Technopolitics
Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
Cory Doctorow begins the episode with an extensive update on his upcoming global speaking tour and personal news regarding his new Framework l
Key takeaways
- The AI sector's total expenditures have surged from approximately $700 billion to over $1.4 trillion annually.
- Langdon Winner's essay 'Do Artifacts Have Politics?' provides a framework for distinguishing between politics in deployment and politics in technical characteristics.
Main topics
- AI investment bubbles
- Technopolitics and Langdon Winner
Notable quotes
Counting words, even all the words ever uttered, is not theft.
Conclusion
The episode offers a profound meditation on how society can decouple u
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:11) Well, hello and welcome back to the Cory Doctorow podcast. I am back at my desk in London for a change. I'm not here for long, though. I'm about to go back on the road. Catch me in Berkeley on September the 24th at UC Berkeley's Samuelson Clinic, celebrating 25 years at the digital frontier. In Edmonton at the Edmonton Public Library on September the 28th for a keynote called Elbows Up. Three talks in Cambridge, Massachusetts. all on September the 30th. It's a busy day. I'm speaking at the Media Lab at MIT at lunchtime on the post-American internet, possibilities for a new internet created by an American hermit kingdom. I'm speaking mid-afternoon at MIT's EmTech conference, Rethinking Our Relationship with AI. And in the evening, I'm doing a public event jointly hosted by the Harvard Berkman Center and Northeastern University's Computer Science Department called The Paradox of Enchidification and Reverse Centaurs. So I hope to see you at one or all three of those. It's going to be a busy day. I'm coming in on the red eye from Edmonton the night before. It's going to be quite a shambles. Boy, that's not in my notes. But right after that. I will be in Brighton at the Green Party Conference speaking about digital sovereignty. And then I'm flying back to the U.S. to speak at Notre Dame on October the 6th in South Bend and at the Hudson, Ohio Library on October the 7th. Calgary on October the 8th for WordFest. Winnipeg on October the 9th at McNally Robinson. And then to Vancouver for the Vancouver Writers Festival on October the 19th and 22nd. On the 19th, I'm on a panel called Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice. And on the 22nd, I'm doing a keynote called Life After AI. And in between, I will be at Monroe's Books in Victoria on October the 20th. Then Ottawa. Life After AI at the Ottawa Writers Festival, October the 24th, and Kill Kenny Ireland for the Kilkenomics Festival, November 6th through 8th. I will be back in British Columbia for the first time on Vancouver Island at the Sid Williams Theatre on November the 10th, and then in Vancouver proper for the BC Policy Solutions Gala on November the 12th. And then way, way away from now, next autumn, September 2nd through 6th, I will be the Toastmaster, one of the guests of honor for the World Science Fiction Convention in Montreal. So I hope to get you one or all of those. And if none of those work for you, well, I have this graphic novel coming out called Unauthorized Bread. based on my novella from my 2019 collection, Radicalized. I was adapted by the wonderful Blue Delacuante, and I am going to be doing a little tour for that in April, built around some academic talks as well. So those dates are still being finalized, but I'm going to be in Seattle and Chicago. And then one or all we don't know yet of San Francisco, Portland, and Minneapolis. And then I'll be in L.A. and then likely Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, possibly Halifax, and then New York City and Ithaca. So that'll all be in April and early May if none of those other dates work for you. So my big news for like the thing that's making me really happy and excited right now is I have a new laptop. So five years ago, I bought the first generation of Framework laptop. This is an open source hardware laptop that can be maintained by its owners. and you can upgrade them just by putting new mainboards in them whenever they come out. And I had gone through five annual mainboard upgrades on my old Framework laptop and really taken it everywhere, dropped it several times, replaced almost all of the parts at one time or another to upgrade them or because I'd snap them. And now after five years, I decided it was time to buy a brand new laptop, something I used to do every year, but I didn't have to do because I had the Framework and it was upgradable. But I bought the Framework 13 Pro and I've... got that all set up along with some extremely expensive RAM because fuck you AI that's why and a really expensive four terabyte hard drive because fuck you that's why thank you AI and boy I love this machine it's got a touchscreen I haven't had a touchscreen laptop 15 years 10 years and I'm finding that super interesting and useful although the smudges are driving me crazy and It's just, it's a beautifully made computer. I cannot say enough good things about it. I did have to do a little tweaking with Ubuntu. It was hanging on suspend, but a little Googling around and I figured that out. And yeah, so that's really lovely. And my kid is back at university. She's in Santa Cruz. moved into her new group house with a bunch of other students and having a lovely time there. She just volunteered at a skateboard event for special needs kids at the weekend and met a bunch of cool people that she's really excited to be hanging out with. And she's back on the dance team. She's back on the horses team. I'm going to actually come to Santa Cruz for her birthday in early February and do a talk at the university and also at the Santa Cruz bookshop. So if you're around Santa Cruz in early February, you can catch me then. Maybe wish my kid a happy birthday if she comes out for either of those. Unfortunately, I can't invite you along for the dinner. And what else? Oh, yeah, I just got back from Budapest. I spoke at the Brain Bar Conference, and it was my first time in Budapest since Orban took power. I used to lecture most summers at the Central European University, which Orban shut down. It was very interesting to get back. What a beautiful city. I'd really missed it. Thank you to everyone who came out there. It was great to see you. I had a real sold-out house for that event. Anyway, so this week on the podcast, I'm going to be reading to you my latest Locus column, something called Technopolitics. It was inspired by something I read by Ginger Coons. She's a researcher and scholar that I met when she was a grad student at the University of Toronto, working on, of all things, open source printer ink, and who now just kind of is an all-around gadfly, as far as I know. She's in Berlin, seems to be thriving. I haven't seen her in a long time, but I subscribe to her blog. And she wrote something about an essay called Do Artifacts Have Politics? And that inspired me to write something about the same subject. So without further ado, from the September 2026 edition of Locus Magazine, here is Technopolitics. Speaker 1 (6:58) It's one thing to be anti-AI in the sense of believing that AI-generated slop, disinformation, and defigs are bad. That AI companies that hope to con your boss into firing you and replacing you with AI that can't do your job are bad. That betting the economy on AI is bad. That betting the human habitable planet Earth on AI is bad. That running roughshod over local environmental rules and seizing farmland for data centers is bad. Those are all good reasons to be anti-AI. But being anti-AI in the sense of opposing the statistical inference techniques we call AI is weird. So it was being anti-AI in the sense of opposing the use of models that were created using large language corpuses because it's inherently wrong to compute the frequency with which words occur in written language. And it's also weird to be anti-AI in the sense of opposing AI because someone somewhere used AI in a way that was gross, harmful, or exploitative. Today, the two kinds of anti-AI are mostly a distinction without