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Backlight Season 25 · Episode 7

The enshittification of the internet

26th November 2025 21 mins Season 25 Episode 7

American activist and writer Cory Doctorow on why the big American tech companies can criticize their products with impunity and we continue to use them anyway. The endless stream of ads nowadays on Google, Instagram and YouTube not only creates frustration, but also genuine concerns. Doctorow coined the term Enshitfification for what goes wrong with the internet and made a thorough analysis of how that could have happened. Because the classic idea, that if a product or service is no longer good, the free market automatically switches to better alternatives, no longer applies in the digital economy.

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The murder of capitalism still
Season 25 · Episode 8

The murder of capitalism

Capitalism has not only been broken, but also replaced by something much worse, according to economist and former finance minister in Greece, Yanis Varoufakis. He has been studying the developments of the market for years and argues that capitalism is on its last legs and has been overtaken by something new. In his book Technofeudalism: What capitalism killed, he calls the new system technofeodalism. A traditional capitalist gave 85 percent of the profits to the employees. At a company like Meta, employees only get one percent.
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