Have you had the funny feeling that content online is just a worse than it used to be – that actually a lot of art – movies, TV, music, comedy is just not has good as 3, 5, 10 years ago?
Or maybe you are a person who makes art, and you feel like there’s just less opportunity to make a living if you aren’t someone like Jay-Z or Taylor Swift?
How did this happen? Why is this the case?
To use a word coined by this week’s guest Cory Doctorow – ‘Enshittification’. That is the title of Cory’s book about how our modern lives slowly and, often intentionally, were made less enjoyable and less functional by big tech. Cory is an author, professor, and digital rights activist and generally one of the most articulate speakers on how the de facto tech monopolies are degrading our standard of living. It is not an optimistic conversation, but it is hopeful.
Vulture is an entertainment-and-culture outlet of New York magazine providing an authentic, relatable experience for pop-culture fans — which is to say, caring disproportionately about great (and not great) entertainment and the people who create it.
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00:00 – Intro
02:12 – Why Artists and Consumers Have the Same Problem
05:20 – Why Artists Are Easy to Exploit
08:04 – The 3 Stages of Platform Decay
09:58 – Inside the Internal Fight That Ruined Google Search
15:06 – How Spotify and Labels Colluded to Underpay Musicians
22:24 – How Companies Use People like Joe Rogan & Taylor Swift
25:21 – Algorithmic Wages for Uber Drivers and Nurses
28:17 – Why It’s a Felony to Fix Your Own Stuff (DMCA 1201)
33:06 – Why Platforms like Facebook are Hard to Leave
35:45 – TikTok’s “Heating Tool”
39:53 – Replacing Influencers with Chatbots
44:01 – How Algorithms Change Art
51:18 – Henry Ford and Elon Musk
57:42 – How Our We Once Broke Monopolies (Standard Oil)
01:01:01 – How to Reclaim the Internet
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