Show Me the Incentive, I’ll Show You the Outcome  ## Metadata - Author: [[Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com]] - Full Title: Show Me the Incentive, I’ll Show You the Outcome - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/73681fd1-78dd-422e-8e9b-8340f056b2b5 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Hotel Zoom Hack For Clean Backgrounds** - Use the ironing board as a laptop stand to avoid showing a messy hotel bed on video calls. - Raise your seat with pillows and the hotel Bible to get eye-level camera framing during remote meetings. Transcript: Cory Doctorow This is the hack. Your hotel room almost certainly has an ironing board, and that ironing board is pretty much the right height for your laptop. So you can move the ironing board so that it's not pointed at the bed, and you can put your laptop on it for the duration of your call, and you can wheel the chair up to it. If the chair isn't tall enough, you can put some pillows from the bed under your butt. And if the laptop needs to be raised up a little, you can put the Bible underneath it from the hotel room drawer. ([Time 0:02:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/38ee3c1b-9424-430b-8678-a21a1cfd2a41)) - **Life Changes With A Transatlantic Household** - Cory describes his wife quitting Disney, joining the BBC, and moving back to London, shifting their household to two cities. - Their neighbors' children moved back in, freeing their flat and making his increased London presence possible. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Lots of things have changed around my house since I last spoke to you. My wife has quit her job at Disney and has taken a job at the BBC and has moved home to our flat in London. She is living in London now for at least the next year. If the contract renews, we will probably move our household over there. But for now, we're kind of living in two cities, although I'm going to be spending as much time as possible in London over the next year. We still have the flat there that we lived in before. Our neighbor's adult children had been living in it, and we weren't so keen on kicking them out. But then through a piece of serendipity, our neighbors wrote to us, they work in film, and they're spending the next year in Berlin working on some TV, and they wanted the kids to come Live in their flat again. But that would have left us without a tenant. And would we mind if that were to happen? And we were like, not only will we not mind, that is perfect. So our neighbor's kids have moved back into their parents' flat. We are living in our flat again, and I'm spending as much time as I can in London. ([Time 0:03:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0ded5c0b-cc8f-4ea0-8087-2a07ee061251)) - **Revealed Preference Can Mask Coercion** - 'Revealed preference' arguments blame users for staying in harmful services instead of recognizing constrained choices. - Cory argues this logic masks coercive structures that limit meaningful user choice and agency. Transcript: Cory Doctorow That is, who is at fault for the pandemic of platform decay, in which the platforms we depend on, where we congregate, trade, perform, sell, buy, connect, love, argue, and mobilize Are all turning into piles of shit all at once. 50 years of neoliberal canon says that we have to blame consumers. You, me, and everyone we know cast ballots in an election in which we, quote, voted with our wallets. And the winners were the ketamine-addled Zucker-Muskian mediocrities who have filled our social media with slop, trolling, bot shit, porn, and gore. In the jargon of the economics trade, we have a, quote, revealed preference for being spied on, manipulated, and harassed. If we didn't want that, we'd simply leave. ([Time 0:06:23](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f1e556fd-7016-4a23-9d29-d6bb142f7940)) - **Real Choices Reveal Real Preferences** - Meaningful choices reveal true preferences, shown when 96% of iOS users blocked Facebook spying after Apple offered the option. - Providing real alternatives changes user behavior dramatically, exposing prior choice constraints. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Take privacy. Prior to 2021, every iOS user who installed a Facebook app consented to being comprehensively spied upon by that app as they moved through both physical and virtual space. Then, in 2021, Apple updated iOS to allow users to block Facebook spying, and 96% of iOS users clicked that box. ([Time 0:08:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/81df33aa-61ac-405c-86d5-975a84e6b0b0)) - **Choice-Stripping As Political Strategy** - The conservative project intentionally strips choices to corral people into undesired 'preferences'. - Removing options then lets elites claim people 'revealed' they preferred those constrained outcomes. Transcript: Cory Doctorow The whole point of the conservative project is to take away choices and corral us into preferences that we disprefer. Eliminate no-fault divorce. Suppress the vote. Gerrymander the electoral map. Cram a binding arbitration clause into every terms of service and a non-compete into every labor contract. Buy up all your competitors. DRM lock all the media. Ban contraception and abortion, and you've got a world of partners you can't divorce, politicians you can't vote out, companies you can't sue, jobs you can't quit, services you can't Leave, books and music you can't move, and pregnancies you cannot prevent nor terminate. And after you are relentlessly corralled into all these things you hate, you will be told that you don't hate them after all, because you revealed your preferences for them. ([Time 0:08:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/dd609f6d-c2e0-4e46-a7c7-4911d77c33f3)) - **Platform Owners Extract Value Post-Acquisition** - Tech bosses accelerated enclosure: Instagram bought users back to Facebook and then increased surveillance and ads. - Platform owners' post-acquisition behavior and fees (like app store cuts) systematically extract value from creators and users. Transcript: Cory Doctorow So, what about tech bosses? Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram and recaptured all the Facebook users who'd fled his platform for a better one, then monotonically increased the surveillance, ads, and boosted Content in all their feeds. Elon Musk bought Twitter, invited the Nazis back, shut down the content moderation department, and then killed the API so that users couldn't easily migrate to Mastodon or Blue Sky And reconnect with the friends they'd made on Twitter. They both made a bet that we'd love each other more than we hated them. Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai relentlessly squeezed app makers and the creators who depend on them, taking 30 cents out of every dollar you send to news outlets, Patreon creators, and Etsy crafters using their apps, and banning apps from advertising other ways to pay. They imposed a 30% economy-wide app tax on the digital world. HP blocked you from refilling ink cartridges or replacing them with generics, and then made printer ink more expensive than the semen of a Kentucky Derby winner. ShiftMed, a company that supplies contract nurses to hospitals, uses commercial surveillance data to look up how much credit card debt a nurse is carrying, and lowers the wage offered Based on their perceived desperation. Amazon charges prime users more than users who haven't prepaid for a year's shipping in advance. ([Time 0:09:58](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0128a180-ed79-4f92-ac33-c374be0d7013)) - **Policy Created The Incentives For Decay** - Policymakers set incentives that reward 'enshittification' by weakening antitrust, privacy, and labor protections. - These laws enabled monopolies, surveillance, lock-in, and predatory practices that degrade services over time. Transcript: Cory Doctorow They take whatever they can get, whenever they can get it. Which brings me to the people who I think bear the brunt of the blame. The true authors of the great Enchitning, the prime movers behind the Enshittacene. Policymakers. The same economists and politicians who gave us revealed preferences also halted antitrust enforcement, allowing companies to buy each other until once thriving sectors had been Degraded to anti-competitive cartels, where the only choice was, heads I win, tails you lose. Cowardly and venal politicians failed to update consumer privacy law for decades. The last federal consumer law that Congress bestirred itself to pass was 1988's Video Privacy Protection Act, a law that bans video store clerks from disclosing your VHS rentals. Bought and paid-for Pauls attacked the American worker, gutting labor law and ripping the heart out of unions. Politicians claiming to be fighting for creative workers passed IP laws like 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a law that bans reverse engineering, and is the reason you can't Use an alternative app store on your phone or console, why you can't install a privacy blocker for your apps, why you can't fix your own wheelchair, and why you can't use third-party Ink. And the thing is, all of these policies were enacted in living memory by named individuals. We know who did this. We warned them at the time that this would be the consequence of their actions, that failing to protect privacy would result in mass surveillance, that failing to police mergers would Lead to monopolies, that banning reverse engineering would invite companies to lock their users in, take away features after people buy their devices and media, spy on users, and Block new companies from creating compatible products. They were warned that this would happen, and they went ahead and did it anyway, and they created the incentives for initiatification. They created a system in which the world's tech bosses could give in to their very worst impulses and grow rich and powerful as a consequence. As our friends on the right like to selectively remind us, incentives matter. I write this not merely to apportion blame where it belongs, but also as a tactical note. When the policy environment rewards inshittification, inshittifiers rise to the top of every company. Investors demand it. Good people and companies and in government are sidelined or trampled by inshittifiers moving into the niches created by bad policy. ([Time 0:12:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d0f6169c-6c66-4358-bf9a-d85e96359880)) - **Prioritize Policy Over C-Suite Changes** - Fixing enshittification requires policy change, not just swapping tech executives. - Replace incentive structures through law and regulation to prevent new 'enshittifiers' from rising. Transcript: Cory Doctorow When the policy environment rewards inshittification, inshittifiers rise to the top of every company. Investors demand it. Good people and companies and in government are sidelined or trampled by inshittifiers moving into the niches created by bad policy. We could fire Zuck and all his bloodless billionaire plans tomorrow, and a new cohort would step right into their shoes. ([Time 0:14:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9feb4e2e-1985-4b9c-8298-0ac8b01627a9))