Loved the talk. Absolute must watch
Cory even revoked my book's return policy:
this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2025
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Why’d the author strike his own name?
I was wondering that myself when I saw it
Seems like it's a thing some authors do, often for various reasons
https://www.writersdigest.com/writing-articles/authors-cross-name-signing-book
Thanks for this!
I particularly liked this author’s response:
Nicholas Belardes
"Sometimes I cross my name out and sign. I do it out of respect for myself, for the idea of accomplishment, for the idea that writers are real people, that we can touch our manuscripts in ways that transcend the printed objects they've become. Our works become even more personal this way, because our signatures are more physically attributed to us in the world than even fingerprints."
To stop enshittification, we all need to chase away any attempt to capitalize on the internet and get back to the roots of preventing data scarcity. Anyone running an ad or promoting some product should be chased out. Their product stolen and copied and shared until these people know they're not welcome. It would have prevented all of the enshittification had pewdiepies and Joe Rogans and Mr beasts were treated as the time vampires they are. It's not just simple advertising that we could turn off. It turned into a massive machine that stole our data, built profiles, created digital addiction tools and tracked all our movements just to sell us things.
This seems to be the crux of his argument in his latest book, enshittification. It takes a step beyond his common complaint (DMCA) and suggests other countries ignore their version of it to circumvent US Big Tech laws. I’m all for it, but it requires European governments to understand the situation and act. We’ll see.
It seems like they'll do the exact opposite. The EU is preparing a change to the GDPR to exclude A.I. purposes and the commission has agreed to adopt American car safety standards (which are way lower) during the tariff negotiations.
Then I guess it's time to put "AI" (actually 3 if-statements in a trench coat) into all my software projects so they can legally jailbreak corporate software!
Using a human brain to "learn" from the music and films!
That is one big but if I may.
I like big buts and I cannot lie!
I thought that I'd listen to 30 seconds and scroll, but I'm really glad I didn't. Really solid argument, but it's got a "last mile" problem, and that's gotta be on us to figure out I think.
The question at the end where he basically ignored and didn't answer was "so how do we do this?". THAT is the question. I'd love to hear that answer.
Step 1 - raise awareness.
Step 2 - gather active participants
Step 3 - collectively do legal things that make life harder for anyone with the power to enact this, yet does not.
Step 4 - repeat Step 3, making it clear why this is happening.
Step 5 - make memes of the affair to further drive engagement.
Step 5.1 (potentially American/Russian/etc Exclusive) - get declared a terrorist for doing a perfectly legal thing.
Step 6 - build support structures and tools to mitigate consequences.
Step 7 - keep going anyway, in spite of what consequences can be brought.
Step 8 - ~~profit~~ build incremental victories to bolster the movement.
I lol'd and cried 5.1 because it's so spot on
If only our politicians had more than 3 neurons and could focus them on the common good instead of their own greed
Then they'd be serving meals at a soup kitchen instead of lying for a living.
As soon as I read his trademark word I knew it was Doctorow, awesome! I'll give this a full listen sometime later.