Big Tech, Enshittification & Why AI Isn’t Inevitable, With Tech Journalist Cory Doctorow

it feels so hopeless so much of the conversation um and as we head towards wrapping up our conversation i think a big question that we have a lot at the back of our minds is how do we continue to move forward when big tech is so entrenched in so many of our lives and especially we're having these conversations predominantly on social media predominantly on you know platforms like spotify is it hypocritical to critique while we still actively engage with them

Yeah, so I think that this 40, 50 years of neoliberalism has really broken our brains about how change happens.

We've been told that change is the result of personal consumption choices, that the way you get rid of a monopoly is to shop really carefully.

And that's all a boycott is.

A boycott is you agonizing over whether you should have a Twitter account or what to buy at the grocery shop.

That's not a boycott, right? You know, BDS or the South African anti-apartheid boycott or the Montgomery bus boycott where people didn't ride the bus for 380 consecutive days.

That wasn't careful shopping, right? That wasn't 380 days of people waking up and going, well, I guess I'm walking to work, right? It was a movement.

I know that like...

Going to meetings sucks, and it's full of tedious people who quote Robert's Rules of Orders, and no one can agree on who's going to do the washing up afterwards.

But actual change comes from organizing carpools when you're going to boycott the bus, and having crisply articulated goals, and going to the legislatures, and bringing people into an ideological project.

What happened after they broke the Montgomery bus segregation system? is they had a civil rights movement made up of the people who came together as comrades by breaking the bus system, right? That's the advantage of it.

So you're not going to shop your way out of this stuff.

And worrying about your consumption choices is a mug's game because...

The fact that you can't change things by shopping carefully is going to make you very demoralized and it's going to make you angry at your friends because you're going to go like, I have been agonizing in the grocery aisle for the last 10 years and we still have, you know, cruel conditions in our hen farms.

And it must be because you're not shopping carefully enough.

And so now I'm angry at you because you're not a good shopper like me.

So the way that you actually make change is you join a polity.

You do politics.

And so local politics suddenly becoming very salient, especially with the data center fights.

Let me tell you, your town fathers are not signing nondisclosure agreements and skipping the environmental review because they know you're going to be pleasantly surprised and they don't want to ruin it.

The only reason to do that shit is if they know you're going to hate it.

Local politics in the age of rising fascism turns out to be the difference between whether you have flock cameras or not, which also turns out to be the difference between whether your neighbors are going to be kidnapped and sent to a gulag.

If you think that can happen in Australia, I've got a little offshore island full of people who are seeking asylum, who have something else to tell you about the Australian attitude towards authoritarianism, not to mention that weird Queensland governor whose wife baked the famous pumpkin pies who banned all gatherings of more than five people, right? I mean, there is authoritarianism lurking in the political capacity of every polity.

So you've got to get involved.

Local politics is easier than you think and can make a big difference.