168. Enshittification -- Cory Doctorow ![rw-book-cover](https://wsrv.nl/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fartwork.captivate.fm%2Fda99d182-d8d8-4ffb-80a8-7026e2f7b177%2FIG_WCQ0Abb11e7-QJpw2oihg.png&w=512&h=512) ## Metadata - Author: [[Everyday Anarchism]] - Full Title: 168. Enshittification -- Cory Doctorow - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/1afd409f-7ff2-462d-9e98-1efb5a94dce4 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Dick Van Dyke Vamping At Rally** - Cory recounts a Bernie rally where Dick Van Dyke, in his 90s, vamped and spitballed to fill time. - The story illustrates public figures improvising and sometimes saying things they may not fully mean. Transcript: Cory Doctorow This group, one of the last events that I went to before lockdown was a Bernie Sanders rally here in LA. And you know how these things go. There's a string of warmup acts, right one after the other after the other and one of them was dick van dyke who was at this point in his 90s and the guy is a national treasure clearly uh but He thought that he was the last act before um before bernie came on so he's like watching the um uh watching the wings and watching for bernie to step up and bernie's not stepping up and He's a trooper. So he starts spitballing. He's like vamping to give Bernie time to make it to the stage. And at a certain point, he's like, and you know, people think that it was wrong to nuke Japan. But honestly, in retrospect, I think nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And it's like he is just spitballing. And again, I think that like 10 years, even I don't even know if Dick Van Dyke believes it, but I think 10 years before he might've had the executive function to say, yeah, maybe this is Like, I know I'm vamping here, but maybe not this vamping. ([Time 0:04:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9bed3484-a37e-48e9-821f-db9017a1e3da)) - **Three-Stage Platform Decay** - Inshittification describes how platforms start user-friendly, lock users in, then degrade service to extract value from businesses and users. - Platforms harvest surplus while keeping just enough functionality to maintain lock-in and extract rent. Transcript: Cory Doctorow So the pathology of incentivization, the pattern of platform decay, starts with platforms being good to their end users and then finding a way to lock those end users in. So you have Facebook, for example, which when it opened up to anyone in the world and not just people with an American college email address with a.edu at the end of it in 2006, made this Pitch that was like, look, I know you've already got an account on MySpace, but MySpace is full of ads and the evil billionaire who owns it, Rupert Murdoch, he spies on you all the time. Come to Facebook. We are the platform that will never, ever spy on you. And all we will do is show you the things that you asked to see, and we'll never put things in your feed that you never asked to see. So people flocked in, and they also locked in, because with social media, we get locked in by something called the collective action problem. You know, I think anarchists understand this, right? You love your friends, but they're a pain in the ass. You can't agree on what board game the six people in your group chat are going to play this weekend. So when there's 200 of you and you're all on Facebook and some of you are there because, you know, you share a rare disease and there's a support group there for you, or that's where the People who live in the country you emigrated from are keeping in touch with you, or it's how you keep in touch with the parents in your kids' little league and play in the car pool, or it's Where your customers or audiences, you know, it's very hard to convince all those people to go. So you have this collective action problem. And because those relationships are so valuable to you, you've got a high switching cost, you have to give up a lot to leave Facebook. And Facebook understands this. So it's time to move on to stage two, which is making things worse for end users in order to lure in business customers. And so Facebook understanding that it's hard for you to leave now, starts to undo the deal that it had offered you in order to make things better for other groups. So they go to the advertisers and they say, hey, you remember we told these rubes we weren't going to spy on them? Well, we're spying on them from asshole to appetite. And for small dollars, we will locate with extreme precision, the targets for your ads. And not only that, but because we're such, you know, generous people, we're paying a building full of engineers to just police ad fraud. And if you give us a dollar to show an ad to a specific user, that's the ad that we're going to put out. And it's going to be seen by that user. You're not going to lose money to fraud. And they go to publishers and they say, you remember we told these rubes we were only going to show them the things that they asked to see. Of course, we were lying about that too. Put excerpts from your website onto Facebook. Put a link back to your website. We'll just like non-consensually cram it into the eyeballs of people never asked to see it. And they will visit your website. They might subscribe to your feed. It's a free traffic funnel. And so the business customers pile in and they get locked in too. And this is something I think that is not well understood. I think a lot of people understood the platforms make things worse for their end users. But if you follow theses like Shoshana Zuboff's surveillance capitalism ideas, you might think that the division is platform owners and advertisers on one side and users on the other. But the reality is that platform owners are being just as rotten to those business customers. You know, just because you're paying for the product doesn't mean you're not the product. So advertisers see the price of ads go way up and they see the fidelity of ad targeting go way down and they see the amount of ad fraud explode beyond all recognition. So Procter& Gamble had been spending $200 million a year on what they call programmatic ads, but which are really surveillance ads. And they zeroed out that $200 million a year spend, and they saw a 0% drop in sales because to a first approximation, no one saw a Procter& Gamble ad. It was $200 million worth of ads just disappearing down the fraud hole. And publishers, they found that they had to add more and more of their content to that excerpt just to have it shown to their own subscribers, let alone to have it recommended, until eventually They were publishing a fully substitutive duplicate of the copy on their website. And then Facebook started punishing them if they linked to the website on the grounds that maybe that's a malicious link. And so you have publishers becoming commodity backend suppliers to the platform and the platform just squeezes them harder and harder. And, you know, because we tend to view things through a consumer lens, we know a lot about monopoly, which is where you have a powerful seller. We don't know as much about this monopsony where you have a powerful buyer. And this is something where maybe if you're a progressive, you've thought about this in the context of labor markets, where, you know, if you live in a company town and there's only one Employer, they can really squeeze you. But, you're just a supplier to a platform for an advertiser or publisher, they can really squeeze you too. And it's much easier to capture a seller than it is to capture a buyer. And once you think about it for a second, it's easy to understand why. So imagine that you're a business and 20% of your receipts come from one customer and that customer decides to stop buying from you. So you have a little coffee shop and 20% of your day's sales are a giant business next door that orders coffee for everyone. And every morning you get up and you, 20% of your, of your revenue is just making coffees and bringing them next door. And that's the whole business. They stop. You're going to have to lay off half of your staff, not 20% of your staff, half of your staff. You might not make the mortgage. You might not make the rent. You might not be able to roll over your loans for the espresso machines. You might go out of business, right? Whereas if you are a coffee drinker and there's five coffee shops on your way to work and one of them goes out of business and you lose 20% of the possible purchases, you don't have any trouble Getting another coffee. And so monopsony is much easier to create and maintain than monopoly. And so you have the platform in its final stage, in stage three, where it is withdrawing the surplus from publishers and advertisers, withdrawing the surplus from end users. The amount of content in our feed has dwindled to a kind of homeopathic residue. The resulting void is being filled with things that people are paying to shove their advertisers and publishers, but they're getting ripped off too. And all of the excess is being harvested by the business, by its executives, and by its shareholders. And the platform wants to sit in this knife edge equilibrium of having harvested all the values save the merest residue needed to keep us locked to each other and to keep the businesses Locked to us. And that's when it turns into a pile of shit. And that's why we keep using it after it stopped being good for us. ([Time 0:07:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f745b21a-9057-4cb9-baa8-53a0127dfa26)) - **Businesses Become Victims Too** - Platforms lure business customers by breaking promises to users and monetizing surveillance and placement. - Advertisers and publishers also get squeezed and often fail to see returns despite paying more. Transcript: Cory Doctorow So it's time to move on to stage two, which is making things worse for end users in order to lure in business customers. And so Facebook understanding that it's hard for you to leave now, starts to undo the deal that it had offered you in order to make things better for other groups. So they go to the advertisers and they say, hey, you remember we told these rubes we weren't going to spy on them? Well, we're spying on them from asshole to appetite. And for small dollars, we will locate with extreme precision, the targets for your ads. And not only that, but because we're such, you know, generous people, we're paying a building full of engineers to just police ad fraud. And if you give us a dollar to show an ad to a specific user, that's the ad that we're going to put out. And it's going to be seen by that user. You're not going to lose money to fraud. And they go to publishers and they say, you remember we told these rubes we were only going to show them the things that they asked to see. Of course, we were lying about that too. Put excerpts from your website onto Facebook. Put a link back to your website. We'll just like non-consensually cram it into the eyeballs of people never asked to see it. And they will visit your website. They might subscribe to your feed. It's a free traffic funnel. And so the business customers pile in and they get locked in too. And this is something I think that is not well understood. I think a lot of people understood the platforms make things worse for their end users. But if you follow theses like Shoshana Zuboff's surveillance capitalism ideas, you might think that the division is platform owners and advertisers on one side and users on the other. But the reality is that platform owners are being just as rotten to those business customers. You know, just because you're paying for the product doesn't mean you're not the product. So advertisers see the price of ads go way up and they see the fidelity of ad targeting go way down and they see the amount of ad fraud explode beyond all recognition. So Procter& Gamble had been spending $200 million a year on what they call programmatic ads, but which are really surveillance ads. And they zeroed out that $200 million a year spend, and they saw a 0% drop in sales because to a first approximation, no one saw a Procter& Gamble ad. It was $200 million worth of ads just disappearing down the fraud hole. And publishers, they found that they had to add more and more of their content to that excerpt just to have it shown to their own subscribers, let alone to have it recommended, until eventually They were publishing a fully substitutive duplicate of the copy on their website. And then Facebook started punishing them if they linked to the website on the grounds that maybe that's a malicious link. And so you have publishers becoming commodity backend suppliers to the platform and the platform just squeezes them harder and harder. And, you know, because we tend to view things through a consumer lens, we know a lot about monopoly, which is where you have a powerful seller. We don't know as much about this monopsony where you have a powerful buyer. And this is something where maybe if you're a progressive, you've thought about this in the context of labor markets, where, you know, if you live in a company town and there's only one Employer, they can really squeeze you. But, you're just a supplier to a platform for an advertiser or publisher, they can really squeeze you too. And it's much easier to capture a seller than it is to capture a buyer. And once you think about it for a second, it's easy to understand why. So imagine that you're a business and 20% of your receipts come from one customer and that customer decides to stop buying from you. So you have a little coffee shop and 20% of your day's sales are a giant business next door that orders coffee for everyone. And every morning you get up and you, 20% of your, of your revenue is just making coffees and bringing them next door. And that's the whole business. They stop. You're going to have to lay off half of your staff, not 20% of your staff, half of your staff. You might not make the mortgage. You might not make the rent. You might not be able to roll over your loans for the espresso machines. You might go out of business, right? Whereas if you are a coffee drinker and there's five coffee shops on your way to work and one of them goes out of business and you lose 20% of the possible purchases, you don't have any trouble Getting another coffee. And so monopsony is much easier to create and maintain than monopoly. And so you have the platform in its final stage, in stage three, where it is withdrawing the surplus from publishers and advertisers, withdrawing the surplus from end users. The amount of content in our feed has dwindled to a kind of homeopathic residue. The resulting void is being filled with things that people are paying to shove their advertisers and publishers, but they're getting ripped off too. And all of the excess is being harvested by the business, ([Time 0:08:28](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6e225d29-6250-441d-8847-b4e36ee2b111)) - **Monopsony Easier To Maintain Than Monopoly** - Platforms create monopsony power—powerful buyer dynamics—that are easier to maintain than monopoly. - Sellers dependent on one platform face catastrophic risk if that platform changes terms. Transcript: Cory Doctorow And, you know, because we tend to view things through a consumer lens, we know a lot about monopoly, which is where you have a powerful seller. We don't know as much about this monopsony where you have a powerful buyer. And this is something where maybe if you're a progressive, you've thought about this in the context of labor markets, where, you know, if you live in a company town and there's only one Employer, they can really squeeze you. But, you're just a supplier to a platform for an advertiser or publisher, they can really squeeze you too. And it's much easier to capture a seller than it is to capture a buyer. And once you think about it for a second, it's easy to understand why. So imagine that you're a business and 20% of your receipts come from one customer and that customer decides to stop buying from you. So you have a little coffee shop and 20% of your day's sales are a giant business next door that orders coffee for everyone. And every morning you get up and you, 20% of your, of your revenue is just making coffees and bringing them next door. And that's the whole business. They stop. You're going to have to lay off half of your staff, not 20% of your staff, half of your staff. You might not make the mortgage. You might not make the rent. You might not be able to roll over your loans for the espresso machines. You might go out of business, right? Whereas if you are a coffee drinker and there's five coffee shops on your way to work and one of them goes out of business and you lose 20% of the possible purchases, you don't have any trouble Getting another coffee. And so monopsony is much easier to create and maintain than monopoly. ([Time 0:11:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/60724820-6c21-4bbe-933a-f337a584089b)) - **Policy Set The Stage For Capture** - Deregulation, weakened antitrust, expanded IP, and weak labor rights enabled platforms to capture markets. - These policy choices removed the consequences that previously disciplined dominant firms. Transcript: Cory Doctorow When there were competitors, when we enforced antitrust law, when companies couldn't buy their direct competitors, whether that's Facebook buying Insta or Google buying everything, They had to worry about us leaving. When there were lots of companies in a sector, they had to compete with one another and they found it hard to capture their regulators because they had different ideas about the best Way to run that business. But once they converge into five giant firms, they all have exactly the same business model and they lobby with one voice and they have so much money left over from not competing that They can buy off their regulators. And I think about Google getting convicted of this illegal search monopoly. And one of the facts in that case was that Google had been paying more than $20 billion a year to Apple not to make a search engine. And so, you know, you had nowhere to go and the regulator let them get away with it. And, you know, even after they lost that antitrust case, the court just ruled that Google could keep paying that bribe because they said, well, Apple might be spending that $20 billion To make better products for iPhone users. So it would not be fair to them to make Apple stop taking this bribe from Google. So you have regulatory capture that stops, that allows companies to get away with it. You used have powerful workers in the tech sector. I know we all make fun of tech bros, but they were in such high demand and they generated so much value for their employers. There's a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper that estimates the net value that each tech worker added to a Silicon Valley firm at a million dollars a year. And that's why they had free kombucha and a ball pit and massages and This a surgeon who'd freeze their eggs so they could work through their fertile years. It was because they were worth a gargantuan amount of money to their employers and there wasn't anyone to fill their job if they quit. And so what that meant is that to the extent that they cared about their users, and a lot of them did, they were, I called them Tron pilled, you know, they fought for the user. These folks, when their bosses ordered them to unshittify a product, they like missed their mother's funeral to ship on time. They just say no. And if the bosses pushed it, they'd walk across the street and have another job by lunchtime. Supply caught up with demand and the fact that these workers never unionized meant that there was nothing to stand between them and their bosses when their bosses didn't need them so Much. Well, they were no longer in a position to fight for our rights. And then finally, we used to have this thing called interoperability, the ability to plug two or more technologies into each other. And, you know, computers formally, there's something called Turing Complete Universal von Neumann machines, which is how computer scientists describe something that is able to Run every valid program. And that means that for every gambit, every dirty trick, every 10 foot pile of shit that a tech boss installed in a product that you used, someone could make an 11 foot software ladder That would go over it. Every time they locked out generic ink on your printer, someone could write the program that unlocked it. Every time they locked you into an app store, someone could lock you out of that. Every time they invaded your privacy, someone could make a privacy protecting layer for your technology. And the thing is that over 20 years, we've just expanded IP law over and over again, often in the name of defending creative workers who, strangely enough, are making less money now than They were 20 years ago. And that has meant that we don't get that interoperability either. And so really, this is not the iron laws of economics. It's not bad consumption choices. It's not the great forces of history. ([Time 0:13:28](https://share.snipd.com/snip/49cae8d9-6847-4c88-bed3-d6ae58b7d154)) - **Platforms Resemble Feudal Rentiers** - Owning platforms that extract rents resembles feudal ownership more than classic capitalist entrepreneurship. - The distinction matters: rents come from ownership, profits come from creating value via competition. Transcript: Graham Culbertson But if a capitalist is someone who builds a product that people like, and they buy that product, you are not a capitalist. You're a feudal lord. How does that sound? Cory Doctorow Yeah. Well, I think that you're getting at something that Giannis talks about in his book, obviously, this difference between rents and profits. You know, rents are things that you get by owning something and profits are things you get by making something or doing something. And it's funny because, you know, if you evince this critique among Germans, they will tell you that you're being structurally anti-Semitic, which is just like as a Jew being told that By people with a Vaughn in their name is very weird, but they're like, oh no, you know, you can't, you can't accuse finance capital of being evil and, you know, parasitic and saying that The real economy is the healthy one. Cause that's what the Nazis did. Well, you know, the Nazis also like the great outdoors. It doesn't mean that it, you know, enjoying fresh air makes you a Nazi. Uh, and I do think that, you know, owning factors of production is what every capitalist aspires to, but mobilizing the factors of production is what capitalists are supposed to do. And while I take your point that there was never like a golden age, there was at least maybe a silver or a bronze age of this stuff that because of the last gasps of antitrust law in the late 1970s and early 1980s, where we broke up AT&T and we nearly broke up IBM, we took IBM through a 12-year antitrust ordeal that really changed its corporate culture. And then later on, we did the same thing to Microsoft, where it went through this antitrust ordeal. And like IBM, it escaped, but it didn't escape unscathed. It was very hard on the company and on its executives. The first viral video was a deposition tape of Bill Gates just being nuts in his deposition and being childish and petulant and just really cringe. And it went VHS viral. People copied the tape and handed it around. ([Time 0:20:35](https://share.snipd.com/snip/298effe2-d349-4999-90ed-60068ec7cfc0)) - **Antitrust Encouraged Tech Dynamism** - Earlier antitrust enforcement encouraged interoperability and dynamism in tech markets. - Breaking up dominant firms historically forced them to avoid rent-seeking and made room for innovation. Transcript: Cory Doctorow And so we got dynamism because the only way you could do capitalism on the internet in those early days and network services was not by figuring out how to extract rent. It was by making better products, right? By poaching customers or by bringing in new customers who didn't know that they needed the internet, but you could make the case to them for doing it. And, you know, IBM, after their 12-year antitrust ordeal, they made the PC out of commodity components rather than out of proprietary ones because the DOJ didn't like it. They didn't make their own operating system because they know the DOJ really hated tying software to hardware. And so they hired this kid called Bill Gates, who had a friend called Paul Allen, and who had a company called Micro-Soft. And they made DOS. Actually, they bought DOS from someone else and sold it to IBM. Technologist, a guy named Tom Jennings, who, among other things, he founded a dial-up network called FidoNet that let different BBSs talk to each other. If you're an old BBS person, you'll remember FidoNet. He was a really key agitator during the AIDS crisis in San Francisco, and he published a called HomoCore. He was also a software engineer, and his employer, Phoenix, paid him to reverse engineer the Phoenix ROM, or the IBM PC ROM, which was the thing that made an IBM PC able to run IBM PC software That worked with Microsoft. So he went into a clean room and he reverse engineered the PC ROM. They made the Phoenix ROM, and that's where you got Dell and Gateway and Compaq. And IBM did not turn them into radioactive rubble because they were afraid of the DOJ coming down on them for being anti-competitive. And then, you know, Microsoft turned into IBM. They crushed Netscape the way IBM crushed so many companies. But then the DOJ got involved with them and Bill Gates was so scarred by it that when Google came along, they didn't do it to Google. So there was this incredible dynamism. Companies rose and they fell. When the cupidity, the greed, the short-sightedness, the rationalization of tech bosses led them to worsen the things that we relied on, we weren't stuck with them. We went somewhere else. Their businesses failed. The smart ones didn't do it because they feared the consequences. ([Time 0:23:35](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fdb3ce80-b01d-4aa5-a630-767131e0fba4)) - **Algorithmic Wage Discrimination For Nurses** - Cory describes nurses being algorithmically discriminated against by apps that set wages based on credit history. - That exploitation drains nurses' capacity to engage in collective action and care work for others. Transcript: Cory Doctorow There'd be two or three in every town. Now they're staffed through four giant apps, each of which calls itself Uber for nurses. And because there's no privacy law, before the nurse gets a shift, the app looks up the nurse's credit history. And if they're carrying a lot of credit card debt, they get offered a lower wage on the grounds that they're probably more economically desperate and willing to take that wage. And look, nurses are the front lines of the struggle for justice in lots of ways. For one thing, they're keeping the rest of us alive and healthy, but they're also fighting for better wages, patient rights, all of those good things. And the nurse who drove Uber till midnight last night and skipped breakfast this morning to make rent because of this wage erosion through algorithmic wage discrimination, that nurse Does not have a lot of spoons left over to help fight those other fights. ([Time 0:26:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d47483ed-a880-405a-8712-bbc799dfbb22)) - **Reclaim Privacy With Self-Help Tech** - Use digital tools and reforms to reclaim privacy and control, like ad blockers and DRM reform. - Run lawful self-help tech (e.g., privacy tools) to regain leverage without waiting for slow legislation. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Around for a couple of reasons. So one is that this flexible digital technology that lets staffing agencies change a nurse's wage at every step, it's also available to us, right? Notwithstanding that IP law gets in the way, we can use digital technology, for example, to claw back privacy from our apps. And, you know, 51% of all web users have installed an ad blocker. It's the largest consumer boycott in human history. It's illegal to do that for apps because they have digital rights management. It's illegal to break digital rights management. But, you know, if we can reform just that law, that law that stops you from altering the technology you use for lawful purposes, then we don't have to wait for a privacy law to be passed And enforced. All we have to do is run that software. We can take what it's sometimes called in political circles, self-help. We can help ourselves there. We don't have to wait for lawmakers to step in and fight our corner. ([Time 0:29:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5132c4eb-44e7-4793-ad42-fe9a3206e8d6)) - **Build Global Coalitions Against Platforms** - Coordinate transnational regulatory pressure and coalition-building to restrain global tech firms. - Use cross-border cases and shared enforcement to amplify impact against platform abuses. Transcript: Cory Doctorow And the other advantage, well, and then as a part of that, the advantage of digital is that we can coordinate, right? You know, I grew up as an activist riding a bicycle through the streets of Toronto, like all the best Americans of Canadian. And I would have a bucket of wheat paste in my bike basket and a stack of flyers to get people out to a protest at the weekend. And I'd be out there all night, you know, wheat pasting these things to telephone poles. And, you know, if you think that we can organize a mass movement without telecommunications technology, I want you to spend a couple of nights in sub-zero temperature with a bucket Of wheat paste and tell me how you feel about it afterwards. It's easy to romanticize this. But the other thing that's really interesting here is that multinational firms that build this kind of technology, that do this kind of technology, they are operating in a foundationally Different way from the way that the monopolists of the Gilded Age operated. So you take someone like John D. Rockefeller and his Standard Oil Company. In America, the Standard Oil Company maintained its monopoly through control over pipelines and refineries, and to a lesser extent, wells. What that meant was that American regulators, they were enforcing against these harms that came out of pipelines, that came out of refineries, but not the same harms that John D. Rockefeller was wreaking on the German economy, which had to do with the monopolization of their ports. And so while they might have had a common enemy, they didn't have a common struggle, right? They had a completely different set of struggles, completely different set of fact patterns. If you successfully prosecuted John D. Rockefeller in Pennsylvania, that wouldn't help you do it in in in Munich. Everywhere, right? The thing that a tech company does in Germany is the same as the thing that a tech company does in Ghana. And it's the same that a tech company does in Canada and in the US. And you've seen an enormous amount of work by these companies, or by these regulators, rather, where they're collaborating across borders, where, you know, you get a successful case Built in the United Kingdom, the EU picks it up and runs with it. And then that is taken to Japan and South Korea and used there. And so you can build these, you know, forgive me, coalitions of the willing, right? ([Time 0:31:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d6654508-4a71-44dc-be35-13e16963d8a3))