The Enshitification Life Cycle With Cory Doctorow

As a holiday treat, we bring you a new conversation with author and Organized Money alum Cory Doctorow about his new book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. Recorded earlier this year at a live book event, David asks Cory to expand on the thesis of the book: that digital platforms are now locked in a cycle of decay, seeing our technology become less intuitive, less useful, and less private. For Cory, this cycle is a choice, driven by government policy favoring lax antitrust enforcement, strong digital rights management, and wholesale regulatory capture. In this wide ranging conversation they discuss how market consolidation and DRM has shifted the balance of power away from workers, who are no longer able to defend themselves with the technology they are forced to use. They also get into the history of digital rights management, why Cory isn't on Audible, algorithmic pricing, and how coalition building and policy change might just be the way out of the enshitification cycle. Organized Money will be back in the new year. Thanks for listening! 

The Warner Bros. deal could decimate the film industry in California, and yet almost no state-level politicians have spoken out about it. Today on the show, Matt and David talk to a California gubernatorial candidate who has vocally opposed the deal: Tom Steyer. Tom is a former financier, 2020 presidential candidate, and billionaire, who happens to be the most vocally anti-monopoly candidate in the race. Tom's background in business and personal wealth makes him an unusual candidate, but it also gives him a sense of how money and competition work than most candidates with anti-monopoly policies. We talk with him about why he opposes the Warner Bros. deal, how to reign in utility boards, housing regulation, and what, exactly, "affordability" means. This is our last regular episode of Organized Money for 2025, but we'll have a special episode recorded live for you next week, and see you again in the new year. 

College sports is a multibillion dollar business, but until a few years ago the athletes didn't see a penny of it. In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that the NCAA, the organization that governs college sports, had violated antitrust laws, and athletes gained the right to monetize their appearances and endorsements. This year, for the first time, athletes will receive revenue sharing from NCAA, the result of another lawsuit.After decades of generating billions for everyone but themselves, athletes are finally starting to share in the value they create. So why is this moment being described as a crisis, with new legislation in Congress that would once again restrict what athletes can earn?Today on the show Matt and David talk with Katie Van Dyck, Senior Legal Fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project and former Attorney Advisor at the Federal Trade Commission, about the NCAA and whether this so-called crisis is really an effort to turn back the clock to a time when student athletes had far less bargaining power and influence in the very fields where they compete.If you love Organized Money, support us! Go to Organizedmoney.fm to subscribe to our newsletter, or Organizedmoney.fm/donate to throw us a donation. It helps us keep the lights on!

With its promise to displace jobs and disrupt daily life, AI and large language models have formed a unique market and social bubble: one that nearly everyone hates. Despite little revenue, billions of dollars are promised by hyperscalers like Google and Meta to help build out AI data centers in increasingly arcane financing schemes that are propping up the otherwise meager economy. Today on the show Matt and David invite two guests: Advait Arun, Senior Associate for Capital Markets at the Center for Public Enterprise and author of a recent paper on data centers, Bubble or Nothing; and Sarah Meyers-West, who is the co-executive director of the AI NOW Institute, to discuss the strange place we've found ourselves in. We discuss the state of the AI economy, the complex ways these data centers are financed (including old favorites like credit default swaps), how the bubble might pop, and what the consequences might be. If you love Organized Money, support us! Go to Organizedmoney.fm to subscribe to our newsletter, or Organizedmoney.fm/donate to throw us a donation. It helps us keep the lights on!

On today's show, David and Matt sit down with Tim Wu, the man who coined the term “net neutrality”, about his new book, The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity. They discuss how tech platforms went from scrappy innovators, enabled by a robust regulatory state, to the massive, extractive platforms we know today. Wu walks through the early idealism of the internet, the missed warnings about platform power from the likes of Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt, and the moment Silicon Valley embraced monopoly as a business model. Along the way, he connects the dots between Big Tech, rising inequality, and the political risks of letting a few companies control so much of modern life. 

It’s one of the most surprising and least understood stories in American agriculture: the monopoly over the seeds that grow our food. Farmers are facing a “seed squeeze,” where two companies, Bayer and Corteva, control 90% of the seed corn market, driving up prices even as crop profits fall. Matt and David speak with Independent seed producer John Latham and industry veteran Todd Martin about how intellectual property, patents, and corporate consolidation have turned seeds into billion-dollar assets to the point that farmers sometimes destroy perfectly good seed just to survive and ultimately impact your grocery bill.Check out John's testimony from the Senate Hearing on Competition Issues in the Seed & Fertilizer Industries. If you love Organized Money, support us! Go to Organizedmoney.fm to subscribe to our newsletter, or Organizedmoney.fm/donate to throw us a donation. It helps us keep the lights on!

From Zohran Mamdani in New York City, to Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, Democratic candidates are putting populist economic messages at the center of their campaigns. On today’s show, Matt and David break down the dynamics of this week’s elections and share their predictions. Then, they’re joined by Organized Money alum Lori Wallach, director of Rethink Trade at the American Economic Liberties Project, to preview Wednesday’s Supreme Court arguments on Trump’s tariffs. They discuss whether the justices will allow Trump his unprecedented power over trade policy or, like the lower courts, move to rein in the executive's power.

Today on the show, Matt and David sit down with Sam Levine and Stephanie Nguyen, formerly of the FTC under Lina Khan, to discuss the dark side of customer loyalty programs like frequent flyer miles, corporate discount cards, and ordering apps from chains like Starbucks and McDonalds. Their new paper, The Loyalty Trap: How Loyalty Programs Hook Us with Deals, Hack our Brains, and Hike Our Prices, exposes the lengths these programs go to to get you into their ecosystem in order to harvest your data, exploit it, and manipulate you to spend more, sometimes with surveillance pricing strategies. Together they discuss why these programs have proliferated, why they are so effective, and why they have been so difficult to regulate.If you love Organized Money, support us! Go to Organizedmoney.fm to subscribe to our newsletter, or Organizedmoney.fm/donate to throw us a donation. It helps us keep the lights on!

This week on Organized Money, David and Matt sit down with Sahaj Sharda and David Barclay, co-founders of The Anti-Fraud Company,  a scrappy new startup aiming to turn corporate whistleblowing into a business model. Sharda, a 27-year-old anti-monopolist and author of The College Cartel, and Barkley, a former FTC attorney known for busting healthcare fraud, explain how they’re using data tools, lawsuits, and a solid dose of nerve to tackle the half-trillion dollars in government fraud that drives up prices for everyone. It’s a new approach to turning outrage into action, or, as they put it, “snitching as a service.”If you love Organized Money, support us! Go to Organizedmoney.fm to subscribe to our newsletter, or Organizedmoney.fm/donate to throw us a donation. It helps us keep the lights on!

Investment in AI infrastructure has exploded over the last few years, with big players like Google, Meta, OpenAI, Nvidia, and Oracle, striking deals involving hundreds of billions of dollars to build out AI data centers. These deals are single-handedly buoying the otherwise-flailing US economy, but where are these billions actually coming from? And why do all these deals seem to involve the same players in increasingly circular arrangements? Even the most optimistic observers are starting to state the obvious: we're in an AI bubble. Today on the show, Matt and David talk to Herb Greenberg of Herb Greenberg's Red Flag Alerts to discuss the hubris of the current moment, how this moment is both alike and different from past bubbles, and how this thing might pop. If you love Organized Money, support us! Go to Organizedmoney.fm to subscribe to our newsletter, or Organizedmoney.fm/donate to throw us a donation. It helps us keep the lights on!