Show notes
We’re revisiting our earlier conversation about Cory Doctorow’s concept of enshittification—the process by which digital platforms begin by serving users, then shift toward serving business customers, and eventually extract value from everyone involved.

When we first recorded this episode, Doctorow’s new book about AI had not yet been published. It is out now: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence — Before It’s Too Late. We’ll be discussing that book in an upcoming episode.

In this re-release, Kimberly has added a short new introduction connecting enshittification to an idea from our more recent discussion of Megan Garber’s Screen People:

A middleman does not simply pass something along. A middleman selects, packages, ranks, translates, recommends, and takes a cut.

With digital platforms, that cut may be financial: advertising revenue, seller fees, subscription fees, or data used to target and price users. With AI systems, it may also be less visible. The cut may be context, uncertainty, minority perspectives, privacy, workers’ bargaining power, or our ability to find and evaluate information without an opaque system deciding what comes first.

In the original conversation, Kimberly and Jessica discuss Doctorow’s three-stage account of enshittification and explore how it shows up across everyday platforms and services.

In this episode

• What Cory Doctorow means by “enshittification”
• Why platforms often begin by serving users well
• How platforms shift from serving users to serving advertisers, sellers, and other business customers
• Why people and businesses become locked into platforms even as those platforms get worse
• Amazon search results, sponsored listings, subscriptions, and shopping friction
• Facebook, Instagram, Google, feeds, ads, and the disappearance of friends’ posts
• Uber, algorithmic wage discrimination, and data-based predictions about worker “desperation”
• Personalized pricing and the possibility of companies charging people based on what they appear willing—or able—to pay
• Private equity, consolidation, strategic acquisition, and why it is difficult for smaller businesses to compete
• Competition and regulation as forms of discipline for corporations
• Interoperability, generic printer ink, app stores, ad blockers, and the right to repair
• Labor power, worker organizing, and why AI-driven workforce reductions may weaken collective bargaining
• Why “the medium is the middleman” helps connect platform economics to AI-mediated knowledge

Related episode and reading

Our discussion of AI, trust, scientific communication, and the “middleman” idea:

How Do AI Chatbots Change Truth, Trust, and Scientific Communication?
Read the Substack post

In that episode and accompanying post, we discuss how AI systems can act as cultural intermediaries: filtering, ranking, summarizing, reframing, and recommending knowledge while making their mediating role difficult to see.

Books mentioned

• Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
• Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence — Before It’s Too Late
• Megan Garber, Screen People: How We Entertained Ourselves into a State of Emergency

Note

This is a re-release of an earlier conversation with a newly recorded introduction. The main conversation was recorded before the publication of Cory Doctorow’s The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI.

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AI-generated deepfakes are getting easier to create, harder to detect, and increasingly being used to target women and children. So who is responsible for stopping the harm: Big Tech, Congress, or the rest of us?

In this episode of Women Talkin’ ’Bout AI, Kimberly Becker talks with Allyson Kapin, founder of Women Who Tech, co-founder of the W Fund, and founder of RAD Campaign, about AI deepfakes, nonconsensual intimate imagery, misinformation, online scams, tech regulation, and political power.

Allyson shares polling showing that Americans are deeply concerned about AI being used to sexually exploit women and children, and explains why she believes both technology companies and lawmakers need to take far greater responsibility.

The conversation also examines a fundamental imbalance in AI regulation -- tech companies possess the technical knowledge, data, money, and control over their platforms, while Congress has the legal power to regulate them but may lack the expertise, time, or political incentives to keep pace.

Kimberly and Allyson discuss:

• How AI deepfakes and nonconsensual sexual imagery are affecting women and children
• Why photos posted online can become raw material for AI-generated sexualized images
• What parents should tell kids about deepfakes, sextortion, and online harassment
• AI-enabled scams targeting older adults
• Why older Americans may also be an important political force in AI regulation
• Whether Congress has enough technical expertise to regulate AI effectively
• The role of Big Tech money and political influence
• How algorithms, platform ownership, and editorial decisions shape what information people see
• Misinformation, media literacy, and the growing burden placed on individuals to determine what is real
• Why asking people to simply “be more media literate” may no longer be enough
• The TAKE IT DOWN Act and other attempts to address nonconsensual intimate deepfakes, including the stalled Defiance Act
• How constituents can pressure members of Congress to pay attention to AI harms
• The historical pattern of new technologies creating harms long before institutions decide who should be accountable

The larger question running through the episode is simple but increasingly urgent:

When technology becomes too sophisticated for ordinary people to reliably protect themselves, where should responsibility sit?

Topics

AI deepfakes, artificial intelligence, AI scams, nonconsensual intimate imagery, NCII, misinformation, disinformation, AI regulation, Congress and AI, Big Tech accountability, women in technology, online safety, child safety, social media algorithms, media literacy, sextortion, deepfake pornography, AI policy, tech policy, older adults and scams, election misinformation

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Kimberly and Jessica are taking a short break from new episodes, so this week we're re-airing one of our favorites, our conversation with Clara Hawking. Clara is a computer scientist, philosopher, and AI governance expert working in K-12 and beyond.

Why now? Since we recorded this, the law Clara champions in this episode has crossed the finish line. On August 2, 2026, the EU AI Act became fully enforceable, making the EU the first jurisdiction to impose comprehensive, binding regulation on AI systems, even as Brussels negotiates a "Digital Omnibus" that would delay the Act's most demanding high-risk provisions until compliance standards are actually ready. And here in the US, the state-by-state patchwork Kimberly and Clara discuss is now itself contested by a House discussion draft called the Great American AI Act, would temporarily preempt state and local laws regulating AI model development for three years. Everything Clara says about trust, risk, and who gets harmed when governance fails has only gotten more current.

In this episode:

• What AI governance actually is: not IT, not cybersecurity, but behavior and culture
• GDPR and the EU AI Act, explained plainly: rights-based vs. risk-based regulation
• Why parents can't give informed consent about their kids' data, and what an uploaded IEP could cost a child in 20 years
• The convergence phase: AI, biotech, robotics, and quantum computing feeding into each other, and why converged risk compounds instead of adding up
• Trust as the bottleneck for AI adoption, from Jessica's Tesla to recidivism algorithms
• Clara's "me first" governance advice: why are you using this technology, and can you justify the answer?
• Peach and Pit

Links

• EU AI Act resource site — Future of Life Institute's tracker, the most readable overview.
• The EU's official AI Act page — European Commission.
• The Regulatory Tide Goes Out — Jones Walker on the Digital Omnibus and global retrenchment. Good "what's changed since we recorded" companion.
• Great American AI Act discussion draft summary — National Association of Counties on the federal preemption proposal.

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