Why Does Everything Online Suck Now?  ## Metadata - Author: [[The Next Big Idea Daily]] - Full Title: Why Does Everything Online Suck Now? - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/0d4c5925-2a3a-4ed5-a5c0-e3b40f85c8e0 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Three-Stage Platform Decay** - Platforms follow a three-stage decay: delight users, monetize business customers, then extract value from everyone. - Users stay because of lock-in like network effects, which lets platforms degrade experiences without losing them. Transcript: Cory Doctorow This follows a classic three-stage process. In stage one, the platform is good to its end users. It's using some surplus it has, like investment capital, to deliver a high-quality service. So think of Facebook when all it did was show you the things that the people you followed wanted other people to see when they posted it. In stage two, the platform takes back some of the value that it's given to its end users and gives it to a group of business customers. In the case of Facebook, at a certain point, they turned around and started spying on users and putting things in their feeds that they'd never asked to see. And yet users stuck around. And the reason they did is because they were locked in. There's lots of different ways that tech platforms can lock users in. In the case of Facebook, it's something economists call the collective action problem. You're there because your friends are there. Your friends are there because you are there. And as much as you love them, they're a giant pain in the ass and you can't convince them to leave or talk them into going somewhere that you'd prefer. So you're all stuck there. So in come the publishers and the advertisers in stage two of inshittification and they get stuck to the platform too. They become reliant on you who has been taken hostage by your friends and in turn you're also holding your friends hostage. In stage three, all of that available surplus is taken away from the business customers and the end users. Publishers have to pay to boost their content just so their subscribers can see it, and no one sees their stuff unless they post whole articles and no link back to their own website, so They become commodity suppliers to Facebook. Advertisers pay more for ads, but they have lower ad fidelity and gigantic amounts of ad fraud. And you, well, your feed has dwindled to a kind of homeopathic residue of things that you asked to see, so that it can be filled up with things that advertisers and publishers will pay To show you. ([Time 0:01:47](https://share.snipd.com/snip/25b39964-caab-4c82-bda0-c2816654ac00)) - **Twiddling: Dynamic Rule Changes** - Digitization enables Transcript: Cory Doctorow So there are lots of kinds of businesses that have gone wrong in the past, but when digital businesses go wrong, they can go wrong in a very special way that has to do with being digital, Because digital businesses are very flexible. They can change the rules on a per user per session basis so that every time you visit a platform, the prices, the costs, the recommendations, every aspect of it that is critical to your Navigating the service and getting a good deal out of it, that can change and it can change based on surveillance data about you and inferences made from that data. I call that twiddling. And there are lots of examples of it. You know, there's a company called Plexure that McDonald's has an investment stake in that advertises that it can use surveillance data about you to figure out how to raise the price On your regular breakfast sandwich that you order in an app on the day you get paid, on the grounds that you're less price sensitive on that day. And then there are the apps that are used by hospitals to hire in contract nurses like ShiftMed and CareRev. These apps buy nurses' credit bureau data, and if nurses are carrying a high degree of credit card debt, it offers them less wages for their shift. Now, these are the kinds of scams that other kinds of merchants and employers would have happily played in the past, but they just couldn't do it because it was too labor-intensive. You couldn't have like a boiler room full of guys in green eye shades slaving over ledgers, changing everyone's wages or marking up the prices. Digitization allows the rules to change from moment to moment, second to second, and user to user. ([Time 0:03:47](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f95b0e1e-705f-4d72-9296-8c1693dc13b6)) - **Real Examples Of Twiddling** - Doctorow gives concrete examples of 'twiddling' in the wild like Plexure and nurse-hiring apps. - Plexure raises fast-food prices when you get paid and ShiftMed offers lower wages to nurses with higher debt. Transcript: Cory Doctorow I call that twiddling. And there are lots of examples of it. You know, there's a company called Plexure that McDonald's has an investment stake in that advertises that it can use surveillance data about you to figure out how to raise the price On your regular breakfast sandwich that you order in an app on the day you get paid, on the grounds that you're less price sensitive on that day. And then there are the apps that are used by hospitals to hire in contract nurses like ShiftMed and CareRev. These apps buy nurses' credit bureau data, and if nurses are carrying a high degree of credit card debt, it offers them less wages for their shift. Now, these are the kinds of scams that other kinds of merchants and employers would have happily played in the past, but they just couldn't do it because it was too labor-intensive. ([Time 0:04:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f425f8b6-25d2-44c0-a06e-12ddb2ed8d32)) - **What Used To Stop Platforms From Abusing Users** - Historical constraints blocked widespread extraction: competition, regulation, worker power, and interoperability. - Those constraints enabled users, competitors, regulators, and engineers to check platform abuse. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Because after all, we had digital platforms for a long time, and either they were good or when they went bad, they went away. So what stopped platforms from unshittifying before they all unshittified? Well, they had competition. And then that ended because we let companies like Facebook buy their competitors like Instagram. And they also had regulation. So they had to worry that if they cheated you in some way, that the fines they would pay or the penalties they would suffer would be worse than the expected gain from the bad behavior. They had the discipline of their own workforce. So tech workers historically were really powerful. And a lot of them were what I called Tron pilled. They liked to fight for the user. And since they had all that power, since they could quit their job and get another job across the street on the same day, well, they often told their bosses to go to hell when their bosses Ordered them to unshittify things. And finally, there is a technical idea called interoperability. So since computers are so flexible, since they're so twiddleable, there's always a program you can write that undoes whatever mischief someone else has done. You know, if HP sells you a printer with a program in it that checks to make sure you're not using generic ink, you can just disable that program. You could run another program that overrides it. You know, every 10-foot pile of shit the platforms build, there's an 11-foot software ladder you can build to go over it. So that's what stopped platforms from inshittifying. ([Time 0:05:29](https://share.snipd.com/snip/11dd9e03-7a6d-48a5-9946-c522d81445b7)) - **Policy Shifts Enabled Decline** - The rollback of antitrust, captured regulators, weakened tech workers, and expanded IP law removed those constraints. - This policy shift made it profitable and legally safe for platforms to exploit users and partners. Transcript: Cory Doctorow First, we stopped enforcing antitrust law. That's the law that stops companies from creating monopolies. We allowed them to buy their direct rivals. I talked about Facebook and Instagram. We allowed them to do predatory pricing. So Uber sold taxi rides below cost, losing 41 cents on every dollar to the tune of $31 billion for 13 years until all of its competitors had exited the market. We allowed exclusivity deals and all kinds of other things that are prohibited under antitrust law. And that started in the 1980s, but it really got going with the tech sector in the 2000s. Now, when you lose that competition law, you also lose regulation. Because when there's 100 companies in a sector, they can't capture their regulators. They can't agree on anything. But when there's five companies or four or three or, or just one, as there is in so many sectors of our economy, they find it really easy to capture their regulators. And that's why, for example, we haven't had a new privacy law since 1988, when Ronald Reagan banned video store clerks from telling the newspapers which VHS cassettes you took home. Congress hasn't acted to protect us from technological privacy threats since Die Hard was in the movie theaters. And that's because there's so much money to be made by violating your privacy and that money gets converted to policy. We also had the tech workforce and they were very powerful, but they lost that power. They lost that power because they never used it to unionize. They each thought of themselves as individually powerful, but not as a class of workers. And so once supply caught up with demand, we've had half a million tech layoffs in the last three years in the United States. Well, then tech workers just didn't have the power they used to have. And finally, with the growth of IP law, the kind of interoperability where you change things to add ad blockers or allow you to use third-party ink or record things off of apps so you don't Have to pay to watch Christmas movies at Christmas. You can record them when they're free on Amazon Prime in July before they put them behind the paywall in December. All of that stuff just went away because IP law made it all illegal. And so we lost all the constraints. We lost the things that stopped tech bosses from doing things to abuse us. We lost the consequences that they would have paid for abusing us. ([Time 0:07:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/65f8e92e-5e62-4af2-9975-c237a8649044)) - **Bring Back Rules And Worker Power** - Reintroduce and enforce antitrust, privacy, and IP reforms to restore market checks and user protections. - Support unionization and worker power so tech employees can push back against harmful platform changes. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Well, obviously, if the problem is that we made policies that allowed companies to get worse without paying consequences, then we should bring back those policies. We need to revive unionization and union law. Now, I know Trump has gotten rid of union law in all but name in this country. And I think that he thinks that just because you get rid of the rules, the game is going to end. He thinks the reason we have unions is because we have union law. That's ahistorical and wrong. We didn't have union law and then we got unions. We had illegal unions, that one union law. Trump has torn up the rule book. That just means that there's no more rules. That means that unions can play hardball and they have to. And every worker is an ally here. The way that tech bosses treat their worst off workers, Amazon drivers or the Chinese factory workers who make iPhones, that's how they treat their programmers if they could. And these days they can. We also need to revitalize antitrust law. And the good news here is that all over the world, that's what's happening. We've seen a massive resurgence of antitrust law over the last four years. In the European Union, in Canada, in Australia, Germany, Spain, France, South Korea, Japan, Australia, China has revitalized its antitrust law. We've really seen so much antitrust action, and it's because people are just fed up to the back teeth. We also need to restore regulation. We need rules that allow people to defend themselves from tech. We need to change how IP law works. And we need rules that stop tech from preying on us. We need privacy laws and so on. Now on the privacy law score, it's kind of interesting because there are a lot of people from all sides of the political spectrum who are angry about something that has something to do With privacy. They think their kids have been brainwashed into anorexia by Instagram that the reason their grandfather's at QAnon is because of Facebook, or they're worried about deep fake porn, Or they're worried about racial discrimination and lending using online platforms, or they're worried about cops identifying the location of everyone who was in a specific place Like the January 6 riots or the Black Lives Matter protests or protests against ICE. ([Time 0:09:26](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9ed50be8-74c2-46a9-80e2-b787e8f6f146))