Gotcha! Enshittification W/ Cory Doctorow  🔗 **Source:** [Gotcha! Enshittification W/ Cory Doctorow](https://share.snipd.com/episode/50ddd54e-b6ca-45be-aa69-cfec18b7ede5) ## Highlights - **Code, Law, Norms, Markets Shape Tech** - Outcomes reflect a mix of code, law, norms, and markets rather than inevitability. - Changing these levers can produce very different technological futures. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Yeah. Well, you know, I think that Larry Lessig, who's a mentor of mine, really nailed this. You know, 25 years ago, he wrote a book called Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. And he says that outcomes are determined by a mix of four factors, code, law, norms, and markets. So nobody ever does a thing that's technologically impossible, definitionally, right? So once a thing becomes technologically possible, it doesn't mean someone's going to do it, but it means they might. And so creating a new technological possibility for better or for worse opens the door for that to occur. Norms, so people do less of things that you're ashamed of. Again, some people do shameful things, but when we are ashamed of things, we don't do as much. And when you're proud of them, we do them differently. So, you know, you can think of the response to misogyny, at least up until like last October, as a thing that changed a norm about the kinds of jokes people made and attitudes that they Evinced in public and that were overt about, even if it didn't change their views in every case. You can also think of, like, the world post ACT UP and Stonewall as changing what people are willing to say about themselves in public, too. So norms change things. Laws change things. So things that are illegal happen less. Going back to Stonewall, there were lots of gay people in long-term relationships that went through a lot of backflips to incorporate an llc and make each other's lasting power of attorney And whatever try and replicate the structures of marriage but once marriage became legal and once we had marriage equality just a lot of queer people just got married right you got more Of it because it was legal and markets right people do things more when they're profitable one of the reasons we have a data broker sector it's not just that there's a bunch of people who Are jerks and don't care about your feelings and so they spy on you. It's that it's profitable, right? And these things are related. So if data brokerage was illegal, right? If we'd had a new privacy law since 1988, when we got the last one, there would still be people doing data brokerage, but they'd be like illegal and they wouldn't have over sources of capital They'd be the mob they wouldn't be like people who went out and raised tens of millions or billions of dollars to create non-consensual dossiers at population scale and you just have Less of it and so all of these things interrelate you know gay marriage became legal in part because of norms right but then once gay marriage was legal it became normatively more acceptable To be gay and married. And so when I approach a technological policy question, I am often looking at it through this lens and asking, what levers do we have that are normative, that are legal, that are technological, And that are commercial, that we can yank on to adjust the conduct firms and the people they relate to. Alix Dunn Yeah, which makes loads of sense because I feel like, I mean, as you said, it's not like laws of physics. These are rules that we tweak and basically construct ideally in a democratic society and you're sort of making these things happen and then things happen within those systems. It's not like the systems manifest out of their own will, I guess. Cory Doctorow Great forces of history, iron laws of economics. Yeah, exactly. And I think that people think that someone came down off a mountain with two stone tablets and said, Larry, Sergey, stop rotating your log files and start looking in them for actionable Market intelligence. They made a choice. They could have made a different choice. The reason they made that choice was in part because they needed more money, because it was the dot-com downturn but the other half of why they thought they could get more money is because We didn't have any privacy laws right like they could have made more money by getting into human trafficking too but they didn't because it was illegal right so you know it leaving aside What we think of their morals or whatever like people who are running or aspire to run public companies and our V to answer to, generally, if they're breaking the law, they're trying To break the law in a way where they're not going to get caught. And if they do, they're not going to go to prison. And it's, you know, the risk is worth the reward. That is clearly the case where child trafficking was not going to be a good outcome, no matter what other reasons they might have had not to do it. But violating your privacy was right. ([Time 0:08:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ddb17809-5ac0-4467-9acc-dab35d37bd8a)) - **Profitability Enables Mass Surveillance** - Profitability, not malice alone, drives industries like data brokerage and surveillance. - Laws and norms that change profitability would have reduced large-scale privacy abuses. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Profitable one of the reasons we have a data broker sector it's not just that there's a bunch of people who are jerks and don't care about your feelings and so they spy on you. It's that it's profitable, right? And these things are related. So if data brokerage was illegal, right? If we'd had a new privacy law since 1988, when we got the last one, there would still be people doing data brokerage, but they'd be like illegal and they wouldn't have over sources of capital They'd be the mob they wouldn't be like people who went out and raised tens of millions or billions of dollars to create non-consensual dossiers at population scale and you just have Less of it and so all of these things interrelate you know gay marriage became legal in part because of norms right but then once gay marriage was legal it became normatively more acceptable To be gay and married. And so when I approach a technological policy question, I am often looking at it through this lens and asking, what levers do we have that are normative, that are legal, that are technological, And that are commercial, that we can yank on to adjust the conduct firms and the people they relate to. Alix Dunn Yeah, which makes loads of sense because I feel like, I mean, as you said, it's not like laws of physics. These are rules that we tweak and basically construct ideally in a democratic society and you're sort of making these things happen and then things happen within those systems. It's not like the systems manifest out of their own will, I guess. Cory Doctorow Great forces of history, iron laws of economics. Yeah, exactly. And I think that people think that someone came down off a mountain with two stone tablets and said, Larry, Sergey, stop rotating your log files and start looking in them for actionable Market intelligence. They made a choice. They could have made a different choice. The reason they made that choice was in part because they needed more money, because it was the dot-com downturn but the other half of why they thought they could get more money is because We didn't have any privacy laws right like they could have made more money by getting into human trafficking too but they didn't because it was illegal right so you know it leaving aside What we think of their morals or whatever like people who are running or aspire to run public companies and our V to answer to, generally, if they're breaking the law, they're trying To break the law in a way where they're not going to get caught. And if they do, they're not going to go to prison. And it's, you know, the risk is worth the reward. That is clearly the case where child trafficking was not going to be a good outcome, no matter what other reasons they might have had not to do it. But violating your privacy was right. ([Time 0:10:29](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d50ea47b-7e14-4134-9197-34236d36bcf4)) - **Three-Stage Platform Decay** - Platforms follow a three-stage decay: hook users, extract from businesses, then degrade for everyone. - They stabilize as zombies because lock-in and extraction preserve their market power. Transcript: Cory Doctorow So inshittification, it's this funny, dirty word that I came up with to describe a big complex idea. And it's a big complex idea that seeks to explain platform decay. Platforms are the kind of indigenous form of enterprise on the internet. They are what you might call an intermediary because they sit between different groups of people. Nothing wrong with intermediaries. Even if you want to drive a taxi, you probably don't want to also found a credit card company. And so it's nice if you can take payments without having to also be a payment company. And so intermediaries are fine but when intermediaries become more powerful than the entities they broker relationships between they can usurp that relationship and rather than Serving both parties and assisting them they end up extracting from both parties to their detriment and to the benefit of the intermediary and so in shitification follows this characteristic Three-stage process not every platform and shitifies the same way but this is the kind of platonic ideal. Platforms start by being good to their end users, but they find a way to lock the end user in. So maybe they like sell you a bunch of media that's locked to their app. And so if you quit the app, you have to throw at your media. So that would be like buying audible audiobooks, or maybe they find a really nefarious form of lock-in, like they get the Saudi royal family to give them $31 billion to piss up a wall, Losing money on every taxi ride until Uber is the only cab company in town and all the transit have been starved investment for a decade. Maybe they just do what social media networks do, which is like have a place where people you like have gathered. And of course, we love our friends, but they are a pain in the ass. And the fact that you all hate where you are doesn't mean that you can agree when it's time to go somewhere else or where to go. You can't even agree on what board game to play. So, so long as you love your friends more than you hate the social media network you're on, you'll stay there because that's how you're staying in touch with them. And so once they've got you locked in, they make things worse for you and they make things better for business customers. You know, Facebook made it possible for publishers to insert things into your feed that you hadn't subscribed to. And they let advertisers target ads to you based on surveillance data that brings those sellers to the platform and locks them in too. Sellers are actually very sensitive to lock-in it's much easier to lock them in than buyers in our discourse about competition and markets we focus on monopolies probably because Like we've all played the board game but monopsony's right which is powerful sellers they don't get as much look in but there are very few businesses that can survive say a 15% overnight Drop in their sales. That is often fatal to a business. Nothing else. It means they have to fire key employees. And then if business picks up, they have to retrain those people. It can be very hard. And so once you are a business dependent on a customer for, say, 20% of your turnover, that customer just gains an enormous amount of power over you. And, you know, anyone who's like supplied stuff to Walmart knows what that looks like. So these business customers also become dependent on the platform. And then the platform starts to screw them too. And this is one place where I think my critique departs from a lot of the critiques that predated it. Because you have people like Shoshana Zuboff or others who are quite critical platforms, but who embrace the idea that you may have heard as an aphorism, if you're not paying for the Product, you're the product. Really what the platforms are doing is they're selling you out to these business customers, as though the platform and the business customer are in cahoots. But the platform and the business customer are not in cahoots. The platform wants to exploit them too, right? Apple rips off every app seller for $0.30 out of every dollar. Amazon takes $0.45 to $ 51 cents out of every seller dollar. Meta, Google take 51% out of every advertising dollar. These are extremely predatory actions. And so what they do is they start to drain off the share that the business customers have as well. And they try to attain a kind of stasis where all the available surplus, everything except what's needed to keep users locked to each other and business customers locked to users has Been extracted for the shareholders and for the executives that's where we're at now but it's also like a really difficult place to be in because the difference between i hate this but I can't seem to stop using it and i hate it and i'm never using it again it's very thin and so oftentimes you'll get to a place where these platforms start to hemorrhage users and then they Panic although they call it pivoting and they do all kinds of really dumb shit like you know Mark Zuckerberg arises from his sarcophagus and says you know hearken to me brothers and sisters I've had a vision in the night I know I told you that the future would consist of like arguing with your racist uncle using the primitive text interface I created in a dorm room so I could Non-consensually rate the fuckability of Harvard undergraduates. But it turns out that the future really consists of me converting you and everyone you love into a legless, sexless, low polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon character that I'm going To imprison in a virtual world I stole from a 25 year old satirical cyberpunk novel that I call the metaverse. Right. And like that's when the platform turns into a pile of shit. And we've seen that before the kind of 2010s, 2005s, when you saw platforms coming and going, you know, MySpace would rise and fall. What's changed since then is that the platforms are much more durable, even after they're terrible. They're zombies, right? They don't die. And the rest of the inshittification thesis, which I can get into, but it takes a while, is about why that's happened, right? What created the circumstances where all these guys decided it was time to wreck the things that they built and how come it didn't result in those things going away? ([Time 0:13:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e8172877-87a8-4288-9aa2-07bd56340218)) - **Cloud Software Enables Remote Confiscation** - Software-as-service enables vendors to remove features they once shipped locally. - That technical control creates a built-in 'self-destruct' capability platforms can weaponize for rent-seeking. Transcript: Cory Doctorow What created the circumstances where all these guys decided it was time to wreck the things that they built and how come it didn't result in those things going away? Yeah. Alix Dunn I also really love that idea of like the monopoly container. There's a quote in the book about, imagine if the carpenter who installed your new kitchen got a share of the closing price of your house when you moved as a correlate. Can you explain, can you actually, I didn't know about the panettone, is it panettone or panettone? Panettone. Panettone is the bread. Cory Doctorow Panettone is, I believe, bread. The Italian Christmas bread. Or maybe, yes, I think you're right. Yes. Alix Dunn So Pantone. Can you tell this story? Because I've never heard this before and it's insane. Cory Doctorow Well, if you own an inkjet printer, you know your printer has four different colors in it, right? Black, blue, yellow, and red, sign, magenta, black, and yellow. Most colors can be made by mixing these. But there are a bunch of colors that you can't make by mixing those four colors. And those colors are things like glow in the dark colors or very bright colors or colors that are matte or shiny or gloss or that have lacquers in them or whatever, right? They're called spot colors. And when you're printing print paper out, something out on paper, you take one of these big industrial printing presses and you run it through four times to get the black, yellow, red, And blue. And then you run it through again to put spots of the spot color on. And Pantone, it's the color swatches that tell you what those spots are. So you go to the paint store and you get a big box of paint chips and it tells you what the colors are. And then you tell them what you want and they mix that paint up. Same thing if you're a designer with a client. You take out your big box of Pantone swatches and you go through and you're like, you like this neon orange, great. I will tell the printer and the printer will either mix that up or buy it. And they'll put it in the fifth bucket in the giant printer when we run your job. ([Time 0:18:39](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fd1d96e8-f3cc-4fc1-9f45-ff028078b59b)) - **Reduce Platform Importance, Not Just Bad Behavior** - Making platforms less important beats hoping they'll behave better. - Portability and standards let users leave, restoring market discipline and reducing reliance on regulators alone. Transcript: Cory Doctorow So to get back to what I said at the start, I don't think there's anything wrong with a platform per se, with an intermediary per se, or there are lots of people who want to be designers who Don't want to invent Photoshop. And that's fine, right? It's fine to have like someone in your supply chain who is giving you those tools. And the problem is when they get very, very powerful. And one of the things that we've tried to do with powerful platforms is make them wield their power more wisely. The best example would be like with social media platforms. We've had like a 20 year experiment in trying to get social media platforms to behave themselves better, mostly in the European Union, with rules about things like hate speech and harassment And, you know, other kinds of bad user to user conduct and i don't want to minimize the harms of that stuff i don't think it's like fake to worry about hate speech and harassment and i'm Keenly aware that the people who are most subject to hate speech and harassment aren't middle-class white guys who speak english as a first language and live in north america and so I never want to say that this is like not a problem because it's not a huge problem for me. But I think we can say that it's been a failure trying to get them to prevent it, right? So 20 years of policing hate speech. And we're at this place where we just keep getting tripped up by the fact that really adjudicating a claim that a platform failed in its duty to police user speech is so fact intensive And time consuming that it never really seems to work, right? If you've had something horrible happen to you on a platform and you ask a regulator to look into it, well, first they have to agree on what is hate speech. Then they have to agree on whether the thing that was said to you meets the definition. Then they have to determine whether the platform took reasonable technical steps to prevent it, which, you know, given that the platforms are all purpose-built hardware and infrastructure, That means deposing their engineers because like nobody understands how Facebook works except for Facebook senior ops people because it doesn't work like anything else that's ever Been built works. And you wouldn't build something new like it today. It's sui generis. And then after all that, five years, seven years, you figure out whether Facebook wronged you. And this is for an occasion that occurs on Facebook a hundred times a minute. And it's just not well matched. And so I think we should look at why people who are marginalized in harm's way and so frequently subjected to hateful conduct on the platforms don't just leave. And the answer is that the only thing worse than being marginalized and subject to hateful conduct and in a lot of trouble is to have all of those problems and be alone, right? Be isolated from the people on the platform that matter to you. And so those people are staying because they're holding each other hostage. Now, there is nothing about a platform, a social media platform, that intrinsically says that if you leave it, you can't stay in touch with the people who stay behind. When Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook, he had this problem that everyone who he might approach to join a social media network already had a social media account on MySpace. And his pitch to MySpace users wasn't, forget your dopey friends, come use Facebook. It was, come use Facebook and here's a bot. And if you give us your login and password, we will log into MySpace several times a day, pretending to be you. Grab everything waiting for you there and put it in your Facebook inbox and you can reply to it. We'll push it back out to MySpace. You don't have to choose between your friends and a superior service where they care about you more. Because Mark Zuckerberg's other big pitch was, Facebook is like MySpace, but we will never ever spy on you. Understanding how he came to break that promise, not whether he meant it sincerely or not, but why he thought he could break it and get away with it, it's a very important matter, because Maybe we could have arranged things so that he didn't think he could get away with breaking that promise, and he might have kept it. ([Time 0:23:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/75e5a708-9f36-4d8d-9690-b26148491ca8)) - **Mandate Interoperability For Easy Exit** - Require interoperable standards that let users port accounts and data between platforms. - Use light regulators to verify transfers so leaving a platform becomes simple and enforceable. Transcript: Cory Doctorow I can be on one masternone server, you can be on the other and I can subscribe to your feed. The underlying standard for that makes it really easy to jump from one server to another. Built into the software is a link that you click as a user when you're logged and it just gives you a little blob of data. And then you quit from that server, you go somewhere else, and you send them that blob of data. And everyone you follow, and everyone who follows you, and all your blocks and mutes and everything, they all just come over to the new server. No one even notices that you've moved. In the same way that you can port your number from T-Mobile to Verizon. If we said to Twitter, Facebook, and their rivals, you know, you have to support this standard, we could easily administer that because say you're running a server and I want to leave Because I don't like how you run the show and I want my little file so I can go and you haven't given it to me. I can go to the regulator and the regulator can say, Alex, know you say you've given corey his file corey says you haven't i don't care who's telling the truth just give a copy to me and i'll Pass it on to him right and then the regulator knows that i have the file and you could imagine like 10 people in an office somewhere administering this policy for 4 billion social media Users and really not having much, breaking much of a sweat to do it. Because these are, that's not a fact intensive question. And so, you know, obviously there are some policies that are really easy to administer because they're trivial, right? They don't get anything done. But I really do believe that this is not actually a hard policy set up. And I don't think it's one that would take a long time to pay dividends. ([Time 0:32:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fc17b10b-3892-42e9-8512-70ae6428ce52)) - **Four Pronged Policy Strategy** - Attack inshittification with four policy fronts: competition, regulation, interoperability, and labor power. - Reform IP and strengthen worker organizing to restore user and worker leverage. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Are the corollaries of why it all happens. So I've alluded a couple of times in this conversation to like what allowed this to occur. Like why can Mark Zuckerberg get away with hurting you without getting into trouble? We used to have forces that disciplined Mark Zuckerberg. So we had competition. He had to worry about, you know, people leaving for a competitor. Alix Dunn I just love this idea of him being disciplined. I'm sorry. It's just so funny to imagine him personally being, oh, there's rules. But sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Cory Doctorow But of course, I am not an economist, but some econ jargon has kind of slipped into my brain because it's like sticky and it gets on everything and you can't wash it off. And so this is econ jargon discipline. But when Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram, he sent a memo to his CFO saying, I'm buying Instagram because people like it better than Facebook. And so even if they leave Facebook, platform, they'll still be customers of Facebook, the business. And so, you know, like they used to fear competition. They don't anymore. They bought all the rivals. Google's a company that had one good idea in the previous millennium about how to be a better search engine. And in this millennium, they have had zero or next to zero successful product launches. All they've done is buy other people's successful products and operationalize them, whether that's Android or Google Maps or Docs or their whole ad tech stack, YouTube. You know, Google Video is a failure. They had to buy someone else's successful video platform to have a successful video platform. So they don't worry about competition. And then when competition collapses, you don't have to worry about regulation because cartels find it really easy to capture their regulators. They solve the problem that your friends can't solve when you want to leave Facebook, right? When there's hundreds of you, you, you know, on Facebook, you can't agree on when to go. But if there was just like three of you, it's a lot easier, which is why it's often the case that like, if there's a bunch of you at a party, it's three of you who leave. And then the other ones get pissed off and they're like, why didn't you tell us you were leaving well we did tell you but you wanted to say goodbye so we just left because when there's a small Number you can solve collective action problems and so they can solve the collective action problem of capturing their regulator they can agree on what it is they're going to say to Their regulator and not only that but because they're not really competing you know these companies they divide up the market like the pope dividing up the new world, right? Google pays Apple $20 billion a year not to make a search engine. That means that they have a lot of surplus capital because they're not competing. So they don't have to worry about what Peter Thiel calls wasteful competition. They don't have to like pay their higher salaries or offer lower prices or increase product quality to retain your business because they're not competing. And so they have excess capital. They solve the collective action problem and they can capture their regulators. And, you know, like that's why the last time Congress passed a consumer privacy law, it was a law that banned video store clerks from disclosing your VHS rentals in 1988. Right. And so, like, why do we have privacy violations? Well, Congress has been captured by the surveillance industry. And so that used to discipline firms and it doesn't anymore. And then there's interoperability, there's technology itself. You know, we saw how Mark Zuckerberg was able to overcome the collective action problem on MySpace by giving users a bot. And the fact of the matter is computers are quite remarkable in that they have this feature of universality that is not like anything else we've ever seen. Formally speaking, a computer is a Turing complete universal von Neumann machine, which is like a fancy way of saying it could run every valid program. And that means that anytime someone builds a 10 foot pile of shit someone else can build an 11-foot ladder you know every ad has an ad blocker every ink ripoff has got a third party in cartridge And the only thing that stops you from doing that is the fact that it's illegal so IP law has been mobilized to make that stuff illegal and so over the last 20 some years we have lost competition In tech we've had regulatory capture we've seen the expansion of IP law that made it harder for people to disrupt in a good way, disrupt bad rent-seeking businesses with technology That restored power to users. But we did for all of that time until pretty recently have powerful tech workers. And the tech workforce is uniquely constituted in that even though it's not unionized, it had a lot of power. And that power came from scarcity. And that scarcity has ended. So we've had half a million layoffs in the last three years in US tech alone. And tech workers just don't have the juice they used to have. And a lot of tech workers, you know, they had been motivated to work very long hours, even though they had so much power by an appeal to their sense of mission they really cared about what They did and they cared about the users that they felt they were they were working on the behalf of i call them tron pilled you know i fight for the user and when the bosses got the whip hand Over them they could no longer say like i'm not going to un-ify that product. I missed my mother's funeral to ship on time. They had to say, yes, boss, uh, I'll have it for you on your desk by Monday because there was just 10 people lined up to take their job if they wouldn't do it. And so, you know, you, you add all those things up and you see that this is how we got to the situation we're in. And then finally, we are at a moment in which more workers want to be unionized and public support for unions is higher than it's been since the seventies. And yeah, Trump did away with the national labor review board, but like he is indulging in the Grinch fallacy. The Grinch thinks that if you take all the who's tinsel and trees and bells and presents that they'll lose Christmas because he thinks that they feel because they've surrounded themselves With these things. The thing is the who's feel Christmassy so they surrounded themselves with these things. The reason we have labor law is not that labor law, people thought it'd be good to have unions so they created labor law and then we got unions. We have labor law because unions, when they were illegal, fought for labor law and Trump thinks that he's ended the game. He's just thrown away the rule book because one of the things that labor law really does is limit what unions can do. And so now that there's no rules, I don't think there's any reason not to be the most militant moment in labor history, especially given that Trump has taken away the contracts from one Million unionized federal workers illegally in the last three months. So all of these policy prescriptions, competition, better regulation, labor rights, reforming IP law to give people more rights to repair, adapt, and modify the technologies they Use, protect themselves from privacy predation, and so on. ([Time 0:36:04](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2a3bca87-68ff-44aa-b325-a88a3087047f)) - **Chickenized Reverse Centaur Example** - 'Chickenized reverse centaur' blends poultry supply-chain abuse with automation-driven worker coercion. - Cory uses Arise and Amazon DSPs to show how workers buy gear, face intense surveillance, and carry debt while controlled by platforms. Transcript: Alix Dunn Is? Because I read it and was just like, you're so, there's like a cumulative concept set of adjectives. They like get longer and bigger and like laden with all kinds of really interesting political concepts. Modifiers. Yeah, totally. Yeah, so what's a chickenized reverse centaur? Cory Doctorow So it comes from labor studies and centaurs and reverse centaurs comes from automation studies. So in labor studies, chickenization refers to workers who are treated as though they are independent contractors, but who have their conduct controlled to a very fine degree in a way That allows their employer to effectively pay them just above a starvation wage, but keep them hooked to the job. And it comes from chicken farming, because there's three major poultry processors left in America, and they've divided up the territory. So any given farmer really only has one poultry processor they can sell to. And so if you want to be a chicken farmer, you have to buy your baby chicks from the poultry processor. They tell you what you have to feed, how often you have to feed them, how much to feed them, which drugs you can use, which vet you can use, how the coop is to be lit, when the light is to be on, What spectrum bulbs to use, and so on. They tell you all of that but they don't tell you how much they're going to buy your birds for and what they do is they wait to observe across the whole supply chain of how many birds have Been made to set a price that allows each farmer to roll over their loans but no one to get out ahead so it's like the minimum price they can give you and they do all kinds of really sleazy Things like they will tell some farmers, you're on this light schedule or this feeding schedule, or you're using this kind of food. They won't tell them this is an experiment, which may produce a greater yield, but may produce a lower yield. Only they know this. And so you have these people who are effectively indentured because they're carrying lots of debt. And because there are these three they also stick together. So there are farmers who speak out against one processor, can't sell their birds to any of them. And indeed, there was one processor who, when a farmer spoke out against them, not only did they not buy chickens from him, but then he started a business fixing coops. And they told other farmers that if you hire this guy to fix your coop, we won't buy your birds. And so they just made him economic roadkill. So that's chickenization. Reverse centaurs. A centaur in automation theory is a person who is assisted by a machine. So when you drive a car, you're a centaur. When you wear glasses, you're a centaur. If you are typing and you have a spell checker that tells you when you make a typo, you're a centaur. All of that is centaurism. You are a human head on a kind of tireless machine body. A reverse centaur is a person who has to assist the machine. And we see reverse centaurism all over the place. You know, Amazon drivers who have these impossible quotas and they have to pee in bottles. Amazon warehouse workers who also have impossible quotas and are injured at three times the rate of other warehouse workers, Uber drivers, and so on. You have these machines that are just using humans as like a kind of inconvenient last step actuators to get some part of the job done without regard to the well-being of the human. And a chickenized reverse centaur is someone who has to buy their own equipment and then gets abused by that equipment and forced to act as its assistant. So there's a company called Arise. It's a kind of pyramid scheme. They recruit mostly black women and they say, you can be a customer service rep for Disney, Carnival Cruises, or many other large blue chip companies. You have to go and you have to buy a special computer, a certain kind of headset. You have to pay us to train to be a carnival cruise customer service rep so you have to pay for the training and then we listen in on all your calls and so if you hear your kids in the background Or a neighbor with a you know leaf blower we're going to dock your salary or we may in fact just say you can no longer work for carnival cruises so all the money you paid to work for it is gone. So everything is being observed and scripted to the finest degree. And yet you are technically your own boss, right? And you have all this debt you're carrying from buying this specialized equipment that they charge a premium for and that you can really only use to work with them. The same thing happens with Amazon delivery drivers. The companies that hire Amazon delivery drivers are not Amazon. They're called delivery service providers, delivery service platforms, DSPs. And so they find some like entrepreneur hustler and they say, do you want to be your own boss? Take out a giant loan, buy a bunch of vans, give them Amazon paint jobs, buy Amazon uniforms, hire drivers, fit them out with all the cameras and sensors that we require that watch those Drivers and penalize them if they open their mouth while they're driving, because you're not allowed to sing if you're an Amazon driver. And then you can get paid for being an Amazon delivery service provider, and you are the last mile, and you're your own boss, and you own your own business. But Amazon then will get five or six in a territory that can only support four, and then they'll fire two of them. And it's not like you can deliver for someone else in your Amazon van, right? So you are chickenized and then your employees are reverse centaurs because they're having their movement scripted to this fine degree by AI cameras that Andy Jassy has insisted on. So yeah, chickenized reverse centaurs, a very important idea from both labor and automation theory. ([Time 0:43:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1076e862-56f7-483b-a8f7-36a3e20ac9e4)) - **Twiddling: Fast, Per-User Economic Tricks** - Modern scams are classic tricks executed at computer speed by 'twiddling' per-user economics. - Digital scale accelerates long-standing con artist tactics into systemic predation. Transcript: Cory Doctorow It has this pattern, good to end users, good to business customers. It has this underlying mechanism, which I think is characteristic of a modern scam that I call twiddling, which is changing the underlying economics on a per-user, per-session basis. So for example, you know, hospitals hate paying union scale for nurses. So most hospitals don't employ enough nurses, and they bring in contract nurses on a daily basis, and they source them from, you know, labor agencies, staffing agencies. And it used to be that there were a lot of staffing agencies up and down the country, several competing in every market, but they have all been supplanted by four giant apps that all call Themselves Uber for nurses. And these apps buy the nurse's credit history because we haven't had a new privacy law since 1988. So they buy the nurse's credit history and they calculate how much the nurse owes on their credit cards and how delinquent that debt is. And if the nurse owes more money they pay them a lower salary because they're more economically desperate they'll take a lower wage right and you know that is a very scam dynamic but it's A scam dynamic that is labor-intensive without automation right so you know black heart of Coal bosses in Tennessee or any Ford songs would surely have loved to have paid their minors On this basis. But you just couldn't pay enough guys in green eye shades to like do this with a ledger and, you know, a pen pot and a quill, right? You need high-speed digital tools to do this. And what computers do is they take these very simple scam dynamics and they speed them up. And I think one of the mistakes that people make when they talk about the platforms and their power is they ascribe to them a kind of sorcerous capability. The people who believe in surveillance capitalism hypothesis and dopamine hacking think that somehow we finally arrived at the era of the mind control ray, that where Mesmer and Rasputin And MKUltra and pickup artists all failed. Mark Zuckerberg has succeeded with AB splitting and warmed over Skinnerian behaviorism. And I think that it's much more straightforward than that, which is good news, right? Because it means that it's easier to fight. It's much more straightforward. ([Time 0:49:18](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0b860398-297f-454c-ae20-01254a14cb27)) - **Origin Story Of 'Enshittification'** - Cory coined 'enshittification' after complaining on Twitter about TripAdvisor's trackers in a cloud forest. - The swear word made the concept sticky and helped it spread when he expanded it into a book. Transcript: Cory Doctorow And it would just time out. And I went to Twitter and I said, has anyone at TripAdvisor ever been on a trip? This is the most inshittified site I've ever used. And a lot of people went, ha ha ha, inshittified, that's a funny word. And then like a year and a half later, I was writing about platform decay, and I used the term and shitification to describe it. And that was very successful. And I have concluded on that basis because, you know, I use the word and shitification to describe TripAdvisor, and no one kept using it, right? Like it came and went, right? It wasn't like it suddenly became the word everyone used to describe bad things. But when I wrote a long, detailed technical explanation and included the swear word, suddenly the two things came together. It was very sticky. And it's funny because, you know, I have a friend and colleague who speaks in very elite security circles. And he said, like, I wish you would use a different word because I can't use that word in front of a NATO general. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure NATO generals have heard the word shit. But if you think that that's a real problem, I encourage you to come up with a different word. Because I didn't come up with this word first. I came up with it last. I stopped because that word worked. ([Time 0:53:39](https://share.snipd.com/snip/77500e68-3f3a-4081-920d-173f0a0786bf))