The Jordan Harbinger Show

1280: Cory Doctorow | Why Everything Got Worse and What to Do About It

February 3, 2026

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  • The degradation of online platforms, termed "inshittification" by Cory Doctorow on *The Jordan Harbinger Show*, is primarily caused by policy decisions that foster monopolies, not by consumer behavior or the malice of individual CEOs. 
  • Tech giants like Google maintain market dominance and degrade service quality because regulatory failures—such as allowing anticompetitive mergers and paying competitors like Apple billions to suppress alternatives—remove the market discipline that would otherwise force them to provide value. 
  • Legal frameworks like the DMCA criminalize security research and reverse engineering, which prevents competitors from creating interoperable alternatives (adversarial interoperability) and allows manufacturers to impose high switching costs and control over devices, even life-critical medical equipment. 
  • The obsession of growth-stage firms with maintaining high Price-to-Earnings (P/E) ratios incentivizes constant pivots (like Metaverse or AI) to signal future growth, even if current ventures are unprofitable, to avoid market panic selling. 
  • Tech monopolies like Amazon and Facebook leverage their market dominance to engage in 'inshittification'—degrading product quality or user experience while extracting more value through practices like predatory pricing, surveillance, and pay-to-play search rankings (payola). 
  • The shift from ownership to subscription models, enabled by digital access controls, fundamentally erodes private property rights, allowing companies to remotely control or revoke access to purchased goods like software features or e-books. 

Segments

Sponsor Reads and Show Intro
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(00:00:00)
  • Key Takeaway: LinkedIn Hiring Pro streamlines small business hiring using AI screening, while Odoo offers an all-in-one business software platform to replace disparate applications.
  • Summary: LinkedIn Hiring Pro assists small teams by drafting jobs, surfacing candidates, and handling initial AI screening to save time. Odoo integrates CRM, inventory, accounting, and HR into a single platform for growing businesses. The Jordan Harbinger Show aims to decode wisdom from fascinating people into practical advice for listeners.
Defining Inshittification and Blame
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(00:02:25)
  • Key Takeaway: Inshittification describes the degradation of platforms into dumpster fires of scams and pop-ups, a process driven by policy failures that enable monopolies, not consumer fault.
  • Summary: Platforms like Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter degrade because they eliminate competition and lock in users, leading to worse service and higher costs for consumers. Cory Doctorow argues that blaming consumers for not ‘shopping their way out’ of monopolies is akin to blaming individuals for climate change. The root cause lies with policymakers who promoted the efficiency of monopolies, creating the ‘inshittogenic policy environment.’
Facebook’s Acquisition Strategy
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(00:08:13)
  • Key Takeaway: Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to acquire Instagram was explicitly documented as a strategy to trap users leaving Facebook, a move approved by regulators who favored monopoly consolidation.
  • Summary: Zuckerberg’s internal memo confirmed buying Instagram was necessary because users hated Facebook and wouldn’t return, illustrating the ‘better to buy than to compete’ philosophy. The Obama administration’s DOJ waved this merger through because regulators, influenced by pro-monopoly economic theories, approved nearly all mergers during that era. This pattern of eliminating competitors extends to Google, which relies heavily on acquisitions like YouTube for core services.
Google’s Deliberate Search Degradation
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(00:12:20)
  • Key Takeaway: Internal Google memos reveal executives intentionally made search results worse to force users to perform multiple searches, thereby increasing ad impressions and revenue growth when market share stalled.
  • Summary: Google executives fought over whether to prioritize technical excellence (Ben Gomes) or revenue growth (Prabhagar Raghavan) when search revenue growth stalled at 90% market share. Raghavan advocated turning off features like auto-correct and context awareness to force users to search multiple times, capitalizing on the $20 billion paid annually to Apple to keep Google the default search engine. This demonstrates that poor search quality is a deliberate business choice, not an accident.
Switching Costs and Policy
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(00:20:11)
  • Key Takeaway: Switching costs, which trap consumers in monopolistic services, are not natural occurrences but are created or lowered by specific regulatory policies.
  • Summary: Regulations like number portability for mobile carriers drastically lower switching costs by making it easy to move services, leading to competition among MVNOs like Mint Mobile. Conversely, laws like Section 1201 of the DMCA make it a felony to reverse engineer devices, effectively raising switching costs by making it illegal to fix or bypass manufacturer-imposed access controls.
Medical Device Security and Legal Barriers
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(00:42:29)
  • Key Takeaway: Manufacturers like Medtronic exploit anti-circumvention laws to enforce monopolies on repairs and updates for critical medical devices, creating life-threatening security vulnerabilities.
  • Summary: Medtronic, which pretends to be Irish for tax purposes, booby-traps devices like pacemakers and ventilators, preventing hospitals from using third-party parts or performing repairs without paying their technicians exorbitant fees. This practice was deadly during the pandemic when travel restrictions prevented Medtronic technicians from unlocking ventilators. The law makes it a felony for security researchers to reveal these vulnerabilities or provide tools to bypass the firmware locks, prioritizing business models over patient safety.
AI Spending Paradox
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(00:48:48)
  • Key Takeaway: AI companies are losing unprecedented amounts of money per user, with GPU owners only avoiding losses if they cannot deploy their hardware.
  • Summary: AI companies are experiencing massive financial losses with every user interaction, a situation so extreme that only those who failed to install their GPUs are not losing money. The high cost of GPUs, even without accounting for electricity, highlights the current unsustainable economic model of AI deployment. This spending is driven by the need to maintain a growth narrative for investors.
Growth Stock Valuation Mechanics
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(00:49:13)
  • Key Takeaway: Growth firms command high Price-to-Earnings (P/E) ratios because their stock is treated as currency for acquisitions and hiring, unlike mature firms.
  • Summary: Investors value growing firms highly based on their potential, reflected in a high P/E ratio, allowing them to use stock as cash for M&A and talent acquisition. Mature firms, even with similar profits, receive lower valuations because their growth potential is limited. This mechanism allows growth companies to perpetually fund expansion by effectively printing stock via spreadsheet entries.
The Growth Target Paradox
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(00:51:08)
  • Key Takeaway: When growth inevitably slows due to market saturation (e.g., 95% market share), investors immediately re-rate the company as mature, causing massive stock sell-offs.
  • Summary: The growth narrative must continue indefinitely because failure to meet growth targets causes investors to instantly devalue the company from a growth stock to a mature one, resulting in severe financial penalties. Mark Zuckerberg’s pivot to the Metaverse was a direct signal to the market to maintain growth potential outside of the saturated social media sector. This dynamic explains the obsession tech leaders have with chasing adjacent markets like Web3, AI, or the Metaverse.
Solipsism and Tech Leaders
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(00:53:33)
  • Key Takeaway: The belief systems of billionaire tech leaders, including concepts like long-termism and the metaverse, are rooted in a form of solipsism where they disbelieve in the reality of most other people.
  • Summary: The ability to inflict large-scale misery or pursue abstract, unproven ventures like the metaverse stems from a psychological detachment where others are viewed as non-real entities (NPCs). This mindset allows for a moral calculus, such as purchasing indulgences through ’earning to give,’ justifying current negative actions based on speculative future happiness for trillions of potential entities. The continuous chase for the next big thing, like AGI, is driven by the need to sustain the share price rather than sincere belief in the immediate viability of the technology.
Amazon’s Prime Lock-in and Tax
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(00:56:21)
  • Key Takeaway: Amazon Prime has ‘rotted the brain’ of consumers into expecting impossible delivery speeds, while the platform enforces ‘most favored nation’ pricing that forces independent sellers to raise prices across all retail channels.
  • Summary: Amazon’s logistics network, built at a high human cost, has conditioned consumers to expect two-day shipping, making it difficult for smaller e-commerce sites to compete without similar infrastructure. The ‘most favored nation’ clause prevents sellers from offering lower prices on their own websites, effectively exporting Amazon’s high fee structure (50-60%) to the entire economy. Consequently, consumers pay an ‘Amazon tax’ on goods purchased everywhere, even if they avoid using Amazon directly.
Amazon Advertising as Payola
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(01:01:59)
  • Key Takeaway: Amazon’s advertising business functions as illegal payola, where sellers bid for search placement, resulting in the top search results being significantly more expensive and often worse quality than organic matches.
  • Summary: Amazon charges sellers billions annually for search result placement through an auction system, which is functionally equivalent to illegal payola in old radio scandals. This forces sellers to charge more, meaning the top result is, on average, 29% more expensive than the best match. Consumers must navigate confusing unit pricing and scroll deep into search results to find the best value, as the system prioritizes paid placement over quality.
IP Theft and Seller Exploitation
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(01:08:07)
  • Key Takeaway: Amazon spies on its third-party sellers using FBA data to clone successful products (Amazon Basics), often driving the original inventors out of business.
  • Summary: By requiring sellers to use Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), the company gains full insight into supply chains, allowing them to replicate successful products, a practice Jeff Bezos initially denied but later admitted to. Sellers are further damaged by knockoffs using random letter strings to bypass Amazon’s trademark checks, and by the platform automatically miscategorizing products to exploit review history. This predatory behavior demonstrates that when Amazon wants surveillance, it is impeccable, but when policing fraud, it is negligent.
The End of Property Rights
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(01:20:23)
  • Key Takeaway: The move to subscription services and digital rights management allows companies like Adobe and BMW to retroactively control or remove functionality from products users believed they owned, signaling the end of private property.
  • Summary: When Adobe stopped paying the Pantone license fee, it threatened to strip the color data from designers’ existing, previously created documents, demonstrating the ability to steal value from past work. Similarly, car manufacturers charge monthly fees for features like heated seats or full acceleration curves that are already physically installed in the vehicle. This dynamic transforms owners into tenants, as they lack ‘sole and despotic dominion’ over their property, unlike traditional corporations.
Algorithmic Wage Discrimination
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(01:26:32)
  • Key Takeaway: Gig economy apps utilize algorithmic wage discrimination, leveraging surveillance data like a worker’s desperation (e.g., credit card debt or low-ball acceptance rates) to offer lower wages.
  • Summary: Uber drivers self-sort into ‘pickers’ (who take every ride) and ‘picky’ drivers; the former are identified as desperate and offered systematically lower wages. This practice extends to contracted nurses who are offered lower pay based on their personal financial data, such as credit card debt, obtained via data brokers. This exploitation is facilitated by regulatory capture and the opaque nature of apps, which prevents workers from sharing wage offers to force competitive bidding.