The AI Enshittification Bubble | Cory Doctorow

**Demetri Kofinas** (0:00)
What's up, everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas, and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in this episode of Hidden Forces is Cory Doctorow, a science fiction author, journalist, and digital rights activist who coined the term insidification and whose recent book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, takes a harsh look at the economics of an AI bubble that he believes will prove more damaging than the 2008 financial crisis and meet or exceed the equity sell-off experienced during the 2020 COVID pandemic. Cory and I spent the first hour of our episode discussing the central argument made in his book insidification, which goes beyond simply describing how things are getting worse from the extractive nature of online relationships to the soul-sucking experience of dealing with burned out call center operators or mindless chatbots, and puts forward a compelling theory for why they are, based on observations about what's happened to competition, regulation, interoperability, and the bargaining power of workers. From there, we compare the prevailing business models and unit economics of the early web companies and large platforms to those leading the charge in AI, and why he believes the latter are not only structurally unprofitable, but existentially dependent on a growth narrative of runaway AI that will run out of capital before it ever delivers on the promise and profits that its investors are banking on. The Second Hour continues our conversation about the AI boom, how retirement accounts and index fund concentration has raised the stakes of an eventual bust, and how new forms of regulatory forbearance, including the mechanics of the recent SpaceX public listing, along with other more explicit government bailouts, will be needed to prop up these otherwise unsustainable valuations. We close our episode with a conversation about the narrative gap between AI-driven job displacement and what the data actually tells us, as well as where the value in AI may actually accrue once the bubble deflates, from open-source models and cheap hardware to the skilled workers and the infrastructure needed to capitalize on.
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Cory Doctorow, welcome to Hidden Forces.

**Cory Doctorow** (3:45)
Hi. Nice to be chatting with you.

**Demetri Kofinas** (3:47)
It's great to have you on Cory. I actually was telling... I'm trying to remember who connected us, but whoever it was, I was telling them that I'd wanted to have you on for a long time actually. And I'd been using your term in shitification long before I actually knew that it was you that created that term. When did you first come up with that terminology?

**Cory Doctorow** (4:05)
The first time I used it, I was on vacation. We were staying in a little cabin on a mountain in a cloud forest in Puerto Rico, and we had microwave relay internet. And really the one thing that everyone seems to know about microwave relay internet is it doesn't go through clouds. And we were in a cloud forest, which made it very hard to get our internet access. And we were a couple hours from town down a hard muddy road. And so before we go into town, we'd have a little look and see on TripAdvisor what was open. And TripAdvisor was loading about 75 trackers.
And we get through about 40 of them before we time out. So you just get the SVG of their little Fabico, the little TripAdvisor icon, just filling the whole screen and nothing else. So in a fit of peak, I went on Twitter and said, does anyone at TripAdvisor ever been on a trip? This is the most inshittified website I've ever seen. And a few people kind of chuckled. And a year or two later when I needed a term to describe this pathology that I was writing about, I thought, well, some people thought that term was a little funny, I'll use it here.