Making The Internet Suck Less With Cory Doctorow – This Week’s Thinking With Mitch Joel Conversation

Episode #1024 of Thinking With Mitch Joel (formerly Six Pixels of Separation – The ThinkersOne Podcast) is now live and ready for you to listen to:

At a time when the digital infrastructure that underpins modern life feels increasingly hostile, few voices have been as prescient… or as relentless… as Cory Doctorow. A science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist, Cory serves as Special Advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and has long stood at the intersection of storytelling, policy and power. Over the course of a prolific career (one that includes bestselling fiction, influential tech policy books like Chokepoint Capitalism and The Internet Con, and his widely read Pluralistic blog) Cory has chronicled how digital markets consolidate, calcify and ultimately betray their users. His latest nonfiction work, Enshittification – Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse And What To Do About It, gives a name to the slow degradation of online platforms: the predictable cycle in which services begin by delighting users, then exploit them, then squeeze the businesses that depend on them, until only monopoly power remains. Cory situates this decline not as technological inevitability but as the result of specific policy choices that empowered monopolies and weakened enforcement. At the same time, Cory challenges the fatalism that often surrounds technological decline. Anti-circumvention laws, regulatory capture and collective action problems may constrain consumers, but they are not immovable forces. Cultural norms can shift. Policy can be rewritten. Markets can be redesigned. Grounded in economic literacy and moral urgency, Cory’s work calls for ethical leadership, regulatory courage and a reclamation of agency in the systems that shape our digital lives. Enjoy the conversation…

You can grab the latest episode of Thinking With Mitch Joel here (or feel free to subscribe via Apple Podcast or whatever platform you may choose): #1024 of Thinking With Mitch Joel (formerly Six Pixels of Separation – The ThinkersOne Podcast).

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