Enshittification, with Cory Doctorow and Matthew Potolsky

In this episode, Matt Potolsky (Professor of English) talks with writer and activist Cory Doctorow about digital privacy, platform decay, and the politics of monopoly.

Drawing on his recent book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Doctorow argues that the erosion of privacy is inseparable from the rise of unchecked commercial surveillance, and that many people care deeply about privacy without recognizing it as such.

They also discuss

• the three-stage collapse of digital platforms
• Robert Bork and the Chicago School’s influence on antitrust law
• the IBM antitrust case
• Yanis Varoufakis’s theory of techno-feudalism
• algorithmic wage discrimination
• effective altruism and longtermism
• AI as a fantasy of boss-without-workers 
• the surprising global resurgence of anti-monopoly politics as a source of hope.

Cory Doctorow is a journalist, blogger, and the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction. He is a longtime contributor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and blogs at pluralistic.net. 

Episode edited by Ethan Rauschkolb. Named after our seminar room, The Virtual Jewel Box hosts conversations at the Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah. Views expressed on The Virtual Jewel Box do not represent the official views of the Center or University.