The Vergecast · Friday, October 2, 2026
The conversation touches upon Cory Doctorow's concept of 'inshittification' to describe the degradation of online platforms for users in favor of business models. This is linked to the potential for AI agents to exacerbate this trend, particularly Meta's business model for Muse, which involves taking a cut of transactions. This raises concerns about agents becoming 'corrupt butlers' driven by advertising and profit, potentially overwhelming the internet with bot traffic.
“Cory Doctorow calls it inshittification. There's a word for it. Pre-inshittifying the agent by being like, we're announcing the business model as a cut of transactions is fascinating to me.”
“And I think that's going to be the real danger of the consumer agent, is the only business model that can work is advertising. And then it's just like, Not only do you have a personal shopper, you have a personal shopper who's true avatar is Mark Zuckerberg.”
“Matthew Prince, who's the CEO of Cloudflare on Decoder, and his prediction is bot traffic will far surpass human traffic.”