A Death In Cryptoland Introduces | Understood: Who Broke the Internet

May 12, 2025·38 min·2 clips

Cory Doctorow defines in-shitification as a three-stage process: lock in users, screw them for business customers, then screw the business customers for shareholders.

Cory Doctorow argues that the internet’s decline was on purpose, not inevitable. He starts with the early optimism of a network that felt open, distributed, and full of possibility. Then he moves into the current mix of intrusive ads, hateful talk, aggressive algorithms, grotesque privacy violations, and mountains of AI-generated slop. The season treats that drift as a chain of small choices, not one clean break. That is the main thesis. The narrative goes back to a time when online spaces were still new enough for people to argue about the most basic rules of conduct. One example is an old dispute over whether an advertisement in a newsgroup should be tolerated at all. The episode uses that argument to show how unsettled the early web really was. It then widens into a structural account of ownership, pointing out that the network was never truly held by one entity. Universities, governments, municipalities, phone companies, and cable companies all controlled pieces of it. From there, the story asks how a decentralized ideal ended up looking so rotten. Search is one answer. As the web grew too large to browse by hand, search engines became indispensable. Their early ranking systems were easy to game, and the episode explains how keyword stuffing exposed that weakness. A page could be bloated with repeated terms and still rise to the top, even when it was useless to real users. That failure matters because it shows how technical convenience invited manipulation. The episode keeps returning to this pattern of clever tools creating fresh incentives for abuse. Its tone stays grave and skeptical, but it still makes room for a little irony when the history gets absurd. Along the way, Doctorow brings in visionaries, villains, and ordinary people trying to live inside the system they inherited. The result is a tight case for how the web lost its promise one compromise at a time.

As heard by us

A sharp account of how the web was bent toward brittleness.

Doctorow frames the internet's decline as a design choice, not an accident. He lays out the early web's promise, then follows how ads, surveillance, slop, and concentrated platform incentives made that promise brittle.

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Why you'd press play

If you want a clear autopsy of how the internet went from open promise to a rotten, ad-soaked mess.

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