[Plura-list] How monopoly enshittified Amazon
Cory Doctorow
doctorow at craphound.com
Mon Nov 28 12:16:41 EST 2022
Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittificaiton/
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This Weds (Nov 30), Tim Wu and I are appearing in conversation to discuss monopoly and creative labor markets at the Knight Foundation's Informed conference in Miami:
https://informed22.interkinnect.com/
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My publisher Tor Books and Goodreads are having a drawing for a giveaway of advance hardcopies of my next novel, "Red Team Blues," a Silicon Valley forensic accounting thriller about a cryptocurrency heist. If you're in the US or Canada, enter here to win a copy:
https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/353941-red-team-blues
Today's links
* How monopoly enshittified Amazon: Chokepoint Capitalism ruins everything.
* Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
* This day in history: 2002, 2007, 2012, 2017, 2021
* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading
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👡 How monopoly enshittified Amazon
In Bezos's original plan, the company called "Amazon" was called "Relentless," due to its ambition to be "Earth's most customer-centric company." Today, Amazon is an enshittified endless scroll of paid results, where winning depends on ad budgets, not quality.
Writing in Jeff Bezos's newspaper *The Washington Post*, veteran tech reporter Geoffrey Fowler reports on the state of his boss's "relentless" commitment to customer service. The state is grim.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2022/amazon-shopping-ads/
Search Amazon for "cat beds" and the entire first screen is ads. One of them is an ad for a dog carrier, which Amazon itself manufactures and sells, competing with the other sellers who bought that placement.
Scroll down one screen and you get some "organic" results - that is, results that represent Amazon's best guess at the best products for your query. Scroll once more and yup, another entire screen of ads, these ones labeled "Highly rated." One more scroll, and another screenful of ads, one for a dog product.
Keep scrolling, you'll keep seeing ads, including ads you've already scrolled past. "On these first five screens, more than 50 percent of the space was dedicated to ads and Amazon touting its own products." Amazon is a cesspit of ads: twice as many as Target, four times as many as Walmart.
How did we get here? We always knew that Amazon didn't care about its suppliers, but being an Amazon *customer* has historically been a great deal - lots of selection, low prices, and a generous returns policy. How could "Earth's most customer-centric" company become such a bad place to shop?
The answer is in Amazon's $31b "ad" business. Amazon touts this widely, and analysts repeat it without any critical interrogation, proclaiming that Amazon is catching up with the Googbook ad-tech duopoly. But nearly all of that "ad" business isn't ads at all - it's payola.
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/27/not-an-ad/#shakedowns
Amazon charges its sellers billions of dollars a year through a gladiatorial combat where they compete to outspend each other to see who'll get to the top of the search results. May the most margin-immolating, deep-pocketed spender win!
Why would sellers be willing to light billions of dollars on fire to get to the top of the Amazon search results?
Prime.
Most of us have Amazon Prime. Seriously - 82% of American households! Prime users only shop on Amazon. Seriously. More than 90% of Prime members start their search on Amazon, and if they find what they're looking for, they stop there, too.
If you are a seller, you *have* to be on Amazon, otherwise no one will find your stuff and that means they won't buy it. This is called a monopsony, the obscure inverse of monopoly, where a buyer has power over sellers.
But monopoly and monopsony are closely related phenomena. Monopsonies use control over buyers - the fact that we all have Prime - to exert control over sellers. This lets them force unfavorable terms onto sellers, like deeper discounts. In theory, this is good for use consumers, because prices go down. In practice, though...
Back in June 2021, DC Attorney General Karl Racine filed an antitrust suit against Amazon, because the company had used its monopoly over customers to force such unfavorable terms on sellers that prices were being driven up *everywhere*, not just on Amazon:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/01/you-are-here/#prime-facie
Here's how that works: one of the unfavorable terms Amazon forces on sellers is "most favored nation" status (MFN), which means that Amazon sellers have to offer their lowest price on Amazon - they can't sell more cheaply anywhere else.
Then Amazon hits sellers with fees. *Lots* of fees:
* Fees to be listed on Prime (without which, your search result is buried at the bottom of an endless scroll):
* Fees for Amazon warehouse fulfillment (without which, your search result is buried at the bottom of an endless scroll)
And finally, there's payola - the "ads" you have to buy to outcompete the other people who are buying ads to outcompete you.
All told, these fees add up to 45% of the price you pay Amazon - sometimes *more*. Companies just don't have 45% margins, because *they* exist in competitive markets. If I'm selling a bottle of detergent at a 45% markup, my rival will sell it at 40%, and then I have to drop to 35%, and so on.
But everyone has to sell on Amazon, and Amazon takes their 45% cut, which means that all these sellers have to *raise* prices. And, thanks to MFN, the sellers then have to charge the same price at Walmart, Target, and your local mom-and-pop shop.
Amazon's monopoly (control over buyers) gives it a monopsony (control over sellers), which lets it raise prices everywhere, at Amazon and at every other retailer, even as it drives the companies that supply it into bankruptcy.
Amazon is no longer a place where a scrappy independent seller can find an audience for its products. In order to navigate the minefield Amazon lays for its sellers (who have no choice but to sell there), these indie companies are forced to sell out to gators (aggregators), which are now multi-billion-dollar businesses in their own right:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/10/monopoly-begets-monopoly/#gator-ade
This brings me back to the enshittification of Amazon search, AKA late-stage (platform) capitalism. Amazon's dominance means that many products are now *solely* available on the platform. With the collapse of both physical and online retail, Prime isn't so much a choice as a necessity.
Amazon has produced a planned economy run as capriciously as a Soviet smelting plant, but Party Secretary Bezos doesn't even pretend to be a servant of the people. From his lordly seat aboard his penis-rocket, Bezos decides which products live and which ones die.
Remember that one of those search-results for a cat-bed was a product for *dogs*? Remember that Amazon made that dog product? How did that end up there? Well, if you're a seller trying to make a living from cat-beds, your ad-spending is limited by your profit margin. Guess how much it costs *Amazon* to advertise *on Amazon*? Amazon is playing with its own chips, and it can always outbid the other players at the table.
Those Amazon own-brand products? They didn't come out of a vacuum. Amazon monitors its own sellers' performance, and creams off the best of them, cloning them and then putting its knockoffs above of the original product in search results (Bezos lied to Congress about this, then admitted it was true):
https://nypost.com/2021/10/18/jeff-bezos-may-have-lied-to-congress-about-amazon-practices-reps/
If you've read *Chokepoint Capitalism*, Rebecca Giblin's and my new book about market concentration in the entertainment industry, this story will be a familiar one. You'll recall that Amazon actually *boasts* about this process, calling it "the flywheel":
https://twitter.com/rgibli/status/1561761732108107777
Everything that Amazon is doing to platform sellers, other platforms are doing to creators. You know how Amazon knocks off its sellers' best products and then replaces them with its clones? That's exactly what Spotify does to the ambient artists in its most popular playlists, replacing them with work-for-hire soundalikes who aren't entitled to royalties.
You can learn more about how Spotify rips off its performers in the Chokepoint Capitalism chapter on Spotify; we made the audiobook version of that chapter a Spotify exclusive (it's the only part of the book you can get on Spotify):
https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing
Entertainment and tech companies all want to be the only game in town for their creative labor force, because that lets them turn the screws to those workers, moving value from labor to shareholders.
Amazon is *also* the poster-child for this dynamic. For example, its Audible audiobook monopoly means that audiobook creators *must* sell on Audible, even though the #AudibleGate scandal revealed that the company has stolen *hundreds of millions of dollars* from these creators. (Our chapter on Audiblegate is the only part of our audiobook on Audible!)
https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/07/audible-exclusive/#audiblegate
Then there's its Twitch division, where the company just admitted that it had been secretly paying its A-listers 70% of the total take for their streams. The company declared this to be unfair when the plebs were having *half* their wages clawed back by Amazon, so they fixed it by *cutting the A-listers' pay*.
https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/22/amazon-vs-amazon/#pray-i-dont-alter-it-further
Twitch blamed the cut on the high cost of bandwidth for streaming. If that sounds reasonable to you, remember: Twitch buys its bandwidth *from Amazon*. As Sam Biddle wrote, "Amazon is charging Amazon so much money to run the business via Amazon that it has no choice but to take more money from streamers."
https://twitter.com/samfbiddle/status/1572667269284777984
As Bezos suns himself aboard his yacht-so-big-it-has-a-smaller-yacht, we ask him to referee a game where he also owns one of the teams. Over and over again, he proves that he is not up to the task. Either his "relentless" customer focus was a sham, or the benefits of cheating are too tempting to ignore.
Historically, we understood that businesses couldn't be trusted to be on both sides of a transaction. The "structural separation" doctrine is one of the vital pieces of policy we've lost over 40 years of antitrust neglect. It says that important platforms can't compete with their users.
https://locusmag.com/2022/03/cory-doctorow-vertically-challenged/
For example, banks couldn't own businesses that competed with their commercial borrowers. If you own Joe's Pizza and your competitor is Citibank Pizza and you both have a hard month and can't make your payment, will you trust that Citi called in your loan but not Citibank Pizza's because they had a more promising business?
Today, all kinds of businesses have been credibly accused of self-preferencing: Google and Apple via their App Stores, Spotify via its playlists, consoles via their game stores, etc. Legislators have decided that the best way to fix this isn't structural separation, but rather, rules against self-preferencing.
Under these rules, companies will have to put "the best" results at the top of their listings. This is doomed. When Apple says it put its own ebook store ahead of Bookshop.org's app because it sincerely believes Apple Books is "better," how will we argue with this? Maybe Apple really *does* believe that. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe it does, but only because of motivated reasoning ("It is difficult to get a product manager to understand something, when their bonus depends on them not understanding it").
The irony here is that these companies' own lawyers know that a sincere promise of fairness is no assurance that your counterparty will act honorably. If the judge in Apple v. Epic was a major shareholder in Epic, or the brother-in-law of Epic's CEO, Apple's lawyers would bring down the roof demanding a new judge - even if the judge promised *really sincerely* to be neutral.
https://marker.medium.com/moral-hazard-and-monopoly-42e30eb159a8
Ultimately, it doesn't matter if Amazon's enshittification is because Bezos was a cynic or because he sold out. Once Amazon could make more money by screwing its customers, that screw-job became a fait accompli. That's why it's so important that the FTC win its bid to block the Activision-Microsoft merger:
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/23/exclusive-feds-likely-to-challenge-microsofts-69-billion-activision-takeover-00070787
The best time to prevent monopoly formation was 40 years ago. The second best time is now.
Anti-monopoly measures are slow and ponderous tools, but when it comes to tech companies, we have faster, more nimble ones. If we want to make it easy to compete with Amazon, we could - for example - use Adversarial Interoperability to turn it into a dumb pipe:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/01/dumb-pipes/#original-asin
That is, we could let local merchants use Amazon's ASIN system to tag their own inventory and produce a realtime database. Customers could browse Amazon to find the things they wanted, with a browser plugin that turned "Buy It Now" into "Buy It Now at Joe's Hardware":
https://doctorow.medium.com/view-a-sku-32721d623aee
But this only works to the extent that Amazon's search isn't totally enshittified. To that end, Fowler has a few modest proposals of his own, like requiring that at least 50% of the first six screens be given over to real results, not ads.
"Perhaps 50 percent sounds like a lot to you? But even that rule would force Amazon to show us at least some of the most-relevant results on the first screen of our device...Amazon wouldn’t comment on this suggestion."
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👡 Hey look at this
* When Bosses Were Terrorists https://jacobin.com/2022/11/bosses-terrorists-kkk-klansmen-capital/
* Who will control the computerised machines https://b2fxxx.blogspot.com/2022/11/who-will-control-computerised-machines.html
* ooh.directory https://ooh.directory
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👡 This day in history
#20yrsago Dan Gillmor: The dotcom bubble was a Big Con https://web.archive.org/web/20021215154034/https://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/columnists/dan_gillmor/ejournal/4621259.htm
#20yrsago GW Bush parodies can't air on UK TV without his permission https://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/28/world/a-bush-parody-is-banned-in-britain.html
#20yrsago Ed Felten’s radical technology agenda https://web.archive.org/web/20021127140640/https://www.chronicle.com/free/v49/i14/14a02701.htm
#20yrsago Harry Potter/Luke Skywalker/Frodo Baggins https://craphound.com/images/frodoharryskywalker_furymix.jpg
#20yrsago What is Moblogging? https://www.links.net/share/write/thefeature/From_Weblog_to_Moblog.html
#20yrsago Imagineeringland: the busiest place on Earth https://www.wired.com/2002/12/rebuilding/
#20yrsago Me (13) with Charles De Lint, 1984 https://craphound.com/images/de_Lint_with_customers.jpg
#15yrsago French law proposal will force ISPs to spy on users and terminate downloaders without trial https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2007/11/the-insanity-and-genius-of-frances-anti-file-sharing-plan/
#15yrsago DHS to firefighters: snoop on emergency victims for evidence of terrorism https://web.archive.org/web/20071127140317/https://www.rawstory.com/rawreplay/?p=127
#15yrsago How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook https://web.archive.org/web/20071128035044/http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204203573
#15yrsago Facebook privacy meltdown: company removed opt-out prior to launch https://web.archive.org/web/20081202155556/http://www.news.com/the-social/8301-13577_3-9823063-36.html
#15yrsago Voice of the London Underground canned for blogging funny fake announcement audio https://www.metafilter.com/66883/The-Voice-of-the-Underground-is-silenced
#15yrsago Mr Splashy Pants in the lead for Greenpeace whale-naming competition https://web.archive.org/web/20071121164456/http://vote.greenpeace.org/11/12/results
#15yrsago Universal Music CEO: Record industry can’t tell when geeks are lying to us about technology https://www.vulture.com/2007/11/universal_music_ceo_doug_morris.html
#15yrsago Time’s Joe Klein shoves his foot in his gob on NSA wiretapping https://www.wired.com/2007/11/time-columnist/
#15yrsago Canada’s coming DMCA will be the worst copyright yet https://memex.craphound.com/2007/11/27/canadas-coming-dmca-will-be-the-worst-copyright-yet/
#15yrsago Google says spammers are giving up https://www.wired.com/2007/11/spammers-giving-up-google-thinks-so/
#15yrsago BBC’s iPlayer sold us out — and then failed https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/nov/27/bbc.digitalvideo
#10yrsago In Finland, piracy fines are orders of magnitude higher than fines for rape, torture and murder https://web.archive.org/web/20120801000000*/http://www.iltalehti.fi/uutiset/2012112716377136_uu.shtml
#10yrsago Letter from Alabama AG to KKK Grand Wizard: “Kiss my ass” https://lettersofnote.com/2012/11/26/kiss-my-ass/
#10yrsago Hotel break-ins blamed on flaw in keycard system https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/11/26/security-flaw-in-common-keycard-locks-exploited-in-string-of-hotel-room-break-ins/
#10yrsago Collaborative critical study of one-line BASIC program written for the Commodore 64 https://10print.org
#10yrsago Toronto mayor Rob Ford is out https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/mayor-rob-ford-will-fight-removal-ruling-tooth-and-nail-1.1187334
#10yrsago Internet of the Dead: the net’s collision course with death https://locusmag.com/2012/11/cory-doctorow-the-internet-of-the-dead/
#10yrsago Coding Freedom: an anthropologist understands hacker culture https://memex.craphound.com/2012/11/25/coding-freedom-an-anthropologist-understands-hacker-culture/
#10yrsago What Disneyland’s “awkward transitions” teach us about signaling changes with physical cues https://passport2dreams.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-awkward-transitions-of-disneyland.html
#5yrsago Once you have a student’s name, birthday and SSN, the US Department of Education will give you EVERYTHING else https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/11/namedobssnfafsa-data-gold-mine/
#5yrsago Spam was nearly dead, then it became an essential tool for crime and came roaring back https://theoutline.com/post/2498/spam-is-back
#5yrago Roy Moore is still in the running because “values voters” would support Satan himself if he was anti-abortion and homophobic https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-values-that-values-voters-care-about-most-are-policies-not-character-traits/
#5yrsago Citing Trump, Philippines dictator declares himself to be a “fascist” and vows to persecute peaceful left-wing opposition groups https://www.telesurenglish.net/analysis/-Duterte-Admits-Fascism-Vows-Defeat-of-Communist-Terrorists-and-Crackdown-on-Left-20171121-0038.html
#5yrsago Jeremy Corbyn tears into the Tories over incoherent Brexit bumbling https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/23/jeremy-corbyn-brexit-tories-labour-eu
#5yrsago Researchers craft Android app that reveals menagerie of hidden spyware; legally barred from doing the same with iOS https://theintercept.com/2017/11/24/staggering-variety-of-clandestine-trackers-found-in-popular-android-apps/
#5yrsago Reverse-engineering a connected Furby toy, revealing its disturbing security defects https://web.archive.org/web/20171124134624/https://www.contextis.com/blog/dont-feed-them-after-midnight-reverse-engineering-the-furby-connect
#5yrsago Rightscorp finished Sept 2017 with $3,147 in the bank, warns investors it will likely have to shut down without more cash https://torrentfreak.com/rightscorp-revenue-from-piracy-settlements-down-48-in-2017-171125/
#5yrsago Arrogant overreach: Ajit Pai’s plan to totally destroy net neutrality may doom him in court https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/22/opinion/courts-net-neutrality-fcc.html">
#5yrsago A generation after American “libertarians” helped with mass disappearances, torture and murder of left-wing activists, Frente Amplio surge in Chilean elections https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-21/from-street-protests-to-kingmaker-chile-s-new-left-comes-of-age
#5yrsago Investigators claim that Oxbridge and other top UK universities are operating a massive, illegal surveillance dragnet aimed at students/alumni and their friends and families https://qz.com/1133808/universities-including-oxford-and-cambridge-are-accused-of-illegal-spying
#5yrsago For the next year, TV, newspapers, and the web will run massive ads from tobacco companies admitting that their products kill people, that they were engineered to be addictive, and that they covered this up https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-26/big-tobacco-forced-to-advertise-admissions-in-us/9194960
#5yrsago Melt a Nazi with the Major Toht candle https://web.archive.org/web/20171204030654/https://firebox.com/Melting-Toht-Candle/p6706
#5yrsago One of the net’s most important freedom canaries died the day the W3C greenlit web-wide DRM; what can we learn from the fight? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/10/drms-dead-canary-how-we-just-lost-web-what-we-learned-it-and-what-we-need-do-next
#5yrsago Trump appointed a loan-shark fixer as an assistant Attorney General, who then wrote a controversial memo justifying the neutering of the consumer finance watchdog https://theintercept.com/2017/11/27/white-house-memo-justifying-cfpb-takeover-was-written-by-payday-lender-attorney/
#5yrsago Comcast spams social media with Net Neutrality promises, hopes you won’t notice that they used to promise a LOT more https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/comcast-quietly-drops-promise-not-to-charge-tolls-for-internet-fast-lanes/
#5yrsago Religious fanatics go to the Supreme Court for the First Amendment right to trick women into bearing unwanted children https://theintercept.com/2017/11/27/the-first-amendment-case-that-could-upend-abortion-law/
#5yrsago How an influential economics paper used imaginary environmental overregulation to spur low-density luxury housing https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/hsieh-moretti-affordable-housing-free-market-fantasy
#5yrsago Wells Fargo execs sealed their bonuses by gouging the bank’s business customers https://thehill.com/policy/finance/362073-wells-fargo-overcharged-hundreds-of-customers-report/
#1yrago The Cuban vaccines https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/28/somos-cuba/#omishambles
#1yrago UK ICO: surveillance advertising is dead https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/26/ico-ico/#market-structuring
#1yrago McKinsey taught Big Pharma how to price-gouge https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/25/strikesgiving/#cool-story-pharma-bro
#1yrago Unions are finally fighting two-tier contracts https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/25/strikesgiving/#shed-a-tier
#1yrago The Tesla-financial complex: When your financial instruments are better than your cars https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#R
#1yrago Spaniards fight Wall Street landlords https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#fuckin-aardvarks
Colophon (permalink)
Today's top sources: Slashdot (https://slashdot.org).
Currently writing:
* The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. Friday's progress: 504 words (66110 words total)
* Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. (92849 words total) - ON PAUSE
* A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
* The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, a nonfiction book about interoperability for Verso. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW
* Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EXPERT REVIEW
* Moral Hazard, a short story for MIT Tech Review's 12 Tomorrows. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION
* Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FINAL DRAFT COMPLETE
* A post-GND utopian novel, "The Lost Cause." FINISHED
* A cyberpunk noir thriller novel, "Red Team Blues." FINISHED
Currently reading: Analogia by George Dyson.
Latest podcast: Sound Money https://craphound.com/news/2022/09/11/sound-money/
Upcoming appearances:
* Conversation with Tim Wu, Informed/Knight Foundation (Miami), Nov 30
https://informed22.interkinnect.com/
* Chokepoint Capitalism: A Conversation/Northeastern University (Boston/webcast), Dec 5
https://northeastern.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_SpHa1dszSZWPzdLUdlbQcA
* Library Learning Experience/American Library Association (New Orleans), Jan 27-30
https://www.2023.alaliblearnx.org/cory-doctorow
* Australian Digital Alliance Copyright Forum (Canberra), Feb 17
https://digital.org.au/2022/11/08/doctorow-giblin-first-speaker-announcement-ada-forum-2023/
* Antitrust, Regulation and the Political Economy (Brussels), Mar 2
https://www.brusselsconference.com/registration
Upcoming appearances:
* Conversation with Tim Wu, Informed/Knight Foundation (Miami), Nov 30
https://informed22.interkinnect.com/
* Chokepoint Capitalism: A Conversation/Northeastern University (Boston/webcast), Dec 5
https://northeastern.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_SpHa1dszSZWPzdLUdlbQcA
* Library Learning Experience/American Library Association (New Orleans), Jan 27-30
https://www.2023.alaliblearnx.org/cory-doctorow
* Australian Digital Alliance Copyright Forum (Canberra), Feb 17
https://digital.org.au/2022/11/08/doctorow-giblin-first-speaker-announcement-ada-forum-2023/
* Antitrust, Regulation and the Political Economy (Brussels), Mar 2
https://www.brusselsconference.com/registration
Recent appearances:
* New Books Network
https://newbooksnetwork.com/chokepoint-capitalism
* Business Without Bullshit
https://open.spotify.com/episode/04GWeryHzC1uWgZrmEjSDH?si=36c048e0fc264437&nd=1
* Team Human interview
https://www.teamhuman.fm/episodes/229-cory-doctorow
Latest books:
* "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59 (print edition: https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.
Upcoming books:
* Red Team Blues: "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books, April 2023
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(Latest Medium column: "Poe vs. Property: A detective story of shifting rationalizations" https://doctorow.medium.com/poe-vs-property-ef918f1724f3)
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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
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