Welcome to Big Tech's'Age of Extraction' In his new book, antitrust scholar and former White House adviser Tim Wu argues that tech giants are bleeding you dry--and lays out a plan to stop them. Growing up in Toronto, Tim Wu had a classmate who was the progeny of Communist parents. His name was Cory Doctorow. Yes, the same guy who just published a book about enshittification . Though they shared a general world view, the boyhood pals also had arguments, with Wu typically taking a less radical stance than his buddy.

Cory Doctorow's theory of "enshittification" explains how tech platforms rot from within. As AI grows more profitable--and powerful--it risks the same fate. Cory Doctorow speaks onstage during Unfinished Live at The Shed in New York City. As one does these days, I ran my itinerary past GPT-5 for sightseeing suggestions and restaurant recommendations. The bot reported that the top choice for dinner near our hotel in Rome was a short walk down Via Margutta.

In 1989, Sir Tim revolutionized the online world. Today, in the era of misinformation, addictive algorithms, and extractive monopolies, he thinks he can do it again. Berners-Lee is building tools that aim to resist the Big Tech platforms, give users control over their own data, and prevent A.I. from hollowing out the open web. Tim Berners-Lee may have the smallest fame-to-impact ratio of anyone living. Strangers hardly ever recognize his face; on "Jeopardy!," Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, in 1989, but people informed of this often respond with a joke: Wasn't that Al Gore? Still, his creation keeps growing, absorbing our reality in the process. If you're reading this online, Berners-Lee wrote the hypertext markup language (HTML) that your browser is interpreting. He's the necessary condition behind everything from Amazon to Wikipedia, and if A.I. brings about what Sam Altman recently called "the gentle singularity"--or else buries us in slop--that, too, will be an outgrowth of his global collective consciousness. Somehow, the man responsible for all of this is a mild-mannered British Unitarian who loves model trains and folk music, and recently celebrated his seventieth birthday with a picnic on a Welsh mountain. An emeritus professor at Oxford and M.I.T., he divides his time between the U.K., Canada, and Concord, Massachusetts, where he and his wife, Rosemary Leith, live in a stout greige house older than the Republic. On the summer morning when I visited, geese honked and cicadas whined. Leith, an investor and a nonprofit director who co-founded a dot-com-era women's portal called Flametree, greeted me at the door. "We're basically guardians of the house," she said, showing me its antique features. I almost missed Berners-Lee in the converted-barn kitchen, standing, expectantly, in a blue plaid shirt. He shook my hand, then glanced at Leith. Minutes later, he and I were gliding across a pond behind the house. Berners-Lee is bronzed and wiry, with sharp cheekbones and faraway blue eyes, the right one underscored by an X-shaped wrinkle. A twitchier figure emerged when he spoke.

Babies trapped in space, zombie football stars and cat soap operas: welcome to YouTube in the era of AI video. Nearly one in 10 of the fastest growing YouTube channels globally are showing AI-generated content only, as breakthroughs in the technology spur a flood of artificial content. Guardian analysis of data from the analytics firm Playboard shows that out of the top 100 fastest growing channels in July this year, nine were showing purely AI-generated content. The offerings include channels featuring bizarre narratives such as a baby crawling into a pre-launch space rocket, an undead Cristiano Ronaldo and melodramas featuring humanised cats. AI video generation has surged amid the release of powerful tools such as Google's Veo 3 and Elon Musk's Grok Imagine.

I didn't know I was dead until I saw it on Google. When I searched my name, there it was: a picture of my smiling face next to the text "Tom Faber was a physicist and publisher, and he was a university lecturer at Cambridge for 35 years". Apparently I died on 27 July 2004, aged 77. This was news to me. The problem was the picture. When you search the name of a notable person, Google may create what it calls a "knowledge panel", a little box with basic information taken from Wikipedia. Somewhere along the way, the algorithm had confused pictures of my face with the biography of another man who shared my name. According to his obituary, he was "a distinguished physicist with a literary hinterland". Google provides a feedback form to resolve this type of bug. I filled it in several times, but it made no difference.

I first spoke with Cory Doctorow two years ago. I was trying to get a handle on the sci-fi genre known as cyberpunk, most famously associated with the work of William Gibson. Doctorow, who is often described as a post-cyberpunk writer, is both a theorist-practitioner of science fiction and a vigorous commentator on technology and policymaking; his answers to my questions were long, thoughtful, and full of examples. And so, after that first talk, I made plans to speak with him again, not for research purposes but as the basis for the interview below. Doctorow, who is fifty-one, grew up in Toronto, the descendant of Jewish immigrants from what are now Poland, Russia, and Ukraine.

Set the first and last books in Cory Doctorow's epic, three-book Little Brother cypherpunk saga side-by-side, and they read a bit like a creative writing master class on telling two starkly opposite stories from the same prompt. The Department of Homeland responds by turning San Francisco into a fascist, total-surveillance police state. The protagonist, a digitally gifted, troublemaking teen, must decide how to respond. In the first Little Brother installment, which Doctorow published in 2008, the answer seemed righteously inevitable: The hero uses his hacker skills to fight back. Specifically, he and his plucky hacker friends figure out how to jailbreak their Xboxes and channel the video game consoles' encrypted comms over the Tor network to create Xnet, a cheap, anonymous, surveillance-proof system for organizing protest and foiling the panopticon cops by injecting false data into their totalitarian schemes. In Doctorow's third work in the series, publishing this week and titled Attack Surface, the protagonist takes an altogether different path.

Bots are a lot like humans: Some are cute. Some are annoying ... and a little racist. Bots serve their creators and society as helpers, spies, educators, servants, lab technicians, and artists. In the 2010s, automation got better, cheaper, and way less avoidable. That means driving directions are more reliable, instant translations are almost good enough, and everyone gets to be an adequate portrait photographer, all powered by artificial intelligence.

The Decade, Reviewed looks back at the 2010s and how it changed human society forever. From 2010 to 2019, our species experienced seismic shifts in science, technology, entertainment, transportation, and even the very planet we call home. This is how the past ten years have changed us. Bots are a lot like humans: Some are cute. Some are annoying ... and a little racist.

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner is delighted to welcome Cory Doctorow, a pioneering international commentator on internet and digital technology, for a lunchtime PrivacyLive forum.The Office of the Privacy Commissioner is delighted to welcome Cory Doctorow, a pioneering international commentator on internet and digital technology, for a lunchtime PrivacyLive forum. He is co-editor of Boing Boing and the originator of Doctorow's Law: "Anytime someone puts a lock on something you own, against your wishes, and doesn't give you the key, they're not doing it for your benefit." This OPC PrivacyLive Forum is at 1pm on Tuesday 13 March 2018 in the Cable Room at Mac's Function Centre, 4 Taranaki St Wharf. This public event is free. Doctorow will discuss the topic'Machine Learning, Big Data and Being Less Wrong'.