How Silicon Valley Enshittified the Internet  ## Metadata - Author: [[Decoder with Nilay Patel]] - Full Title: How Silicon Valley Enshittified the Internet - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/0404d767-6c94-4ccb-b1df-60518cface73 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Three-Stage Platform Decay** - Platforms follow a three-stage decay: favor users, favor business customers, then extract all surplus for themselves. - Cory Doctorow argues this pattern explains why once-good services become unusable and hostile to users. Transcript: Sarah Jeong And what do you think that now means in broader internet culture? Cory Doctorow You and I have done some similar work over the years, organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and you know that a big part of that job is just trying to raise the salience And urgency of questions that are really very abstract and complex and technical. They will eventually become very important to people when everything's on fire, but ideally you'd like people to care about it beforehand. So a lot of that job is just like coming up with metaphors and similes and funny words and framing devices and parables and just all kinds of ways to try and talk about this stuff and bring It home for people. And then shitification was just one of those. I had been working through a way of talking about platform decay. One day I needed a word for it. I'd used the word a year before in a bad tempered tweet when TripAdvisor wasn't working for me. When I was on a holiday with my family, I was like, has anyone at TripAdvisor ever been on a trip? This is the most inshittified website I've ever used. It had like 78 trackers and like all that was happening when I tried to load up web pages was I would get like 20 of the trackers loaded and then the pipe would break and I couldn't get any Information. And so I knew people liked the word. And so I thought, okay, well, people laughed when I used that word on Twitter last year or whenever it was, I will use it in this article. And the fusion of a complex technical analysis that chimed with people and, you know, this minor license to vulgarity turned out to be a very winning combination. And as to what it means, it's kind of most superficial level is a way of describing platform decay. But its most important part is the causal narrative it brings together. You know, why is this happening now? Observationally, we can see that platforms go through this pattern where first, they're good to their end users. They find a way to lock those users in. And at stage one, when they are certain that it's hard for those users to leave, they make things worse for those users in order to make things better for business customers. And that's stage two. And then once the business customers are locked in, then they make things worse for those business customers too. They harvest all the available surplus. They take everything for themselves, for their shareholders and executives. They leave just the mingiest kind of most homeopathic residue behind a value that will keep us all stuck into the platform. ([Time 0:04:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/49c81773-0159-41c3-9fdf-b4ea46208d89)) - **TripAdvisor Tweet Sparked The Term** - Cory coined "enshittification" after a frustrated tweet about TripAdvisor's trackers breaking his holiday browsing. - The vulgar term helped package a technical critique into a resonant, widely-shared idea. Transcript: Cory Doctorow I'd used the word a year before in a bad tempered tweet when TripAdvisor wasn't working for me. When I was on a holiday with my family, I was like, has anyone at TripAdvisor ever been on a trip? This is the most inshittified website I've ever used. It had like 78 trackers and like all that was happening when I tried to load up web pages was I would get like 20 of the trackers loaded and then the pipe would break and I couldn't get any Information. And so I knew people liked the word. ([Time 0:05:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b262c7b1-a4dc-404e-b1cb-80296296f311)) - **W3C DRM Was A Turning Point** - Adding DRM into browsers (W3C decision) removed user protections and made security research and accessibility hacks risky or illegal. - Doctorow marks the W3C DRM adoption around 2017 as a turning point in losing technical discipline on the web. Transcript: Cory Doctorow And it was when this standards body called the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, was pressured by the big movie studios and the big tech companies to fundamentally change how browsers Work, to add something called digital rights management to browsers. That's the thing that is supposed to stop you from recording videos. Basically, Netflix and a few of the other big streaming companies, they said, look, if you don't put digital rights management into browsers, then we will no longer allow streaming Video in browsers and everyone will have to use apps and the web will die. And the W3C believed them and they really pushed hard to do this. And the problem here is not just that there are a lot of unfair ways in which this limits how we use video. The problem is that the laws that protect digital rights management are so onerous and overreaching that they prevent you from doing lawful things with your browser once there's DRM In there. For example, now it's illegal to change how your browser works so that if you have epilepsy, it checks to see whether there's a strobe effect in the video and dampens that before it can Induce a seizure. If you're a security researcher trying to figure out whether this video module allows attackers to harm the 3 billion people who use browsers, you can't investigate that security Module. And the penalties for this are like a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. We try very hard to get the W3C to extract a promise from its members to say, okay, we are going to put this in browsers nominally to stop piracy. And we are going to exempt people who modify their browsers to improve accessibility or to discover security defects. And they just refused outright. And the W3C thumbed the scales and did it. And I looked at this and I was like, wow, this public interest internet institution that has been such a staunch guardian of the idea that technology should serve its users and its owners Has been cornered to the point where they are taking the other side because they feel that if they don't give this away, the web will die altogether. And that was such a turning point. It was very demoralizing too. ([Time 0:08:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/15217b4a-0be7-47a7-8851-38dbb2f841ac)) - **Facebook As The Reference Case** - Doctorow traces Facebook's decline from early user-focus to prioritizing advertisers and then immersive 'metaverse' ambitions. - He highlights lock-in via social ties and business monopsony as mechanisms that let Facebook extract value while worsening user experience. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Facebook in 2006 opened up to the general public. You no longer needed a.edu address from an American college to sign up. They had a problem, which was that everyone who might become a Facebook user at that moment was already a MySpace user. And so they made a pitch to those MySpace users. They were like, sure, we know you like MySpace, but did you know it's owned by an evil, crapulent, senescent Australian billionaire, immortal vampire named Rupert Murdoch, and that Guy spies on you all the time. We're not run by an evil billionaire, and we will never spy on you. Come to Facebook, tell us who matters to you. We'll show you the things they post. So you just piled in, and they got locked in. And Facebook plays lock-in on the easy setting, unlike a company like Uber, say, which has to light $31 billion on fire over 13 years, losing 41 cents on every dollar they bring in until All the other cab companies have gone under. And we've had a lost decade in transit investment before they can start raising prices and abusing their users and their drivers. Facebook can rely on us to lock ourselves in through something economists call the collective action problem, which is more easily understood as you love your friends, but they're A giant pain in the ass. And if the six people in your group chat can't agree on what movie you're going to see this Friday, there's no way you're going to agree on when it's time to leave Facebook. And so, so long as you love those people more than you hate Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg can make things worse for you. And that's when we get to stage two, when he goes to business customers and he, you know, gives the advertisers data on you that he promised he would never collect. And he promises them that he's going to take very small amounts of money, spend all that and more policing ad fraud and target ads to you with exquisite fidelity. And he goes to publishers and he offers them the ability to promote their material to people who never asked to see it, to have it crammed into the eyeballs of people who don't subscribe To their feeds and says, just put excerpts from your own website here on Facebook, link back to your own website, we'll give you the free traffic funnel. And those business customers, they get locked into Facebook too. And I think unless you're an economist or unless you run a small business, it's really hard to understand intuitively how easy it is for a supplier to be locked into a purchaser, how easy Monopsony, which is like the buy side version of monopoly is. But if you have a coffee shop and the office next door is like 20% of your business, this tower next door, and then they go out of business and you lose 20% of your receipts overnight, your Coffee shop may not survive the month, right? You're going to have to do layoffs. You're going to have to get another loan to, you know, carry the coupon on your, on your espresso machines. You're going to have to like maybe get rent relief from your landlord and you could be out of business in a couple of weeks, even though 20% is not a lot, right? It's nowhere near a majority. And certainly like as a purchaser of coffee, if there's like five coffee shops on the block and one of them goes under, you have a 20% reduction, doesn't even really register, right? You can just get your coffee somewhere else. Monopoly is a lot harder to establish than monopsony. And so these business customers, they get locked in and the advertisers start to find, well, now our ads cost way more. Our ad targeting fidelity is way down. And ad fraud is so bad that when Procter& Gamble zeroed out its $100 million a year surveillance ad spend, they saw a 0% drop in sales because all the ads were disappearing into the fraud Hole. And publishers, you know, they have to put like the full text of their articles on Facebook now and no links back to their website. Otherwise, they won't be shown to anyone, much less their subscribers. And they're now fully substitutive, right? And the only way they can monetize that is with Facebook's rigged ad market. And users find that like, the amount of stuff that they asked to see in their feed is dwindled to basically nothing, so that these voids can be filled with stuff people will pay to show Them and those people are getting ripped off. This is the equilibrium Mark Zuckerberg wants, right? Where all the available value has been withdrawn, but he has to contend with the fact that this is a very brittle equilibrium, right? The difference between I hate Facebook, but I can't seem to stop using it. And I hate Facebook and I'm not going to use it anymore. It's so brittle that if you get like a live stream mass shooting or a whistleblower or a privacy scandal like Cambridge Analytica, people will flee. And then the market gets cold feet because they're like, OK, well, maybe this is the end of the ride for Facebook. Facebook sees big stock drops, and then they panic. But being tech bros, they call it pivoting. And so, you know, one day Mark Zuckerberg arises from his sarcophagus and says, hearken to me, brothers and sisters, I know I told you that the future was arguing with your most racist Uncle using this text interface, but actually I'm going to transform you and everyone you love into a legless, sexless, low polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon character so I can Imprison you in a virtual world I stole from a 25-year cyberpunk novel. I call it the metaverse, right? And that's end stage in shitification, the giant pile of shit. ([Time 0:11:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/891928e3-c502-46d5-88c1-f7d6e899b03d)) - **Loss Of Tech-Sector Discipline** - Tech-specific discipline (interoperability, skeptical workers) kept platforms honest but was eroded by IP law, DRM, and mass layoffs. - Losing these checks enabled apps and platforms to lock users and monetize by increasing invasiveness without fear of circumvention. Transcript: Cory Doctorow They go hog wild on you. And I think that tech had different sources of discipline to a company like Walmart. Brick and mortar businesses, they have two sources of common discipline. One is markets and the other is regulators. So the discipline of commerce and the discipline of government. And they're pretty closely related, right? When you allow a sector to dwindle to a bare handful of firms or even just one company, they don't have to worry about competitors anymore. You know, when Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram, you know, his CFO asked him, like, why are we giving this 12 person and company a billion dollars? And he put it in writing. He sent his CFO an email saying like, well, people leave Facebook, they go to Instagram, they like Instagram better. So to reduce competition, we'll buy Instagram. So those people will remain users of even if they're not, you know, on the Facebook platform. That's like a confession of guilt, right? Like the only thing that even the antitrust skeptics who've been running the show on antitrust for 40 years think you should be able to punish is the deliberate reduction of competition, You know, which is hard to prove because someone would need to tell you that the reason they're buying a company is to reduce competition. But Mark Zuckerberg's never had a bad idea. He didn't put him writing, right? He's the guy who's like, hey, Bob, that guy we were thinking about killing, I think we should do it. And definitely it should be a murder. And now that I think about it, I'm really premeditating it, right? And yet, you know, the Obama DOJ waved that through just like all of the Bush DOJs and FTCs waved through all of their mergers, and just like Trump won, did it with a couple of exceptions, And like everyone did except for Biden, right, who for four years did more on antitrust than we'd seen in 40 years. And when you lose the competition, you also lose the regulation, because, you know, when there's 100 companies in a sector, they're a rabble, right? They can't agree on anything. They can't agree what they're going to tell their regulators. They don't have the excess profits that you get from avoiding what Peter Thiel calls wasteful competition to spend on regulatory adventures. But when the sector is just a handful of companies, they find it very easy to agree. They don't have a collective action problem. And they have so much money because they have divided up the market like the Pope dividing up the new world. Think of, you know, Google giving $20 billion a year to Apple not to make a search engine. And then both of them get to reap super normal profits from not competing on that line of business, you know, and so they can totally transform the policy environment to suit them. And so that's the Walmart story. But tech had two other sources of discipline that are distinct to the tech sector, as we understood it for the last 25 years. One was interoperability. You know, the only kind of computer we know how to make is that wonderful Turing complete universal von Neumann machine. It can run every program. If some tech boss puts a 10-foot pile of shit in something you use, some programmer can give you an 11-foot code ladder to go over top of it. Everything that stops you from installing a third-party app or using generic ink or, you know, protecting your privacy while you use a website has a piece of software that could undo That mischief and shift the balance towards you. But the unchecked growth of IP law over the last 40 years, particularly the laws that protect digital rights management, which we were talking about before, these anti-circumvention Laws in America, it's Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Those laws have taken that interoperability off the table. And now there's no reason not to go nuts, right? You know, in the old days, if you were thinking about making the ad load on your website more invasive, you also had to contend with the possibility that users would install an ad blocker. You don't have to worry about that for apps because apps are basically websites skinned in the right kind of IP to make it a felony to install an ad blocker. And so the fact that your app is more invasive doesn't spur people to install an ad blocker. They can search, how do I block ads in this app all they want? The answer they're going to get is we can't. So to give you a really clear example of this, a company called Chamberlain, they make garage doors. They got some private equity money. They bought all the other companies that make garage doors. If you have a garage door opener, it doesn't matter what the maker's mark on it is. It's a Chamberlain. They discontinued support for something called HomeKit, which is a standard way for apps to talk to devices in your home. So you could have lots of different apps that let you open your garage door. So now you had to use the Chamberlain app. And the Chamberlain app shows you seven ads before it lets you open your garage door, right? And, you know, like that's why they're so horny to make you stop using the web, right? It's because apps let them abuse you and leave you helpless. And so we lost that source of discipline. ([Time 0:17:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8c36eb7b-06f7-4fbc-9897-3a61a5720ac1)) - **Monopoly, Not Just Liability, Drove Decay** - Enshittification arose more from unchecked mergers and predatory tactics than from intermediary liability shields like CDA 230. - Doctorow argues antitrust failures allowed Amazon and Google to buy or crush rivals, creating entrenched platforms that extract value. Transcript: Cory Doctorow It was that we failed to police intermediary mergers. Right? So like, how did Amazon get so big? It wasn't by being the best in every sector, right? Amazon bought all of its competitors and they bought them in the dirtiest way possible. So in the book, I tell the story of a startup called diapers.com. It was doing really well. It was the leading retailer of goods for new parents and Amazon couldn't crack that vertical. So they made a purchase offer and they were like, no, you know what? We've got a good business here. We won't sell to you. So Amazon broke antitrust law. They did something called predatory pricing where they sold goods for newborns below cost to the tune of $200 million in a couple of months. And they drove diapers.com out of business. They bought them for pennies in the dollar. Diapers.com's investors sold to Amazon, even though they had a better offer from Walmart, because they were afraid of what Amazon would do to their other startups if they didn't sell To Amazon. Amazon then shut down Diapers.com and no one ever said no to Amazon. How did Amazon come to dominate every vertical? They bought all the companies that had good businesses and they were able to buy all the companies that had good businesses because we didn't stop them when they broke the law. ([Time 0:36:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d96f6fca-4169-4ab4-96fc-a8194c8dc6e9)) - **Legal Protections Enabled AI Training** - Fair use and intermediary protections enabled AI development by allowing scraping, indexing, and transient copying for analysis. - Doctorow warns that new copyright rules to restrict training could entrench dominant firms who already control creative distribution. Transcript: Cory Doctorow So as to AI, AI, I think you're right that without the limitations on liability, we wouldn't have AI, you know, particularly the fair use stuff. But if you think about what you get from the lawfulness of the things that are involved in AI training. So indexing and making transient copies of work for the purposes of analysis. Like if you ever want to go look up what CBS's DEI policy used to be before they caved into Trump, you want people to be scraping and retaining copies of works, like without permission. If you want to have computational linguistics, if you want to have that kid in Austria who scraped all the web prices of the two major grocers and showed that they were moving in lockstep And that they were colluding to rig prices, we need scraping, right? So what about the analysis, right? What about counting the stuff in the documents, which is stage two of training, right? Training run. Well, again, like, do we really want to say counting things in copyrighted works requires permission? You know, I know Anthropic just settled this giant case, but that was because they pirated the books, not because they counted the words in them, right? If you go to the flea market and buy a pirate CD and then count the number of adverbs, the CD might be illegal, but your tally of the adverbs is not. And then finally, there's publishing a literary work, right? That's what a model is, a piece of software. That's why software is copyrightable. It's a literary work. You publish a literary work full of facts about other literary works. Well, if you like dictionaries, encyclopedias, bibliographies, like books of facts about other copyrighted works, you probably want them to be legal. But, you know, more importantly, and back to this idea that we allowed monopolies to form, it wasn't just in tech where we saw those monopolies, also in media. ([Time 0:39:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a493aa55-43fc-435e-9d5f-0e1979436161)) - **AI Lacks Human Communicative Intent** - AI-generated content often lacks communicative intent and feels eerie because it shows 'intent without an intender.' - Doctorow believes this reduces AI art's expressive value despite technical impressiveness. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Different things I want to say about this. So one is about the likely outcome of AI, and one is about the thing that you fainted at there with the what is the nature of slop, right? How expressive is it? I don't like AI art. And the reason I don't like AI art is because I think art is the, it starts with someone who has a big, irreducible, numinous, complex emotion. And they try to infuse it into some intermediary medium, like a sculpture or dance or a book or a song or a image in the hopes that it causes a facsimile of that emotion to materialize in Someone else's mind when they experience it. And AI doesn't have any of those things. And your prompt is, you know, if you prompt an AI to do something, the prompt, assuming it's quite short, you know, it could be quite long. You could write a whole book as a prompt, right? That might be very communicative. But if you're writing two sentences, then those two sentences are diluted across a million pixels or 100,000 words. And basically, the communicative intent of the work becomes undetectable. And this is why I think we call it inhuman or eerie. You know, eeriness, Mark Fisher says, is the seeming of intent without an intender, right? In some ways, when you look at AI and you see a picture, it's as though a very realistic image is formed in the clouds. It can be aesthetically striking, but the clouds have nothing to say to you, right? And, you know, we are habitual imputers of intent to words and images because our experience of them is that every set of words has a speaker and every image has an image producer, a painter, A drawer, but it doesn't have to anymore. And very quickly, I think a lot of that novelty and that strikingness has worn off. It's become very hack to make this stuff. And so as to how communicative is AI, I think it depends, right? It really depends on to what extent the communicative intent of the prompter is visible through it. I don't want to foreclose on the possibility that AI could be a communicative act, right? It's a very fact-intensive question, and it's tied into these questions of aesthetics. ([Time 0:50:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b642948f-6700-410a-9e4e-ec1dc6563d96)) - **AI's Political Economy Is Unsustainable** - The economic case for massive AI investment is shaky: huge CapEx with limited, concentrated revenue makes the industry brittle. - Doctorow predicts foundation-model economics may collapse, leaving smaller open models and different political economy behind. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Their capital outlay is in the $700 billion range. Their gross revenues are $45 billion a year at most. And that includes just the sweatiest goddamn accounting tricks you can imagine. So that's Microsoft saying, oh, we gave $10 billion in Azure credits to OpenAI and then OpenAI gave them back to us. That's $10 billion in revenue. That's like Starbucks giving you a gift certificate for a latte and then you redeeming it and then booking it as revenue, right? Except it's $10 billion and it's $10 billion out of $45 billion. And they're like, well, it's okay because we'll recoup that investment before these assets depreciate. They say the assets depreciate over five years. Some independent work out of the Princeton group that studies this stuff says it's two years. So these assets are going to be cooked in two years. They burn out at an incredible rate. And the revenue model that they've projected for this stuff, it's not the stuff that we're worried about here, deepfake porn, slop, election disinformation. It's displacing wages, right? And so I think if you want to understand the political economy of AI, you always have to ask yourself, what is the total wage bill of everyone who stands to lose their job from this AI application? So while it's really gross that they took stuff from illustrators in a bid to bankrupt illustrators, and that the CTO of OpenAI went on stage and said some creative jobs never should Have existed, it's not economically significant to anyone except those illustrators. Because the total wage bill for every illustrator working today is like rounds to zero against the budgets that they're using to train these models. And so it's a demo, right? Deep fake porn, like again, like all the money being generated by deep fake porn adds up to nothing compared to the AI budgets. You know, election disinformation, you know, that famously high waged sector that is election disinformation, right? Zero at all those wage bills, you get nothing back. And so what you have to look at is what AI does in high-wage sectors. So can AI be a software engineer? Well, AI can definitely write code, it needs review, and so on. And we can argue about how good that code is, but AI can't be a software engineer. Engineering requires a very wide and a very long context window because software engineering is not writing modules. It's assembling modules and thinking through the logical connections between them, how they chain together, how they handle exceptions, where inputs come in, where outputs go out, How they iterate between each other and so on. And AI does not scale context, right? Adding a linear amount of context to AI adds an exponential amount of compute to AI. This is why it kept losing count of how many fingers you have, is because by the time it counted all the way to five, it had lost count again, right? And so it just kept adding fingers, right? This is why you see it being unable to tell you how many states have an R in their name and so on. These are all context window problems. And yes, they're quote unquote hallucinations, but they're hallucinations related to this context issue. And it's not a thing that we have a theoretical basis for, for fixing using the kind of stuff we're doing now. Next word guessing programs are not good at holding context. So I don't think it's going to replace software engineers. They will fire a lot of software engineers and replace them with chatbots. The chatbots can't do their jobs, right? And actually, you know, it's worse than like firing programmers who do work that we need and replacing with chatbots that do that work badly. It's like the foundation model is going dark and then no one doing that job. That's even worse, right? Than it being done badly. And the same goes for radiologists. No one's talking about taking the radiologist who examines 100 x-rays a day and giving them an AI co-pilot that asks them to look again at two of them so that their output falls. They're saying fire like 90% of your radiologists who have a $30 billion per year wage bill in the United States. It's a good number, right? Find, you know, 100 of those people and you're cooking, 100 of those professions you're cooking. But they're saying fire 90% of your radiologists, have the ones that remain, rubber stamp the radiology reports at a rate that they cannot possibly have examined them, and then turn Them into the accountability sink when someone dies of cancer, right? So you look at all of those foundational problems with AI, and you look at the answers that the AI sector has, like maybe if we keep shoveling words into the word guessing program, it will Become intelligent. Well, that's like saying maybe if we keep breeding these horses to run faster, one of them will give birth to a locomotive, Intelligence is not word guessing with more words. They're unrelated to one another. It is a separate problem to solve. It's not that word guessing programs can't do impressive things. It's just that they can't do the things that justify a $700 billion CapEx and OpEx that is so high that even if you could zero at the CapEx by taking all these companies through bankruptcy And selling off their assets at 10 cents on the dollar, no one could afford to run those models anyway, because no one would pay enough for the things that those models are producing. And so I would not be surprised if the number of foundation models in a couple of years was zero. ([Time 0:53:47](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a246e132-4ca9-4fbc-85d0-fd7afb56fb37)) - **Context Limits Cap AI Capabilities** - Current 'next-word' models struggle with large context windows and won't trivially scale to general intelligence. - Doctorow warns that treating word-guessing as a path to true intelligence misreads the technical problem. Transcript: Cory Doctorow And it's not a thing that we have a theoretical basis for, for fixing using the kind of stuff we're doing now. Next word guessing programs are not good at holding context. So I don't think it's going to replace software engineers. They will fire a lot of software engineers and replace them with chatbots. The chatbots can't do their jobs, right? And actually, you know, it's worse than like firing programmers who do work that we need and replacing with chatbots that do that work badly. It's like the foundation model is going dark and then no one doing that job. That's even worse, right? Than it being done badly. And the same goes for radiologists. No one's talking about taking the radiologist who examines 100 x-rays a day and giving them an AI co-pilot that asks them to look again at two of them so that their output falls. They're saying fire like 90% of your radiologists who have a $30 billion per year wage bill in the United States. It's a good number, right? Find, you know, 100 of those people and you're cooking, 100 of those professions you're cooking. But they're saying fire 90% of your radiologists, have the ones that remain, rubber stamp the radiology reports at a rate that they cannot possibly have examined them, and then turn Them into the accountability sink when someone dies of cancer, right? So you look at all of those foundational problems with AI, and you look at the answers that the AI sector has, like maybe if we keep shoveling words into the word guessing program, it will Become intelligent. ([Time 0:56:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/aa71eb0e-8bca-48e3-8ce7-90cfde039a93)) - **Enforce Portability To Break Lock-In** - Make it easy to leave platforms by enforcing identity and data portability like number portability for phones. - Doctorow says portability would restore discipline because platforms would lose users immediately when they mistreat them. Transcript: Cory Doctorow So what if we just make it easier to leave the platforms? Right? We have number portability for our phones. If you want to switch from T-Mobile to Google Fi, you do a little administrative work and three seconds later, you're on a different network. No one's ever called anyone else up and said, hey, you wouldn't believe whose SIM is in my phone now. It just doesn't matter, right? We have in like the legacy networks, they're all designed as silos, right? Twitter, Facebook, TikTok. But modern networks, Blue Sky, Mastodon, they're designed for identity portability. You know, on Mastodon, you click a link, you get a little thing that's like a little text file. It's got everyone who follows you, everyone you follow, all your blocks and mutes and so on. You put that on a different server, it just all moves over like that. We could make Twitter, you know, support that and then give those files to users who want to leave Twitter and want to go somewhere else so that they could talk to the people who they left Behind on Twitter and, you know, read what those people are saying, but not be under Elon Musk's jurisdiction anymore. And, you know, if we have a dispute about this and like you come to me and I'm the regulator and you say, Musk never gave me my little data file, I don't have to adjudicate any questions. I just go to Musk and I say, look, I know you say you gave Sarah her file. She says you didn't. Escrow it with me and I'll give it to her. And like one person could administer 100 million users' complaints, right? In real time with like delays of minutes. And every time a platform boss did something that was bad to their users, they would lose users. And so maybe they get the message, although I wouldn't bet on it because these guys are very stupid. And so maybe they go out of business finally. ([Time 1:05:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bf17a6aa-209a-4c4e-82cb-4194398b50fc)) - **Unionize To Reimpose Market Discipline** - Organize labor in tech now; sectoral bargaining and unions protect workers and discipline firms over the long term. - Doctorow stresses that worker organizing is essential because tech bosses will exploit non-scarcity without organized resistance. Transcript: Cory Doctorow And I'll mention one other thing that's less crisp, but I think very important to this moment, which is labor organizing. So tech workers didn't organize when they had the chance, when they were scarce. And that's the paradox of scarcity-driven worker power is that workers don't feel like they need a union when they're scarce because they're treated well when they're scarce. They don't look ahead far enough to what happens when they're not scarce. We know what happens to workers for tech companies who aren't scarce because that's warehouse workers and Chinese factory workers and delivery drivers. These are the people who have suicide nets at their workplaces, who pee in jars, who are injured at three times the national average. That's what Jeff Bezos will do to his programmers. That's what Tim Cook will do to his programmers as soon as he's not afraid of them anymore, right? Because that's what he does to workers he's not afraid of. So it can be very disheartening to think about forming a union now, even though there are more workers who want to be in a union than at any time since the Carter administration. And opinion of unions is higher than it's been at any time since the Carter administration. And the unions have larger cash reserves than they've had since the Carter administration. But all of that notwithstanding, Trump has fired so much of the National Labor Relations Board that they no longer have a quorum. They can't act anymore, right? They can pursue old court cases, which is how we just got this wonderful judgment that says Amazon drivers work for Amazon and not for the contractors they use as cutouts. But unfair labor practices can't be adjudicated anymore. But Trump has made a really important category error here. He thinks the reason we have unions is that we have labor law. And obviously, it's backwards. We had unions for a long time before it was legal to be in a union. They fought these incredible, violent pitch battles in the streets. And eventually, capital sued for peace, right? They were like, we need a labor peace here. And the National Labor Relations Act is a compromise. Sure, a lot of it is about what bosses can and can't do to workers, but as much of it is about what workers can and can't do to bosses. And I'll give you one guess which half of that law has been enforced most vigorously since it was passed. You know, when you fire the referee, you don't have to end the game, but you certainly don't have to play by the rules. And we are back where we were in living memory when we were making unions without support of this state, and there's never been a better time to do it. And there are people alive today, not who are part of that movement, but who are trained by people part of that movement. No one's being asked to recover the lost praxis of a fallen civilization. You don't need to figure out how to like embalm a pharaoh, right? You just need to figure out how to do what our forebears did when they unionized a century ago. And we're going to have to do it again. ([Time 1:06:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/44c27037-c44c-42bc-86fe-48f8eaad26fa)) - **Use Global Antitrust Coalitions** - Leverage international antitrust momentum to challenge dominant U.S. tech platforms across jurisdictions. - Doctorow notes many countries now pursue aggressive competition enforcement and can coordinate to constrain oligopolies. Transcript: Cory Doctorow This giant move to disensitify the rest of the world's internet, to get away from American-imposed tech policies. And we have this incredible willingness to do it. And Donald Trump has poured gasoline on the flames, which is usually a bad thing. I'm all for like moving fast and breaking things so long as those things belong to billionaires. And it looks like we are opposed to break a lot of billionaires things. I'm very excited about it. ([Time 1:13:05](https://share.snipd.com/snip/01f16c18-900c-4b46-a510-205790d6159a))