh eFA at the e f The EFF also was very helpful back in the day when somebody who had sat on a podcast patent was trying, were you here with that? No, you weren't. This is the premise of your Marin episode, isn't it? This was the premise of the Marin episode because I got contacted around the same time as Marin.

And I, you know, Marrow was a bigger fish, but I had, I can't remember at the time. but, you know, I had been in contact with the EFF as guests, so I connected them. I was just getting very excited because they wanted to, the patent trolls, wanted to talk to my CFO. And I was sitting in a, like literally a closet almost with Michael and Matt Binder. And I'm like, oh, okay, what I'll do is I'll get one of those accountant hats. And I'm going to do a Zoom call with them. Have Matt videotape it. And I'll go like, I'm going to get my CFO.

Hey guys. Just come back with the hat. Wait, what's an accountant hat? The green be a hat. Oh, yes. God, yeah. I mean, that's old. That's like mafia movies.

They wear them in those, right? Did they wear? Well, I mean, in like the 20s, 1920s. Yeah. We're talking about 20th century iconography here. I mean, I mean, accountants, what are they? now like just AI basically got to be half replaced

no actually there's a huge shortage of accountants that turns out it's tough to find qualified accounts I've been reading the FT lately it's been in shitification died that's close enough that's the the leck approach to accounting is taking

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taking questions about the role of particularly Jewish billionaires in their politics. And I'll just say it's going to be tough for anybody to try to straddle that right wing the way Charlie had it. I think they're in foray world of, I mean, I said the abyss. So yeah, check it out. Patreon. coms, left reckoning show tomorrow night. see you in the fun half

three months from now six months from now nine months from now and I don't think it's going to be the same as it looks like in six months from now and I don't know if it's necessarily going to be better six months from now than it is three months from now but I think around 18 months out

we're going to look back and go like wow what what is that going on it's nuts wait a second hold on for hold on for a second. The majority report. Fun hat.

Emma, welcome to the program. Hey. Fun hat. Matt. Who. Fun hack. What is up, everyone? Fun hack.

No, me, Keene. You did it. Fun hack. Let's go Brandon. Let's go Brandon. Let's go Brandon. Fun hat. Bradley, you want to say hello?

Sorry to disappoint. Everyone, I'm just a random guy. It's all the boys today. Fundamentally false. No, I'm sorry. Women's. talking for a second and let me finish where is this coming from dude but dude uh you want to smoke this um seven eight yes um it's me this name yes um it is it's me it is you it is you think it is you

think it is you who is you no sound every single freaking day what's on your mind sports we can discuss free markets and we can discuss capitalism I'm gonna go to life libertarians they're so stupid though common sense says of course

gobbled e gook we fucking nailed him so what's 79 plus 21 challenge met I'm positively clovery I believe 96 I want to say 857 210 35 501 1 1 1⁄3 8th 911 for instance

3,400 $900 $600 5 for three trillion dollars sold it's a zero-sum game actually you're making me think less but let me say this poop you call satire sam goes it satire on top of it all my favorite part about you is just like every day all day like everything you do without a doubt hey buddy we see you all right folks folks folks it's just the week being weeded out obviously.

Yeah. Sun's out guns out. I don't know. But you should know. People just don't like to entertain ideas anymore. I have a question. Who cares? Our chat is enabled folks.

I love it. I do love that. Got to jump. You got to be quick. I get a jump. I'm losing it, bro. Two o'clock. We're already late.

And the guy's being a dick. So scurum. Sent to a gulaw? Outrage. Like, what is wrong with you? Love you. Bye. Love you.

Bye-bye.