Last weekend, I traveled to Las Vegas for @defcon 32, where I had the immense privilege of giving a solo talk on Track 1, entitled "Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification":
https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54861
1/
(Nitter addon enabled: Twitter links via https://nitter.privacytools.io)
Lisa Melton reshared this.
Bill Seitz
Unknown parent • • •Content warning: Long thread/eof
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess
2/
Pluralistic: “Disenshittify or Die” (17 Aug 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/3
This was a followup to last year's talk, "An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification," a talk that kicked off a lot of international interest in my analysis of platform decay ("enshittification"):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4
The Defcon organizers have earned a restful week or two, and that means that the video of my talk hasn't yet been posted to Defcon's Youtube channel, so in the meantime, I thought I'd post a lightly edited version of my speech crib.
3/
- YouTube
www.youtube.comJocelyn
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/3
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Jocelyn • • •Content warning: Long thread/3
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/4
If you're headed to Burning Man, you can hear me reprise this talk at Palenque Norte (7&E); I'm kicking off their lecture series on Tuesday, Aug 27 at 1PM.
4/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/5
What the fuck *happened* to the old, good internet?
I mean, sure, our bosses were a little surveillance-happy, and they were usually up for sharing their data with the NSA, and whenever there was a tossup between user security and growth, it was always YOLO time.
But Google Search used to *work*. Facebook used to show you posts from people you *followed*. Uber used to be cheaper than a taxi *and* pay the driver more than a cabbie made.
5/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/6
Amazon used to sell *products*, not Shein-grade self-destructing dropshipped garbage from all-consonant brands. Apple used to defend your privacy, rather than spying on you with your no-modifications-allowed Iphone.
There was a time when you searching for an album on Spotify would get you that album - *not* a playlist of insipid AI-generated covers with the same name and art.
6/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/7
Microsoft used to sell you software – sure, it was buggy – but now they just let you access apps in the cloud, so they can watch how you use those apps and strip the features you use the most out of the basic tier and turn them into an upcharge.
What – and I cannot stress this enough – the *fuck* happened?!
I’m talking about enshittification.
7/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/8
Here’s what enshittification looks like from the outside: First, you see a company that’s being good to its end users. Google puts the best search results at the top; Facebook shows you a feed of posts from people and groups you followl; Uber charges small dollars for a cab; Amazon subsidizes goods and returns and shipping and puts the best match for your product search at the top of the page.
8/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/9
That’s stage one, being good to end users. But there’s another part of this stage, call it stage 1a). That’s figuring out how to lock in those users.
There’s *so many* ways to lock in users.
If you’re Facebook, the users do it for you. You joined Facebook because there were people there you wanted to hang out with, and other people joined Facebook to hang out with you.
9/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/10
That’s the old “network effects” in action, and with network effects come “the collective action problem." Because you love your friends, but god*damn* are they a pain in the ass! You all agree that FB sucks, sure, but can you all agree on when it’s time to leave?
No way.
Can you agree on where to go next?
*Hell no*.
10/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/11
You’re there because that’s where the support group for your rare disease hangs out, and your bestie is there because that’s where they talk with the people in the country they moved away from, then there’s that friend who coordinates their kid’s little league car pools on FB, and the best dungeon master you know isn’t gonna leave FB because that’s where her customers are.
11/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/12
So you’re stuck, because even though FB use comes at a high cost – your privacy, your dignity and your sanity – that’s still less than the *switching cost* you’d have to bear if you left: namely, all those friends who have taken you hostage, and whom you are holding hostage
12/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/13
Now, sometimes companies lock you in with money, like Amazon getting you to prepay for a year’s shipping with Prime, or to buy your Audible books on a monthly subscription, which virtually guarantees that every shopping search will start on Amazon, after all, you’ve already paid for it.
13/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/14
Sometimes, they lock you in with DRM, like HP selling you a printer with four ink cartridges filled with fluid that retails for more than $10,000/gallon, and using DRM to stop you from refilling any of those ink carts or using a third-party cartridge. So when one cart runs dry, you have to refill it or throw away your investment in the remaining three cartridges and the printer itself.
14/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/15
Sometimes, it’s a grab bag:
* You can’t run your Ios apps without Apple hardware;
* you can’t run your Apple music, books and movies on anything except an Ios app;
* your iPhone uses parts pairing – DRM handshakes between replacement parts and the main system – so you can’t use third-party parts to fix it; and
15/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/16
* every OEM iPhone part has a microscopic Apple logo engraved on it, so Apple can demand that the US Customs and Border Service seize any shipment of refurb Iphone parts as trademark violations.
Think Different, amirite?
Getting you locked in completes phase one of the enshittification cycle and signals the start of phase two: making things worse for you to make things better for business customers.
16/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/17
For example, a platform might poison its search results, like Google selling more and more of its results pages to ads that are identified with lighter and lighter tinier and tinier type.
Or Amazon selling off search results and calling it an “ad” business. They make $38b/year on this scam. The first result for your search is, on average, 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. The first row is 25% more expensive than the best match.
17/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/18
On average, the best match for your search is likely to be found *seventeen* places down on the results page.
Other platforms sell off your feed, like Facebook, which started off showing you the things you *asked* to see, but now the quantum of content from the people you follow has dwindled to a homeopathic residue, leaving a void that Facebook fills with things that people *pay* to show you: boosted posts from publishers you haven’t subscribed to, and, of course, ads.
18/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/19
Now at this point you might be thinking ‘sure, if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.'
Bullshit!
*Bull.*
*Shit*.
The people who buy those Google ads? They pay more every year for worse ad-targeting and more ad-fraud
Those publishers paying to nonconsensually cram their content into your Facebook feed? They *have* to do that because FB suppresses their ability to reach the people who actually subscribed to them
19/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/20
The Amazon sellers with the *best* match for your query have to outbid everyone else just to show up on the first page of results. It costs so much to sell on Amazon that between 45-51% of every dollar an independent seller brings in has to be kicked up to Don Bezos and the Amazon crime family. Those sellers don’t have the kind of margins that let them pay 51% They have to raise prices in order to avoid losing money on every sale.
20/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/21
"But wait!" I hear you say!
[Come on, say it!]
"But wait! Things on Amazon aren’t more expensive that things at Target, or Walmart, or at a mom and pop store, or direct from the manufacturer.
"How can sellers be raising prices on Amazon if the price at Amazon is the same as at is everywhere else?"
[Any guesses?!]
21/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/22
That’s right, they charge more *everywhere*. They *have to*. Amazon binds its sellers to a policy called “most favored nation status,” which says they can’t charge more on Amazon than they charge elsewhere, including direct from their own factory store.
So every seller that wants to sell on Amazon has to raise their prices *everywhere else*.
Now, these sellers are Amazon’s best customers. They’re paying for the product, and they’re *still* getting screwed.
22/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/23
Paying for the product doesn’t fill your vapid boss’s shriveled heart with so much joy that he decides to stop trying to think of ways to fuck you over.
Look at Apple. Remember when Apple offered every Ios user a one-click opt out for app-based surveillance? And *96%* of users clicked that box?
(The other four percent were either drunk or Facebook employees or drunk Facebook employees.)
That cost Facebook at least *10 billion dollars per year* in lost surveillance revenue?
23/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/24
I mean, you *love* to see it.
But did you know that at the *same time* Apple started spying on Ios users in the *same way* that Facebook had been, for surveillance data to use to target users for its competing advertising product?
Your Iphone isn’t an ad-supported gimme. You paid a thousand fucking dollars for that distraction rectangle in your pocket, and you’re *still* the product. What’s more, Apple has rigged Ios so that you can’t mod the OS to block its spying.
24/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/25
If you’re not *not* paying for the product, you’re the product, and if you *are* paying for the product, you’re *still* the product.
Just ask the farmers who are expected to swap parts into their own busted half-million dollar, mission-critical tractors, but can’t actually *use* those parts until a technician charges them $200 to drive out to the farm and type a parts pairing unlock code into their console.
25/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/26
John Deere’s not giving away tractors. Give John Deere a half mil for a tractor and you will be the product.
Please, my brothers and sisters in Christ. Please! Stop saying ‘if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.’
OK, OK, so that’s phase two of enshittification.
Phase one: be good to users while locking them in.
Phase two: screw the users a little to you can good to business customers while locking *them* in.
26/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/27
Phase three: screw *everybody* and take all the value for yourself. Leave behind the absolute bare minimum of utility so that everyone stays locked into your pile of shit.
Enshittification: a tragedy in three acts.
That’s what enshittification looks like from the outside, but what’s going on *inside* the company? What is the pathological mechanism? What sci-fi entropy ray converts the excellent and useful service into a pile of shit?
27/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/28
That mechanism is called *twiddling*. Twiddling is when someone alters the back end of a service to change how its business operates, changing prices, costs, search ranking, recommendation criteria and other foundational aspects of the system.
Digital platforms are a twiddler’s utopia. A grocer would need an army of teenagers with pricing guns on rollerblades to reprice everything in the building when someone arrives who’s extra hungry.
28/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/29
Whereas the McDonald’s Investments portfolio company Plexure advertises that it can use you data to predict when a user has just gotten paid so the seller can tack an extra couple bucks onto the price of their breakfast sandwich.
And of course, as the prophet @GreatDismal warned us, ‘cyberspace is everting.' With digital shelf tags, grocers can change prices whenever they feel like, like the grocers in Norway, whose e-ink shelf tags change the prices *2,000 times per day*.
29/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/30
Every Uber driver is offered a different wage for every job. If a driver has been picky lately, the job pays more. But if the driver has been desperate enough to grab every ride the app offers, the pay goes down, and down, and down.
The law professor @veenadubal calls this ‘algorithmic wage discrimination.' It’s a prime example of twiddling.
30/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/31
Every youtuber knows what it’s like to be twiddled. You work for weeks or months, spend thousands of dollars to make a video, then the algorithm decides that no one - not your own subscribers, not searchers who type in the exact name of your video - will see it.
Why? Who knows? The algorithm’s rules are not public.
Because content moderation is the last redoubt of security through obscurit: they can’t tell you what the como algorithm is downranking because then you’d cheat.
31/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/32
Youtube is the kind of shitty boss who docks every paycheck for all the rules you’ve broken, but won’t tell you what those rules were, lest you figure out how to break those rules next time without your boss catching you.
Twiddling can also work in some users’ favor, of course. Sometimes platforms twiddle to make things *better* for end users or business customers.
32/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/33
For example, Emily Baker-White from *Forbes* revealed the existence of a back-end feature that Tiktok’s management can access they call the “heating tool.”
When a manager applies the heating toll to a performer’s account, that performer’s videos are thrust into the feeds of millions of users, without regard to whether the recommendation algorithm predicts they will enjoy that video.
33/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/34
Why would they do this? Well, here’s an analogy from my boyhood I used to go to this traveling fair that would come to Toronto at the end of every summer, the Canadian National Exhibition. If you’ve been to a fair like the Ex, you know that you can always spot some guy lugging around a comedically huge teddy bear.
34/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/35
Nominally, you win that teddy bear by throwing five balls in a peach-basket, but to a first approximation, no one has *ever* gotten five balls to stay in that basket.
That guy “won” the teddy bear when a carny on the midway singled him out and said, "fella, I like your face. Tell you what I’m gonna do: You get just *one* ball in the basket and I’ll give you this keychain, and if you amass two keychains, I’ll let you trade them in for one of these galactic-scale teddy-bears."
35/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/36
That’s how the guy got his teddy bear, which he now has to drag up and down the midway for the rest of the day.
Why the hell did that carny give away the teddy bear? Because it turns the guy into a walking billboard for the midway games. If that dopey-looking Judas Goat can get five balls into a peach basket, then so can you.
Except you can’t.
36/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/37
Tiktok’s heating tool is a way to give away tactical giant teddy bears. When someone in the TikTok brain trust decides they need more sports bros on the platform, they pick one bro out at random and make him king for the day, heating the shit out of his account.
That guy gets a bazillion views and he starts running around on all the sports bro forums trumpeting his success: *I am the Louis Pasteur of sports bro influencers!"
37/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/38
The other sports bros pile in and start retooling to make content that conforms to the idiosyncratic Tiktok format. When they fail to get giant teddy bears of their own, they assume that it’s because they’re doing Tiktok wrong, because they don’t know about the heating tool.
But then comes the day when the TikTok Star Chamber decides they need to lure in more astrologers, so they take the heat off that one lucky sports bro, and start heating up some lucky astrologer.
38/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/39
Giant teddy bears are all over the place: those Uber drivers who were boasting to the NYT ten years ago about earning $50/hour? The Substackers who were *rolling* in dough? Joe Rogan and his hundred million dollar Spotify payout? Those people are all the proud owners of giant teddy bears, and they’re a *steal*.
Because every dollar they get from the platform turns into five dollars worth of free labor from suckers who think they just internetting wrong.
39/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/40
Giant teddy bears are just one way of twiddling. Platforms can play games with every part of their business logic, in highly automated ways, that allows them to quickly and efficiently siphon value from end users to business customers and back again, hiding the pea in a shell game conducted at machine speeds, until they’ve got everyone so turned around that they take *all* the value for themselves.
40/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/41
That’s the how: How the platforms do the trick where they are good to users, then lock users in, then maltreat users to be good to business customers, then lock in those business customers, then take all the value for themselves.
So now we know *what* is happening, and *how* it is happening, all that’s left is *why* it’s happening.
41/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/42
Now, on the one hand, the *why* is obvious. The less value end-users and business customers capture, the more value there is left to divide up among the shareholders and the executives.
That’s *why*, but it doesn’t tell you *why now*. Companies could have done this shit at any time in the past 20 years, but they didn’t. Or at least, the successful ones didn’t. The ones that turned themselves into piles of shit got *treated* like piles of shit. We avoided them and they died.
42/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/43
Remember Myspace? Yahoo Search? Livejournal? Sure, they’re still serving some kind of AI slop or programmatic ad junk if you hit those domains, but they’re *gone*.
And there’s the clue: It *used* to be that if you enshittified your product, bad things happened to your company. Now, there are no consequences for enshittification, so everyone’s doing it.
Let’s break that down: What stops a company from enshittifying?
43/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/44
There are four forces that discipline tech companies. The first one is, obviously, competition.
If your customers find it easy to leave, then you have to worry about them leaving
Many factors can contribute to how hard or easy it is to depart a platform, like the network effects that Facebook has going for it. But the most important factor is *whether there is anywhere to go*.
44/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/45
Back in 2012, Facebook bought Insta for a billion dollars. That may seem like chump-change in these days of eleven-digit Big Tech acquisitions, but that was a big sum in those innocent days, and it was an especially big sum to pay for *Insta*. The company only had 13 employees, and a mere 25 million registered users.
But what mattered to Zuckerberg wasn’t how many users Insta had, it was where those users came from.
[Does anyone know where those Insta users came from?]
45/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/46
That’s right, they left Facebook and joined Insta. They were sick of FB, even though they liked the people there, they hated creepy Zuck, they hated the platform, so they left and they didn’t come back.
So Zuck spent a cool billion to recapture them, A fact he *put in writing* in a midnight email to CFO David Ebersman, explaining that he was paying over the odds for Insta because his users hated him, and loved Insta.
46/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/47
So even if they quit Facebook (*the platform*), they would still be captured *Facebook* (*the company*).
Now, on paper, Zuck’s Instagram acquisition is illegal, but normally, that would be hard to stop, because you’d have to prove that he bought Insta with the intention of curtailing competition.
But in this case, Zuck tripped over his own dick: *he put it in writing*.
47/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/48
But Obama’s DoJ and FTC just let that one slide, following the pro-monopoly policies of Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II, and setting an example that Trump would follow, greenlighting gigamergers like the catastrophic, incestuous Warner-Discovery marriage
Indeed, for 40 years, starting with Carter, and accelerating through Reagan, the US has *encouraged* monopoly formation, as an official policy, on the grounds that monopolies are “efficient.”
48/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/49
If everyone is using Google Search, that’s something we should celebrate It means they’ve got the very best search and wouldn’t it be perverse to spend public funds to *punish* them for making the best product?
But as we all know, Google didn’t maintain search dominance by being best.
49/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/50
They did it by paying bribes. More than *20 billion* per year to Apple alone to be the default Ios search, plus billions more to Samsung, Mozilla, and anyone else making a product or service with a search-box on it, ensuring that you never stumble on a search engine that’s better than theirs.
Which, in turn, ensured that no one smart invested big in rival search engines, even if they were visibly, obviously superior.
50/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/51
Why bother making something better if Google’s buying up all the market oxygen before it can kindle your product to life?
Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon – they’re not “making things” companies, tey’re “buying things” companies, taking advantage of official tolerance for anticompetitive acquisitions, predatory pricing, market distorting exclusivity deals and other acts *specifically prohibited* by existing antitrust law.
51/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/51
Their goal is to become too big to fail, because that makes them too big to jail, and that means they can be *too big to care*.
Which is why Google Search is a pile of shit and everything on Amazon is dropshipped garbage that instantly disintegrates in a cloud of offgassed volatile organic compounds when you open the box.
Once companies no longer fear losing your business to a competitor, it’s much easier for them to treat you badly, because what’re you gonna do?
51/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/52
Remember Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the AT&T operator in those old SNL sketches? “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.”
Competition is the first force that serves to discipline companies and the enshittificatory impulses of their leadership, and we just stopped enforcing competition law.
52/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/53
It takes a special kind of smooth-brained asshole – that is, an establishment economist - to insist that the collapse of every industry from eyeglasses to vitamin C into a cartel of five or fewer companies has nothing to do with policies that officially encouraged monopolization.
53/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/54
It’s like we used to put down rat poison and we didn’t have a rat problem.Then these dickheads convinced us rats were good for us and we stopped putting down poison, and now rats are gnawing our faces off and they’re all running around saying, "Who’s to say where all these rats came from? *Maybe* it was that we stopped putting down poison, but *maybe* it’s just the Time of the Rats. The Great Forces of History bearing down on this moment to multiply rats beyond all measure!"
54/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/55
Antitrust didn’t slip down that staircase and fall spine-first on that stiletto: they stabbed it in the back and then they *pushed it*.
And when they killed antitrust, they also killed regulation, the *second* force that disciplines companies. Regulation *is* possible, but only when the regulator is more powerful than the regulated entities. When a company is bigger than the government, it gets damned hard to credibly threaten to punish that company, no matter what its sins.
55/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/56
That’s what protected IBM for all those years when it had its boot on the throat of the American tech sector. Do you know, the DOJ fought to break up IBM in the courts from 1970-1982, and that every year, for 12 consecutive years, IBM spent more on lawyers to fight the USG than the DOJ Antitrust Division spent on *all* the lawyers fighting *every* antitrust case in the entire USA?
56/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/57
IBM outspent Uncle Sam for 12 years. People called it “Antitrust’s Vietnam.” All that money paid off, because by 1982, the president was Ronald Reagan, a man whose official policy was that monopolies were “efficient." So he dropped the case, and Big Blue wriggled off the hook.
It’s hard to regulate a monopolist, and it’s hard to regulate a cartel. When a sector is composed of hundreds of competing companies, they *compete*.
57/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/58
They genuinely fight with one another, trying to poach each others’ customers and workers. They are at each others’ throats.
It’s hard enough for a couple hundred executives to agree on *anything*. But when they’re legitimately competing with one another, really obsessing about how to eat each others’ lunches, they can’t agree on *anything*.
58/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/59
The instant one of them goes to their regulator with some bullshit story, about how it’s impossible to have a decent search engine without fine-grained commercial surveillance; or how it’s impossible to have a secure and easy to use mobile device without a total veto over which software can run on it... ..
59/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/60
.or how it’s impossible to administer an ISP’s network unless you can slow down connections to servers whose owners aren’t paying bribes for “premium carriage"; there’s some *other company saying, “That’s bullshit”
“We’ve managed it! Here’s our server logs, our quarterly financials and our customer testimonials to prove it.”
60/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/61
100 companies are a rabble, they're a mob. They can’t agree on a lobbying position. They’re too busy eating each others’ lunch to agree on how to cater a meeting to discuss it.
But let those hundred companies merge to monopoly, absorb one another in an incestuous orgy, turn into five giant companies, so inbred they’ve got a corporate Habsburg jaw, and they become a *cartel*.
61/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/62
It’s easy for a cartel to agree on what bullshit they’re all going to feed their regulator, and to mobilize some of the excess billions they’ve reaped through consolidation, which freed them from “wasteful competition," sp they can capture their regulators completely.
You know, Congress used to pass federal consumer privacy laws? Not anymore.
62/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/63
The last time Congress managed to pass a federal consumer privacy law was in 1988: The Video Privacy Protection Act. That’s a law that bans video-store clerks from telling newspapers what VHS cassettes you take home. In other words, it regulates three things that have effectively ceased to exist.
63/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/64
The threat of having your video rental history out there in the public eye was *not* the last or most urgent threat the American public faced, and yet, Congress is deadlocked on passing a privacy law.
Tech companies’ regulatory capture involves a risible and transparent gambit, that is so stupid, it’s an insult to all the good hardworking risible transparent ruses out there.
64/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/65
Namely, they claim that when they violate your consumer, privacy or labor rights, It’s not a crime, because they do it with an app.
Algorithmic wage discrimination isn’t illegal wage theft: we do it with an app.
Spying on you from asshole to appetite isn’t a privacy violation: we do it with an app.
And Amazon’s scam search tool that tricks you into paying 29% more than the best match for your query? Not a ripoff. We do it with an app.
65/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/66
Once we killed competition - stopped putting down rat poison - we got cartels - the rats ate our faces. And the cartels captured their regulators - the rats bought out the poison factory and shut it down.
So companies aren’t constrained by competition or regulation.
But you know what? This is tech, and tech is different.IIt’s different because it’s flexible. Because our computers are Turing-complete universal von Neumann machines.
66/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/67
That means that any enshittificatory alteration to a program can be disenshittified with another program.
Every time HP jacks up the price of ink , they invite a competitor to market a refill kit or a compatible cartridge.
When Tesla installs code that says you have to pay an extra monthly fee to use your whole battery, they invite a modder to start selling a kit to jailbreak that battery and charge it all the way up.
67/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/68
Lemme take you through a little example of how that works: Imagine this is a product design meeting for our company’s website, and the guy leading the meeting says “Dudes, you know how our KPI is topline ad-revenue? Well, I’ve calculated that if we make the ads just 20% more invasive and obnoxious, we’ll boost ad rev by 2%”
This is a good pitch. Hit that KPI and everyone gets a fat bonus. We can all take our families on a luxury ski vacation in Switzerland.
68/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/69
But here’s the thing: someone’s gonna stick their arm up - someone who doesn’t give a shit about user well-being, and that person is gonna say, “I love how you think, Elon. But has it occurred to you that if we make the ads 20% more obnoxious, then 40% of our users will go to a search engine and type 'How do I block ads?'"
69/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/70
I mean, what a nightmare! Because once a user does that, the revenue from that user doesn’t rise to 102%. It doesn’t stay at 100% It falls to *zero*, forever.
[Any guesses why?]
Because *no user ever went back to the search engine and typed, 'How do I start seeing ads again?'*
Once the user jailbreaks their phone or discovers third party ink, or develops a relationship with an independent Tesla mechanic who’ll unlock all the DLC in their car, that user is *gone*, *forever*.
70/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/71
Interoperability – that latent property bequeathed to us courtesy of Herrs Turing and Von Neumann and their infinitely flexible, universal machines - that is a serious check on enshittification.
The fact that Congress hasn’t passed a privacy law since 1988 Is countered, at least in part, by the fact that the *majority* of web users are now running ad-blockers, which are also tracker-blockers.
71/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/72
But no one’s ever installed a tracker-blocker for an *app*. Because reverse engineering an app puts in you jeopardy of criminal and civil prosecution under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with penalties of a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine for a first offense.
72/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/73
And violating its terms of service puts you in jeopardy under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, which is the law that Ronald Reagan signed in a panic after watching Wargames (seriously!).
Helping other users violate the terms of service can get you hit with a lawsuit for tortious interference with contract. And then there’s trademark, copyright and patent.
All that nonsense we call “IP,” but which Jay Freeman of Cydia calls “Felony Contempt of Business Model."
73/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/74
So if we’re still at that product planning meeting and now it’s time to talk about our app, the guy leading the meeting says, “OK, so we’ll make the ads in the *app* 20% more obnoxious to pull a 2% increase in topline ad rev?”
And that person who objected to making the website 20% worse? Their hand goes back up. Only this time they say “Why don’t we make the ads 100% more invasive and get a 10% increase in ad rev?"
74/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/75
Because it *doesn't matter* if a user goes to a search engine and types, “How do I block ads in an app." The answer is: *you can't.* So YOLO, enshittify away.
“IP” is just a euphemism for “any law that lets me reach outside my company’s walls to exert coercive control over my critics, competitors and customers,” and “app” is just a euphemism for “A web page skinned with the right IP so that protecting your privacy while you use it is a felony.”
75/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/76
Interop used to keep companies from enshittifying. If a company made its client suck, someone would roll out an alternative client, if they ripped a feature out and wanted to sell it back to you as a monthly subscription, someone would make a compatible plugin that restored it for a one-time fee, or for free.
76/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/77
To help people flee Myspace, FB gave them bots that you’d load with your login credentials. It would scrape your waiting Myspace messages and put ‘em in your FB inbox, and login to Myspace and paste your replies into your Myspace outbox. So you didn’t have to choose between the people you loved on Myspace, and Facebook, which launched with a promise *never* to spy on you. Remember that?!
77/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/78
Thanks to the metastasis of IP, all that is off the table today. Apple owes its very existence to iWork Suite, whose Pages, Numbers and Keynote are file-compatible with Microsoft’s Word, Excel and Powerpoint. But make an IOS runtime that’ll play back the files you bought from Apple’s stores on other platforms, and they’ll nuke you til you glow.
78/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/79
FB wouldn’t have had a hope of breaking Myspace’s grip on social media without that scrape, but scrape FB today in support of an alternative client and their lawyers will bomb you til the rubble bounces.
Google scraped every website in the world to create its search index. Try and scrape Google and they’ll have your head on a pike.
When they did it, it was progress. When you do it to them, that’s piracy. Every pirate wants to be an admiral.
79/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/80
Because this handful of companies has so thoroughly captured their regulators, they can wield the power of the state against *you* when you try to break their grip on power, even as their own flagrant violations of our rights go unpunished. Because they do them with an app.
Tech lost its fear of competitin it neutralized the threat from regulators, and then put them in harness to attack new startups that might do unto them as they did unto the companies that came before them.
80/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/81
But even so, there was a force that kept our bosses in check That force was *us*. Tech workers.
Tech workers have historically been in short supply, which gave us power, and our bosses knew it.
To get us to work crazy hours, they came up with a trick. They appealed to our love of technology, and told us that we were heroes of a digital revolution, who would “organize the world’s information and make it useful,” who would “bring the world closer together.”
81/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/82
They brought in expert set-dressers to turn our workplaces into whimsical campuses with free laundry, gourmet cafeterias, massages, and kombucha, and a surgeon on hand to freeze our eggs so that we could work through our fertile years.
They convinced us that we were being pampered, rather than being worked like government mules.
This trick has a name. Fobazi Ettarh, the librarian-theorist, calls it “vocational awe, and Elon Musk calls it being “extremely hardcore.”
82/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/83
This worked very well. Boy did we put in some long-ass hours!
But for our bosses, this trick failed badly. Because if you miss your mother’s funeral and to hit a deadline, and then your boss orders you to enshittify that product, you are gonna experience a profound moral injury, which you are *absolutely* gonna make your boss share.
83/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/84
Because what are they gonna do? Fire you? They can’t hire someone else to do your job, and you can get a job that’s even better at the shop across the street.
So workers held the line when competition, regulation and interop failed
But eventually, supply caught up with demand. Tech laid off 260,000 of us last year, and another 100,000 in the first half of this year.
84/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/85
You can’t tell your bosses to go fuck themselves, because they’ll fire your ass and give your job to someone who’ll be only too happy to enshittify that product you built.
That’s why this is all happening right now. Our bosses aren’t different. They didn’t catch a mind-virus that turned them into greedy assholes who don’t care about our users’ wellbeing or the quality of our products.
85/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/86
As far as our bosses have *always* been concerned, the point of the business was to charge the most, and deliver the least, while sharing as little as possible with suppliers, workers, users and customers. They’re not running charities.
Since day one, our bosses have shown up for work and yanked as hard as they can on the big ENSHITTIFICATION lever behind their desks, only that lever didn’t move much. It was all gummed up by competition, regulation, interop and workers.
86/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/87
As those sources of friction melted away, the enshittification lever started moving very freely.
Which sucks, I know. But think about this for a sec: our bosses, despite being wildly imperfect vessels capable of rationalizing endless greed and cheating, nevertheless oversaw a series of actually *great* products and services.
Not because they used to be better people, but because they used to be subjected to *discipline*.
87/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/88
So it follows that if we want to end the enshittocene, dismantle the enshitternet, and build a new, good internet that our bosses can’t wreck, we need to make sure that these constraints are durably installed on that internet, wound around its very roots and nerves. And we have to stand guard over it so that it can’t be dismantled again.
88/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/89
A new, good internet is one that has the positive aspects of the old, good internet: an ethic of technological self-determination, where users of technology (and hackers, tinkerers, startups and others serving as their proxies) can reconfigure and mod the technology they use, so that it does what they need it to do, and so that it can’t be used *against* them.
89/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/90
But the new, good internet will *fix* the defects of the old, good internet, the part that made it hard to use for anyone who wasn’t *us*. And hell yeah we can do that. Tech bosses swear that it’s impossible, that you can’t have a conversation friend without sharing it with Zuck; or search the web without letting Google scrape you down to the viscera; or have a phone that works reliably without giving Apple a veto over the software you install.
90/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/91
They claim that it’s a nonsense to even *ponder* this kind of thing. It’s like making water that’s not wet. But that’s bullshit. We can have nice things. We can build for the people we love, and give them a place that’s worth of their time and attention.
To do that, we have to install constraints.
91/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/92
The first constraint, remember, is competition. We’re living through a epochal shift in competition policy. After 40 years with antitrust enforcement in an induced coma, a wave of antitrust vigor has swept through governments all over the world. Regulators are stepping in to ban monopolistic practices, open up walled gardens, block anticompetitive mergers, and even unwind corrupt mergers that were undertaken on false pretenses.
92/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/93
Normally this is the place in the speech where I’d list out all the amazing things that have happened over the past four years. The enforcement actions that blocked companies from becoming too big to care, and that scared companies away from even trying.
93/
Udo B.
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/93
93 toots for a single article feels like a DOS attack!![:-( :-(](https://friendica.hellquist.eu/images/smiley-frown.gif)
Please look for a better fitting tool like #writefreely
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Udo B. • • •Content warning: Long thread/93
@udob
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/16/how-to-make-the-least-worst-mastodon-threads/
How To Make the Least-Worst Mastodon Threads – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netUdo B.
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/93
Thank you for the reply, I will go for .rss!
I am actually a fan of your statements/articles![:-) :-)](https://friendica.hellquist.eu/images/smiley-smile.gif)
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Udo B. • • •Content warning: Long thread/93
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/94
Like Wiz, which just noped out of the *largest acquisition offer in history*, turning down Google’s $23b cashout, and deciding to, you know, just be a fucking business that makes money by producing a product that people want and selling it at a competitive price.
Normally, I’d be listing out FTC rulemakings that banned noncompetes nationwid.
94/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/95
Or the new merger guidelines the FTC and DOJ cooked up, which – among other things – establish that the agencies should be considering whether a merger will negatively impact privacy.
I had a whole section of this stuff in my notes, a real victory lap, but I deleted it all this week.
[Can anyone guess why?]
95/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/96
That’s right! This week, Judge Amit Mehta, ruling for the DC Circuit of these United States of America, In the docket 20-3010 a case known as *United States v. Google LLC*, found that “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly," and ordered Google and the DOJ to propose a schedule for a remedy, like breaking the company up.
So yeah, that was pretty fucking *epic*.
96/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/97
Now, this antitrust stuff is pretty esoteric, and I won’t gatekeep you or shame you if you wanna keep a little distance on this subject. Nearly everyone is an antitrust normie, and *that's OK*. But if you’re a normie, you’re probably only catching little bits and pieces of the narrative, and let me tell you, the monopolists know it and they are *flooding the zone*.
97/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/98
The *Wall Street Journal* has published over 100 editorials condemning FTC Chair Lina Khan, saying she’s an ineffectual do-nothing, wasting public funds chasing doomed, quixotic adventures against poor, innocent businesses accomplishing nothing
[Does anyone out there know who owns the *WSJ*?]
That’s right, it’s Rupert Murdoch. Do you really think Rupert Murdoch pays his editorial board to write *one hundred editorials* about someone who’s not getting anything done?
98/
Kim Scheinberg
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/98
I joked the other day when the Fake Reviews and Testimonials ruling came down that I would buy Lina Khan merch
Turns out... it exists
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/08/federal-trade-commission-announces-final-rule-banning-fake-reviews-testimonials
Federal Trade Commission Announces Final Rule Banning Fake Reviews and Testimonials
Federal Trade CommissionCory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT reshared this.
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Kim Scheinberg • • •Content warning: Long thread/98
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/99
The reality is that in the USA, in the UK, in the EU, in Australia, in Canada, in Japan, in South Korea, even in *China*, we are seeing more antitrust action over the past four years than over the preceding *forty* years.
Remember, competition *law* is actually pretty robust. The problem isn’t the law, It’s the enforcement priorities.
99/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/100
Reagan put antitrust in mothballs 40 years ago, but that elegant weapon from a more civilized age is now back in the hands of people who know how to use it, and they’re swinging for the fences.
Next up: regulation.
As the seemingly inescapable power of the tech giants is revealed for the sham it always was, governments and regulators are finally gonna kill the “one weird trick” of violating the law, and saying “It doesn’t count, we did it with an app.”
100/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/101
Like in the EU, they’re rolling out the Digital Markets Act this year. That’s a law requiring dominant platforms to stand up APIs so that third parties can offer interoperable services.
101/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/102
So a co-op, a nonprofit, a hobbyist, a startup, or a local government agency wil eventuallyl be able to offer, say, a social media server that can interconnect with one of the dominant social media silos, and users who switch to that new platform will be able to continue to exchange messages with the users they follow and groups they belong to, so the switching costs will fall to damned near zero.
102/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/103
That’s a very cool rule, but what’s even cooler is how it’s gonna be enforced. Previous EU tech rules were “regulations” as in the GDPR - the General Data Privacy Regulation. EU regs need to be “transposed” into laws in each of the 27 EU member states, so they become national laws that get enforced by national courts.
103/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/104
For Big Tech, that means all previous tech regulations are enforced in *Ireland*, because Ireland is a tax haven, and all the tech companies fly Irish flags of convenience.
Here’s the thing: every tax haven is also a crime haven. After all, if Google can pretend it’s Irish this week, it can pretend to be Cypriot, or Maltese, or Luxembougeious next week. So Ireland has to keep these footloose criminal enterprises happy, or they’ll up sticks and go somewhere else.
104/
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/105
This is why the GDPR is such a goddamned joke in practice. Big tech wipes its ass with the GDPR, and the only way to punish them starts with Ireland’s privacy commissioner, who barely bothers to get out of bed. This is an agency that spends most of its time watching cartoons on TV in its pajamas and eating breakfast cereal. So all of the big GDPR cases go to Ireland and they die there
105/
Suzanne Aldrich (she/her)
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/105
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT reshared this.
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Suzanne Aldrich (she/her) • • •Content warning: Long thread/105
Suzanne Aldrich (she/her)
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/105
Zhi Zhu 🕸️
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/14
And even if you buy the name brand ink cartridges, if you don't buy them often enough, they lock you out of your printer.
My Epson printer claims that it can't recognize the EPSON cyan, magenta & yellow ink cartridges that are in it. They're the same cartridges that have always been in it. I just don't replace them very often, because we rarely print in color.
So... I have to replace them, even though they're not empty, because the printer won't work until I do.
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT reshared this.
OldGeek
in reply to Zhi Zhu 🕸️ • • •Content warning: Long thread/14
@ZhiZhu
Yeah I just tossed my whole printer. Have laser now. What is so stupid is that when this model is on sale its cheaper than a replacement cartridge.
@pluralistic
Token Sane Person
in reply to OldGeek • • •Content warning: Long thread/14
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Bill Seitz • • •Content warning: Long thread/eof
How To Make the Least-Worst Mastodon Threads – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netLen Whitten
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/eof
Nicole Parsons
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/eof
@billseitz
It's odd the various methods folks use to cope with cognitive dissonance.
When the brain says "I acknowledge the rightness of what you say, but I don't want to cope with reality right now."
Women & POC are very familiar with the "tone policing" used to maintain a social hierarchy & enforce deference rituals, to derail an effective messaging strategy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_policing
https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft7h4nb4rx&chunk.id=d0e2622&toc.depth=1&toc.id=&brand=ucpress
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept)
Bad faith advice ...
1/2
manipulative tactic that focus on the tone in which a statement was presented and in turn detract attention from the truth or falsity of that statement
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)The Janx Devil
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •TLDR: the street can’t find its own uses for things anymore, because everything has been made useless by design now. The suits are all out of ideas, with no way to get new ones, and their entire defense strategy— including the vast system of logistics that supports it— is organized around keeping everything useless by design for as long as possible, using nothing but sheer authoritarian brutality as their only tool, until they don’t have even that anymore.
It is not hard to see how that plan goes wrong for them.
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT reshared this.
The Janx Devil
Unknown parent • • •Karl Auerbach
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Well, I was there "at the beginning" when we rejected "kings" and centralized sources of internet identity/authentication.
That was in keeping with the Internet evolving out of the hippie era Governments were considered bad.
But as I age I am thinking we made a mistake; that many of our internet woes arise out of our rejection of control over the net and the things that attach to it.
Certainly we don't want to go back to the notions of key escrow and other horrors of the past, but perhaps we do want to revisit our views of testing and qualification of things that attach to the net. Innovation at the edge is a good idea, but it we may have taken it too far.
(I would also throw a large mental brick at Milton F and the Chicago School of Economics for foisting the false, even illegal, notion that corporations are slaves to "shareholder value" - I am so sick of corporate Boards of Directors who do not understand their duties and instead screw the communities that give them legal life.)
Captain Superfluous
Unknown parent • • •@aud
I'm not sure if any union represents workers at Microsoft. There's something going on re Activision and perhaps with contract companies but is there any union representation at Microsoft proper? Asking because I don't know and a quick search shows no union representation at Microsoft.
@pluralistic @janxdevil
Asta [AMP]
in reply to The Janx Devil • • •I don't know about CWA at large, but I'm pretty sure they're basically a corporate puppet at places like Microsoft and don't do shit except let Microsoft pretend it's a "union shop".
I won't pretend to know or say anything about the union at large but at least at Microsoft the only people they seem to talk to are the bosses. Round after round of layoff, and you'd have no idea a union even existed there... because it pretty much doesn't.
Josh
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Misha Van Mollusq 🏳️⚧️ ♀
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Captain Superfluous
Unknown parent • • •@aud
Hypothetically...
If you were a soulless tech ceo, and suddenly LLMs are being hyped like neon tulips, and major shareholders are clamouring for layoffs -
And you've been worrying because tech unionization efforts have been gaining ground lately -
Two birds, one stone?
Hmmm. I'm a little embarrassed to say that this is just now occurring to me.
@pluralistic @janxdevil
Asta [AMP]
Unknown parent • • •Asta [AMP]
in reply to Captain Superfluous • • •Den of Earth
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/112882405794965141
Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr)
La Quadrature du Net - Mastodon - Media FédéréCory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
Unknown parent • • •The Memex Method – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netBill Seitz
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Content warning: Long thread/eof
Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT
in reply to Bill Seitz • • •Content warning: Long thread/eof
Sashin
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •Janet Vertesi
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •the title alone is worth an Academy Award!
@defcon @Incognitim
OddOpinions5
in reply to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT • • •