The Internet Con  ## Metadata - Author: [[Future Knowledge]] - Full Title: The Internet Con - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/7626287d-2e7a-4677-a516-6719255ef2a4 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Platforms Keep Users Locked In** - Platforms deliberately lock users in by making it costly and painful to leave and abandon their social graphs. - This design fosters user retention by exploiting collective action problems and social dependencies. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Does the thought of leaving your friends behind if you check out of Facebook make you feel uncomfortable, like it's more work in pain than it might be worth? Well, guess what? That's by design. Hi, everyone. I'm Chris Freeland, and I'm a librarian at the Internet Archive. I want to welcome you to today's book talk. In the Internet Con, Corey Doctorow explains how to seize the means of computation by forcing the big tech platforms to do the thing they fear the most, interoperate. In our discussion today, Corey will walk us through his latest book and explain how interoperability will tear down the walls between technologies, allowing users to leave platforms, Remix their media, and reconfigure their devices without corporate permission, which sounds like a dream. As we get started, I'd like to welcome Brewster Kale, Internet Archive's founder and digital librarian to the show. Thank you, Chris. And thank you very much, Corey. This is a fabulous opportunity to share the stage in the Internet Archive community with one of my favorite thinkers, but also doers of making the internet a better. I'm super thrilled this is happening. So thank you very much, Corey. Thanks, Brewster. Now I'd like to welcome Dave Hanson, the executive director of Authors Alliance, to the conversation. Hi, everyone. I'm really pleased today to introduce Corey Doctorow. Corey is a science fiction author, an activist, a journalist. He's also a member of the Authors Alliance Advisory Board, which we're really grateful for his advice. And he's here today to talk to us about his latest book, The Internet Con, How to Seize the Means of Computation. It's a big tech disassembly manual about monopoly and interoperability. He's a prolific author. I think I first encountered Cory's work, it was 2007, a collection of short stories called Overclocked, Stories of the Future Present. And it got me hooked. And he's written an awful lot since then, has been a visiting professor of practice at the University of North Carolina's School of Library and Information Science. So welcome, Corey. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you very much. It's great to be virtually back at the Internet Archive. I've stood on the stage at that wonderful building more times than I can remember, and each one has been better than the last. So it's a pleasure as always to be back. So as you may have gathered from the fact that I stood on the stage at the Internet Archive so many times, there is an unfortunate truth that I've had to confront in the recent years, which Is that I'm now officially old. I am 52 years old, and that means that I have two artificial hips, I have cataracts, and on my 50th birthday, as happens in America, the doxing ninjas of the American Association for Retired People tracked me down and issued me a card officially entitling me to complain that things used to be better in my day. But I do actually think ([Time 0:00:18](https://share.snipd.com/snip/71a9f446-e927-4c0f-be47-94b02d4c7cc0)) - **Platform Decay: The Shittification Cycle** - Platforms extract value in stages: initially benefiting users, then siphoning off value to advertisers and publishers, finally leaving minimal value to users. - This decay process, termed 'shittification,' traps and exploits all participants over time. Transcript: Cory Doctorow And it's that the eminent form of internet business that has emerged in the decades since the commercialization of the internet in the late 1990s has been the platform. And platforms are an interesting phenomenon because the promise of the early internet was disintermediation, right? A world where we could transact directly, buyer to seller, writer to reader, people in the same community or the same family, same romantic relationship, all talking directly to one Another without being dependent on the whims of some intermediary. And indeed, we did incinerate a lot of intermediaries back in the early days, but then we also immediately re-intermediated the internet with these platforms. A platform is just an intermediary. It's a business that has two kinds of customers. It has end users and has business customers, and it sells the access from one to the other, whether that's Uber selling riders to drivers, or Amazon selling customers to purchasers, Or something like Tinder selling people to each other. And platforms, they have a very predictable decay cycle, which I have dubbed in shittification. There's many reasons to use that word. One is that it's quite funny. Another is that it's great to listen to radio and television hosts try to figure out how to say that and stay within FCC contours. And finally, I take enormous personal pleasure in watching it show up in academic citations. And I think the academics secretly like it too. And in shitification follows a three-stage process. In the first stage, you have a platform that has some surplus, usually in the form of investor capital, and it converts that surplus to benefit for its end users. Think here about Facebook, right? When Facebook kicked off in earnest, right? When it went beyond the American college kids who had been its first users because they initially required you to have a.edu address to sign up and now anyone can sign up. They made quite a simple pitch to those end users. They said, I know you love all your friends over there on MySpace and you're having a good time talking to them, but has it ever occurred to you that MySpace is owned by an evil, crapulent, Senescent Australian billionaire named Rupert Murdoch who spies on you from asshole to appetite with every hour that God sends? Tell you what, if you come over to Facebook, we're going to give you a much better deal. First thing, we're never, ever going to spy on you. Facebook is the privacy forward alternative to MySpace, and we will make an ironclad promise not to spy on you. Second thing, if you just articulate your social graph, that is, if you tell us explicitly who matters to you, who you love in this world, and who you want to hear it from, we will convert That into a feed of all the things that those people have to say for public consumption. And that's all we're going to show you, the stuff you want to see. So that is stage one of inshittification. And the goal here is not to permanently transfer a surplus to end users, but rather to find some means by which those end users can be locked to the platform such that the surplus can be Withdrawn. And there are lots of different ways that platforms have figured out to do this. DRM is one that's quite relevant to the Internet Archive. But you don't need DRM or indeed any kind of real technical shenanigans to lock people to a social media platform. We actually do that to ourselves through something called the collective action problem. So once you and all your friends are hanging out on Facebook, because you joined Facebook because your friends were there and your friends then signed up for Facebook because you were There. Once you're all there, you might disagree or you might all agree rather that you don't like Facebook, right? That it's not pleasurable to be there, that it's growing worse by the day. But even though you love those people, you can't agree on when it's time to go, whether it's time to go, and even if you all want to go where you should go next. We've all experienced this, right? You and six of your friends can't even figure out what movie to see on Friday. Like 150 friends on Facebook and all of their 150 friends, plus the communities they belong to and the customers they rely on and the businesses they're parts of or their kids' little League team that's using Facebook to plan the carpool, they are holding each other hostage. So once this collective action problem starts to hold users hostage, Facebook can start withdrawing the surplus from those users and handing it over to those business customers. This is stage two of inshittification. And in stage two, those business customers are given stuff that used to go to the end users. So Facebook goes to the publishers or to the advertisers rather, and they say, do you remember when we told these suckers that we were never going to spy on them? That was a lie. We are now spying on them all day long. And for pennies, we are going to target ads to them on your behalf. Moreover, we have a whole building full of engineers who are going to do nothing but fight ad fraud. So if you pay us a dollar to show an ad, it's a dollar well spent because a human being who matches your characteristics is going to see it. Then they went to the publishers and they said, hey, do you remember when we told these roofs that we weren't going to show them anything except the stuff they asked to see? Also a lie. All you need to do is put little excerpts of your content and a link to your content. And we're going to non-consensually cram it into the eyeballs of people who never asked to see it. And that's going to be a free traffic funnel for your website. So now the publishers and the advertisers are starting to get locked to the business. And Facebook here, like all digital platforms, has the unlimited variability of digital where they can change the deal from moment to moment and second to second by almost undetectable Increments. So they can draw down the quality of advertising. They can start doing things like having these synthetic audiences where you say, I want to reach half a million, 18 to 34 children in the Bay area who have an Xbox and are searching recently On gonorrhea. And if there's only 300,000 of those on Facebook, they'll find you a similar audience, which is just like people you don't want to advertise to. And then they draw down the enforcement on ad fraud, little by little, pulling Jenga blocks out until we reach this point where just a few years ago, Procter& Gamble dropped its $100 Million per year programmatic advertising spend. That's surveillance ads of the sort that Facebook was selling. And they got a $0 decrease in sales because basically almost none of those ads were even being shown to anyone. They're being billed for them, but not getting them delivered. So that's what they do to the advertisers. The publishers, they also exploit this incredible variability of digital that lets them twiddle the knobs on the business rules. So they start to make it so you have to put more and more of your content on a post to get it recommended ([Time 0:03:57](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6e5fcc8f-1f37-440e-aeaa-a0fcc04ef330)) - **High Switching Costs Trap Users** - Disentangling from dominant platforms is difficult due to high switching costs and infrastructural dependencies. - Lack of viable alternatives forces users into harmful or exploitative arrangements despite dissatisfaction. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Or eBay or any of the other platforms that we rely on, TikTok and so on. There's real emphasis among policymakers to do something about their decreasing utility and their increasing danger, because we are all permanently enmeshed in these platforms. We can't readily disentangle ourselves from them. You can quit Uber, but after a decade of starvation of public transit because of Uber's big lie about how they were going to replace buses and somehow defy the laws of geometry by filling The streets with single rider vehicles, you may not have a bus to ride. You probably don't have a taxi to ride because they lost 41 cents on the dollar for 13 consecutive years, spending $31 billion of the Saudi royal family's money to bankrupt every taxi Business. So with no taxis and no buses, even as bad as Uber gets, and it's getting pretty bad, you might find yourself still riding in an Uber. And our policymakers are responding to these crises by trying to make the platforms better, right? They're hunting for a lever that will make Mark Zuckerberg better at being the unelected social media czar of 4 billion people's lives, or failing that, a lever that will operate the Ejection seat that defenestrates Mark Zuckerberg from that job and replaces him with someone who is better suited to being the unelected social media czar for life of 4 billion people's Lives. And I don't think they're going to find that person. I don't think we can fix the platforms. I think it's time to evacuate the platforms. And I've really had my thinking clarified on this since I became a Californian. I am from Canada, as you can tell by my accent. We're like serial killers. We're everywhere and we look just like everybody else. But I live in California now. And of course, every year, the sky turns red. I can't go outside. Ashes sift down out of the sky and the fires burn. And even if we were to resolve climate emergency tomorrow, that would continue to happen. And the reason is that 300 years ago, settler colonialists declared war on the controlled burns that indigenous First Nations people used to do on an annual basis to clear out dead wood, Reduce the amount of fuel that is lying around, and open up the canopy for new growth. And when you abolish good fire, you don't get no fire, you get wildfire. So centuries in, we have so much fire debt that even the tiniest spark can set off a wildfire that will rage for weeks unchecked. And right now, the policy response of a lot of California lawmakers looks a lot like the policy response of our policymakers to tech, which is that they are pouring resource and making It safer to live at the urban wildlife interface. And all that does is encourage people to move there. And there isn't a future in which we stop having fires there. So all we're doing is putting more people in harm's way. What we really need to emphasize is evacuating the urban wildlife interface, getting those people out of there before the inevitable fire wipes their towns off the map. And that's what we need to do with tech too. We need to find ways to reduce the switching costs, right? Because the reason people stay on platforms is it costs too much to leave. When you leave Facebook, you leave behind the friends, the family, the customers, the communities that matter to you. When you leave Twitter, the same thing happens. When you leave Amazon, now that predatory pricing has killed all the stores in your local retail district, you just give up on buying things more or less. Same ([Time 0:15:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9e370193-d90a-45e1-81fc-9b6c2386e0b3)) - **Steps to Break Big Tech Monopolies** - Restore traditional antitrust laws to dismantle monopolies and punish predatory practices in tech. - Constrain platforms' abilities to arbitrarily change business rules and restore users' rights to customize and protect their digital environments. Transcript: Cory Doctorow And I think we do that with three steps. The first step is we have to restore traditional contours of antitrust. Because until the Carter era, and more properly, the Reagan era, most of what these firms have done to attain scale was unlawful. Google did not become a trillion dollar company by making a bunch of products that we all loved and used. Every product Google made since search, almost without exception, was a failure. Google can't do anything in-house except for operationalize the startups they buy from other people. They are not Willy Wonka's idea factory. They're rich uncle penny bags. And everything from ad tech to mobile to server management to docs and collaboration to maps, those are all businesses they bought from someone else in a merger that would have been Unlawful until the Reagan administration. So we need to restore the traditional contours of antitrust. And we need to unwind the mergers and punish the predatory conduct that has been the norm for 40 years. And look, it's going to be hard. It took 69 years to break up AT&T. When they went after IBM in 1970, it embarked on a 12-year project where it outspent the entire Department of Justice Antitrust Division on outside counsel every single year. For 12 consecutive years, they outspent the U.S. Government because it's much easier to prevent a monopoly from forming than to break them up once they're too big to fail and too big to jail. So it's going to be hard. And the best time to have done this was 40 years ago. But the second best time is now. And we're doing it now. We are living in a moment of unprecedented muscular antitrust action, stuff that hasn't been seen since I was in diapers. And I remind you, I am 52. So whether that's the DOJ and the Federal Trade Commission taking on new merger guidelines that explicitly restore scrutiny of labor and other non-consumer welfare considerations, Or whether that's action to block large mergers, or whether it's the antitrust cases that have currently been brought against Microsoft or Apple and, or sorry, Amazon and Google here, The antitrust investigations against Apple and Microsoft in the EU and the UK, and the expansion of antitrust funding and action all over the world, we are living through a turning Point. This is incredible. Someone in the chat just said, Lena Kahn is amazing. Lena Kahn is amazing. Seven years ago, she was a third-year law student writing groundbreaking law review papers for the Yale Law Review about Amazon and its relationship to monopoly. Now she is the head of the largest consumer agency and the most powerful one in the world. In her early thirties, first woman of color to hold that job, just an astounding force of nature. And so I bring you good tidings on that first score. The second thing we need to do in addition to restoring traditional antitrust contours so there's somewhere else you can go is we have to constrain the ability of these platforms to Twiddle the knobs. They act as though once you add an app or a cloud to a labor consumer or privacy violation, it ceases to be a violation. They have the unlimited ability to violate our privacy, to steal our wages and violate our labor rights, and to rip us off. And there's almost nothing that we've been able to do about it. So we need to pass and enforce muscular rules that limit their twiddling, limit their ability to touch those knobs and change the business rules in the back end. And then finally, we need to restore our own right to twiddle because that same flexibility that digital imparts to a platform to abuse us is available to us to resist their abuse. ([Time 0:19:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3114ba8c-8409-4557-b28f-539e0ea50611)) - **DRM Laws Undermine User Control** - Digital rights management (DRM) laws criminalize user adaptations like ad blockers for apps, limiting user control. - True interoperability requires restoring legal permissions to reverse engineer and customize software freely. Transcript: Cory Doctorow A la carte menus. Now, in the InternetCon, I tell the history of how this came about, where the monopolization came from, how monopolies were able to consolidate their power by becoming a unified voice In policy circles. If you're old like me, you'll remember the Napster Wars. In the Napster Wars in the late 90s, you had a tech sector that was 10 to 20 times larger than the entertainment sector. But the entertainment sector ran circles around them and eventually destroyed them in every policy form, courts, regulators, lawmakers. And the reason those entertainment companies were able to trash the much larger tech sector in all of those fights was that there were seven giant entertainment companies and hundreds Of tech companies. The tech companies couldn't even agree on where to hold a meeting to discuss what they would tell Congress. The entertainment companies had dwindled to a handful so small they could all fit around one table, so they did. And they figured out what their policy should be. Today, tech is far more concentrated than entertainment was back then. Tech is so concentrated, practically has a Habsburg jaw. And in that inbred consensus, you get enormous bargaining power. And I describe how that bargaining power changed the way that we regulate tech to give it all the flexibility it needed to harm us and to take away any of the flexibility we might deploy To help ourselves. And I describe how we could change both of those factors, how we can open up a space for interoperability that lets us say, how about nah? How about I'm going to use this app, but you can't spy on me? Not because you agree, but because my device, which belongs to me and is mine, no longer feeds you the telemetry that you're asking it for because it's mine. So how about, how would we get that kind of interoperability remedy? ([Time 0:25:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/84e676c8-7082-49ee-ae98-db83ffb680d2)) - **Monopoly Crisis Is Systemic** - The tech monopoly crisis reflects broader systemic monopoly issues across many industries beyond technology. - Unified, cross-sector coalition action is crucial to overcoming systemic monopoly power. Transcript: Cory Doctorow With the post-New Deal world, right? And those problems were like that it didn't go far enough, although it was trying, right? Think about how all of the pluralistic benefits that came about as a result of the post-war were used as the launching ground for battles for women's rights, queer rights for people Of color, decolonization fights, rights for people with disabilities, and so on. Friedman didn't want to finish the incomplete project of the New Deal. Friedman wanted to roll it back and turn us all into forelock tugbing plebs who knew our place among our social betters. People would say, Milton, how the hell are you going to convince people to go back to that period of de facto peasantry? And Friedman said, look, in times of crisis, ideas lying around can move from the periphery to the core. So our job is to keep good ideas lying around so that when the crisis occurs, the impossible can become the inevitable. Now, Satan took Friedman to hell in 2006. And I like to think that when he hears my words in his mouth, he gargles a curse around the red hot iron bar that protrudes from his jaws as the demon turned the cranks on that spit. But he was right. It worked. We are living in Friedman's world. And if there is one thing that the concentrated tech sector has given us, it's an absolute abundance of crisis. There is a new crisis every day, and we let them go to waste by doing the same thing we did last time, but harder and hoping for a better outcome. And if there's anything worse for the victims of those crises than that, I don't know what it is. I think we need these shovel-ready ([Time 0:29:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/09d6f040-40c2-436d-a14e-d0f4be326acd)) - **Prepare for Crisis-Driven Change** - Keep ready, transformative ideas at hand for times of crisis when radical change becomes possible. - Build broad coalitions to leverage such moments for systemic reform against monopolies. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Ideas lying around. I think the crisis will present itself. And I think that when it does, we will confront that crisis, not just on our own as people who care about this admittedly esoteric subject, but in coalition with everyone else who's been Harmed by monopoly. Because while tech is exceptional in that it has this interoperability possibility, and it's exceptional in that it's the platform on which we fight lots of other battles about the Climate and gender and racial justice, inequality, and so on. Tech is not exceptional in its concentration. The same policies that dwindled tech to a handful of companies also reduced every other sector to a handful of companies, whether that's athletic shoes or vitamin C, bottle caps or Intermodal shipping, professional wrestling and cheerleading. These are all sectors with five or fewer companies. In my sector, in entertainment, five publishers, four studios, three labels, two companies that do all the ad tech and one company that runs all the concert venues in the world. Everyone who is struggling with monopoly is fighting the same fight that we're fighting. As Jamie Boyle says, before we had the word environment or ecology rather, you had people who cared about owls and people who cared about the ozone layer, but they didn't know they were Fighting the same fight. They didn't know how to connect the destiny of charismatic nocturnal avians with the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere. But the term ecology welds a thousand issues into one movement. And when that movement comes together, it is an unstoppable force for change. And so that's how I think we're going to get this. Thank you very much for coming and for listening. ([Time 0:31:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/24abc996-5b23-4b5e-865b-2c5e2567a935))