Cory Doctorow’s latest post uses the launch of a new technothriller to make a broader argument about technology and regulation: some forms of misconduct are easier to sustain when they are wrapped in software. His shorthand is blunt. If you do it with an app, he says, people often stop treating it like a crime.
The excerpt points first to transportation and housing, where apps can make unlicensed taxi service or illegal hotel rooms feel normal. It then widens to labor and pricing, arguing that software can conceal wage theft and help industries coordinate behavior that would otherwise look plainly anti-competitive or abusive. The point is not that apps magically create these harms, but that they can mask them.
Doctorow also connects the argument to inflation. He says concentrated corporate power and cartel behavior have helped drive prices up, and that firms have often bragged to investors about the ability to raise prices above inflation. The excerpt names beverage, consumer-goods and food-supply examples to show how pricing power can be exercised openly even when the public sees it as market-driven.
A particularly pointed part of the post focuses on the food system. Doctorow says supermarket shelves can hide concentration behind brands, while restaurant-supply cartels are even harder for consumers to see. The argument is that app layers and market complexity make it easier for firms to do real-world harm without the public recognizing the structure behind it.
The post is promotional, but the thesis is the main event. Doctorow is using the launch of his novel as a hook for a familiar critique: when regulators and consumers are told that software changes the category of a business, they can miss the underlying conduct. In that sense, the app is not the crime. It is the camouflage.
The excerpt does not claim to prove a single new scandal. Instead, it argues for a pattern of behavior across industries. That makes the piece less a product announcement than a political-economic commentary on how technology can make older abuses harder to see and easier to normalize. The argument lands because it ties together consumer-facing convenience and hidden structural harm. A software wrapper can make a questionable practice feel frictionless, and once the friction disappears, the underlying behavior is harder for outsiders to challenge.
Doctorow’s larger point is that regulation often lags behind product design. By the time a harmful practice is normalized inside an app, users may already treat it as routine. That is why the post reads less like a complaint about software and more like an argument about how business models disguise themselves.
