Everything you described about chokepoint capitalism sure sounded a helluva lot like insurance companies. They stand between the consumers and providers, control how they interact, and dictate what is or is not 'acceptable' care based on how much profit they can cut themselves out of that exchange.
I think it's important to qualify "insurance companies" by saying "health insurance companies," which appears to have been your point. Property/Casualty and Life Insurance seems to have been a necessary and useful innovation 100+ years ago that allows us to transfer catastrophic risks, and doesn't seem especially predatory. Indeed, that's the root problem with health "insurance." It's not "insurance" at all, because the economics don't work like casualty and life, and never have. That's why we (in the USA) should just nationalize it all. It's *not* insurance.
Enshitification is a great word for what I've been experiencing on TH-cam for a while now. Larger ads, more ad video thumbnails interspersed in suggestions, more ads during videos, annoying popups for premium, declining quality of recommendations, and a ton of weird stuff injected into search results that make them almost impossible to parse, because if people could search, they might actually find what they are looking for!
I have all of that and I can't even actually search very well, the 5 first results are actually related to the search term, the rest is not related, an ad, or a video I already watched. I don't understand how the site owned by a company which the primary business was a search engine can mess this up this much.
I am so surprised to see Cory Doctorow here. I started the Podcast, heard his name and was like WHAT!? I read his book "Little Brother" in my late teens and it fundamentally changed my outlook on privacy issues, surveilance and revolutionary thinking. To the very small chance you're reading this, Mr. Doctorow: Thank you. Thank you very much for opening my eyes at the right time in my life and shaping me to be the certain kind of thinker I am today. Your work is important and reaches more people than you may think. Have a wonderful day.
Cory Doctorow's work also changed my world view significantly. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Someone Comes to Town/Someone Leaves Town, Little Brother, Makers, For The Win, Pirate Cinema. So much of his work influenced how I think about technology, and what we can achieve, and how we should organize to get there. I'm forever grateful for his efforts.
I remember one of my high school teachers telling us that one of the downsides to communism was that it stifled innovation - everything was held by the same few entities, and there was no pressure to keep inventing and improving. Sure is nice that we don't have a few enormous entities controlling everything under capitalism, yes siree
In the last five or six years alone, Disney and Microsoft have each proven themselves capable of coughing up sums in the 70 billion dollar range to straight up buy out another huge corporation. That's higher than the GDP of entire European countries. So I guess we'll just have to see how well your words age.
Your high school teachers weren’t speaking with any form of knowledge whatsoever. They were simply echoing doctrinaire mental conditioning. The downsides to communism are unknown on account of the fact that the world has never seen a communist system. The idea that a society where everyone’s needs are met would be a drab lifeless dystopia can only spring from the kind of mind who cannot fathom what they’d do if they weren’t driven by a profit motive. This is similar logic to the Christian who believes the only thing stopping them from raping and murdering is a list of rules that mostly forbid it (unless certain loopholes are used; and they are, frequently). Watch children. What do they do when their needs are met? They flourish. They make art. They play games. The construct things. That’s what we could do. But we won’t, because it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (for the poor fools who were “taught” about communism by government bureaucrats). Good luck in your life, enjoy this amazing capitalist world we live in. This IS the utopia you were promised.
Every critique that could be made of the Soviet Union could be made of the Anglo nation states: extensive spying; schloric economy; vast prisons; et cetera... But we don't even have the cheap rent that Soviet citizens had
That's not present in market economies "by definition" as it is in communism, sometimes called "state-monopoly capitalism," although since the beginning they had some limited pro-market reforms. In "free" market economies, competition is good, particularly for the consumer, although not only for the consumer. But for _capitalists_ themselves, entrepreneurs and their investors, their own monopoly is what's desirable, and competition, to be avoided. Even though they also benefit from competition on their own supply chain. While this aspect of competition being good even for some of the big-players is something that may to some degree make less likely the development of monopolies and cartels, it's nonetheless insufficient, and ideally we have laws/regulations helping to prevent and to break monopolies and cartels. But even if there was no significant advantage on economic efficiency for the consumer, democracies would still be on the higher moral grounds in terms of allowing not only more liberties in terms of exchanging goods and services, but also/more importantly, civil/political liberties.
That giant teddy bear analogy is perfect. The point isn’t to give out the giant teddy bear…it’s to make people think they can win the giant teddy bear.
It's like Slavoj Zizek's thing about 'the exceptions' being wheeled all the time to prove the system works, when actually, the whole point is, it only does for this tiny minority of exceptions.
@aylbdrmadison1051 There's a necessary distinction between competition and straight out opposition. One is proper consideration for fairness, ethics, respect, and a sense of fellowship with one's competitors, and the other is each is the enemy of the other. Of course, today, competitor = nemesis.
Wow, imagine a world where everyone lived by the principle suggested: the point of a publisher is the authors and books, not the publisher. The point of a concert venue is the artist, not the venue owner; the point of a hospital is the patient not the doctor/admin; the point of a grocery store is the food and hungry customers, not the owner and their profit. 👏
Can't happen cuz of the Prisoner's Dilemma - a good company will be forced to adopt profit mentality cuz it loses in the market against a greedy company. So, everyone ends up being bad. Only way out is stronger regulation by the govt.
It's actually not that difficult to accomplish that vision, but we don't have the stomach for it. The Federal government simply caps executive compensation based on some metric or combination of metrics (number of customers, size of contracts, etc.) This removes the motivation for executives to try to squeeze more and more rents out of their customers and providers, because doing so doesn't line their pockets after a certain point. Then they're forced to compete on *actually serving their customers*. Of course, we have no stomach for this because it starts to look like that old boogie man, "socialism." We drank way too deep of the Chicago School of Economics about 40 years ago, and we're *still* in love with their pronouncements, even though we have mountains of evidence that government regulation is *necessary* for the healthy operation of markets (and we even have Milton Friedman's own words about companies misusing their power to manipulate the government into damaging the marketplace).
Cory! I read little brother as a kid and it totally opened my eyes for the first time about privacy and internet activism and the power of an idea! Love to see him on here still fighting the good fight. ❤
There's a passage from Doctorow's novel Walkaway that I absolutely love. Three characters are out in severely cold weather in heated mech suits, and end up getting stuck in a snow storm. As they wait it out, slowly watching the power in their suits drain, pissing themselves, and mentally preparing themselves for the possibility of death, a couple characters kind of lash out at the third, asking how he can stay so optimistic. What follows is one of the most beautiful things I've ever read. The supposedly "optimistic" character uses an analogy: if someone is caught in a shipwreck, left stranded, treading water in the middle of the ocean, that person is going to kick their legs and wave their arms until they can't do it anymore. That person is not being optimistic. That person does not think that they have good odds at survival. That person is *exercising hope.* Now, that person is stranded in the middle of the ocean with someone they care about who can't tread water on their own. That person is going to kick their legs and wave their arms for both of them. Optimism isn't really helpful, not compared to the active exercise of hoping.
"As a long time reader and fan of yours, it is my goal to make you happy and proud of me" That one really hit Adam, did not expect to feel aggressively seen in the first 5 minutes of this podcast.
Someone else has probably mentioned this, but Taylor Swift was able to re-record because she is a writer on all her songs, so she has song-writing rights. There is a mandatory minimum that she has to wait before re-recording, but after that they can't do anything to stop her. They own the masters, but she owns the song
Came here to say this too. You can't just record (and sell) some else's song. The writer owns a copyright. Taylor wrote her songs, so she can give herself permission to do new recordings.
Yet another reason new artists should learn their craft and push for songwriting credits rather than just becoming performers of what are essentially just other people's songs.
@JenSell1626 I am aware there is a long history of artists covering other artists songs, often improving on the original. My comment was not meant pejoratively.
@@DrBravo2I believe they directly countered your point in the collective rights section of this video. The owner or writer of a song CANNOT block you from recording a cover once they publish it. They control the use of direct copies of their song but cannot stop anyone from recording a cover. You just have to pay the "Compulsory Mechanical License." your license request cannot be denied.
Adam, this video came to me at a perfect time. I am an amateur and independent artist, writer and news reporter, and have been shunned by large media for years. I don't run in a circle of people who are in it on the daily and was feeling pretty dejected, especially when I see so many, as I call them non-stories in the news today and my stories are complete, concise and accurate, yet get thrown in the bin. I even have sent emails to professional journalists with the subjects of my concern to no avail.
So glad to hear someone talking about monopsonies, basically every Econ teacher I have ever asked claimed that they were rare to the point of irrelevancy
This was such a good deep dive. As a creator it's hard for me not to feel desperately fatalistic about creating content in this environment...which I guess is their goal.
No one's trying to do you down, it's just the AI blob of capitalist logic leading to its own contradiction. They need creators to keep creating, but they also need to immiserate them like they do every other worker. Sooner or later, they'll probably resort to trying to automate creativity with digital AI.
When AI inevitably takes over the realm of “labor” due to AI being a one-time investment that can replace and generate more revenue than an employee, our society will need to fundamentally change how it operates. Already we can see this occurring within our economy, dumbing down the work of the average employee, giving less incentive to earn degrees to do work that someone with a high school diploma could do. It’s an insult to ask for a degree with the expectation of paying wages that do not account for the student loan the employee had to take on.
The thing about competition is that eventually someone wins. This makes monopoly the inevitable end point of capitalism. This alone disqualifies capitalism from being fit for purpose. And it's far from the only issue with it.
"Friedrich Engels once said: "Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism." What does "regression into barbarism" mean to our lofty European civilization? Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness. A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means. This world war is a regression into barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization." ~ROSA LUXEMBURG
Exactly this. Somebody wins. They talked about monopsony there, how when there is a market where one buyer buys 10% of everything produced can distort everything worse than if it was a monopoly. That reminded me of the story of McDonald's and their rise to power. Before there was McDonald's and they were big enough to matter, there was more than 70 types of potato commercially grown in USA. After McDonald's become THE company to sell potatoes to (for the fries, of course), the variety dropped to 15. Why? Because McD wanted long fries with certain flavor and density. If you want to grow and sell a lot of potatoes, you have to sell them to McDonald's, sooner or later. And they won't buy potatoes that are not fit to make long fries that can be curled in their curling machines.
Cory Doctorow's books got me through some hard times! Love hearing him in interviews -- he speaks so visually which helps a visual neurodiverse buddy such as myself. Great conversation!
Adam is great, and he gets such fantastic guests. This dude is just a class act. Fighting the good fight, intelligent as fuck, and at 52 minutes when Adam compliments him he immediately credits his associate for teaching him an ability that he probably already had, and she just exercised. Great stuff. Just great.
It's so nice seeing Adam without the ball and chain of a tv station/major company controling what he says. I remember when his show went from college humor to a tv station, and the huge drop in quality/subject matter/obvious capitalist agenda. So happy now that he's free he's truely speaking his mind. I know so many people that syopped liking him cause of the tv show, but have no idea what he really thinks and how he really acts.
OMG This was so eye opening in the fact that our product on Amazon just had its buy button removed bc as I was told today that Amazon was unhappy our product sold at Target for less. This was today & then I listened to you today to hear this & I am blown away. Thank you both as knowledge is power. Keep telling truth! I'll keep my ears open to you!
This video thumbnail speaks to me. Adam; ruiner of stuff, seals the deal. And helping recoup some lost view makes me feel helpful. This is a winner of a video.
It's great to hear truly knowledgeable people discussing these issues, laying out the reality of the world and how the wealthy and powerful exploit everyone else. Thank you Corey Doctorow and Adam.
That's the thing about the NHS, it's essentially a monopoly, but the Government are the Customer, but also the Owner, with the people getting the care being the product. So it works great so long as the Owner cares about the product, and it has enormous buying power to keep the pharma companies in line.
the nhs works great, until the party of the rich decide to undermine it by underfunding it so they can make a lot of money off of the private health care industry. Public monopolies are great when well run and well funded but we need to remain vigilant to protect them from bad faith politicians. when I moved from the UK as a child, the NHS was brilliant but British people are increasingly being forced onto a predatory private market akin to America's after a decade of austerity
fun fact: I know that Adam Ruins everything was originally on college humor. I only started watching ARE on Tru. I didn't follow college humor for YEARS, but i recently started watching dimension 20 and their consistent upload schedule reminds me to check the carious Adam socials for new content. Also LOVE Cory on this show. 10/10 episode. Glad the google overlords allowed me to receive the content (under their eye). Can I suggest a round table: re AI (the current itteration taht's really machine learning and not a machine thinking for themself) with Adam, Cory, and Hank Green? I feel all have differing opinions and it would be super interesting to see this space discussed amongst people who's opinion I've independently grown to appreciate talk about it.
I missed it. Either because I haven't read that book, or because I fell asleep. I need my rest now that I've contracted some sort of coughing disease. Waterboarding for the Gain of Function guild!
YO GUYS! Who else is SO goshdarn glad for Adam Conover being out here on his job and doing God’s work of being educational and hilarious!?! I tell everybody I can about this guy and to show some love and support!
We do too, because he makes us laugh knowing he is a caricature of people from this world view. He is both sanctimonious and says the quiet parts out loud.
Cory Doctorow's books are absolutely phenomenal. Chokepoint Capitalism really doesn't disappoint. Available through most libraries even on audiobook FYI. Great guest.
I actually did a presentation in college about Walmart back in 2007 about how they had become a true monopsony. I actually convinced a few other fellow students to stop shopping there. Lol
I warned folks about Walmart sucking the soul out of small-town America in the late 80s. No one knew what I was talking about. Those small-town downtowns are still empty storefronts and no one has a decent paying job with benefits.
It's fantastic that I can watch this entire video multiple times all the way through and then still wish it were even longer! This was like taking a higher level economics course. Helpful and also fun!
This was an amazing conversation! Wish I could share this with some people I know who could really benefit from this without insinuating a culture war:(
You can start by sending them some of his blogbosts. He rarely praises Marx or calls himself a leftist openly. And he has some blogposts that conservatives might like. For example he raids against woke companies. He advocates for farmer's rights to fix their own tractors. He has articles where he firmly defends freedom of speech against Facebook's algorithmic censorship. I believe that if you find a way to hook them in, they might later subscribe to even some of his more radical thoughts. Case in point. The America act that he talks about here, that he campaigned for, was sponsored by Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Lindsey Graham along with Elizabeth Warren. Because the stuff he talks about can unite the leftists with the MAGA crowd.
I loved Little Brother when I first read it in high school. Then someone posted a the "enshittification of tiktok" article on reddit a few months ago. Now this podcast has me absolutely in love with Cory Doctorow. The discussion of future solutions, of guerilla warfare against tech giants to force them to either play nice or lose billions of dollars, filled me with a genuine hope for the future, which I remember also feeling when I read Little Brother. Cory is genuinely one of the greatest minds of the modern age and an immense force for good.
I absolutely love both of you. Thank you so much for your work - we seem to have a real shortage of solid critical thinking here in America, and you both provide an incredible breath of fresh air.
I didn't know about your podcast! This is awesome! You and Doctorow are two of my favorite people and I'm so happy that you had him on to talk about this awesome and important book. Can't wait to listen to this and then get caught up on your podcast.
53:00 capitalism does naturally monopolize for max efficiency. Also it NEEEDS artificial scarcity. It cannot function without it. We have enough resources to meet all needs and even wants. Yet they are not met. Capitalism is good at generating consumerism.which is also problematic because although we have enough resources for our current needs they aren't infinite in some areas. So we are burning through more resources than we need to for things that aren't needed. It's like we r speedrunning human extinction. They just cross their fingers and hope we can innovate our way out of it.
Fantastic interview. I had no idea about the depth of Amazon's douchery. I also had no idea how knowledgeable Cory Doctorow was. I had read a couple of his early books, I'm going to have to check out his latest work, scifi and nonfiction included.
Love these! Also with the defender needing to touch the bag to get the runner out, you’re correct. The fielder with the ball has to touch the base before the runner does. However, that only works on a force play (where the runner has no choice but to advance to that base, like if a runner is on first, and the batter puts the ball in play, the runner on 1st HAS to go to 2nd, because the batter is on his way to first. The batter also HAS to go to first. At both 2nd base, and 1st base, the runner can be called out by the fielder touching the base with the ball in hand.) If there is no force play at a base (if that runner on 1st decided to run the extra base to 3rd, with the original batter only forcing them to move 1 base up instead of 2), then the runner has to be tagged with the ball (usually the ball is in the fielder’s glove). This is why runner slide into bases, to avoid getting tagged.
I was in a book shop recently looking for a specific book for a birthday gift, I couldn't find it so ordered it from Amazon on my phone there and then (this was my chance to go out shopping before said birthday). Later on I see the book in a different shop, and even though it cost £3 more than the Amazon one I cancelled that order and bought from the bricks and mortar shop.
One of the best guests I have seen on a show in forever. Articulate, well thought out arguments, and even the few points I can disagree with him on, I have to absolutely applaud his discussion and presentation skills. If my congressman were as clever and well thought out as he, I'd habe faith in America.
Doctorow's comments about interoperability guerilla tactics are bang on. We need an open source version of EVERY mass user platform that constitutes the 'digital town square'. We cant depend on the private sector to conduct themselves in a ethical manner, and we cant depend on government competency. The only option is user owned and operated video, discussion/debate, library, social, market and voting platforms. DAO everything!
Ok sport you write the code and pay for bandwidth and server space. Don't get me wrong bim with you partially I use Linux mint on my older computers and it's great. However the social media sites cost a shit ton of money to operate video even more expensive. Wait about 10 years when we get better compression algorithm which will drastically reduce bandwidth and storage costs.
Working at the Department of Energy, we can't buy simple things we need on Amazon because we can't verify supply chain with them, and we're required by law to have our vendors verify that we're not supporting human trafficking by purchasing from them. Nearly every other vendor we can ever deal with can verify their sellers are not conducting human trafficking. Amazon won't. Also we can't verify stuff we need isn't crappy knock-off crap that will break instantly, but mostly the human trafficking. I find that very disturbing.
Adam, keep doing what you are doing! Wish you all the best! Love the content, as always, and wishing the best for you, your team, and your career going forward.
I would like to say that I am normally a diehard capitalist conservative BUT Adam’s presentations over the years have helped me see the amount of nuance in the grander discussion. I’m also typically anti-government but this definitely shows me how a REPRESENTATIVE government like the US could actually act on behalf of the people’s best interests when there aren’t competing corporate interests at play. Thank you Adam, for what you do here.
Sadly he's completely right. I highly recommend the documentaries, "America: Freedom to Fascism", "The Corporation", "Confessions of a Economic Hitman", "The Secret of OZ", and "Zeitgeist Addendum". Thank you.
Cory is absolutely amazing. This podcast blew my mind at every turn. I was already on their side and the side of the workers, not of the capital owners, but I did not expect that everything I would learn in this video would be incredibly stunning. I feel this primal urge to tell everyone about this. What an insane conversation and learning experience.
Good job getting Cory Doctorow on your show! Little Brother absolutely changed my entire worldview regarding protecting my right to privacy on the internet.
I would say the only thing worse than a monopoly is an oligopoly. When you have four or five companies that control everything, and rather than competing they play nice with each other, there is little to no innovation, there is plausible deniability with the lack of competition with some light jabs in ads or in junk research, and startup becomes next to impossible. Look at American telecommunications and internet, for example. They hardly compete, small businesses can't survive, innovation dies, consumers get price gouged. Again, it's a monopoly but with the plausible deniability because, "look, there are many of us"
@@voodoophil it's a square and rectangle case. All cartels are oligopolies, but not all oligopolies are cartels. Cartels are the most egregious form of oligopoly. When oligopolies set price floors that are fixed at several standard deviations above the normal price, when the theatre of competition itself goes away, when barriers to entry go from high to nearly impossible, that's when they become cartels. I'll also add that attempts to regulate an oligopoly may possibly see the other companies let that company go down. Cartels will defend one another, much to the detriment of everyone. Health insurance and telecom are oligopolies, but I hope to God they don't become cartels, like oil and diamonds, as you said.
@@voodoophil no worries! Economic theory is complicated and kind of boring anyways, so i don't blame you. Plus the US does have very odd principles when it comes to healthcare. I split my time between the US, India, and Germany, and having to learn 3 different kinds of policy is a bit of a headache 😅
I appreciate that this conversation made me open up another tab and look up more context. The expert can have a conversation with a good flow to it, they don't have to be backtracking and explaining topics they find obvious, and I am prompted to go learn about the specifics of Writers Must Be Paid, who Lena Khan is, etc. I appreciate that this conversation is hard to keep up with.
I really love hearing a conversation between two people who are more intelligent than I am. What a great opportunity to learn, even if the thing I am learning is how and why I am so miserable and why shit keeps getting worse over time. Thank you both, seriously, I really like you guys! And best of luck to us all!
The peak year of the Google Maps website mashup culture Adam mentions at 1:14:20 was 2005, when people figured out how to make their own overlays by patching the Google Maps website. Then Google started obfuscating their JS and released an official Maps API, with limited terms of usage.
1:18:34 I never worked as an IT person, but my father worked with the computers, servers, and the needed interconnections for large buildings to have reasonably easy to operate air control systems. A lot of this language is familiar to me, and I remember dad talking about the challenges of getting everything in a 50 floor office building to all talk to this ONE executable that then communicates with the larger system of sensors, and translating all that into an intelligable UI screen for the end user ( and make sure all adjustments in that UI leads to the system taking the appropriate actions ). Yeah, take your kid to work day with him was pretty neat because his company serviced my school. So I DID go to school that day, but spent my day in the boiler room while dad tried to figure out why boiler 1 and 3 were doing as they were told, boiler 2 kept trying to heat the cafeteria irregardless of what the thermostat read for that zone. Eventually they found that the wrong thermostat reading was getting crossed into that connection ( from a sensor on the ceiling of the gym, for some reason ), and that sensor almost never got warm enough to tell the system to kick off. So yeah, the 'in the field' guy who makes large air handlers usable and troubleshoots systems after installation. And as part of his job, he collected a LOT of junked computer bits. Keyboard here, old CPU tower there, SO MANY MYSTERY FLOPPY DISKS! I remember really liking Windows above Apple because Windows ( 95, anyway ) felt like it was waiting for what I wanted to do, whilst Apple tried to *guess* what I was doing and take steps to make that task easier... But made everything else harder if that SPECIFIC thing the system was trying to facilitate wasn't my objective. Truely, this was just my hatred of auto-run programs showing up early. Apple liked to boot all your apps in case you wanted to dive right in, Windows only pre-booted applications on the desktop AND you could shut that process off with 3 clicks. ( again, 95, that functionality and everything else I liked about the old OS had been stripped away over time, thanks enshitification )
There are so many educated programmers and computer scientists, is there not a group of people who can create a video platform that is owned collectively by its creators? I've been thinking about starting a TH-cam channel. But in all my research and listening to others who either make money or use it as a creative space, it seems so restrictive. And I honestly have struggled to think of a different place to start to create video content that isn't ruled by an algorithm. I know Nebula is the democracizing space, but it's behind a pay wall, and seems to be for people with bigger audiences. People need a space to be able to grow their art and community without all the limitations of what TH-cam seems to put on its artists (creators).
Can't. It costs too much money to build a streaming platform - that's a huge barrier to entry. See the point at 21:23 ($100M just for the copyright filter).
Peertube is an example of a video hosting platform which can be independently run, though one trouble of the process is the costs of storage - video data is relatively large, so it's difficult to scale past a certain point
I love your work so much. I loved you on College Humor, on Adam Ruins Everything, on the Obama show. Having said that, please don't peddle supplements unless you have to for your survival. Please don't be the guy who would critique capitalism and then turn around and peddle spurious bull crap unless you truly believe this is the only way to keep the channel going.
Looking forward to this book. Some recent reads that cover similar territory: The Master Switch by Tim Wu and The Myth of Capitalism by Jonathan Tepper w Denise Hearn
cory doctorow's Little Brother was one of the very first revolutionary novel i read that spoke to real-world issues rather than the post-dystopian stuff like hunger games. it was absolutely one of the tenants of my high school leftist radicalisation that helped form the basis of my forever-developing political/economic/social views today. i read it in 2013-ish when it was uploaded to wattpad of all places, and it was a big influence on my focus on systemic issues nowadays rather than the small-scale, individualised problems that are really symptoms of a greater disease. cheers, cory, for helping turn me into the insufferable anarchist i am today
Exactly! Doctorow sounds and acts in so much of the way John Ritter portrayed his role as "Vaughan Cunningham" in the movie Swing Blade, he was so sweet in his last big role.
@Adam_c080 I'm sure I've just lost every last remaining bit of sentimentality for the plight of any Russian for any reason now. I wish the allies had never done as much to help them. Slava Ukraini! Viv Israel!
I can't give you brass tacks on the algorithm but I definitely got shown this because I'm already capitalism resistant and hilariously that's because I was a Cory Doctorow fan way before the algorithm was a thing.
and for the record even if it means nothing I read Little Brother for free, loved the model he used on distributing it, then bought it hardcover just to support the business philosophy I wanted to see in the world when I had some spare cash.
Great episode. Great show. I would suggest a shockmount or something similar for the mics to reduce the noise from the table, Adam is apparently a table slapper like me 🤷🏻
i think one of the interesting things about any dialogue on "competition" under capitalism is that we don't really distinguish it from collaboration. not in any way that's separated from capital and profit. what we *benefit* from, in the broad abstract social sense, isn't the competition, it's the diversity of minds and perspectives working on the same project. they don't have to be fighting for that to be beneficial - they *especially* don't have to be fighting over *customers.* as a society, we'd benefit so much more from collaboration and cooperation than from competition - not even in a good-vibes utopian idealist kinda way that i know people are quick to see in that argument - but in the sense that collaboration shares methods and resources, increasing the pool accessible to each new person, to build on or improve the project. competition encourages secrecy and subversion, then wastes resources on espionage and propaganda (marketing) when those resources could have gone into the project itself, or else made the whole thing less costly to begin with. but of course capitalism doesn't actually want competition any more than it wants collaboration. it wants *disparity.*
Not to be that person, but Taylor Swift re-recording isn't just about the fact anyone can cover anyone else's music, but mostly about the fact that Masters of songs are usually what's owned by a label and after a couple years you are allowed to take your own compositions and lyrics and re-record and re-master them.
Adam Smith himself (he didn't coin the word "capitalism" but he is one of the first writers/thinkers to synthesize the idea of it - you remember him from high school: the "invisible hand" guy - he's often wrongly co-opted by the "greed is good" crowd) warned about this very thing. He made it very clear that it is inherently tempting for a large enterprise to use their power to dismantle competition and that, without intervention/regulation, there would be a tenancy towards less of it (and thus "less good" outcomes for consumers).
Everything you described about chokepoint capitalism sure sounded a helluva lot like insurance companies. They stand between the consumers and providers, control how they interact, and dictate what is or is not 'acceptable' care based on how much profit they can cut themselves out of that exchange.
It's a chokepoint within a chokepoint, and getting to the end of that tunnel is the difference between life and death.
It sounds like pretty much everything.
It sounds like that because it is, this applies to everything in our modern dystopia.
I think it's important to qualify "insurance companies" by saying "health insurance companies," which appears to have been your point. Property/Casualty and Life Insurance seems to have been a necessary and useful innovation 100+ years ago that allows us to transfer catastrophic risks, and doesn't seem especially predatory. Indeed, that's the root problem with health "insurance." It's not "insurance" at all, because the economics don't work like casualty and life, and never have. That's why we (in the USA) should just nationalize it all. It's *not* insurance.
The formula for evil. The anti life equation.
Enshitification is a great word for what I've been experiencing on TH-cam for a while now. Larger ads, more ad video thumbnails interspersed in suggestions, more ads during videos, annoying popups for premium, declining quality of recommendations, and a ton of weird stuff injected into search results that make them almost impossible to parse, because if people could search, they might actually find what they are looking for!
😆
I have all of that and I can't even actually search very well, the 5 first results are actually related to the search term, the rest is not related, an ad, or a video I already watched.
I don't understand how the site owned by a company which the primary business was a search engine can mess this up this much.
@@bluester7177 exactly, search on YT is totally busted, because it gives the user too much control.
Agitprop is the word. Useless shit whose sole purpose is propaganda or marketing.
How about those ads in the middle of songs?
Reposted to fix audio level glitch. Previous upload had 16K views.
Thanks! Another great epi
We'll add it to the count in our minds.
ADAM YOU FILTHY LIAR, THE OLD VID HAD 12K VIEWS
Here take my view
🎉🎉🎉
I am so surprised to see Cory Doctorow here. I started the Podcast, heard his name and was like WHAT!?
I read his book "Little Brother" in my late teens and it fundamentally changed my outlook on privacy issues, surveilance and revolutionary thinking.
To the very small chance you're reading this, Mr. Doctorow: Thank you. Thank you very much for opening my eyes at the right time in my life and shaping me to be the certain kind of thinker I am today. Your work is important and reaches more people than you may think.
Have a wonderful day.
@Adam_c080scammer
I remember when he was on Slashdot in the 90s.
Cory Doctorow's work also changed my world view significantly. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Someone Comes to Town/Someone Leaves Town, Little Brother, Makers, For The Win, Pirate Cinema. So much of his work influenced how I think about technology, and what we can achieve, and how we should organize to get there.
I'm forever grateful for his efforts.
@@kellymoses8566 I remember seeing him referenced in XKCD comics in the early 00s
@@parkyercarcass Only reading Down and Out in Magic Kingdom and Makers, he sure helped shape my worldview when I was younger!
I remember one of my high school teachers telling us that one of the downsides to communism was that it stifled innovation - everything was held by the same few entities, and there was no pressure to keep inventing and improving. Sure is nice that we don't have a few enormous entities controlling everything under capitalism, yes siree
At least it’s a few entities instead of one?
In the last five or six years alone, Disney and Microsoft have each proven themselves capable of coughing up sums in the 70 billion dollar range to straight up buy out another huge corporation. That's higher than the GDP of entire European countries. So I guess we'll just have to see how well your words age.
Your high school teachers weren’t speaking with any form of knowledge whatsoever. They were simply echoing doctrinaire mental conditioning. The downsides to communism are unknown on account of the fact that the world has never seen a communist system. The idea that a society where everyone’s needs are met would be a drab lifeless dystopia can only spring from the kind of mind who cannot fathom what they’d do if they weren’t driven by a profit motive. This is similar logic to the Christian who believes the only thing stopping them from raping and murdering is a list of rules that mostly forbid it (unless certain loopholes are used; and they are, frequently).
Watch children. What do they do when their needs are met? They flourish. They make art. They play games. The construct things. That’s what we could do. But we won’t, because it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (for the poor fools who were “taught” about communism by government bureaucrats).
Good luck in your life, enjoy this amazing capitalist world we live in. This IS the utopia you were promised.
Every critique that could be made of the Soviet Union could be made of the Anglo nation states: extensive spying; schloric economy; vast prisons; et cetera... But we don't even have the cheap rent that Soviet citizens had
That's not present in market economies "by definition" as it is in communism, sometimes called "state-monopoly capitalism," although since the beginning they had some limited pro-market reforms. In "free" market economies, competition is good, particularly for the consumer, although not only for the consumer. But for _capitalists_ themselves, entrepreneurs and their investors, their own monopoly is what's desirable, and competition, to be avoided. Even though they also benefit from competition on their own supply chain. While this aspect of competition being good even for some of the big-players is something that may to some degree make less likely the development of monopolies and cartels, it's nonetheless insufficient, and ideally we have laws/regulations helping to prevent and to break monopolies and cartels.
But even if there was no significant advantage on economic efficiency for the consumer, democracies would still be on the higher moral grounds in terms of allowing not only more liberties in terms of exchanging goods and services, but also/more importantly, civil/political liberties.
That giant teddy bear analogy is perfect.
The point isn’t to give out the giant teddy bear…it’s to make people think they can win the giant teddy bear.
It's like Slavoj Zizek's thing about 'the exceptions' being wheeled all the time to prove the system works, when actually, the whole point is, it only does for this tiny minority of exceptions.
Yes, it's a fraudulent practice.
Another wonderful aspect is it’s something easy to be gaslit on
Cooperation > competition. A team that works together can easily achieve far more than "rugged individualists."
@aylbdrmadison1051
There's a necessary distinction between competition and straight out opposition. One is proper consideration for fairness, ethics, respect, and a sense of fellowship with one's competitors, and the other is each is the enemy of the other. Of course, today, competitor = nemesis.
Five Giant companies that turned the internet into screenshots and text of the other four.
WOW. I am speechless by how spot on that is!
th-cam.com/video/IP2EKTCngiM/w-d-xo.html
I used to hang out in an old Mom and Pop bookstore, bless their memory. Wonderful people they were. They got me into theater as a day laborer.
Wow, imagine a world where everyone lived by the principle suggested: the point of a publisher is the authors and books, not the publisher. The point of a concert venue is the artist, not the venue owner; the point of a hospital is the patient not the doctor/admin; the point of a grocery store is the food and hungry customers, not the owner and their profit. 👏
Can't happen cuz of the Prisoner's Dilemma - a good company will be forced to adopt profit mentality cuz it loses in the market against a greedy company. So, everyone ends up being bad. Only way out is stronger regulation by the govt.
I agree, wishful thinking, but could you imagine that utopia? Lol
Democratize the businesses.
It's actually not that difficult to accomplish that vision, but we don't have the stomach for it. The Federal government simply caps executive compensation based on some metric or combination of metrics (number of customers, size of contracts, etc.) This removes the motivation for executives to try to squeeze more and more rents out of their customers and providers, because doing so doesn't line their pockets after a certain point. Then they're forced to compete on *actually serving their customers*.
Of course, we have no stomach for this because it starts to look like that old boogie man, "socialism." We drank way too deep of the Chicago School of Economics about 40 years ago, and we're *still* in love with their pronouncements, even though we have mountains of evidence that government regulation is *necessary* for the healthy operation of markets (and we even have Milton Friedman's own words about companies misusing their power to manipulate the government into damaging the marketplace).
The point of the school is the learner, not the teacher/admin. You're right on point
Cory! I read little brother as a kid and it totally opened my eyes for the first time about privacy and internet activism and the power of an idea! Love to see him on here still fighting the good fight. ❤
this whole thing was incredible but those last ten minutes brought me to tears. yes to hope, not fatalism! thank you, Adam and Cory
Agreed
Thank goodness bc I'm 44 min in and about to cry from hopelessness... i'll hang in there till the end
There's a passage from Doctorow's novel Walkaway that I absolutely love. Three characters are out in severely cold weather in heated mech suits, and end up getting stuck in a snow storm. As they wait it out, slowly watching the power in their suits drain, pissing themselves, and mentally preparing themselves for the possibility of death, a couple characters kind of lash out at the third, asking how he can stay so optimistic. What follows is one of the most beautiful things I've ever read.
The supposedly "optimistic" character uses an analogy: if someone is caught in a shipwreck, left stranded, treading water in the middle of the ocean, that person is going to kick their legs and wave their arms until they can't do it anymore. That person is not being optimistic. That person does not think that they have good odds at survival. That person is *exercising hope.*
Now, that person is stranded in the middle of the ocean with someone they care about who can't tread water on their own. That person is going to kick their legs and wave their arms for both of them.
Optimism isn't really helpful, not compared to the active exercise of hoping.
"As a long time reader and fan of yours, it is my goal to make you happy and proud of me" That one really hit Adam, did not expect to feel aggressively seen in the first 5 minutes of this podcast.
Someone else has probably mentioned this, but Taylor Swift was able to re-record because she is a writer on all her songs, so she has song-writing rights. There is a mandatory minimum that she has to wait before re-recording, but after that they can't do anything to stop her. They own the masters, but she owns the song
Came here to say this too. You can't just record (and sell) some else's song. The writer owns a copyright.
Taylor wrote her songs, so she can give herself permission to do new recordings.
Yet another reason new artists should learn their craft and push for songwriting credits rather than just becoming performers of what are essentially just other people's songs.
@JenSell1626 I am aware there is a long history of artists covering other artists songs, often improving on the original. My comment was not meant pejoratively.
@@DrBravo2I believe they directly countered your point in the collective rights section of this video.
The owner or writer of a song CANNOT block you from recording a cover once they publish it. They control the use of direct copies of their song but cannot stop anyone from recording a cover. You just have to pay the "Compulsory Mechanical License." your license request cannot be denied.
Adam, this video came to me at a perfect time. I am an amateur and independent artist, writer and news reporter, and have been shunned by large media for years. I don't run in a circle of people who are in it on the daily and was feeling pretty dejected, especially when I see so many, as I call them non-stories in the news today and my stories are complete, concise and accurate, yet get thrown in the bin. I even have sent emails to professional journalists with the subjects of my concern to no avail.
So glad to hear someone talking about monopsonies, basically every Econ teacher I have ever asked claimed that they were rare to the point of irrelevancy
We were lied to. The Crapitalist Overlords are killing us, starving us.
This was such a good deep dive. As a creator it's hard for me not to feel desperately fatalistic about creating content in this environment...which I guess is their goal.
th-cam.com/video/IP2EKTCngiM/w-d-xo.html
No one's trying to do you down, it's just the AI blob of capitalist logic leading to its own contradiction. They need creators to keep creating, but they also need to immiserate them like they do every other worker. Sooner or later, they'll probably resort to trying to automate creativity with digital AI.
When AI inevitably takes over the realm of “labor” due to AI being a one-time investment that can replace and generate more revenue than an employee, our society will need to fundamentally change how it operates. Already we can see this occurring within our economy, dumbing down the work of the average employee, giving less incentive to earn degrees to do work that someone with a high school diploma could do. It’s an insult to ask for a degree with the expectation of paying wages that do not account for the student loan the employee had to take on.
Probablly should not call what you create content then.
@@Silver77cyn what a bizarre and random bit of nonsense to post as a response to something from a year ago. You need a hobby?
The thing about competition is that eventually someone wins. This makes monopoly the inevitable end point of capitalism. This alone disqualifies capitalism from being fit for purpose. And it's far from the only issue with it.
"Friedrich Engels once said:
"Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism." What does "regression into barbarism" mean to our lofty European civilization? Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness.
A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means. This world war is a regression into barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization."
~ROSA LUXEMBURG
Exactly this. Somebody wins.
They talked about monopsony there, how when there is a market where one buyer buys 10% of everything produced can distort everything worse than if it was a monopoly. That reminded me of the story of McDonald's and their rise to power. Before there was McDonald's and they were big enough to matter, there was more than 70 types of potato commercially grown in USA. After McDonald's become THE company to sell potatoes to (for the fries, of course), the variety dropped to 15. Why? Because McD wanted long fries with certain flavor and density. If you want to grow and sell a lot of potatoes, you have to sell them to McDonald's, sooner or later. And they won't buy potatoes that are not fit to make long fries that can be curled in their curling machines.
The most relevant message of hope. We need more voices like these two!
Cory Doctorow's books got me through some hard times! Love hearing him in interviews -- he speaks so visually which helps a visual neurodiverse buddy such as myself. Great conversation!
Cory Doctorow is amazing. I have had the pleasure of seeing him at more than one SF convention. Just an amazing individual on so many levels.
Adam is great, and he gets such fantastic guests. This dude is just a class act. Fighting the good fight, intelligent as fuck, and at 52 minutes when Adam compliments him he immediately credits his associate for teaching him an ability that he probably already had, and she just exercised. Great stuff. Just great.
It's so nice seeing Adam without the ball and chain of a tv station/major company controling what he says. I remember when his show went from college humor to a tv station, and the huge drop in quality/subject matter/obvious capitalist agenda. So happy now that he's free he's truely speaking his mind. I know so many people that syopped liking him cause of the tv show, but have no idea what he really thinks and how he really acts.
OMG This was so eye opening in the fact that our product on Amazon just had its buy button removed bc as I was told today that Amazon was unhappy our product sold at Target for less. This was today & then I listened to you today to hear this & I am blown away. Thank you both as knowledge is power. Keep telling truth! I'll keep my ears open to you!
This video thumbnail speaks to me. Adam; ruiner of stuff, seals the deal. And helping recoup some lost view makes me feel helpful. This is a winner of a video.
It's great to hear truly knowledgeable people discussing these issues, laying out the reality of the world and how the wealthy and powerful exploit everyone else.
Thank you Corey Doctorow and Adam.
That's the thing about the NHS, it's essentially a monopoly, but the Government are the Customer, but also the Owner, with the people getting the care being the product. So it works great so long as the Owner cares about the product, and it has enormous buying power to keep the pharma companies in line.
>with the people getting the care being the product.
How?
the nhs works great, until the party of the rich decide to undermine it by underfunding it so they can make a lot of money off of the private health care industry. Public monopolies are great when well run and well funded but we need to remain vigilant to protect them from bad faith politicians. when I moved from the UK as a child, the NHS was brilliant but British people are increasingly being forced onto a predatory private market akin to America's after a decade of austerity
@@SomeThingOrMaybeAnother Because that's what healthcare is. Its quite literally trying to get treatment to people.
@@SeisoYabai How are they the product in this scenario though?
@@SomeThingOrMaybeAnother Because it's what's being produced? It's not entirely literal, I guess, but treating people is what they're producing
fun fact: I know that Adam Ruins everything was originally on college humor. I only started watching ARE on Tru. I didn't follow college humor for YEARS, but i recently started watching dimension 20 and their consistent upload schedule reminds me to check the carious Adam socials for new content.
Also LOVE Cory on this show. 10/10 episode. Glad the google overlords allowed me to receive the content (under their eye). Can I suggest a round table: re AI (the current itteration taht's really machine learning and not a machine thinking for themself) with Adam, Cory, and Hank Green? I feel all have differing opinions and it would be super interesting to see this space discussed amongst people who's opinion I've independently grown to appreciate talk about it.
That Atlas Shrugged jab was excellent! Great video
It would have been funnier to just let it lie there. Those who got it, got it.
That had me laughing so loud I had to pause the video
I was worried I'd missed it and then there it was. LOL
I just truelys hate Rayndism....
I missed it. Either because I haven't read that book, or because I fell asleep. I need my rest now that I've contracted some sort of coughing disease. Waterboarding for the Gain of Function guild!
Doctorow is a treasure. Conceptualizing enshittification is just masterwork.
Finally, two of the most insightful people I follow together in one video. This is fantastic. Thanks.
YO GUYS! Who else is SO goshdarn glad for Adam Conover being out here on his job and doing God’s work of being educational and hilarious!?! I tell everybody I can about this guy and to show some love and support!
We do too, because he makes us laugh knowing he is a caricature of people from this world view. He is both sanctimonious and says the quiet parts out loud.
Cory Doctorow's books are absolutely phenomenal. Chokepoint Capitalism really doesn't disappoint. Available through most libraries even on audiobook FYI.
Great guest.
I loved his enshittification article! Explained SO MUCH
I actually did a presentation in college about Walmart back in 2007 about how they had become a true monopsony. I actually convinced a few other fellow students to stop shopping there. Lol
McDonald's too, for potato producers. Heinz for tomato producers.
@@_Chessa_ yes
Good job.
I warned folks about Walmart sucking the soul out of small-town America in the late 80s. No one knew what I was talking about. Those small-town downtowns are still empty storefronts and no one has a decent paying job with benefits.
It's fantastic that I can watch this entire video multiple times all the way through and then still wish it were even longer! This was like taking a higher level economics course. Helpful and also fun!
This was an amazing conversation! Wish I could share this with some people I know who could really benefit from this without insinuating a culture war:(
Do it anyway...
There's so much content that I share but falls on deaf ears. I wish this who are willfully ignorant would just listen.
If they only knew... B
@@deniseengle4269 th-cam.com/video/IP2EKTCngiM/w-d-xo.html
The culture war exists to distract from the class war
You can start by sending them some of his blogbosts. He rarely praises Marx or calls himself a leftist openly.
And he has some blogposts that conservatives might like. For example he raids against woke companies. He advocates for farmer's rights to fix their own tractors. He has articles where he firmly defends freedom of speech against Facebook's algorithmic censorship.
I believe that if you find a way to hook them in, they might later subscribe to even some of his more radical thoughts.
Case in point. The America act that he talks about here, that he campaigned for, was sponsored by Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Lindsey Graham along with Elizabeth Warren.
Because the stuff he talks about can unite the leftists with the MAGA crowd.
Such a fantastic discussion. Can't wait to get the book from Rebecca and Cory. Experts are really so rare these days.
I really do hope your content gets more traction and you get allot more support, you and the team do amazing work.
I loved Little Brother when I first read it in high school. Then someone posted a the "enshittification of tiktok" article on reddit a few months ago. Now this podcast has me absolutely in love with Cory Doctorow. The discussion of future solutions, of guerilla warfare against tech giants to force them to either play nice or lose billions of dollars, filled me with a genuine hope for the future, which I remember also feeling when I read Little Brother. Cory is genuinely one of the greatest minds of the modern age and an immense force for good.
Great to see Doctorow on here again. I always love hearing from him and reading his essays/novels. So much insight and hope in his work.
"don't go to therapy, just write"
Therapists tell us to write. He's their go-to.
They ALWAYS want us to keep a journal.
Blood for the blood god, comments for the algorithm
Seriously though, more people need to see this.
Here you go, blood!
I am commenting to feed the algorithm. Keep speaking the truth Adam.
So I’m not crazy?! My Facebook has literally been showing me less and less of my friends I wanna keep in touch with?! I KNEW IT
Facebook is like 90% ads its ridiculous.
Your podcast has become a highlight of my week. This was such a great interview, truly informative and engaging. I’m a fan.
I am calling it right now. 2023 word of the year nominee: Enshitification 🎉
Longtime fan of Cory Doctorow. He is one of the most brilliant minds out there.
Wow Adam thank you for introducing me to Cory Doctorow. This was a great interview.
miss you man, glad your back and fired up, adam ruined everything was a bitter pill to swallow but man we needed more of it
I absolutely love both of you. Thank you so much for your work - we seem to have a real shortage of solid critical thinking here in America, and you both provide an incredible breath of fresh air.
I have loved Cory Doctorow since middle school, though its been a minute since I've read one of his books. He's been great and I hope he keeps it up
I didn't know about your podcast! This is awesome! You and Doctorow are two of my favorite people and I'm so happy that you had him on to talk about this awesome and important book. Can't wait to listen to this and then get caught up on your podcast.
Doing my part to feed the algorithm, came back to this over the course of a week to hear it all. Great stuff.
53:00 capitalism does naturally monopolize for max efficiency. Also it NEEEDS artificial scarcity. It cannot function without it. We have enough resources to meet all needs and even wants. Yet they are not met. Capitalism is good at generating consumerism.which is also problematic because although we have enough resources for our current needs they aren't infinite in some areas. So we are burning through more resources than we need to for things that aren't needed. It's like we r speedrunning human extinction. They just cross their fingers and hope we can innovate our way out of it.
cory doctorow was inspirational. thank you for hosting him on your show adam, i would have never found this author otherwise.
Fantastic interview. I had no idea about the depth of Amazon's douchery. I also had no idea how knowledgeable Cory Doctorow was. I had read a couple of his early books, I'm going to have to check out his latest work, scifi and nonfiction included.
Love these!
Also with the defender needing to touch the bag to get the runner out, you’re correct. The fielder with the ball has to touch the base before the runner does.
However, that only works on a force play (where the runner has no choice but to advance to that base, like if a runner is on first, and the batter puts the ball in play, the runner on 1st HAS to go to 2nd, because the batter is on his way to first. The batter also HAS to go to first. At both 2nd base, and 1st base, the runner can be called out by the fielder touching the base with the ball in hand.) If there is no force play at a base (if that runner on 1st decided to run the extra base to 3rd, with the original batter only forcing them to move 1 base up instead of 2), then the runner has to be tagged with the ball (usually the ball is in the fielder’s glove). This is why runner slide into bases, to avoid getting tagged.
I was in a book shop recently looking for a specific book for a birthday gift, I couldn't find it so ordered it from Amazon on my phone there and then (this was my chance to go out shopping before said birthday). Later on I see the book in a different shop, and even though it cost £3 more than the Amazon one I cancelled that order and bought from the bricks and mortar shop.
One of the best guests I have seen on a show in forever. Articulate, well thought out arguments, and even the few points I can disagree with him on, I have to absolutely applaud his discussion and presentation skills.
If my congressman were as clever and well thought out as he, I'd habe faith in America.
Doctorow's comments about interoperability guerilla tactics are bang on. We need an open source version of EVERY mass user platform that constitutes the 'digital town square'. We cant depend on the private sector to conduct themselves in a ethical manner, and we cant depend on government competency. The only option is user owned and operated video, discussion/debate, library, social, market and voting platforms.
DAO everything!
Ok sport you write the code and pay for bandwidth and server space. Don't get me wrong bim with you partially I use Linux mint on my older computers and it's great. However the social media sites cost a shit ton of money to operate video even more expensive. Wait about 10 years when we get better compression algorithm which will drastically reduce bandwidth and storage costs.
Working at the Department of Energy, we can't buy simple things we need on Amazon because we can't verify supply chain with them, and we're required by law to have our vendors verify that we're not supporting human trafficking by purchasing from them.
Nearly every other vendor we can ever deal with can verify their sellers are not conducting human trafficking. Amazon won't.
Also we can't verify stuff we need isn't crappy knock-off crap that will break instantly, but mostly the human trafficking.
I find that very disturbing.
Adam, keep doing what you are doing! Wish you all the best! Love the content, as always, and wishing the best for you, your team, and your career going forward.
I would like to say that I am normally a diehard capitalist conservative BUT Adam’s presentations over the years have helped me see the amount of nuance in the grander discussion. I’m also typically anti-government but this definitely shows me how a REPRESENTATIVE government like the US could actually act on behalf of the people’s best interests when there aren’t competing corporate interests at play. Thank you Adam, for what you do here.
glad you’re open minded, we need more people like you
Love this podcast, so good! As soon as I saw it was Cory Doctorow I just got a huge smile on my face.
Sadly he's completely right. I highly recommend the documentaries, "America: Freedom to Fascism", "The Corporation", "Confessions of a Economic Hitman", "The Secret of OZ", and "Zeitgeist Addendum". Thank you.
Good job Adam and Cory you killed it. Can't wait to listen to your new book. Adam's in Austin next week! 🚀🫶
Cory is absolutely amazing. This podcast blew my mind at every turn. I was already on their side and the side of the workers, not of the capital owners, but I did not expect that everything I would learn in this video would be incredibly stunning. I feel this primal urge to tell everyone about this. What an insane conversation and learning experience.
I've come back to watch this video like 5 times all the way through. Gives me hope in place of fatalism.
Good job getting Cory Doctorow on your show! Little Brother absolutely changed my entire worldview regarding protecting my right to privacy on the internet.
This was such a wonderful discussion. Thank you both
You know I will say this, respect to youtube for autoplaying a video that convinced me that youtube is a problem.
I would say the only thing worse than a monopoly is an oligopoly.
When you have four or five companies that control everything, and rather than competing they play nice with each other, there is little to no innovation, there is plausible deniability with the lack of competition with some light jabs in ads or in junk research, and startup becomes next to impossible. Look at American telecommunications and internet, for example. They hardly compete, small businesses can't survive, innovation dies, consumers get price gouged. Again, it's a monopoly but with the plausible deniability because, "look, there are many of us"
@@voodoophil it's a square and rectangle case. All cartels are oligopolies, but not all oligopolies are cartels. Cartels are the most egregious form of oligopoly. When oligopolies set price floors that are fixed at several standard deviations above the normal price, when the theatre of competition itself goes away, when barriers to entry go from high to nearly impossible, that's when they become cartels. I'll also add that attempts to regulate an oligopoly may possibly see the other companies let that company go down. Cartels will defend one another, much to the detriment of everyone.
Health insurance and telecom are oligopolies, but I hope to God they don't become cartels, like oil and diamonds, as you said.
This never stopped the Democratic and Republican parties.
@@voodoophil "cabal" is the word you're looking for. usa = evil
@@voodoophil no worries! Economic theory is complicated and kind of boring anyways, so i don't blame you. Plus the US does have very odd principles when it comes to healthcare. I split my time between the US, India, and Germany, and having to learn 3 different kinds of policy is a bit of a headache 😅
I appreciate that this conversation made me open up another tab and look up more context. The expert can have a conversation with a good flow to it, they don't have to be backtracking and explaining topics they find obvious, and I am prompted to go learn about the specifics of Writers Must Be Paid, who Lena Khan is, etc. I appreciate that this conversation is hard to keep up with.
Skulls for the skull throne, blood for the blood god, power to seize the means of production for the working class, a comment for the algorithm.
One of the most informative videos I've ever watched on TH-cam! Thank you.
Fascinating interview. Knowledgeable interesting guest. Glad you're back Adam
I really love hearing a conversation between two people who are more intelligent than I am. What a great opportunity to learn, even if the thing I am learning is how and why I am so miserable and why shit keeps getting worse over time. Thank you both, seriously, I really like you guys! And best of luck to us all!
I met Alan Dean Foster. He’s a great guy and I pray he and his wife are better.
Thank you Adam. Please keep going, we are with you.
Great show, I have been reading Cory's articles on his site pluralistic. Love his and your work thanks.
This video can't have enough views! Thanks a lot for this Adam and Cory. Such an insightful and interesting podcast!!
The peak year of the Google Maps website mashup culture Adam mentions at 1:14:20 was 2005, when people figured out how to make their own overlays by patching the Google Maps website. Then Google started obfuscating their JS and released an official Maps API, with limited terms of usage.
Remember monster milktruck?
First time I have heard Cory or this content. Blown away. I want this book.
Good video. Very informative. Adam you are a treasure. Same to you Cory.
1:18:34 I never worked as an IT person, but my father worked with the computers, servers, and the needed interconnections for large buildings to have reasonably easy to operate air control systems. A lot of this language is familiar to me, and I remember dad talking about the challenges of getting everything in a 50 floor office building to all talk to this ONE executable that then communicates with the larger system of sensors, and translating all that into an intelligable UI screen for the end user ( and make sure all adjustments in that UI leads to the system taking the appropriate actions ).
Yeah, take your kid to work day with him was pretty neat because his company serviced my school. So I DID go to school that day, but spent my day in the boiler room while dad tried to figure out why boiler 1 and 3 were doing as they were told, boiler 2 kept trying to heat the cafeteria irregardless of what the thermostat read for that zone. Eventually they found that the wrong thermostat reading was getting crossed into that connection ( from a sensor on the ceiling of the gym, for some reason ), and that sensor almost never got warm enough to tell the system to kick off.
So yeah, the 'in the field' guy who makes large air handlers usable and troubleshoots systems after installation. And as part of his job, he collected a LOT of junked computer bits. Keyboard here, old CPU tower there, SO MANY MYSTERY FLOPPY DISKS!
I remember really liking Windows above Apple because Windows ( 95, anyway ) felt like it was waiting for what I wanted to do, whilst Apple tried to *guess* what I was doing and take steps to make that task easier... But made everything else harder if that SPECIFIC thing the system was trying to facilitate wasn't my objective.
Truely, this was just my hatred of auto-run programs showing up early. Apple liked to boot all your apps in case you wanted to dive right in, Windows only pre-booted applications on the desktop AND you could shut that process off with 3 clicks. ( again, 95, that functionality and everything else I liked about the old OS had been stripped away over time, thanks enshitification )
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There are so many educated programmers and computer scientists, is there not a group of people who can create a video platform that is owned collectively by its creators?
I've been thinking about starting a TH-cam channel. But in all my research and listening to others who either make money or use it as a creative space, it seems so restrictive. And I honestly have struggled to think of a different place to start to create video content that isn't ruled by an algorithm.
I know Nebula is the democracizing space, but it's behind a pay wall, and seems to be for people with bigger audiences.
People need a space to be able to grow their art and community without all the limitations of what TH-cam seems to put on its artists (creators).
Can't. It costs too much money to build a streaming platform - that's a huge barrier to entry. See the point at 21:23 ($100M just for the copyright filter).
@@annaczgli2983 Thank you, that makes sense
Peertube is an example of a video hosting platform which can be independently run, though one trouble of the process is the costs of storage - video data is relatively large, so it's difficult to scale past a certain point
I love your work so much. I loved you on College Humor, on Adam Ruins Everything, on the Obama show. Having said that, please don't peddle supplements unless you have to for your survival. Please don't be the guy who would critique capitalism and then turn around and peddle spurious bull crap unless you truly believe this is the only way to keep the channel going.
Looking forward to this book. Some recent reads that cover similar territory: The Master Switch by Tim Wu and The Myth of Capitalism by Jonathan Tepper w Denise Hearn
Is this the same Jonathan Tepper who pushed GM to do stock buybacks?
cory doctorow's Little Brother was one of the very first revolutionary novel i read that spoke to real-world issues rather than the post-dystopian stuff like hunger games. it was absolutely one of the tenants of my high school leftist radicalisation that helped form the basis of my forever-developing political/economic/social views today. i read it in 2013-ish when it was uploaded to wattpad of all places, and it was a big influence on my focus on systemic issues nowadays rather than the small-scale, individualised problems that are really symptoms of a greater disease. cheers, cory, for helping turn me into the insufferable anarchist i am today
also i am so glad i use the "subscription" tab here on youtube so i genuinely can see every upload
Great podcast, Mr. Doctorow is devastatingly knowledgeable, learned a lot of new things to be mad and hopeful about :)
Exactly! Doctorow sounds and acts in so much of the way John Ritter portrayed his role as "Vaughan Cunningham" in the movie Swing Blade, he was so sweet in his last big role.
@Adam_c080 I'm sure I've just lost every last remaining bit of sentimentality for the plight of any Russian for any reason now. I wish the allies had never done as much to help them. Slava Ukraini! Viv Israel!
I can't give you brass tacks on the algorithm but I definitely got shown this because I'm already capitalism resistant and hilariously that's because I was a Cory Doctorow fan way before the algorithm was a thing.
and for the record even if it means nothing I read Little Brother for free, loved the model he used on distributing it, then bought it hardcover just to support the business philosophy I wanted to see in the world when I had some spare cash.
Great episode. Great show. I would suggest a shockmount or something similar for the mics to reduce the noise from the table, Adam is apparently a table slapper like me 🤷🏻
Great guest and conversation, I was pleasantly surprised at his knowledge of the music industry. Id love to hear more of that
Favorite new podcast. Great talk.
I think it is amazing, how by speaking with self-confidence, you can convince anyone of anything.
i think one of the interesting things about any dialogue on "competition" under capitalism is that we don't really distinguish it from collaboration. not in any way that's separated from capital and profit.
what we *benefit* from, in the broad abstract social sense, isn't the competition, it's the diversity of minds and perspectives working on the same project. they don't have to be fighting for that to be beneficial - they *especially* don't have to be fighting over *customers.*
as a society, we'd benefit so much more from collaboration and cooperation than from competition - not even in a good-vibes utopian idealist kinda way that i know people are quick to see in that argument - but in the sense that collaboration shares methods and resources, increasing the pool accessible to each new person, to build on or improve the project. competition encourages secrecy and subversion, then wastes resources on espionage and propaganda (marketing) when those resources could have gone into the project itself, or else made the whole thing less costly to begin with.
but of course capitalism doesn't actually want competition any more than it wants collaboration. it wants *disparity.*
This was an amazing conversation, watched it in its entirety and it was very edifying. Commenting for the algo!
Not to be that person, but Taylor Swift re-recording isn't just about the fact anyone can cover anyone else's music, but mostly about the fact that Masters of songs are usually what's owned by a label and after a couple years you are allowed to take your own compositions and lyrics and re-record and re-master them.
If "Zuckervegan" doesn't catch on, it won't be due to me not trying. All hail Doctorowisms!
Adam Smith himself (he didn't coin the word "capitalism" but he is one of the first writers/thinkers to synthesize the idea of it - you remember him from high school: the "invisible hand" guy - he's often wrongly co-opted by the "greed is good" crowd) warned about this very thing. He made it very clear that it is inherently tempting for a large enterprise to use their power to dismantle competition and that, without intervention/regulation, there would be a tenancy towards less of it (and thus "less good" outcomes for consumers).