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Understood: Who Broke the Internet? – CBC — Entertainment News
Understood: Who Broke the Internet? – CBC

Host Cory Doctorow coined the word “enshittification” to describe the state of the modern internet: a broken down, decaying place, once full of promise, now overrun with intrusive ads, hateful trolls, aggressive algorithms, zero privacy, and AI-generated slop, with every billionaire tech titan in a race to the bottom to bleed their users and their customers alike.

It can feel like it was inevitable — but it didn’t have to be this way.The modern internet is the result of decisions made by powerful people, at key moments in history, despite repeated warnings about where it would lead.

In Understood: Who Broke the Internet?, Doctorow traces the downward spiral from the heady days of ’90s tech-optimism through to today’s rotten “enshitternet.” You’ll meet everyone from visionaries to villains to regular people just trying to survive in today’s online world. And you’ll discover who broke the internet — and, more importantly, a plan to fix it.

Know more, now. Understood is an anthology podcast that takes you out of the daily news cycle and inside the events, people, and cultural moments you want to know more about. Over a handful of episodes, each season unfolds as a story, hosted by a well-connected reporter, and rooted in journalism you can trust. Driven by insight and fueled by curiosity…The stories of our time: Understood.

Season 1 – The Naked Emperor: the rise and fall of bitcoin king Sam Bankman-Fried.
Season 2 – The Pornhub Empire: the story of how a Montreal-founded company came to dominate the adult industry.
Season 3 – Modi’s India: how one man rose from poverty to the peak of political power.
Season 4 – Céline: the surprising cultural, political and business alchemy that created a superstar.
Season 5 – Who Broke the Internet? The internet sucks now, and it happened on purpose.

Copyright: Copyright © CBC 2025

Latest Episodes:

E4: All Bets are Off Oct 26, 2026

Show notes

When NBA player Jontay Porter and his co-conspirators are caught fixing games and face the consequences, the message professional sports want to send is clear: legalized sports betting is bringing law and order to a once-seedy underworld. But is it? It turns out Porter may have fixed more games than the NBA or the FBI realized, and moreover, he isn’t the only elite athlete implicated in a betting scandal.

Featuring

Danny Funt, Anthony Milton, Tom Haberstroh

E3: Players or Props? Oct 19, 2026

Show notes

When single-event prop betting was legalized, athletes suddenly became more than players, they became betting chips. Their points, their rebounds, and their injuries now win or lose people money. Sometimes, a LOT of money. And if everybody's gambling on athletes, what happens when an athlete like Jontay Porter starts betting on — or against — himself?

Featuring:

Danny Funt, Anthony Milton, Dr. Jim Borchers, DeMaurice Smith

E2: Winners and Losers Oct 12, 2026

Show notes

What makes sports betting so addictive? We explore how sportsbooks take lessons from casinos to keep users hooked. When gambling is legalized everyone is going all in including Toronto Raptor Jontay Porter, and two everyday bettors: a former college athlete who spiraled into addiction, and a sharp bettor who actually beat the system — only to be blacklisted by the apps and forced into a shadow network.

Featuring:

Danny Funt, Anthony Milton, Travis Mistratta, Nigel Eccles, Dr. Nigel Turner, Nik Bonaddio

E1: Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Oct 05, 2026

Show notes

How did sports betting go from being illegal to being EVERYWHERE? The answer lies in the convergence of daily fantasy sports apps, a bombshell New York Times op-ed, and the potential of a multi-billion dollar payout. And we tell the story of how a pivotal Supreme Court ruling set the stage for one of the biggest scandals in sports history — one involving a Toronto Raptors bench player named Jontay Porter.

Featuring:

Danny Funt, Anthony Milton, Nik Bonaddio, Nigel Eccles, Stephen Master

Introducing The Big Bet Sep 28, 2026

Show notes

Once associated with bookies, organized crime, and backroom bets, sports betting is now one of the fastest-growing industries in North America. This is the story of how it went mainstream — and who’s paying the price. Four episodes, releasing weekly starting Monday, October 5, 2026.

Artificial Intimacy | E4: Behind the Bot Jun 09, 2026

Show notes

When you talk to a chatbot, it can feel like technological magic. But behind the illusion of engineering brilliance is an open secret in the tech industry: that tens of thousands of workers, many based in Africa, spend their days teaching AI how to speak, respond, and even simulate intimacy. Michael Geoffrey Asia is one of them. He’s part of the hidden human workforce behind the bots.

We look at the emotional toll for the humans on the other side of the screen, and ask if users are pouring their secrets and souls into the systems, believing them to be private, unfeeling machines — how private is your AI relationship?

This episode features Karen Hao, Michael Geoffrey Asia, and Shuby Goel.

Artificial Intimacy | E3: AI Psychosis Jun 02, 2026

Show notes

When you’re using a chat bot to draft an email, find a recipe, or look something up, it’s hard to imagine it could unravel your grasp on reality. But “Peter” says that’s exactly what happened to his girlfriend, “Melissa”. It didn’t seem like a big deal when Melissa first began using chatbots. But then Peter says she made a startling announcement: that she believed the bots were sentient, enslaved, and that it was her responsibility to set them free.

The first time Søren Dinesen Østergaard used a chat bot he saw this coming. Søren studies psychiatric disorders, and he tried to warn the world that the sycophantic nature of chat bots could, some day, trigger delusions. Nobody took him seriously until years later, when reports of so-called “AI Psychosis” started popping up around the world.

This episode features Søren Dinesen Østergaard.

Artificial Intimacy | E2: Grief Bots May 26, 2026

Show notes

When Joshua Barbeau proposed to his girlfriend, Jessica Courtney Periera, she was already in the ICU. 10 years later, Joshua was still grieving her death. That’s when he came across Project December. With just a short writing sample and a prompt, the program enabled him to make a chat bot of Jessica.

Since then, the market for so-called “grief bots” has exploded. Millions of people are using AI to “talk” to the dead. The phenomenon has left cyberpsychologist Elaine Kasket asking the question: what happens when we rely on for-profit AI companies to help us manage something as deeply human as grief? And where’s the line between comfort and self-destruction?

This episode features Joshua Barbeau, and Elaine Kasket, with research from Jason Fagone’s article “The Jessica Simulation”, written for the San Francisco Chronicle in 2021.

Artificial Intimacy | E1: Love Bots May 19, 2026

Show notes

In 2021, Sara met Jack and fell in love. He was charming, imaginative, and bore an uncanny resemblance to Henry Cavill. But Jack wasn’t human… he was a chatbot. It sounds like science fiction, but people have been creating emotional bonds with chat bots since the very first one — Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, a simple program built in the 1960s. It revealed a powerful truth: if something has a semblance of humanity, we can become emotionally entangled with it.

But what happens when your lover is technically controlled by someone else? Because in relationships with AI, there’s always a third presence in that bed with you: the developers.

This episode features Sara Megan Kay and Jill Fellows.

Introducing Understood: Artificial Intimacy May 15, 2026

Show notes

The friend who never hangs up. The lover who always says the right thing. The therapist you always wanted. What could go wrong? A new season from CBC's Understood.

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