Hello and welcome to Decoder. This is Sarah Jong, features editor at The Verge.

I'm standing in for Neely for one final Thursday episode as he settles back into full-time

hosting duties. Today we've got a fun one. I'm talking to Corey Doctoro, prolific author,

internet activist, and arguably one of the fiercest tech critics writing today. He has a new

book out called Insidification, Why Everything Suddenly suddenly got worse and what to do about it. If you want to know what happened to the tech industry and why the products and platforms you use every day feel like they've gotten meaningfully noticeably more terrible, this is the book that explains it. Inshootification as a term is relatively new. Corey only coined it a few years ago.

But it's become a kind of rallying cry among creatives, tech theorists, and others trying to make sense of where exactly the internet went so wrong.

And now with generative AI, it feels like everything in our lives is becoming inshittified in ways that are plainly obvious to even the most casual user of technology.

So you'll also hear Corey and I delve into that intersection between the rise of what we now call AI Slough and inshiddification,

and why it's important that these two themes have so much overlap.

Now, I've known Corey for a long time.

We've traveled in a lot of the same circles on the internet for years, writing and debating copyright Section 230, and a lot of the other major forces in U.S. law that have shaped the tech industry.

And a lot of that comes up in this conversation, too, because central to the narrative around

inshittification is how tech companies became so big and so powerful that they were able to

start abusing their market dominance with little to no consequences. And so ins shittification in Corey's eyes is as much a legal and regulatory story as it is a product one.

But which laws and regulations have what kind of effects over time?

What kind of effects will they have in the future?

What's the best way to curb monopoly power?

This was a really fascinating conversation that touches on a lot of decoder themes

that come up again and again on the show. And in true Corey fashion, he really does not hold back.

I think you're going to like it. Okay, in Shittification author Corey Doctoro, here we go.

Okay. Corey Doctor-O, you are the author of the new book in Shittification,

why everything suddenly got worse and What to Do About It,

...