The Underworld Podcast - Digital Hucksters, Crypto Scams and the Internet’s “Enshittification” with Cory Doctorow

Episode Date: March 19, 2024

From Ponzi schemes to shitcoins, phishing scams and Nigerian princes, we’re living in a golden age of online crime. But hasn’t it always been this way? Cory Doctorow’s latest novel “The Bezzle” dives into some of these recesses, and America’s prison-industrial complex—all part of something he’s dubbed the “enshittification” of the World Wide Web Get 20% off and free shipping with the code Underworld at Manscaped.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College deal, everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 premium and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate

with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th, terms at AKA.m.m.S.com slash college PC. All new drinks are now at McDonald's, with refreshers like the strawberry watermelon refresher, and the mango pineapple refresher with popping boba, to crafted sodas like the Sprite Berry Blast, with berry flavors and cold foam. Who knew ice cold drinks could be so fire? Try them all now at McDonald's.

Refreshers contain caffeine. Copyright 2026, the Coca-Cola Company. Sprite is a registered trademark of the Coca-Cola Company. Hi guys, welcome to the Underworld podcast. I'm Sean Williams in Wellington, New Zealand, and I'm acquiring a quote unquote setup for video, which will be debuting soon, which I think makes me an influencer, so top of the world, Mar. I'm joined for today's show not by Danny Gold in New York, but Corey Doctoro, an author, journalist and digital rights activist whose latest novel, The Bezzle, is the second in a trilogy featuring the forensic lawyer Martin Hensch. in last year's Red Team Blues.

And Corey, the not so distance past, coined something called the inshittification of the internet, which I'm sure underworld listeners will understand all too well. So first of all, welcome to the show, Corey. And I guess as this is a podcast about organized crime, well, let's start right there. More specifically, you yourself got scammed a few weeks ago. You want to dive into that a bit?

Yeah, sure. I mean, it shouldn't surprise anyone that people who know a lot about scams can get scams. Indeed, as you'll hear when I tell you what happened, it was the fact that I knew something about scams that made me especially vulnerable in this case. So I was on vacation over the Christmas break with my wife, and we were in New Orleans, and we got off the plane, checked off our, dropped off our bags and needed some cash. So we went to an ATM from a big high street bank in the French quarter in New Orleans. And the transaction failed. The machine just threw an error.

So later on, we were walking past a little credit. union. I bank with a one branch credit union. So that's great. You don't pay a fee to use another credit unions ATM. So I took some money out of that one. And we had a couple of days in New Orleans. It was really nice. And then my wife and kid were back at the hotel and I was getting ready to leave and just going for one last walk and going up for my favorite sandwich. And I got a phone call from my bank. And the guy said, you know, Mr. Doctor, have you just bought an iPhone in New York for $1,000? And I said, well, no, I haven't. God damn it. Either that Chase ATM had a skimmer in it or maybe it was that cheap Chinese ATM

from the credit union that had a skimmer in it because I don't normally use this card and here it is getting scammed. God damn it. So this guy starts going through his very long spiel and I've been through this before with my bank. It's as I said a one branch credit union. They don't manage their own out of hours fraud stuff. It's a third party company. They service a ton of banks and so they got to ask you a lot of redundant information because it's like not stuff they have to hand and we're going through transactions. And it's just, I can see the minutes ticking away and that sandwich is going to slip away with it. So I eventually tell them, you know, you've already frozen my card. I got to go to the airport.

I will call you guys after I'm on the other side of security and I'll call the afterer's number. We'll sort it out. And he was really pissy about it. But I was like, forget it. I'm going to go. So I got my sandwich. We go to the airport. it. And it turned out that that was the day when the door plug fell out of Boeing 737 max. And every

737 max in the American aviation fleet was immediately grounded. And everyone who was on one of those flights had to get rebooked. Now, we weren't on one of those flights, but boy, oh boy, was there a long line to check in for our flight? And even though I'm like a 33rd order Mason on British Airways, which gets me to the front of the American Airlines queue, we were still in line forever. And by the time we got to the gate, we just had a couple of minutes. So I called the out of hours number for my bank, and they said, actually, you've reached the stolen card number. The fraud number is a different number, but if you've told them to freeze the card, it's probably fine. So I board the plane. We get home. Sunday is the next day. Monday morning, I print out all the transactions. There's about $8,000 of

the fraud and I go to my little one branch bank, and I get to speak to a vice president, because it's a one branch bank, right? It's like, it goes like manager, vice president, president. That's the bank, right? So she's really furious about this $8,000 because, you know, if Visa says that it was their fault, then they're going to have to eat the charge. I mean, it's not going to come out of my pocket, but like, you know, they don't have a lot of margin at these things. And so it'll eventually harm me too because they got my mortgage, my car note, you know, my business account, my personal account, my kids savings account, it's all there. And so I said, you know, this is really partly that cack handed out of the business. of hours, janky call center you use. Those guys, they're just so rough.

You know, like, I told that guy to freeze my card on Saturday, and all this fraud happened on Sunday. She was like, well, that's not right. I'm going to go call them right now. And off she goes to her office, comes back 10 minutes later and said, they never called you on Saturday. Like, what? She said, yeah, that was the fraudster.

And I hadn't been skimmed. That was the thing I made up in my brain because I had just used. a couple of dodgy ATMs and I was getting a call for my bank and I had vacation brain and I wanted to get that sandwich. And so I filled in all these blanks and I'm like, how did that guy managed to rip me off? Because I didn't give him anything important. I gave him my date of birth, but that's in my Wikipedia entry. How did he even get my phone number? My phone number is a secret. I actually like pay to keep it off the internet. And how did he know what bank I banked with? And all he'd ever asked me for was the last four digits of my card.

And, you know, that leaves wait. He asked for the last seven digits of my card. And at the time, I remember thinking, oh, another piece of bullshit from my banks after our service thing. But then I look at the vice president and I say, you've only got the one nine digit prefix for your visa cards, right? So the last seven digits is the whole card number. And she said yes.

And I realized I had given the. this guy, my whole credit card number. And that's how he had gone and done $8,000 with a fraud. So this is classic Swiss cheese security, right? There were, there were a bunch of different defenses that all failed at once. This guy got very lucky. He called me while I was on vacation, so I had vacation brain. This is a well-documented phenomenon. I used to be a Disney Imagineer. And, you know, when you're designing theme parks and you're thinking about the ways that people might get themselves into trouble, you have to remember that, like, people on vacation, switch their brains off. Things that would be safe for people on their way to work,

they will absolutely impale themselves on while they're on holidays. And so I had vacation brain. I was in a hurry. There was that Boeing 737 max. I called the wrong out of hours number. The way the voicemail tree was structured at my one branch credit union. It directed me to the wrong number. The out of hours fraud number was not clearly labeled in the voice menu. All of these things like kind of piled up together and the different layers of Swiss cheese, which all have their own holes that are normally blocked by the layer behind them, all aligned as it does for everyone. And in that moment... And in the sandwiches as well, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's mostly provolone in the muffillette. It's a good sandwich, though. If you're ever in New Orleans, I recommend it.

A briny, olive salad, three kinds of cold cuts, two kinds of cheese on a big, crusty Italian loaf. It's very good. So here I was, right? I'm getting scammed because anyone can be scammed. And honestly, if he'd called me an hour later, I would have been on the way to the airport. And I'd have said, freeze my card, I'll call you back later. And if he'd called me an hour earlier, I wouldn't have been such a hurry. It was like, he just got me by random chance right in that moment.

In the same way that, like, you can get a little cut on your arm and a little bit of staff bacteria that lives on your skin and is just like doing no harm to you at all just happens to be right next to that cut and it gets into your skin and gives you necrotizing fasciitis, right? That bacteria wasn't good at being bacteria, right? It just was lucky. And this guy was lucky. And he was lucky because he commits a million attempts at fraud a day and you throw enough darts and one of them is going to hit a bullseye. It seems such fertile ground for this right now. John Oliver is doing bits on cable television about pig butchering schemes. There's the FTX fiasco.

Finance. All kinds of crypto stuff besides that, too. Is this different from the kinds of crimes that went on in the past? Are we now in a golden age for digital scams or have they always been like this? Well, that is kind of the thesis of these forensic accountancy novels I've been writing, that Red Team Blues and the Bezell, that we are in a kind of golden age of scams and that tech and scams kind of go together like peanut butter and chocolate. I think that one of the things that primes people to participate in certain kinds of scams, like crypto or like multi-level marketing, is the sense that the opposite of scam is not legitimate business.

That legitimate business and scam are on the same side. If you can, as a private equity company, buy a firm, cheat at suppliers, steal the pension, buy your competitors, slash costs, acquire debt you never plan on taking on, destroy a business, and walk away with your hands in your pockets whistling. Why shouldn't I think that I can buy shit coins and unload them on a greater fool as a totally legitimate form of economic activity? There's a story about the collapse of the Soviet Union in Albania. There was a huge Ponzi scheme that took over the whole economy.

And even the finance minister had a downline. And after it imploded, because Ponzi's always blow up, it's just like math, right? You just keep adding layers to the pyramid and you just run out of people. But after it imploded and they went and asked people like, why were you in this Ponzi scheme? They were like, well, we all knew it was a scam. We just thought we were on the right side of it. right um there's a story that's like you can't cheat an honest man this is a thing con artists say as a way of kind of escaping moral culpability for for deceiving people and cheating them but it's it's not quite

that you can't cheat an honest man it's that when people are desperate enough you can talk them into talking themselves into thinking that it's not really cheating i guess the tlDR you get about internet scams in most media stories now and you've got that golden age of cons in the mid-90s, the pyramid schemes. I mean, I've got a pal in Tirana, Albania. He told me what they all went down there. Folks raided the military. You had people with tanks on their front lawn, crazy stuff. You had Triple M in Russia. I think that was another huge one. And then you go to the early 2000s and most people say, the internet has supercharged all these things, con artists with access to millions of marks. I mean, is that really the case?

So there's definitely a bigger funnel, right? You, You can go to like a dark net carding site and you can get a bajillion credit card numbers and then you can cross-reference it with some other database like known customers of a certain bank or phone numbers or something else. And you can put together a kind of like a lead gen system where you can go, okay, well, here's this person. I know a few facts about them I can use as a convincer. So one of the things that happen with my little one branch credit union because it's so cool

to bank with a little one branch credit union. So this guy called me back and tried to do it again the following Friday right after 5 p.m. on a long weekend, which is like the golden hour of scams because everybody's out for the weekend. And I knew what he was about. And so I took notes. And I was like, okay, here are some like, here's some things, right, that you could change at the bank that would armor you against this procedure. And I was speaking. And so I called up on the Tuesday after the long weekend. And I spoke to the head risk officer at the bank.

And she and I were talking. And she was like, it's not just us. Every credit union in America is getting this. There's a leak in the supply chain somewhere where you're getting phone numbers and banks, right? So those two pieces of information. And that was the convinceer for me. It's not like I don't know the caller ID can't be spoofed. But this guy knew where I banked.

And he knew my phone number. And to a first approximation, you have to be my bank to know where I bank and know my phone number. So I was pretty convinced and a little distracted. So there's definitely a lot more. bits and pieces of convincers you can get for you know it's the difference between a psychic doing a cold reading and a hot reading and so there's you know in the same way that like um psychic con artists can do much more impressive hot readings now because they can do like facial recognition on the audience as they come in and then look up their Facebook profiles and then you know if they really want to go nuts they can go to a credit reporting bureau and they can buy dossiers on all these people and so like between the dark net and social media and legit channels, you know, you can do a lot to convince people that you know a lot more than you know.

It's kind of a Douglas Adams and the towel thing here, where if you got the towel, they assume you've got everything else. If you know six facts about them that they think no one could possibly know, they'll assume that you know 100 facts about them and we'll freely discuss them with you and assume when you confirm that you already knew that, that you're telling the truth.

not that they've given you new information. That's definitely the case. But the other thing that's happened is that, you know, we've had this kind of stripping away of the social safety net and the rise and rise of a kind of vicious sort of idea that you are an entrepreneur of one, you know, that everyone's a brand, that you have to sell things, that you're, social relations exist solely as a kind of conduit to extracting value, that everything is transactional. So, you know, like the typical MLM victim, who's also a perpetrator, is a woman of low income, who is raiding the social relationships in her friendship circle, which are really important to her survival, right?

If you don't have any money, you rely on social capital, right? your boss wants you to work late you the neighbor babysits your kid because you don't have cash and so you're taking these social relations that are so important to you and commodifying them and and the reason that it feels okay to do that is because you've been told that you're a brand you're a company you're an entrepreneur you're you're not a you know you're not a person first you're like an LLC with legs. And so all of that conduct that is so characteristic of executives, you know, the kind of insidificatory impulse to harm suppliers and customers

in order to maximize return to shareholders. If you larp that as a girl boss, you end up committing the same sins, right? Like if you tell yourself, you're the sociopaths CEO. of a multinational corporation and waiting and then approach your interpersonal relations in that spirit, then you will conduct yourself in this sociopathic and remorseless

and unethical way. In the onslaught of AI then, is it going to change this whole scene altogether or is it actually already done so? I mean, are there crimes or scams that you've seen that are employing AI already? I guess most of what we see is election interference. and stuff like that.

But I'm guessing crooks have access to this stuff too. So I'm guessing there's loads of criminality going on. Yeah, you know, I think it's unseemly to focus too much on these kind of hypothetical harms when there's so many real harms. Right. So I think the single most pervasive and successful piece of AI disinformation is that your boss can fire you and replace you with AI that will do your job as well as you can. and the most credulous marks who are most routinely convinced of this is your boss. So our bosses are completely, you know, like relentlessly, insatiably horny for firing us and replacing us with software. And there are lots of contexts in which it's happening.

And it's not just like Chancer's running a corner shop. Like Air Canada fired their online support staff and replaced them with a chat bot. and that chat bot just started lying to people. So very famously there was a guy who, you know, yeah, gets on his chat and says, my grand's dead. I'm taking a, you know, flight to a funeral. What's your bereavement policy? And the chat bot says, well, you got four weeks after your flight to get us the death certificate.

And so he takes the flight and then spends the next eight weeks fighting with Air Canada about it, eventually going to the regulator because Air Canada's like, no, that was wrong. And we disavow what the software said. And, you know, this guy, I think lots of people have heard this story, but I think a lot of people have missed the point of it, which is that this guy spent, it wasn't even eight weeks, it was 10 weeks, two and a half months fighting with Air Canada over 800 Canadian dollars. And then went to the regulator. So this guy was like a six sigma pain in the ass, right? If that guy got all that way to get his money back, I guarantee you a thousand other people gave up. this chat bot didn't steal from one person, right?

So the most pervasive form of AI disinformation is the disinformation that says fire your employees and replace them with AI. And the second most pervasive piece of disinformation is the information that the chatbots that have been hired to do our job for us produce, right? That's like the really important stuff. There's also a lot of AI harms that are like not hypothetical election harms. they're not, you know, the spicy auto-complete waking up and turning us all into paper clips or whatever. They're things like the algorithm telling the police to go to your neighborhood of color and just like start throwing young man up against a wall and turning their pockets out. And the algorithm telling the banker not to offer a loan to someone who lives in a neighborhood that's predominantly black. And the algorithm taking away your kids or the algorithm saying you're, you know, you don't get the job.

or the algorithm that allows landlords to collude to raise prices without speaking to one another directly, right? And those are really serious algorithmic harms. And to the extent that AI is capable of getting us to believe conspiratorial accounts of how our institutions work, I think that's downstream of the institutions failing, right? In the same way that like that guy knowing my phone number made me believe that he was calling from my bank. Someone's showing up and saying, you know, computer says no, you have, you have one hour to get this data to us or, you know, make this payment or do something else or some grotesque, terrible thing is going to happen to you, like you're going to lose your car, your house, or your liberty, or your kids or whatever. All of that is

credible because the institutions themselves have been starved and inshittified to the the point where they routinely conduct themselves this way. And then when someone comes up with a conspiratorial account and says, like, the vaccines are bad for you because the pharma companies want to murder you and their regulators will let them get away with it, the reason that story rings true is on the one hand, because the pharma company has been trying to murder us for years. I mean, the Sacklers once threatened to sue me for writing about their role in the opioid epidemic. And the regulators are, in fact, asleep at the switch and letting them attempt and commit.

murder and all the quite sensible grownups when they hear that vaccines are considered unsafe by these conspiratorialists, instead of saying, you're right, pharma is crooked, their regulators are crooked, they will kill you to make a nickel, say, you're so diluted, of course this stuff is fine for you. And look, I have six jabs. I get the greatest 5G reception you can imagine. But it's not because I think pharma is on the up and up. And I think if you think pharma is on the up and up, you're nuts, right? Like you've got your head in the sand and some pharma company is going to kill you with Vioxx or with oxycontin or with some other drug that's in the pipeline. And so, you know, like, I think that...

Expedia and Visit Scotland invite you to come step into centuries of... of history that await in Scotland. Castle steeped in legend, walk along cobblestone streets. Come share the warmth of stories passed down through generations. This is a place with a past that is fully present today and all yours to explore. Plan your Scottish escape today at Expedia.com slash visit Scotland. Bonjour, compadre. It's the price line negotiator.

How do I negotiate so many great trance? Travel deals? My greatest gadget. The Price Line app. It's got hotel deals, flight deals, rental car deals, all of those deals in a bundle. Deals. Game Day deals. Concertrip deals. No one deals more deals than Price Line. Hold your horses. There's more. The app lets you filter hotels by neighborhood, vibe, star level, and amenities like pools and spas and beach fronts. Wait, I'm not done. Stop cutting me up. We focus on AI election disinformation as a kind of. We focus on AI election disinformation as a kind of kind of paternalistic exercise in assuming that everyone who believes in conspiracies is just a

moron and also as deflection so that we don't have to confront the deep systemic problems that make conspiratorial accounts so credible. And AI companies want us to focus on election disinformation because if we were focusing on the manifest unsuitability of AI for all of its industrial applications, their share price would go down. But, if we decide that AI shouldn't be used for election disinformation, they don't lose a penny. They're not trying to sell AI for election disinformation. So this is an act of distraction. You know, it's, it misses the real here and now points. And if you really care about conspiratorialism, it also fuels conspiratorialism to focus on the account of conspiratorialism that says conspiratorialists

are fools who've been duped because everything is fine. And that is just going to make people who have been hurt by the system easier pickings for the con artists who want to convince them, you know, about Q&On or whatever, George Soros or, you know, any of that other stuff. And I Klein's new book, Doppelganger, she quotes someone who says that anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools. That, you know, if you start with this kind of thought that rich people are part of a kind of system that benefits them at the expense of everyone else, and you go, okay, well, it's a systemic problem, and here's how capital functions, and here's how labor markets function, and here's why the state is liable to capture by capital,

then you become a socialist. But if you fall back on, there's a room in Davos full of people who look like Vimer-era-era caricatures of Jewish bankers who are responsible for all of it. You become an anti-Semite. But, you know, the problem with the anti-Semitic account is the location of this problem

with a cabal of individuals and then the scapegoating of Jews. the problem with that account is not the idea that there are elites who act with impunity and whose leadership has been disastrous for our planet, our economy, our species, and so on. Speaking of this blurring of legal, illegal, con, not con, let's move on to the bezel. I listened to the audio book this past couple weeks, so my bald a terrier thanks you for the extra workouts. Very good.

It's a revenge thriller about Marty Hens, this forensic accountant who encounters this work. Well, first of all, a Ponzi scheme on Catalina Island in California, but then it moves on to a critique of the prison industrial complex. So, yeah, with the last book which focused on crypto scams, you've kind of run the gamut of the past 25 years of cons from the dot-com bubble onwards, right? I mean, how did you settle on which kind of issues or crimes to embed in a narrative? And second, perhaps most importantly, is Cab Candy a real thing? I mean, this is a start up putting candy in.

cabs, right? Well, for that, you kind of have to understand a little of the context here. So I write as displacement activity for anxiety. So life-kizzy SARS-I-Makes-Sparilla. During lockdown, I wrote nine books. And one of them was this novel, Red Team Blues. And the conceit of Red Team Blues was that I was going to write the final installment in a long-running kind of detective series with this kind of two-fisted, wise-cracking, beloved character that, you know, you've read all your life and followed the adventures of him. Here's this final adventure. And I was going to do that without writing any of the other books. Just the final one, right? Just straight to pudding. No meat, no veg. And I, so I set out to do this and I wrote it really fast. It was just,

it just came so easily. I wrote it in six weeks. from the day I started to the day I finished the first draft. And I sent it to my editor who is like a beloved dear pal. We met on a BBS when I was 18. He's been my editor for all my novels. And I love him, but he's not going to think that I'm maligning him when I tell you that he is not the world's most reliable email correspondent. So having sent him the book, I expected like months to go by. And instead the next morning I had an email in my inbox.

It was just three lines. That was a fucking ride. Wow. And he bought three of them. And this was great, but it's also like, this was Marty Hensh's last adventure. He's 67 in this book. How am I going to write another one? There is some precedent for it.

You know, Conan Doyle brings back Sherlock after he pushes him over, Wickenbacker Falls. But that was because Queen Victoria offered him a knighthood. And my editor is a very powerful man in New York publishing, his vice president of the McMillan company, one of the big five. But he can't knight me. And so I figured, uh, I would just. like leave Marty in retirement and that I would write the books out of order. And the cool thing is that when you write the books out of order, there's no continuity problems because you're not

foreshadowing, you're backshadowing. And the more detail you put in, the more of a premeditated motherfucker you seem to be, even if you're just making it all up. So I wrote two more of these. There's actually two more planned. You call it a trilogy. There's like it's an infinititology. because Marty is the zealig of high-tech finance crime. His origin story is that he starts during the heroic era of the PC in 1982 in Silicon Valley, and he stays in it until 2022 with crypto. And so 40 years, every high-tech scam you can imagine, which means that you just pick a high-tech scam,

and you can just stick Marty in it. Now, the dot-com era is one that I lived through. I started a venture-backed dot-com in 1999, moved to San Francisco, to be the founder on the ground there. I'm from Toronto. And then ended up leaving when our venture capitalists screwed us and stole the company from us when Microsoft offered to buy it and going to work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation,

a digital human rights nonprofit that I've been with for more than 20 years now. And so I know that milieu really well. And so when I thought I was going to write something from the era in which Yahoo was destroying every promising Web 2.0 company, it was just like the whole thing just kind of snapped into place. I knew exactly the milieu. And yeah, cab candy was a real company that got a real term sheet from our real venture capitalist for millions of dollars to have cab drivers drive around with their boots full of candy for stoners. It was amazing.

That is definitely better than 99.9% of startups I've seen. Honestly, the fundamentals are better than literally every cryptocurrency startup, All of them, like combined. And so you start with this Ponzi scheme where folks are selling hamburgers for extortionate prices on the island. And then you flip the book into the prison industrial complex, this mad Philip K. Dick-like peer into weird prison companies skimming off all sorts. I mean, I've had my own experiences with this stuff. When I was reporting the Joe Exotic stuff like five years ago, the Oklahoma prison system had this crazy messaging system called Tiger of all things. I was spending so much cash called in this guy.

So this is already happening, right? So sleazy, borderline, illegal. No, it's ripped from the headlines. And the point of paying attention to this is not merely that we should have empathy for our fellow humans who are locked in cages. And America locks people up like no country in the history of the world. There's more people in American prisons than there were in South Africa during apartheid or Stalinist Soviet Union or China at any point. in its history. It's the world beater in locking people up. But you should care about this, like not merely because of that travesty, but also because there's this thing I call the shitty

technology adoption curve. Or if you've got something really ghastly you want to do to people with computers, you don't inflict it on affluent white guys like me first, because when I complain, people pay attention. You find people whom you can abuse with impunity and you sand the rough edges the technology down on their bodies. You normalize it while working your way up the privilege gradient, you know, asylum seeker, mental patient, prisoner, parolee, blue collar worker, you know, gig worker and then white collar worker. And, you know, before you know it, you get this a kind of soup to nuts picture where 20 years ago, the only people who had dinner under the gaze of a CCTV camera were, you know, people who were, you know, people who were in.

a supermax prison. And today it's just like anyone who's like unwise enough to buy a home automation system from, you know, Google or Apple or God help us all Facebook. And that's the shitty technology curve in action. So, you know, William Gibson says the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed. The future is most concentrated, right? The dystopian future is most concentrated in prisons. And they are the early adopters of the things that will ruin your life in 15 years. And if you want to know what's coming and if you want a chance of heading it off, you need to pay attention to what's being done to prisoners too. Yeah, and you mentioned the confluence of the late capitalist side of it with the laws themselves, right? I mean, you've got the three strikes legislation in California, the decay in prison funding, everything just piling on and piling on the pressure against this prison demographic, making theirs and their families lives as difficult as possible.

And you really flesh that out. Well, that's why it's a revenge story, right? Because because in my fantasy, everyone, one of those people who sits bloodlessly in a boardroom coming up with these schemes with the perfect anonymity that they they all go down right that's that's that's that's my fantasy i know it's never going to happen but you know there's this this old idea from the webcomic penny arcade the internet greater fuckwad theory uh that anonymity plus the internet makes people into fuck wads and i don't think it's true. First of all, the number of people who use their real names to be unbelievably awful. You know, we all know this, right? Facebook has had a real names policy since its inception.

It should be the most polite place on the internet if greater internet fuckwad theory is right. But there is a greater corporate fuckwad theory because every corporation that does something really awful, it's done by someone anonymous, right? Like, do you know who took the decision to, you know, dial down the proportion of material in your Instagram feed that comes from your friends to like a little homeopathic crumb and dial up the ads and suggestions, right? Like no one knows who that person is. Like if they did, we'd be out there billing guillotine on their lawns. So these people operate with the impunity of anonymity. You know, it's the banality of anonymity. I remember when I was writing on The Guardian, I had an interview, or rather I did an investigative piece. where I spent weeks talking off and on with the Vice President of Communications of a multinational,

multi-million dollar corporation discussing something her company was doing. And she was just telling me the stuff that her company wanted the press to know. She wasn't a whistleblower, right? She wasn't leaking secrets. And then at the end of this, I was like, well, I think I've got everything I need. How should I reference you in the article? And she said, oh, you mustn't name me. you can quote a spokesperson familiar with the situation.

And I was like, wait, what? You are a vice president at a multinational corporation. And moreover, you are the vice president in charge of talking to the press. And that corporation was in fact a press outlet. I think I can tell you that without outing who this was. Right. So what on earth are you talking about? And so I wrote a, I wrote the, I published the piece, but then I published another piece, or I wrote another piece for the Guardian, about how it's mad that the press does this. And it's the only column I wrote in 10 years on the Guardian that they spiked because my editor was like, no, this is fine. Like just when you read about, when you read spokespeople apologizing for terrible things corporations have done, count how often they're just, they're unnamed, right? How, how infrequently?

It is absolutely standard practice in anglosphere media to afford anonymity to corporate spokespeople. And my editor's line was something like, well, if they're lying, it's their job. And why should we punish them, right? It's the company's problem if they're lying, not theirs. This seems like a chatbot story all over again. It really is. Yeah, they're kind of a moral crumple zone for the corporation. I'm sorry, we were about to plug my book some more, but I had to finish it.

that. Let's move on to inshittification then. I'm in my late 30s so I can remember when the internet was a bit more interesting, right? Diverse, a bit weird, freaky, and then it kind of just got boring with all the big firms taking over the place. Yeah, there's a software developer

in Wellington named Tom Eastman who says, I'm old enough to remember when the internet wasn't just five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of text from the other four. And I think that's the best account of it I've ever heard. Yeah. That's right on the head.

Is it just that the internet's getting shitter? It's more than that, right? It's captive workers, captive users, kind of the whole shebang around us. Well, I think it's the combination of several things. So the first is that digital services can go rotten in ways that physical services can't, just because they can change the business logic really quickly. Like the expected wage for driving your Uber or the price,

you know, all of this stuff can just change from moment to moment second to second. and be totally personalized. There's a thing called algorithmic wage discrimination that Uber practices where, you know, drivers are offered a different payout, a different per mile and per minute, based on how selective they've recently been

in taking offers. And the more selective you are, the more the algorithm gives you. But then as you become less selective, it draws your pay down in tiny little increments that have a certain amount of randomness in it, so it's hard to detect the pattern. And the idea is to gradually bring you down,

to the point where you're accepting a very low wage, which is almost certainly also correlated with you having jettisoned everything else that you were doing that allowed you to bypass low wage jobs. And so that's just, that's a thing that bosses would have loved to have done since time immemorial. You know, you think about like coal bosses memorialized in 19th century angry folk songs, right? They would have done this that they could have.

They just didn't have like enough guys in green eye shades to do it. Right? when an algorithm can do it, you can just, I call it the Darth Vader MBA. You know, I've altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it further. You could just change the rules from moment to moment and second to second. And then, you know, the constraints that stop firms from doing this have slipped away. So the first constraint is competition where the fear that you might take your business elsewhere, if you figure out what they're doing, can stay their hand. And if it doesn't, if they have too much hubris or greed, then you can go somewhere else. And, you know,

40 years ago, we stopped enforcing antitrust law, competition law. And it's been drawn down ever since all over the industrial world. And so now we allow firms to buy all their major competitors and merge with smaller competitors and to, you know, do predatory pricing. So again, Uber took $32 billion from the Saudi royal family and then just pissed it up a wall, discounting every ride so that 41 cents on every dollar was subsidized by the Souths. And then, you know, everyone goes, well, I guess this is a going concern after 13 years. All the rival taxi firms have gone out of business. We've had a massive disinvestment in public transit because why would you spend money for public transit

when you can get private hire cars so cheaply? And then they just start jacking the price up after the IPO and they flip the shares to suckers who assume that a pile of shit this big has to have a pony underneath it. So, you know, you have the drawdown of competition. It means that companies don't fear losing your business. It also means that sectors become dominated by very small cartels. Five or fewer companies dominate everything from bottle caps to vitamin C to intermodal shipping to cheerleading, professional wrestling, athletic shoes, beer, spirits, tobacco, finance, the internet media. Right.

So all of these, all of these sectors are super concentrated. And one of the things you get when you're that concentrated is a certain ease of resolving your differences. That there's this thing that economists called a collective action problem where like 100 people find it really hard to agree on anything. But like five, they can figure it out. And so where you might once have had regulators being told different things by different firms that were sort of checking each other's more outlandish claims to keep regulation in the zone of kind of evidence basis. once a sector is down to four or five firms, they just all speak with the same voice in front of their regulators and the courts and what have you. And also because they've abolished so-called wasteful competition, right? They're all extracting supernormal profits and they can mobilize that to

take their priorities and make it happen. Now, those things happen with every kind of firm, not just tech firms, but with tech, there's two other dimensions. So the first is self-help that historically, because computers are so universal, they're so flexible, the thing that allowed companies to move value around so quickly also allowed users, whether they were suppliers or customers, to take some of that value back. So, like, historically, if you were in a boardroom thinking about a digital product and someone said, you know, fellas, I've been thinking about it and we can get like another 2% gross revenues if we make the ads 20% more invasive, someone else in that room who just didn't give a shit about the users at all or their well-being or their experience still might say, all right, but what? happens if 40% of our users then type into a search engine, how do I block ads? Then the expected revenue from those users, it's not 100% our current baseline, doesn't go up to the 102% you're hoping. It goes down to zero and it stays there forever because no one ever went back to the search engine and typed,

how do I uninstall this ad blocker? And so that constituted a certain constraint on the worst conduct of firms. And again, where it failed, you had remedies. You could get third partying for your printer. you could block ads, more than half of all web users block ads. You could do all kinds of things, alternate clients for Facebook, whatever. And the same regulatory capture that allows companies to flout regulation to abuse our labor rights, our consumer rights, our privacy rights, also allows them to mobilize regulation against would-be competitors.

You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water.

The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work,

use Indeed-sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be. be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75-sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. What's up, everyone? I want to talk to you guys today about my friends at Barber Surgeons Guild.

They're an incredible barbershop and hair restoration center in Los Angeles and New York. I actually get my hair cut at the one in New York. So go see my man, Justin, if you want a great cut. But it's actually so much more than that. These are the guys helping celebrities, you know, athletes, actors in their 30s and their 40s, 50s, 60s all have great hair. They are the miracle workers. You know, I myself, I was born in the 80s, so I'm definitely trying to take good care

of my hair. and besides getting my hair cut there, I've actually seen them for PRP maintenance, which has been like a huge help. My hair looks great, but they do so much more than that. They've got all sorts of cutting edge technology. You know, they've got programs.

They've got something for everyone. They also do robotic hair transplants, which is like the newest thing in hair transplant technology. Definitely look them up. It's barber-surgentsgill.com. You can get a free consultation and mention Underworld and you'll actually get a free gift as well. That's barbersurgensgill.com. B-A-R-B-E-R-B-E-R-G-E-O-N-S-G-U-I-D.

Dot com. They're going to help you look great. And so the Australia-U-S and the New Zealand U.S. Free Trade Agreements incorporates something called anti-circumvention that makes it a crime to reverse engineer apps. And so there are ad blockers for the web, but there's no ad blockers for apps because the reverse engineering step is itself a crime. And so as a result, that constraint goes away as well. And then the final constraint was labor, because even though tech workers have historically had very low union density, they still have a lot of bargaining leverage because they were in short supply. And it's a curious kind of bargaining leverage you

get from feeling important. It makes you very vulnerable to a certain kind of exploitative flattery where your boss says, oh, the reason we're having you work in this whimsical campus where you get, you know, free kombucha and massages and like, will freeze your eggs if you work through your fertile years is because, um, you guys are like entrepreneurs in waiting, right? You're like temporarily embarrassed founders. You're heroes of the tech revolution. And that's why you have to sleep under your desk and miss your, miss your mother's funeral in order to ship this app to this deadline I've set. And the thing about appealing to workers' sense of mission instead of their sense of precarity is that they will feel a sense of mission. And so while workers might not have flexed their muscle when they were being worked like government mules,

they did often step in and say, I refuse to inshidify this thing that I put so much effort in because I would experience a profound moral injury if you made me do it. Well, fast forward to last year, Google fires 12,000 workers just months after doing an $80 billion stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years. 260,000 tech work jobs disappear from the U.S. economy. Workers aren't telling their bosses, no, I won't and shittify this, because their boss's answer is great, you know, turning your badge, those things aren't cheap

and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. And so as all of those constraints collapse, companies are able to engage in the shell game where they allocate value to their users, bring users in, lock them in, use the fact that those users are there to bring in business customers, lock them in, draw down the value that those business customers and those end users have, give them to their shareholders, and keep everyone locked in.

And that's why every platform is turning into a pile of shit all at once. Is these constraints have all collapsed, they all have the flexibility of digital tools to play games with the value. And there's a playbook that works really well to hollow out a service and extract all the value that business customers and end users create for it. That's an optimistic point to get to towards the end of our conversation, Corey. I was going to ask you in this world, right, where nobody seems to care about this stuff, cops, politicians that, you know, the congressional hearings where gray beers are grilling Mark Zuckerberg,

they're comical, right? Is there an upside, something we can look forward to, or is it just a sliding scale future of scams, cons and criminalities from here on? Well, anyone who studies finance scams knows. Stein's law, anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. We are definitely reaching peak indifference to scams. People are pissed off. And, you know, the thing about the inshittification analysis that says, like, it starts with weakening competition law, which leads to regulatory capture, which allows firms to also abuse their workforce and their customers and their

suppliers is that it implies a set of remedies of prophylaxies of, you know, cures, right? We restore competition law, which is going brilliantly all around the world. We are seeing a resurgence of competition law not seen since the Reagan years, since the Thatcher years, right? We have a new Federal Trade Commission chair in the United States, Lena Kahn, who's done more in three years than her predecessors the last 40 years combined. she's absolutely brilliant and she deserves the job but the reason she's in that job is not just because she's brilliant it's because that like this is the moment in which someone who's brilliant

the way she is ends up in that job which is why you're also seeing resurgent anti-trust and competition law in the European Commission and the European Union with the UK and the digital markets unit and the competition markets authority Canada which has like never had a fit for purpose competition law has finally, finally said that they are going to put in the minimum standard for competition law, which is what's called the harmful dominance standard, abusive dominance standard, right? Which is like, just like literally you could not bring up someone on competition law charges merely because they abused their dominance until, well, it hasn't yet been made law, but it's now, it's on the order paper. China's Cyberspace Act is like

really takes aim at Chinese tech giants. It's funny because, you know, Nick Clegg, who's this absolute piece of shit, who used to be the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and is now Facebook's speaker to government, so four million a year going around the world saying, if Facebook is weakened, the internet will fall to China

and the Chinese Communist Party will take over the internet. We are your bulwark. We are the West champion. It's so obviously nonsense. You just have to look at, how China relates to its tech giants. They're rounding up tech leaders in China

and sticking them in gulags. That is not how you treat the leadership of firms that you think of as the projection of soft national power abroad. It's what you do when you think of them as your rivals, which they are in the same way that multinational corporations are rivals

for the legitimate power of every government. And so we're in this unprecedented moment for competition. It's looking very good. There's a huge backlash. It's a moment in which, you know, the bureaucrats and the politicians who are pushing this agenda really need to our support. In the United States Congress, there's an effort to just gut the budgets of the Department of Justice Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission. Same in the UK. Same in the EU. Like, corporations don't like this.

The Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch's, you know, business paper of record has published 80 editorials condemning Lena Con, the Federal Trade Commission chair, for being a time-waster who gets nothing done. Like, Rupert Murdoch does not pay his editorial board to write 80 editorials about someone who gets nothing done, right? This is the tell is in the frequency. And so, you know, they need our support. We need to craft regulation that is harder to capture. And we need regulatory institutions that are more capture-resistant.

We also need to restore the right of technologists to reverse engineer and unilaterally modify the services that we use. We need to escape those obligations. The United States has imposed on so many countries around the world to block circumvention. And we need to build out tech worker unions, which finally are becoming an important force in union organizing all around the world, because the power of individual bargaining is very weak compared to. to the power of collective action and solidarity. And if we do all of that, we can claw back the old good internet and create a new good internet.

We can make the inshitternet like an embarrassing transitional phase between those two good internets. We can take the part of the old good internet that was bad, which was that you needed to be a technically savvy person like me to have individual technological self-determination. We can get rid of that. We can keep the ease of use that we got with Web 2.0 and its successors. But we can bring back the self-determination, the right to decide how the service that you use works, to escape services that aren't serving you, to understand and alter the deal yourself,

instead of just being a prisoner of the Darth Vader MBA, we can restore all of that and have an internet that is fit to be the digital nervous system for a planet in crisis that needs to resolve the climate emergency, fascism, genocide, all of these other fights that are far more important than how the internet is regulated, but the internet's the terrain on which we win or lose those fights. Awesome. Thanks for your time, Corey. Appreciate it. The bezel.

Is it out now or? Oh, yeah. No, it's out. It's out. You're in New Zealand, right? I've been operating on this assumption. You are. So there it's out from Bloomsbury's head of Zeus division.

I don't know how it's selling in New Zealand. It's an American national bestseller. It was just just days after it came out. So it's doing quite well here. I hope to get back to NZ at some point. point or I forget what I'm supposed to call it now. Oh yeah, Otero and New Zealand. Yeah, Otero, New Zealand.

I hope to get back at some point. Every visit I've had has been just superb. If anyone for the Wellington Writers' Festival is listening, I'm happy to come back anytime. Oh, I'll get them on the case in. That would be awesome. Yeah, thanks so much again. Thanks.

All right, cheers. Pay off your home, travel. for life. Drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly big board buck slot machine by aristocrat gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino and San Manuel is giving one person a $1.6 million dream package. The biggest prize in Yamava's history. Club Serrano members can earn daily instant prizes and secure a spot in the finale May 29th. Don't pass go and own it all. Only at Yamava, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You win? Details at yamava.com must be 21-20. Please gamble responsibly.

Monopoly is a trademark of Hasbro. Hasbro is not a sponsor of this promotion. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.