Enshittification  ## Metadata - Author: [[Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com]] - Full Title: Enshittification - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/6ea07b7e-c648-437f-a31b-617622b5d83e ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Digital Decay Is Becoming Physical** - Doctorow argues the digital collapse spills into physical spaces as computing embeds in homes and bodies. - Poor platform design therefore threatens essential infrastructure beyond phones and apps. Transcript: Cory Doctorow And then, yeah, lots of other stuff happening. So that's the tour stops coming up. I've been talking for a long time. You should be just listening to In Shittification at this point. I'm going to put that on right now. John, roll In Shittification. In Shittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow. To my comrades, past, present, and future, it has been an honor. I'll never forgive them for what they've done to the computer. Ed Zitron. Introduction. It's not just you. The internet is getting worse fast. The services we rely on, that we once loved, they're all turning into piles of shit all at once. Worse, the digital is merging with the physical, which means that the same forces that ([Time 0:09:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6ff297dc-594d-45cd-90b0-a3391100b963)) - **Inshittification As A Diagnostic Framework** - "Inshittification" explains why beloved digital services degrade through a predictable process. - The framework links symptoms, mechanism, and epidemiology to actionable remedies. Transcript: Cory Doctorow It's not just you. The internet is getting worse fast. The services we rely on, that we once loved, they're all turning into piles of shit all at once. Worse, the digital is merging with the physical, which means that the same forces that are wrecking our platforms are also wrecking our homes and our cars, the places where we work and Shop. The world is increasingly made up of computers we put our bodies into and computers we put into our bodies. And these computers suck. This is infuriating. It's frustrating. And depending on how important those services are to you, it's terrifying. I've been an Internet activist for a quarter of a century, working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital human rights group that more or less invented the whole idea of Digital human rights. I've been a United Nations observer and helped draft Internet treaties. I've lobbied legislatures and agencies in the United States, Canada, Europe, and the United Kingdom. I've been through street protests and virtual blackouts. I've never seen anything like this. In 2022, after decades of striving to get people fired up about the esoteric world of internet policy, I coined a term to describe the sudden-onset platform collapse going on all around Us. In shittification. To my bittersweet satisfaction, that word is doing big numbers. In fact, it has achieved escape velocity. It's a funny, naughty word, and it's funny and naughty to say, and I'm proud of that. But that's not why the American Dialect Society named it its word of the year for 2023, nor why Australia's Macquarie Dictionary named it its word of the year for 2024, nor why millions Of people have used it to describe the inescapable online dumpster fire that's roasting them alive. The reason for inshittification's popularity is that it embodies a theory that explains the accelerating decay of the things that matter to us, explaining why this is happening and What we should do about it. Because inshittification isn't just a way to say something got worse. Footnote, though it's fine with me if you want to use it that way. One of the glories of English is its malleability. English words mean whatever English speakers say they mean. Go nuts. You have my blessing. But inshittification isn't just a way to say something got worse. It's an analysis that explains the way an online service got worse, how that worsening unfolds, and the contagion that's causing everything to get worse all at once. You see, this moment we're living through, this great and shittening, it's not a mystery. It's not the great forces of history bearing down on our moment, decreeing that we must all suffer through the end of services that once met our needs. It's a material phenomenon, much like a disease. Like a disease, it has symptoms, a mechanism, and an epidemiology. The first part of this book will explain these components of inshittification. But the point of this analysis isn't merely to give you a more technically informed way to feel demoralized and furious about the state of the digital world. I wrote this book to propose a cure. That's the second part of this book. This era, the inshittacine, is the result of specific policy decisions made by named individuals. Once we identify those decisions and those individuals, we can act. We can reverse the decisions. We can name the individuals. We can even estimate what size pitchfork they wear. Or at the very least, we can make sure that they are never again trusted with the power to make policy decisions for the rest of us. We can make a new, good internet, one that's fit for human thriving. We can create the digital nervous system we need to connect and coordinate us through a 21st century haunted by climate collapse, genocide, authoritarianism, and economic chaos. We can create inshittification-resistant infrastructure for a new, good world. ([Time 0:10:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4abde6d0-c308-40df-98c1-30059f32a35c)) - **Name Causes To Enable Remediation** - Identify the policy choices and individuals causing platform decay to enable targeted remedies. - Reverse those decisions and bar those actors from making future platform policy. Transcript: Cory Doctorow I wrote this book to propose a cure. That's the second part of this book. This era, the inshittacine, is the result of specific policy decisions made by named individuals. Once we identify those decisions and those individuals, we can act. We can reverse the decisions. We can name the individuals. We can even estimate what size pitchfork they wear. Or at the very least, we can make sure that they are never again trusted with the power to make policy decisions for the rest of us. We can make a new, good internet, one that's fit for human thriving. ([Time 0:13:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4ca95025-3dfa-4484-9d1e-0be225eab94a)) - **Design For Inshittification Resistance** - Use the inshittification analysis to design resistant infrastructure and policy interventions. - Build new digital systems that prioritize human thriving over extractive rent-seeking. Transcript: Cory Doctorow I wrote this book to propose a cure. That's the second part of this book. This era, the inshittacine, is the result of specific policy decisions made by named individuals. Once we identify those decisions and those individuals, we can act. We can reverse the decisions. We can name the individuals. We can even estimate what size pitchfork they wear. Or at the very least, we can make sure that they are never again trusted with the power to make policy decisions for the rest of us. We can make a new, good internet, one that's fit for human thriving. We can create the digital nervous system we need to connect and coordinate us through a 21st century haunted by climate collapse, genocide, authoritarianism, and economic chaos. ([Time 0:13:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c8c36d2c-a4b1-46da-9fff-399395dd3ae2)) - **Four-Stage Pattern Of Platform Decline** - The natural history of inshittification follows four stages from user-friendly to degraded. - This staged pattern appears across platforms and predicts their decline. Transcript: Cory Doctorow This natural history is an ordered catalog of the disease's progress, what symptoms do patients exhibit, and in which order. Here's the natural history of inshittification. 1. First, platforms are good to their users. 2. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Three, next they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Four, finally, they have become a giant pile of shit. ([Time 0:20:18](https://share.snipd.com/snip/aa89f464-5f37-4186-9031-b1f846298d2a)) - **Facebook's Early Lock-In Story** - Facebook began as a college-only service that users turned into a valuable social space. - Users then locked themselves in by creating dense social links that raised switching costs. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Facebook is the perfect place to start. Facebook is a service that Mark Zuckerberg started in his dorm room so that he and his creepy pals could non-consensually rate the fuckability of their fellow Harvard undergraduates. Footnote. True story. It was Zuck's users who figured out how to make something great out of this inauspicious beginning. They filled up the vessel with themselves and with connections to one another, forging bonds. It was a compelling experience, so much so that many people called it addictive. But Zuck was determined to bring Facebook back to its origins, a service that treated people as means, not as ends, as something for the platform's managers to toy with and ultimately Abuse. When Facebook started, it was available only to American college kids. They loved it, and investors saw potential. With all these users piling in, there would be innumerable opportunities to sell things to them. Hell, you could sell users to one another. Investors poured money into the business. In 2006, Facebook decided to spend some of its investors' cash to expand to the general population, so it dropped the requirement for users to sign up with the.edu email address that Only American college students, faculty, and personnel can get. Back in 2006, Facebook made a simple and compelling pitch to those new users it was hoping to lure onto the platform. Sure, we understand that most of you already have a social media service that you enjoy using called MySpace. But has it occurred to you that MySpace is owned by an evil, crapulent, senescent Australian billionaire named Rupert Murdoch and he spies on you with every hour God sends? Come to Facebook, where we will never spy on you. Footnote. Yeah, really. For more, see Dina Srinivasan's classic article, The Antitrust Case Against Facebook, A Monopolous Journey Towards Pervasive Surveillance in Spite of Consumers' Preference for Privacy. Berkeley Business Law Journal 16, Number 1, 2019. Come to Facebook, where we will never spy on you. All we ask of you is that you create a Facebook account and then, quote, articulate your social graph by telling us which other users you want to connect to you. Then we will create an automated custom feed consisting solely of the things that the people you follow have posted for consumption by their followers. Footnote, Ibbot, Supra, Re. This is a sarcastic paraphrase and not a direct quote. This is a pretty good deal. You aren't imagining it. Facebook was fun and useful and valuable once upon a time. That was stage one. Facebook had a surplus, its investors' cash, and it allocated that surplus to its end users by subsidizing a feed of things that users wanted to see rather than the things that businesses Would pay to show them. To sweeten the deal, Facebook gave MySpace refugees a way to eat their cake and have it too, a bot. Once you joined Facebook, you could give that bot your MySpace login and password, and then, several times a day, the bot would log into MySpace on your behalf, scraping all the messages Your friends there had left for you and pasting them into your Facebook inbox. You could reply to those, and the bot would push them back out to MySpace on your behalf. That way, you didn't have to choose between Facebook's superior user experience and the friends you left behind on MySpace. Footnote. Try to do this to Facebook today, and they'll nuke you till you glow. See the discussion of felony contempt of business model later in this audiobook. So users piled in, and they proceeded to lock themselves into Facebook's platform. ([Time 0:21:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5f05bf3b-fb35-4f43-ac7c-bbc5d23e2d81)) - **Why Users Can't Easily Leave** - Network effects plus high switching costs create collective-action lock-in that platforms exploit. - This dynamic makes coordinated exits extremely difficult even when users hate the service. Transcript: Cory Doctorow It also relies on high switching costs. Switching costs is another useful piece of economics jargon. Switching costs are everything you have to give up when you switch from one product or service to another. In the case of Facebook, the switching costs of leaving Facebook include the company of everyone you hang out with there because they'll still be on Facebook and you won't be. Now, hypothetically, you can't avoid this switching cause. If you can convince all the people you like on Facebook to quit at the same time as you and transition to a new social network where you can all reestablish your links, you can leave Facebook And keep your friends. Here's where the collective action problem comes in. That's our third and final piece of economics jargon. The collective action problem is the incredibly difficult business of getting other people to do what you want them to do when you want them to do it. You experience the collective action problem on a small scale all the time. You know that group chat with half a dozen friends in it? Remember how hard it was to decide what movie or bar to go to or which board game you should all play? Even when you all agree that you want to do something together, it's hard to agree what to do and when to do it. That's the collective action problem. Adding people to the group makes the collective action problem exponentially more problematic. Once you're established in a Facebook community with a couple hundred friends, you have to convince them all to leave at the same time as you and go to the same place as you. But all those friends have their own groups of people that they can't afford to leave. Maybe they're in a support group for people with a rare disease. Maybe they use Facebook to organize their kids' little league carpool with the other parents. Or maybe that's how they stay in touch with the people they left behind when they emigrated. Maybe it's where their customers are. To get your friends to switch away from Facebook, you not only must convince them that it's time to go and that you've got the right place for them to go next, you also have to convince them To talk all those other people into leaving too, or you have to convince them to endure the switching costs of leaving their own groups behind. So Facebook users can't help but take one another hostage. And Facebook grew progressively more cognizant of this fact. ([Time 0:25:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d61b19a1-845b-44b5-ad3f-3e0ccc6c7210)) - **Amazon's Subsidy-to-Lock-In Journey** - Amazon started by subsidizing prices, shipping, and returns to attract users and selection. - Those early surpluses created Prime and DRM lock-ins that later entrenched dependency. Transcript: Cory Doctorow In Jeff Bezos's original business plan for Amazon, the company was called Relentless. Critics say that this is a reference to Bezos's cutthroat competitive instincts, but Bezos always insisted that it was a reference to his company's relentless commitment to customer Service. How did Amazon go from a logistics company that got packages to you quickly and efficiently to a behemoth of digital content defined by the prime experience, which has much less to do With free shipping now and more to do with everything else. Stage 1. Good to Users Like Facebook, Amazon started with a large surplus that it was able to allocate to its customers. And allocated did. The company raised a fortune from early investors and then a larger fortune by listing on the stock market. Then it used that fortune to subsidize many goods, selling them below cost. It also subsidized shipping and offered a generous, no-questions postage-paid returns policy. As with Facebook, this offer tempted millions of users to pile onto the platform. Unlike Facebook users, however, Amazon users didn't automatically lock themselves in with a collective action problem. It doesn't matter to your neighbor whether you shop at Amazon or not. Your purchase of e-books or audiobooks on Amazon doesn't make those books more valuable to other readers. Your Prime membership doesn't make their Prime membership harder to give up. But that Prime membership does go a long way to locking you into Amazon. Paying for shipping a year in advance is a powerful incentive for you to do your shopping on Amazon. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of Prime subscribers begin their e-commerce searches on Amazon, and if they find what they're looking for, don't comparison shop for a better deal. You can think of Prime as a form of soft lock-in, Amazon binding you to its platform with a silken ribbon. But Amazon's also got some iron chains in its toolbox. All the audiobooks and movies and most of the e-books and e-magazines you buy from Amazon are permanently locked to Amazon's platform. That's because these platforms are sold with Digital Rights Management, or DRM, a form of encryption designed to force you to view or listen to those digital products using apps that Amazon controls. Break up with Amazon and delete your apps, and you will lose all the media you've ever bought from the platform. For a certain kind of reader, listener, or movie buff, this is a very high switching cost indeed. Footnote. For more on this, see The End of Self-Help later in this book. Amazon has one more trick up its sleeve. After years of selling goods below cost, it has completed the work that Walmart started, eliminating swaths of small, independent brick-and businesses. Its online predatory pricing tactics have done the same for much of the e-commerce world. Footnote. For more on this, see The End of Competition, later in this book. That means that shopping anywhere other than Amazon has gotten substantially more inconvenient. These tactics, Prime, DRM, and predatory pricing, make it very hard not to shop at Amazon. ([Time 0:36:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8017b0bc-f53d-44a8-bcf6-d172f28d8606)) - **The Flywheel And Antitrust Blindspot** - Amazon's 'flywheel' uses user attraction to extract concessions from merchants and reinforce dominance. - That dynamic fits a consumer-welfare antitrust era that tolerates scale if prices appear low. Transcript: Cory Doctorow It brings in users with low prices and a large selection. This attracts merchants who are eager to sell to those users. The merchant's dependence on those customers allows Amazon to extract higher discounts from those merchants, and that brings in more users, which makes the platform even more indispensable For merchants, allowing the company to require even deeper discounts. And around and around the flywheel spins. Let's take a step back before we get hurt. This flywheel is the direct product of a radical legal theory that has had the world in its grip since the late 1970s. From the 1890s until the Carter administration, corporate power was blunted by antitrust law, which treated large corporations as threats simply because they were large. Once a company is too big to fail, it becomes too big to jail, and then it becomes too big to care. Antitrust law was designed to fight that apathy and force companies to care. A rival, and frankly terrible, theory of antitrust law says that the only time a government should intervene against a monopolist is when it is sure that the monopolist is using its Scale to raise prices or lower quality. This is the consumer welfare standard theory, and its premise is that when we find monopolies in the wild, they are almost certainly large and powerful thanks to the quality of their Offerings. Anytime you find that people all buy the same goods from the same store, you should assume that this is the very best store selling the very best goods. It would be perverse, goes the theory, for the government to harass companies for being so excellent that everyone loves them. It was under this theory that Jimmy Carter started to remove a few of the Jenga blocks from the antitrust system. Then Ronald Reagan came along and tore them out by the fistful. Most of the right-wing policies for which we remember Ronald Reagan started under Carter, who was hoping to woo conservative voters. He failed. Every president since, Republican or Democrat, followed Reagan's example, up to, but not including, Joe Biden. The Amazon flywheel is designed to fit neatly into the consumer welfare framework. It proclaims itself to be an enemy to merchants on behalf of consumers. The flywheel is all about lowering prices, and the consumer welfare standard theory prizes low prices above all else. Stage 3. A Giant Pile of Shit Amazon has a myriad of tactics at its disposal for shifting value from business customers to itself, some of which also involve shifting value away from end users, No matter what the cute flywheel pitch says. ([Time 0:41:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/01541b59-a4bc-4452-904d-3a1334a77447)) - **How Hidden Fees Corrupt Market Prices** - Amazon taxes merchants through hidden fees and paid placement, which raises prices everywhere. - Paid search placement and junk fees make top results worse and conceal true low prices. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Amazon uses its overview of merchants' sales, as well as its ability to observe the return addresses on direct shipments from merchants' contracting factories, to cream off its merchants' Best-selling items and clone them, relegating the original seller to page umptimillion of its search results. Amazon also crushes its merchants under a mountain of junk fees that are pitched as optional but are actually effectively mandatory. Take Prime. A merchant has to give up a huge share of each sale to be included in Prime, and merchants that don't use Prime are pushed so far down in the search results that they might as well cease to Exist. Same with Fulfillment by Amazon, a service in which a merchant sends its items to an Amazon warehouse to be packed and delivered with Amazon's own inventory. This is far more expensive than comparable or superior shipping services from rival logistics companies, and a merchant that ships through one of those rivals is, again, relegated Even farther down the search rankings. All told, Amazon makes so much money charging merchants to deliver the wares they sell through the platform that Amazon's own shipping is fully subsidized. In other words, Amazon gouges its merchants so much that it pays nothing to ship its own goods, which compete directly with those merchants' goods. Footnote. Quote, At this point, the price Amazon charges those third-party sellers has grown to nearly 50% of its revenue. Is this money, estimated at $123 billion in total last year, that pays for, quote, free shipping, as well as its video service, its music service, Twitch, and everything else that comes Bundled with Prime. From Matt Stoller, the FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide hidden tax in the big substack, September 27, 2023. Here's where Amazon's attacks on its merchants' bottom lines turn into higher prices for its customers. A merchant that pays Amazon through the nose needs to make up the money somewhere. Hypothetically, merchants could eat Amazon's fees themselves. In other words, if Amazon wants a 10% fee on an item with a 20% margin, the seller could split the difference and settle for a 10% profit. But Amazon's fee isn't 10%. Add all the junk fees together, and an Amazon seller is being screwed out of 45 to 51 cents on every dollar it earns on the platform. Even if a merchant wanted to absorb the Amazon tax on your behalf, it couldn't. Merchants just don't make 51% margins. So merchants must jack up prices, which they do. A lot. Now, you may have noticed that Amazon's prices aren't any higher than the prices you pay elsewhere. There's a good reason for that. When merchants raise their prices on Amazon, they are required to raise their prices everywhere else, even on their own direct sales stores. This arrangement is called Most Favored Nation status, and it's key to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's antitrust lawsuit against Amazon. Let the implications of most favored nation settle in for a moment. If Amazon is taxing merchants 45 to 51 cents on every dollar they make, and if merchants are hiking their prices everywhere their goods are sold, then it follows that you're paying the Amazon tax no matter where you shop. Amazon has made prices go up at Target, at Walmart, at the corner mom and pop hardware store, at the manufacturer's own website. Then there's Amazon's, quote, search product. The quotation marks around search are there for the purpose of expressing withering sarcasm, because Amazon's search product isn't about search at all. Amazon makes $38 billion every year charging merchants for search placement. When you search for a product on Amazon, the top results aren't the best matches. They're the matches that pay the highest bribes to Amazon to be at the top of the list. On average, the first result in an Amazon search is 29% more expensive than the best result for your search. Click any of the top four links on your screen and you'll pay an average of 25% more than you would for the best match. On average, that best match is located 17 places down in an Amazon search result. The researchers Rory Van Leeu and Nikita Agarwal call this Amazon's pricing paradox. Footnote. Amazon's pricing paradox. Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 37, number 1, fall 2023. Amazon gets to insist that it has the lowest prices in the business, but no one can find those prices. Instead, we all pay a massive Amazon tax every time we shop there, and the merchants we buy from are paying an Amazon tax too. ([Time 0:43:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4044a9d8-eb81-43f1-bc7b-85cd5f8388df)) - **iPhone's Walled Garden Origin** - The iPhone launched as a well-curated, privacy-friendly walled garden that prioritized user experience. - That curated control also created deep lock-in and dependence on Apple's decisions. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Stage 1. Good to Users. It wasn't merely Steve Jobs' legendary reality distortion field. The iPhone really was a revolutionary product. It built on the elegance of the iPod, a device that just worked. Plug a new iPod into your computer, and in a few seconds, all the music on your laptop would be mirrored into a pocket-sized gadget along with your playlists and ratings. The iPhone extended that easy synchronization to email, calendars, and a host of other utility features that were easier to use and more powerful than those of its rivals, like the BlackBerry and Android. The iPhone kept itself so slick and functional by operating as a quote, walled garden. Although it was a full-featured computer capable of running any software, Apple made it so that you could only run the programs it authorized. At first, these were the apps that shipped with the phone, but a year later, Apple opened its App Store, a, quote, curated marketplace of apps that the company had vetted for safety and Quality. Apple touted this as a service to its end users. The company expended considerable resources, ensuring that every app you downloaded, paid or free, just worked. That was stage one. The company had a surplus, the sums it chose to spend on product quality and maintenance, rather than on, say, share buybacks or dividends, and it allocated that surplus to users. Then, some of that surplus was shifted to its business customers, the app vendors. Apple has always stressed the superiority of its closed, curated, managed service over Google's Android, whose app store is said to have looser rules for inclusion and to be more dangerous Than Apple's peaceful Eden. To make things worse, owners of Android devices can choose to directly install apps without ever touching an app store. That means that, on their intimate pocket computers, they can run code that has never been vetted by a multi-billion dollar tech company's security experts. Apple has also touted the superiority of an economy grounded in good old-fashioned money, contrasting this with Google's ad-centric Android. Both Google and Apple charge you for the service you get, but, Apple claims, Apple puts the price tag on the front of its product, while Google charges you by siphoning off a constant Stream of personal data used to feed a vast surveillance advertising empire. Apple said it was a hardware company swapping material objects for cash, not a surveillance company that made its profits by selling its customers. Apple's defenders claim that this makes Apple a better bargain for its users and for society. Because Apple gets paid in dollars rather than eyeballs, it has an incentive to satisfy you. If you're paying Apple, Apple wants to keep you happy by showing you the things that you want to see as quickly and efficiently as possible. Not so the, quote, surveillance capitalists like Google. The longer you linger with their products, the more chances they have to show you an ad, and every time they show you an ad, they make more money. So these bad capitalists try to hook you by, quote, hacking your dopamine loops to keep you angry and clicking and fighting, leading to a host of evils, from anorexia and teens to right-wing Extremist militias. Thus, in the surveillance capitalism hypothesis, the good capitalism of Apple, the kind where money is exchanged for goods, has no need for surveillance. This is obviously a self-serving narrative, but this much was true. The iPhone was substantially less surveillance than Android, and the lockdown nature of the iPhone platform meant that there were fewer hacks and fewer scandals about data-stealing Apps. In other words, Apple had a surplus, and it allocated that surplus to its end users. The company devoted substantial engineering to producing a smoothly operating platform, and it devoted even more work to vetting apps. But the flip side of that was lock-in. Unlike Android phones, which are typically designed to allow users to make use of alternative app stores and even install different operating systems, iPhones use software and hardware Locks to prevent users from modifying Apple's rules. This is a system that works well but fails badly. So long as Apple remains a benevolent dictator, your iPhone is a walled garden that protects you from the bad guys who want to attack you. But if Apple turns on you, that walled garden becomes a prison, one that pens you in and makes you easy pickings. Apple's total control over the iPhone meant that the more you used your phone, the more hooks Apple could sink into you, raising the switching costs of leaving a platform. ([Time 0:52:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6c785436-a84a-4771-ba10-21f7a8bd2122)) - **Platform Generosity Turns Into Rent Extraction** - Apple used initial generosity to attract app developers, then imposed 30% fees and restrictive rules. - Lock-in let Apple later extract rents from both developers and users across platforms. Transcript: Cory Doctorow IPhone users and funneled it into the commercial surveillance vortex, where it was sold, given away, stolen, published, and weaponized. Users could not install privacy blockers, spoofing tools, or any other utility that would let them push back against this abuse. Only Apple could do that. And it didn't. As far as Apple was concerned, only the company could decide which privacy protections you deserved. By allowing for some surveillance on iOS, Apple could lure in more business customers. So iOS users had to tolerate whatever surveillance Apple judged to be tolerable. At first, anyway. But in 2021, Apple took action on surveillance in the App Store. The company announced a one-click opt-out from app-based surveillance. Once users checked the Don't Spy On Me box, all the third-party apps on their phones were prevented from gathering information on them. This was a massive blow to the commercial surveillance industry. Facebook warned investors that the move would cost the company at least $10 billion in the first year. There's a reason Apple's crackdown on commercial surveillance was so hard on Facebook and other surveillance-oriented app companies. Everyone hates commercial surveillance, sure, but Apple customers bought a product that was specifically marketed as a way to avoid it. Once Apple offered iPhone owners a single button they could click to block surveillance, 96% of iPhone owners clicked it. Presumably, the other 4% were drunk or Facebook employees or drunk Facebook employees. Stage 3. A giant pile of shit. But in shitification, never sleeps. Right around the time that Apple was running a global ad campaign touting its commitment to privacy, it was also rolling out a secret surveillance system for iPhones, iPads, and other IOS devices. Apple now gathers the very same data that Facebook once gathered on its customers, and for the same purpose, to fuel Apple's own surveillance advertising business. The argument that, quote, if you're not paying for the product, you're the product, is herein revealed as bunk. Companies don't treat you well because they're good capitalists, and they don't abuse you because they're bad capitalists. Respect for your privacy isn't a rebate you get for every thousand dollars you spend on an iPhone. Companies abuse you if they can get away with it. That's the crux of inshittification. Apple didn't treat its customers well because it loved them. It treated them well to lure them into its walled garden, which was then revealed to be a prison. ([Time 0:59:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/337a52f3-9671-4897-9b53-4af44f7a561b)) - **Twitter's API-First Origins** - Twitter began as an API-first, developer-friendly service that fostered user-driven innovation. - Third-party tools and features emerged organically and were later formalized by Twitter itself. Transcript: Cory Doctorow When Twitter started, its most obvious characteristic was its brevity. Users were limited to sending messages no longer than 140 characters, brief enough to fit into the short message service or SMS system, the standard text messaging system used by mobile Phones around the world. But for business customers, developers looking to integrate with Twitter, the length constraint for messages was secondary. The most interesting thing about Twitter was its API, or rather, that Twitter was an API. API is one of those computer industry acronyms that doesn't really stand for anything. It originally stood for Application Programming Interface and later Advanced Programming Interface, but really, API stands for API, a subtle, sui generis way of talking about a Feature of a digital system that has no adequate equivalent in the non-digital world. An API, broadly speaking, is any way that one program can exchange data with another program, and or receive data, and or instructions from another program. For example, you might get emails with calendar invitations in them. Clicking on these invitations automatically adds them to your personal calendar. This is possible because there is a formal standard for calendar invites decided by a committee at the Internet Engineering Task Force. Anyone who consults this standard can use it to make a compatible calendar or to generate invitations that work with such a calendar. Stage 1. Good to Users But an API can also be informal and improvisational. Hashtags are a kind of API. A developer who scrapes Twitter can use hashtags to figure out what each post is about. APIs can also be added by third parties. A developer who scrapes Twitter and categorizes posts by hashtag can then set up a more formal way for others to pull those out of their own database without doing all that messy scraping. At its outset, Twitter was, in fact, an API. The core of Twitter was a database of users' posts that users themselves had no way to access. In order to post or read tweets, users had to make use of a program that used the Twitter API to access the database, pulling out the relevant entries and presenting them in a human-readable Form. Twitter made one of those API-accessing programs, but it also allowed anyone else to make such programs, and they all accessed the same API. It's hard to overstate how revolutionary this was. Normally, companies give themselves privileged access to their own infrastructure. The API they expose to third parties is a weak, thin version of the private tool. But not Twitter. It gave first-class access to all comers, and developers threw their resources into the project of building all kinds of ways of accessing Twitter. Some of these may be familiar to you, like TweetDeck, which Twitter eventually acquired and brought in-house. Others were strictly programmatic, tools that made it easier for other developers to do cool things with Twitter, like operate bots that answered queries, told jokes, or automated Public safety announcements. Twitter also paid close attention to its users. Users invented retweeting by typing RT and copying and pasting someone else's tweet into the composition box. Twitter noticed this and automated the process, creating a one-click system for retweeting anything on the system. Many of Twitter's core features were developed in this way, including quote tweeting, typing some commentary on a tweet, then pasting in the link and the hashtag QT tag. Twitter now automates this process as well. Developers call this paving the desire paths. That's a reference to a design principle from physical spaces like parks and campuses. Landscape architects look for places where people have worn the grass thin by cutting across lawns and fields, desire paths, and formalize them by leveling them and paving them or Putting down gravel, wood chips, or some other material. Taken together, these two policies, first-class access to the Twitter API and integration of users' own innovations, constitute a system of generous value-sharing with both business Customers, who could create a variety of tools for themselves and for users, and users, whose workarounds were observed and turned into official features. People loved using Twitter. It was playful. It was fun. It was a party that the whole world was invited to. ([Time 1:05:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/635c763f-8bbc-4225-8c48-90b9429a24ba)) - **Debt-Fueled Rapid 'Inshittification' At Twitter** - Elon Musk's acquisition loaded Twitter with debt that incentivized rapid revenue extraction. - Cost-cutting and value grabs (e.g., sacking moderators) degraded safety and advertiser trust quickly. Transcript: Cory Doctorow In 2022, Elon Musk assumed ownership of Twitter. Musk had to borrow $22.4 billion to fund the acquisition. That vast debt exerts enormous pressure on Musk to extract money from Twitter. Remember, shareholders prefer to get paid by the companies they invest in, but their ability to compel the companies they invest in to pay them is limited to voting for company directors Who appoint CEOs who will agree to give the company's money to its investors rather than spending it on product maintenance and development, wages for staff, improved infrastructure, Or executive bonuses. But creditors who hold a company's debt are entitled to regular payments on that debt, and if the company stiffs them, they can ask a court to force the company to cough up. And if the company doesn't have enough money and can't borrow or raise it, they can force the company into bankruptcy. By taking on tens of billions of dollars in debt, Musk was setting the company up for a world of hurt. Twitter, or for some reason X, will need to come up with large sums of money every year to service its debts, or its creditors can kill the company. Of course, if they do that, they will wipe out any chance of getting paid back. Forcing the company into bankruptcy would likely mean a fire sale of Twitter to someone else, with a share of the proceeds going to the creditors. By contrast, if they let Musk stiff them, they at least have the hope of getting paid in the future if he turns the company around, or if he makes it structurally important to a future federal Government, as Musk was actively trying to do with the second Trump administration as of early 2025. There's not much to be gained by trying to read the minds of tech CEOs to determine which of their espoused views are sincerely held and what they're merely saying to win points with some Group of users, customers, lawmakers, investors, or peers. And honestly, it doesn't matter whether Musk's strident pronouncements about gender politics, wokeness, or other subjects are his true feelings, transient blurts, or acts of calculated Image crafting. Stage 3. A Giant Pile of Shit Rather than playing Twitter Kremlinology, let's instead look at how Musk's handling of Twitter post-acquisition is an example of how an unshittification speedrun Can boomerang on the unshittifier, and how those bad choices can nevertheless inflict serious harms on users. Musk's tenure at Twitter's helm is best understood as a rapid, indiscriminate, and clumsy series of value transfers from end users to Twitter, which is to say Musk, his investors, And his creditors. At the outset, Musk shed the vast majority of Twitter's content moderation team. These workers were charged with maintaining an environment that was both hospitable to users and, quote, brand safe. This is an absurdly difficult balancing act. Life is not brand safe, and many of the least brand safe parts of our lives matter the most to us. When platforms seek to ensure that their advertiser's material only runs alongside uplifting user content, they have to suppress or block users' posts about their sex lives, their Political fears, or the disasters they're in the midst of. While users don't necessarily want the platforms to block their own frustrated or angry posts, they also don't want to be abused, dogpiled, or doxxed. They don't want their feeds filled with unsolicited gore, sexually explicit content, or extremist hatred. So moderators have to figure out how to trade off the interests of advertisers against the sensitivities of users. On top of that, moderators are charged with weeding out bad ads, frauds and scams, paid disinformation, and ads for illegal products, as well as weeding out bad non-advertising content Like spam, scams, and unpaid but coordinated disinformation. No platform does this well. Pre-Musk, Twitter was somewhere in the middle of the pack, having made its share of high-profile gaffes and missteps, but also routinely blocking millions of posts of the sort that It intended to block, consistent with its own decisions about the interests of users and advertisers. Getting rid of the moderators made Twitter instantly, permanently, significantly worse for both users and advertisers. ([Time 1:12:27](https://share.snipd.com/snip/cd17eef7-552c-4c14-b7b3-3485c3c62a07)) - **Users' Desperation Sustains Zombie Platforms** - User communities act as anchors, making platforms 'zombie' services that persist despite decline. - Desperation of users and businesses, not owners, keeps degraded platforms alive. Transcript: Cory Doctorow That's why people are still on Twitter. It's not that they like the service, it's that they like one another. And leaving one another is especially hard in moments when things are especially terrible, say when Elon Musk and Donald Trump are dismantling whole swaths of the U.S. Government in a blatantly undemocratic way. These moments of existential terror are exactly when you need your community the most. In shittification, deliberately worsening a service is only possible when people value that service to begin with. In shittification is a game of seeking an equilibrium between how much people like the thing that locks them to the service, often that's other people, and how much they hate the management Of that service. Twitter is a cautionary tale. It tells us that the market forces that we'd expect to kill off services that turn into piles of shit have been neutralized. We are living in an age of zombie platforms. Platforms that shamble on long after they should have been double-tapped and stuffed in a shallow grave. ([Time 1:33:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b27fafdd-6a82-4185-9137-50d48dc4c839)) ## New Highlights added 2026-05-06 at 9:22 AM - **Repair Laws Help Without Fully Breaking Lock In** - Recent repair wins help, but they do not fully solve lock-in because companies can still collect data, invoke intellectual property claims, and keep parts pairing in place. - Chris Berube notes John Deere released software and some derate overrides, yet Jared Wilson still joined a class action over repair monopolies. Transcript: Chris Berube Is good news. And actually, in response to this push, we have already seen some companies who have started sending out these repair tools. So these are companies trying to get out preemptively ahead of these laws. I bet. And an example of this a couple of years ago, a little company called John Deere, perhaps you have heard of them from multiple references in this story. A little company called John Deere have put out this software to their customers that's designed to make it possible for farmers to decode these error messages and troubleshoot lots Of problems with their tractors, so to fix things themselves. And as of this year, John Deere told me, farmers can actually override a derating in some cases. So this is the problem we talked about at the beginning of the show, where the tractor shuts itself down. So this all sounds like good news, but there are still some caveats. Roman Mars Okay, so what is this caveat? Chris Berube Well, Jared says there are still flaws with the repair software. He's particularly concerned about the way it collects his data, his harvesting data. He says that's not ideal for him. He's actually been part of a class action lawsuit against John Deere saying they have an unfair monopoly on repair tools and the software is part of the complaints that they filed. And in a bigger sense, while there's been progress around right to repair, there's no guarantee that things like the federal law about car repairs is going to pass, right? Like there are some big lobbies pushing back against that. Some car companies have opposed more right to repair laws because they worry it could lead to their intellectual property being violated. My God, their intellectual property about the information on my car. Roman Mars That is an absurd assertion. Yeah, I mean, when you put it that way, it sounds pretty silly. Chris Berube But these right to repair laws, like they can make a big difference, right? But they aren't a magic bullet. Like many of these laws do not outlaw parts pairing, for example, so they don't solve the problem of interoperability. You know, you can't necessarily put third party parts on to repair something. So there's an argument that these laws could go further. Roman Mars Yeah. So it can make the platform better, but you're still locked into the platform. Chris Berube You're totally locked into the platform. So in lots of ways, like you need these laws to be more comprehensive. And Cory Doctorow says, like, maybe we should start thinking beyond the laws. Like, he has other approaches to this. He thinks we actually need to be doing something a lot more radical. Oh, OK. Tell me more. What does he have in mind? One thing Cory is pushing for is countries outside the United States to basically break the digital locks, right, to allow third party manufacturers to make replacement parts, things Like that. So Canada and Mexico are in a trade war with the U.S. Right now. And Corey says, look, what if those countries made generic replacement parts that go around the locks and then export those generic parts all over the world? We could do the same for tractors and tractor parts and cars and car parts. Cory Doctorow We have all the car part factories in Ontario, right? If we can't ship those across the border anymore, we can just make generic car parts in Ontario, sell them all over the world, along with the software to turn off the car part checking Tool in the cars. We could have third-party ink manufacturing. And you know what? If we don't do it, someone else is going to do it. Roman Mars It is a very Cory Doctorow thing to turn Canada into a lawless land of jailbreaking. But I do love it. I don't see it ever really happening in that way, but I do love it. Chris Berube Yeah, that can feel like a long shot, right? But we do have to think about different ways to fix this problem. I totally agree. Roman, there's so much going on in the world right now, but this issue feels pretty urgent to me. Because if we don't act, you know, if we don't do something about these kind of everyday frustrations, this general shittiness of things, but also this big cost for lots of people, it's Just going to get worse. And on a much simpler level, Roman, I would like to live in a world where somebody like Jared can just fix his tractor. Jared Wilson It doesn't benefit us, the citizen, to have stuff that we buy that we can't fix when it breaks. It's not good economically. It's not good environmentally. Allowing these companies to stymie competition is not in our best interest. And I really hope that people can take that to heart well ([Time 0:31:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6083f857-d755-4f29-8acb-5000de52aa6d))