Technofeudal Enshittification with Cory Doctorow

Yes.

And Facebook really has gotten like comically bad.

And it's like the only thing kind of holding it together is the fact that everybody's still there, you know, and that is something that could collapse like, you know, relatively rapidly.

But luckily for Facebook, you know, for Meta, I should say, they've branched out into owning all this other stuff.

That they can sort of hedge their bets with like Instagram, for example.

But yeah, one of the things that really occurred to me, like one of the threads that kept coming up throughout your book is that this is not something that happens because individual capitalists like decide to be greedy or decide to be evil.

Right.

And to me, like when I was reading this, I kept coming back to this idea that what is really going on here is not even really about these corporations either.

What it's about is about capital flows.

And the fact that like in the stage of capitalism that we found ourselves in, you can have these corporations that have become So gigantic, both in terms of like their dollar value, but also in terms of their market share market shares that are now like completely global, like in a totally frictionless way where, you know, billions of people use like Facebook, for example.

Right.

It's not like it's not like everybody in America uses it.

It's like everybody uses it.

And when you get like economic entities on this scale, like the way that capital responds to it is always going to be in sort of like the most predatory way possible because that is the entire purpose of these capital markets, right? Is to extract value however they can, right? And so what they do is like they're trying to – like basically like capital – sort of like writ large, like I'm talking in a kind of abstract way now, will find ways to take over these corporations and then sort of like divert their activities to the ends of making far more money for investors, right, for the investor class.

And we saw this, I think, in one of the most maybe like poetic ways, I think, with Google.

And like you were talking about this a lot in your book, about how like Google started off.

I mean, actually many of these companies started off with kind of like idealistic tech people or, you know, at least who sold themselves as idealistic who, you know, and in the case of Google, they were like, don't be evil was like their motto.

And there were sort of these like nerdy engineer people who were like, we're going to like organize the whole internet, like for, you know, for the, for the betterment of humanity.

Right.

And then basically like fast forward 20, 30 years.

And what's happened is that the, the capital, uh, The finance bros have like taken over these companies and they sparked like these civil wars within and they win every time, right? And if they don't win, then the company goes under and the capital like flows to another company, right? And you never hear about that company.

And so you want to tell us a little bit about what happened with Google and the civil war that happened within Google?

Yeah.

You know, I do find it funny speaking as like a card carrying DSA member who was raised by Trotskyists that I have to explain to self-described capitalists that Adam Smith was like, hey, you know, if you allow firms to corner the market, they'll like raise prices and lower quality.

There's, you know, famous bit in Wealth of Nations where he says, you know, it's not from the baker's kindly heart that we get our bread.