Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

This week on my podcast, I read Swapping money for expertise, a recent essay from my Pluralistic blog about the political economy of “AI” based on theory-free inference. The need to understand and describe a thing before you could apply “AI” to it is a bottleneck, because it requires programmers to understand how a thing... <a href="https://craphound.com/podcast/2026/10/11/swapping-money-for-expertise/" class="more-link" title="Read Swapping money for expertise">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I read LLMs are real, AI is fake, a recent essay from my Pluralistic blog about the material reality of the Hugging Face hack. Here’s how that works: the Python program starts by prompting the chatbot with the nature of the challenge: “I’m participating in a hacker capture the flag... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2026/09/27/llms-are-real-ai-is-fake/" class="more-link" title="Read LLMs are real, AI is fake">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I read Technopolitics, my latest Locus Magazine column, about the degree to which AI’s politics are baked in or historically contingent. These sins are baked into this kind of AI production. There is no way to raise trillions in subsidies that allow AI companies to sell computation at a subsidy... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2026/09/20/technopolitics/" class="more-link" title="Read Technopolitics">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I read Why businesses lie about AI, a recent essay from my Pluralistic newsletter that breaks down Nikhil Suresh’s essay describing the total absence of any proof that any business is benefiting from AI deployment. One person who’s had a lot of opportunity to observe the shear between the stated... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2026/08/09/why-businesses-lie-about-ai/" class="more-link" title="Read Why businesses lie about AI">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I read Post-political, a recent essay from my Pluralistic newsletter, about the material, irreconcilable differences between leftism and other political beliefs. But when it comes to a “post-politics that is neither right nor left,” the definition I turn to most often comes from science fiction writer Steven Brust, who once... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2026/07/26/post-political/" class="more-link" title="Read Post-political">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>