In this live interview recorded in November at Web Summit 2025 in Lisbon, Cory Doctorow returns to Revolution.Social to talk about building alternatives to “enshittified” digital platforms.
"Apps are websites that are illegal to protect your privacy while you use them," Cory explains. "The reason companies are so horny to get you to use their apps is because they can't be modified in that way. No one's ever installed an ad blocker for an app."
Cory and Rabble also discuss how Europe could export jailbreaking tools as industrial policy, why other countries should respond to American tariffs with a targeted strike against the tech industry, and why tech workers should have unionized when they had leverage.
Chapters:
00:00:00 Introduction
00:03:06 Anticircumvention Laws & GDPR
00:06:54 Apple and Google's DRM Controls
00:09:14 Chokepoint Capitalism and the EuroStack
00:11:10 Adversarial Interoperability
00:14:09 Printer Ink vs. Stallion Semen
00:15:38 The AI Bubble Will Pop
00:18:48 Tech Bosses Aren't Afraid of Their Workers
Read Cory’s new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It https://bookshop.org/p/books/enshittification-why-everything-suddenly-got-worse-and-what-to-do-about-it-cory-doctorow/d3f8483b158906ce
Follow Rabble on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rabble.nz
Follow the podcast: https://episodes.fm/1824528874
This episode was produced and edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm, and executive produced by Alice Chan from Flock Marketing.
To learn more about Rabble’s social media bill of rights, and sign up for our newsletter, visit https://revolution.social/
