YouTube Video pwq1oNgrKN8 🔗 **Source:** [YouTube Video pwq1oNgrKN8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwq1oNgrKN8) > [!note]+ Document Notes > tags: [technology, antitrust, platform-policy, enshittification, tech-activism, digital-policy, corporate-power, tech-platforms, policy-reform] > author: David Pierce > source: The Verge > reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwq1oNgrKN8 > date created: 2024-01-01 00:00 > > # 🏷️ Title: Cory Doctorow on enshittification and what we can do about it | The Vergecast > <!-- deep-read:sections start --> ## 🧰 Action Inbox - [H1] Understand the three stages of enshittification — 03:45 #policy - [H2] Focus on policy change over consumption choices — 10:22 #activism - [H3] Support data portability legislation — 28:45 #interoperability ## 🧭 Table of Contents - [📝 Summary](#-summary) - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) - [🗒️ Notes](#️-notes) - [📚 References](#-references) - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#️-paraphrase) - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) - [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) - [❓ Questions](#-questions) - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) - [💡 Implications](#-implications) - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#-deib-assessment) - [✅ Logical Validity](#-logical-validity) - [🛡️ DARVO Analysis](#-darvo-analysis) - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) ### 🔗 References - [Enshittification book](https://craphound.com/category/enshittification/) - [Electronic Frontier Foundation](https://eff.org) - [Electronic Frontier Alliance](https://efa.eff.org) ## 📝 Summary - David Pierce interviews Cory Doctorow about enshittification and solutions to platform decay - Doctorow explains why individual consumer choices aren't sufficient to combat systemic problems - The focus should be on policy changes that enable interoperability and data portability - Legal barriers like DMCA Section 1201 prevent the kind of reverse engineering that once enabled competition - Real solutions require making it easy for users to leave platforms while maintaining their networks ## 📖 Main Content Cory Doctorow, author of "Enshittification," discusses with David Pierce why technology platforms systematically get worse and what can be done about it. Doctorow argues that enshittification follows a predictable three-stage pattern: first, platforms are good to users to lock them in; second, they abuse users to be good to business customers; third, they abuse both users and business customers to benefit themselves. The conversation focuses heavily on solutions, with Doctorow emphasizing that individual consumer choices ("shopping your way out of monopoly") are insufficient for systemic problems. Instead, he advocates for policy changes that would enable data portability and interoperability, allowing users to leave platforms while maintaining their social connections and data. ## 🗒️ Notes #### ⏱️ [00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwq1oNgrKN8?t=0) — [H1] Introduction and setup - Key idea: David Pierce interviews Cory Doctorow about enshittification solutions - Evidence: "We're here for a conversation that I had a couple of weeks ago with Corey Doctorow" #### ⏱️ [03:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwq1oNgrKN8?t=225) — [H1] The three stages of enshittification - Key idea: Platforms follow predictable patterns of decay in three stages - Evidence: "First you have a platform that is good to its end users while finding a way to lock those end users in... In stage two... things can be made worse for those users... in order to make things good for business customers... stage three... harvesting the value both from end users and from business customers" #### ⏱️ [05:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwq1oNgrKN8?t=330) — [H2] Why "enshittification" is the right word - Key idea: The term's profanity is a feature that helps spread awareness - Evidence: "People love to cuss... the word is getting more usage than it would because it makes some people go tehe to say the word shit" #### ⏱️ [07:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwq1oNgrKN8?t=435) — [H2] Facebook as the perfect enshittification example - Key idea: Facebook demonstrates the clearest pattern of all three stages - Evidence: "Facebook is probably your cleanest perfect example" #### ⏱️ [10:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwq1oNgrKN8?t=622) — [H1] Why individual consumer choices aren't the solution - Key idea: Systemic problems require systemic solutions, not individual consumption changes - Evidence: "I just don't think you solve systemic problems with individual consumption choices... Shopping your way out of monopoly is like trying to recycle your way out of the wildfires" #### ⏱️ [13:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwq1oNgrKN8?t=825) — [H2] The policy environment creates enshittification - Key idea: Specific policy decisions enable platforms to abuse users - Evidence: "When we say, 'Okay, well we're going to let you buy your competitors. There's nowhere for your users to go.' We make it easier for the platforms to treat us worse" #### ⏱️ [16:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwq1oNgrKN8?t=990) — [H2] Focus energy on political organizing - Key idea: Activists should prioritize policy change over consumption choices - Evidence: "Don't worry too much about your consumption choices... organize yourself around like political change" #### ⏱️ [20:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwq1oNgrKN8?t=1215) — [H2] Technical solutions exist but are illegal - Key idea: We could build interoperability tools but they violate copyright law - Evidence: "All this stuff is like technically possible. It's just illegal... because this reverse engineering violates section 121 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act" #### ⏱️ [22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwq1oNgrKN8?t=1350) — [H1] How Facebook defeated MySpace - Key idea: Facebook used scrapers to let users maintain MySpace connections while switching - Evidence: "Facebook never organized an everyone leave MySpace day. What Facebook did was gave everyone on MySpace... a scraper a bot" #### ⏱️ [25:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwq1oNgrKN8?t=1545) — [H2] Platforms pulled up the ladder behind them - Key idea: Companies used techniques to gain market share then made those techniques illegal - Evidence: "They did it and then they pulled up the ladder behind" #### ⏱️ [28:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwq1oNgrKN8?t=1725) — [H1] Data portability as policy solution - Key idea: Requiring data export files would enable easy platform switching - Evidence: "If we said as a policy matter... the legacy platforms... have to... provide you with a file that lets you... follow all the people that you were following" #### ⏱️ [32:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwq1oNgrKN8?t=1940) — [H2] Why data portability is easier to enforce than content moderation - Key idea: Technical requirements are simpler to verify than subjective content rules - Evidence: "Unlike say a hate speech rule... you still have to agree on what hate speech is... Meanwhile, if you just say like you can leave, you can leave. It's really easy" #### ⏱️ [35:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwq1oNgrKN8?t=2110) — [H2] The revealed preference paradox - Key idea: People stay on harmful platforms because leaving means losing their communities - Evidence: "The only thing worse than being a member of that disfavored minority and being showered in abuse is being a member of that disfavored minority, showered in abuse, and being isolated from your community" #### ⏱️ [38:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwq1oNgrKN8?t=2310) — [H2] Geopolitical pressure for platform alternatives - Key idea: Trump's threats are driving European investment in non-American platforms - Evidence: "Donald Trump has made it really clear that America doesn't have trading partners, it doesn't have allies, it has rivals" ## 📚 References - [Electronic Frontier Foundation](https://eff.org) - [Electronic Frontier Alliance](https://efa.eff.org) - [Enshittification book by Cory Doctorow](https://craphound.com/category/enshittification/) - [Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace by Lawrence Lessig](https://lessig.org/product/codev2/) ## 🗣️ Paraphrase - Enshittification describes how platforms systematically abuse users and business customers over time through a predictable three-stage process of lock-in and value extraction - Individual consumer choices can't solve systemic monopoly problems - policy changes enabling interoperability and data portability are needed instead - Companies like Facebook used techniques to compete that they later made illegal through IP law interpretations, creating barriers to new competition ## 📰 Newsletter **Fighting Platform Enshittification: Why Policy Beats Shopping** Cory Doctorow's latest interview reveals why your choice to delete Facebook won't save us all - but smart policy might. The key insight: platforms deliberately make it hard to leave while keeping your connections intact. The solution isn't another exodus attempt, but data portability requirements that would let you take your social graph anywhere. This worked for phone number porting with carriers, and it could work for social platforms too. Instead of debating which alternative platform to use, we should focus on making all platforms compete by enabling seamless migration between them. **Key Takeaway**: Technical interoperability problems have policy solutions. Support organizations working on platform regulation and data portability rights. Resources: [Electronic Frontier Foundation](https://eff.org), [Electronic Frontier Alliance](https://efa.eff.org), [WordPress developer community](https://make.wordpress.org) ## ✅ Action Items #### DevRel - Advocate for interoperability standards in platform APIs and data export formats - Educate developers about reverse engineering legal restrictions under DMCA 1201 - Create developer tools and documentation for building federated alternatives #### OSPO - Develop policies supporting open protocols and interoperability standards - Review legal implications of interoperability features in open source projects - Support legislation enabling competitive reverse engineering for interoperability #### Community - Organize advocacy campaigns for data portability legislation at state and federal levels - Support EFF and similar organizations working on platform competition policy - Build alternative platforms using open protocols like ActivityPub #### WordPress - Continue developing ActivityPub integration for WordPress sites - Advocate for WordPress as an alternative to centralized social platforms - Build tools enabling easy migration from proprietary platforms to WordPress #### The WPCC - Fund projects building interoperable social features for WordPress - Support policy research on platform competition and open web standards #### FAIR - Ensure platform alternatives maintain transparent governance and funding models - Prevent capture of alternative platforms by same forces that enshittified incumbents ## 🧪 Hypotheses - Data portability requirements would significantly increase platform competition and reduce user lock-in effects - Legal barriers to reverse engineering are the primary obstacle preventing competitive alternatives to major platforms - Policy changes enabling interoperability would be more effective than antitrust breakups for addressing platform power - European investment in platform alternatives will accelerate if U.S. platforms continue being used as geopolitical weapons ### 📊 Methodology - Analyze the effects of number portability on mobile carrier competition as precedent for social platform portability - Study legal frameworks in different jurisdictions regarding interoperability requirements - Compare user migration patterns between platforms with and without data export features ### ❓ Questions - How would mandatory data portability affect the business models of advertising-driven platforms? - Could interoperability requirements create new privacy and security vulnerabilities for users? - What technical standards would be needed to enable seamless cross-platform communication? ### 🔮 Future Research - Investigate optimal policy frameworks for platform interoperability requirements - Explore how federated social protocols could scale to compete with centralized platforms - Study the relationship between platform switching costs and market concentration ### 💡 Implications - Practice: Developers should prioritize building with open protocols and interoperability - Policy: Data portability legislation could be more effective than content moderation for platform governance - Security: Interoperability features need careful design to avoid creating new attack vectors - Education: Need better public understanding of how policy creates technology market structures - Funding: Investment in alternative platforms should focus on interoperability over features ### 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment Reading level estimate: Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level 12-14 #### 👀 Visual learners - Present: Clear examples using Facebook, Amazon, and other recognizable platforms - Improve: Diagrams showing the three stages of enshittification and data flow between platforms #### 🔊 Aural learners - Present: Full audio podcast episode with natural conversation flow - Improve: Chapter markers and summary audio segments #### 🗣️ Verbal learners - Present: Clear definitions of enshittification, interoperability, and data portability - Improve: More analogies like "shopping your way out of monopoly is like recycling your way out of wildfires" #### 🧩 Kinesthetic learners - Present: Concrete examples of trying alternative platforms and switching costs - Improve: Step-by-step guides for data export and platform migration #### 🧠 Logical learners - Present: Clear cause-and-effect relationships between policy and platform behavior - Improve: More detailed timelines of how specific policies enabled platform concentration #### 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Social learners - Present: Discussion format with back-and-forth exploration of ideas - Improve: Links to activist organizations and community groups working on these issues #### 🧘‍♀️ Solitary learners - Present: Comprehensive individual interview format - Improve: Reading lists and individual action items for further exploration #### 🌿 Naturalistic learners - Present: Systems thinking about platform ecosystems and competition - Improve: More analogies to natural systems and ecosystem health ### 📊 Accessibility Assessment #### Screen reader semantics - Present: Clear heading structure and speaker identification - Improve: More descriptive timestamps and section summaries #### Keyboard navigation - Present: Standard video player controls with keyboard support - Improve: Skip-to-section navigation within the video #### Contrast and readability - Present: High contrast video player interface - Improve: Closed captions with customizable styling options #### Text resizing and reflow - Present: Responsive transcript text - Improve: Ensure transcript remains readable at 200% zoom #### Media and captions - Present: Auto-generated captions available - Improve: Professional human-reviewed captions with speaker identification #### Forms and interactions - Present: Standard video controls and sharing options - Improve: Accessible comment and discussion interfaces ### 🌍 DEIB Assessment #### Cultural breadth - Present: Discussion includes global examples like European platform alternatives - Improve: More diverse geographic perspectives on platform regulation #### Inclusive language - Present: Technical concepts explained in accessible terms - Improve: Define more jargon terms and provide plain language summaries #### Neurodiversity support - Present: Long-form conversation allows deep exploration of topics - Improve: Chapter breaks and content warnings for intense policy discussions #### Representation - Present: Features expertise from established tech policy advocates - Improve: Include voices from communities most harmed by platform enshittification #### Psychological safety - Present: Respectful discussion of complex policy topics - Improve: Acknowledge different perspectives on platform regulation approaches ### ✅ Logical Validity #### Strong reasoning - Deductive strength: Clear logical progression from policy changes to platform behavior outcomes - Inductive strength: Uses historical examples like Facebook vs MySpace to support general claims - <!-- deep-read:sections end --> ## 📺 Video  --- # 📄 Full Transcript *Auto-generated from YouTube captions · timestamps roughly every 30 seconds · [watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwq1oNgrKN8)* **[00:02]** Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of transferring all value to your business customers. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am sitting here in my almost entirely empty basement. Right behind me is where my desk used to be, but it's all gone. This is all good news. We're moving this weekend. It's all very exciting. But I made the very stupid mistake of taking all of my audio equipment, all of my lights, my computer, my desk chair, everything out of this room before I recorded this. So now I sit on the floor and I talk into my MacBook Air, which is **[00:32]** currently sitting on a couch cushion. This is This is the life that I lead. Thank you, by the way, Apple for making the MacBook Air microphones pretty good now. So hopefully this will sound okay. And by the way, if you're like, "Oh gosh, David, not only does the MacBook Air microphone sound pretty good. It makes your voice sound like deeper and more powerful than normal." Alas, no. I just have a cold, but I'll be over that soon. Anyway, we're not here to talk about any of that. We're here for a conversation that I had a couple of weeks ago with Cory Doctorow. Cory is one of those people who has been writing about and thinking about the internet **[01:03]** like for decades. He was at Boing Boing where I read him for a long time. He's done a lot of work at the EFF about internet policy and that kind of thing. And a couple of years ago he coined a term called enshittification, which describes basically the way that technology companies and the products that they make have systematically gotten worse. He also wrote a book called enshittification. It's out now. It's fabulous. You should read it. And we're going to talk to him. We did this interview and I was like, "I don't know what we're going to make of this." And I enjoyed talking to him so much about what happened and what we do about **[01:34]** it that I just figure we're just going to run it. I think you'll like it, too. All that is coming up in just a sec. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back. All right, we're back. So let me just set up the conversation I'm about to have with Cory. So again, enshittification essentially describes this process by which good companies and good products go bad. And you'll hear him describe kind of the basic tenets of that at the very beginning, but it's essentially a company builds a good product that a lot of people like. And then when it has that good product that **[02:05]** a lot of people like, it starts to shift value away from users and towards business clients, right? So if you're a Google, instead of having a great search engine that gives people exactly what they want, you start to turn knobs that make your advertisers more money. And then the third step is that you eventually take all of that value for yourself. So if you're Amazon, instead of being good to your buyers or good to your sellers, ideally you'd do both, right? But the theory is you do one and then the other. You're just good to yourself. And you find ways to squeeze both sides of the **[02:37]** equation all to deliver value to yourself. Cory was just on Decoder, our other podcast, a couple of weeks ago describing how all of this works, how we got here, and why this all happened. It's a fabulous interview and you should go listen to it. I think you can listen to it after you listen to this, so it's not like you have to pause and go listen to that. But it's a really good companion to the conversation we're about to have because I wanted to talk about something different with Cory, which is essentially what do we do now? Cory's book is full of policy recommendations and ideas about the future and ways that things can get better, **[03:08]** but there's not a lot in the book that is like pointing you in the face and being like, "Here is what you should do." And I wanted to know if there's anything that I can do and you can do to change this and make sure it doesn't happen again and to see how we can build a better internet together, if that's even possible. So that's most of what Cory and I talked about. I really enjoyed this conversation and I think you will, too. Let's do it. Cory Doctorow, welcome back to the Vergecast. It's been a minute. Thank you very much, David Pierce. Uh it has been a minute. I'm glad to be back. Last time you were here we yelled about printers **[03:39]** together. Um we got a lot of feedback about that episode and now I feel like we get to take that thing and sort of blow it up to the size of the universe. And I'm I'm very excited about it. Excellent. Me, too. So I I want to spend very little time talking about like the premise of enshittification. In part because you were just on Decoder, our other podcast, uh that I generally refuse to talk about. And you did a very good job sort of running through, I think, how it works. And I want to I want to build on that more than anything, but I just want to do sort of two minutes of level setting here. Uh and the first is **[04:10]** talk to me about the word enshittification. I haven't seen anybody ask you if having [snorts] this this thing has become a phenomenon, was it the right word? Like I'm sure you didn't imagine it was going to be this thing when you first used the word enshittification. Is it the right word? Is it still the right word? Yeah, I think so. Look, I I first of all, I'm a science fiction writer. So I coin neologisms like ant build hills. Uh and also I'm a tech activist. I've worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I'm in my 24th year now. So **[04:41]** for most of my adult life, I'm 54 years old. And uh that job is a job of getting people to care about things that are quite abstract and technical until they're not, at which point it's kind of too late. It's a little like climate change, right? Where like, sure, everyone starts to understand what CO2 means and a greenhouse gas is when there's a wildfire outside their door and a zoonotic plague that's locked them in the house that's on fire. Uh but it would be really nice if we could do something about it before then. And so I've spent like most of my adult life coming up with parables, analogies, **[05:13]** funny words, framing devices, whatever. And so I I'm um I'm quite pleased with the legs that this word has. Uh I'm also uh quite pleased to see it being used loosely. So there's a cohort of people who are quite adamant in defending my honor by telling other people off if they use enshittification in a non-technical sense. And I really wish they'd cut it out. >> I see it the other way where like any bad thing that ever happens to anyone anywhere is now about enshittification. **[05:43]** >> Oh, I'm happy to see that, right? So my my first two languages were English and Yiddish, which are both like, you know, glorious mongrel languages that happily steal vocabulary from other languages and use them loosely and so on. So I'm really happy to have my word used very loosely indeed. Uh not only because it gives me a little ego boost, but also like tactically, if 10 million people use the word loosely and 1 million normies look it up, uh that's a million people I just never would have reached. And then the word itself I think is quite fun, you know, when the American **[06:14]** Dialect Society made it uh their word of the year, they they had linguists actually like talk about how it decomposes, which, you know, I have to say like I am I don't have a background in linguistics at all. Uh and and barely have a background in grammar. I went to weird alt-right schools. We never got any formal grammar instruction. I I learned English by ear the way most native speakers of most languages do. Uh and it was very interesting to hear them decompose it, break it down. I do think that prefix n implies both something that is underway **[06:45]** and something that is uh maybe intentional. Uh and so I I I quite like the way that that plays out. And then the one other thing I'll say is that I've had some colleagues say, "Well, I wish you'd chosen a word that didn't have a swear in it." I was just about to ask if the swear is a feature or a bug here. So obviously it's a feature, right? People people love to cuss. Uh and so the word is getting more usage than it would because it makes some people go t e to say the word [ __ ] Uh but also like this friend was like **[07:16]** um, you know, he's a security expert. He's like, "Well, I can't use this word in an address to a bunch of NATO generals." And I'm like, "Well, dude, first of all, I'm pretty sure that NATO generals have heard the word [ __ ] But second of all, if you've got a better word like, uh you know, go off, king. Like like I have come up with a million words. None of them ever spread the way this one did. So yeah, by all means do something better and I'll happily use it, right? Like this is not my my glory doesn't come from having a word that's on other people's lips. My glory, if it **[07:47]** ever comes, will come from having made a difference in the world. That's fair. I buy it. My only note would be it doesn't sort of transpose into other parts of speech very well. Like you use the word enshittificatory a bunch. And I will say listening to you say it in the audio book is spectacular. You're very good at saying it. But boy is that a hard word to figure out. >> It makes it fun. We're in the enshittacy. There's enshittificatory impulses being advanced by enshittifiers. We need to be uh disenshittifying and we need to fight **[08:17]** the forces of anti-disenshittification. Like it's I never learned Latin, but this makes me feel like I'm learning those complex verb tenses. All right, I I I love it. I mean, I'm sold. So the you've been on this book tour for a while, which means I suspect you have this next part down pat. And this is hopefully the only speech I'm going to make you give that is like a rehearsed speech at this point. But uh for folks who have not read the book and everybody should or have seen your stuff on this, walk me through the very quickly the three steps of enshittification just at the at the sort of basis level. >> Sure. Sure. So the the three steps of enshittification, that that kind of **[08:49]** procession of the illness in a firm, is that first you have a platform that is good to its end users while finding a way to lock those end users in in stage one. In stage two, because the users are locked in, things can be made worse for those users without risking their departure in order to make things good for business customers. Uh once those business customers are locked in, you go to stage three, which is harvesting the value both from end users and from business customers in order to deliver it to shareholders and executives until there's no value left in the platform save for that mingy **[09:20]** homeopathic res- residue needed to keep users locked to the platform and business customers locked to the users. And that's enshittification. And you would say I think I think I've seen you say that Facebook is probably your cleanest perfect example of what that has looked like. Yeah. Yeah. And I think yeah, I I I tend to agree. I think you could make a case that it's either Facebook or Amazon, but they both feel and in a very sort of mainstream like in my own day-to-day life we have felt that change and I think it's really useful. So I I want to spend almost all of our time here talking about what we **[09:51]** do about it because I think the thing that is not in the book that I found most surprising is some like raw raw speech to me the reader about how I should change my life in order to make all of this do better. And like if if if only this is just a collective action problem that we can all solve together by quitting Amazon, right? That it's like why the end of the book is just you being like here's 10 other stores you can go to that are not this same thing. Why is that not the prescription here? Well, I just don't think you solve **[10:22]** systemic problems with individual consumption choices, right? Shopping your way out of monopoly is like trying to recycle your way out of the wildfires, right? It's just [laughter] it's not going to work. Um, you know, these are like I think if you if you know the galaxy brain meme where there's sort of three explanations and the brain gets bigger. So, you know, this the smallest version is, well, uh, consumers are the secret regulators of the world. We vote with our wallets. We got the outcomes we vote for. If you want to go real neoliberal on this, you could talk about revealed preferences, right? You know, if you say you hate it, but you **[10:52]** still shop there, then you must love it. Anyone who sells their kidney in order to pay the rent has a revealed preference for one kidney. Uh, and and you know, this is like what you get if you're a neoliberal and you have no theory of power and you just think of things as a bunch of uh, people of equal power bargaining equally among one another with perfect market information. So, that's the that's the tiny brain. The medium brain is, oh no, it's these like ketamine adult Zuckermuskyan failures who took over these platforms and are really bad. And sure, like there is like a tech oligarch **[11:23]** shaped hole in the policy environment, but it would attract any sufficiently uh, terrible tech executive to fill it, right? We it's not that Elon Musk is a singular genius. It's just that Elon Musk is uniquely suited to fill the Elon Musk shaped hole in our environment and there's plenty of people who are nearly as good. And if like he overdoses on ketamine tonight, there'll be a succession battle among 10 big balls and whoever ends up sitting in his chair tomorrow will be indistinguishable from him. So, if you really want to think about what's going on here, you have to think about this in shitogenic policy environment, right? That the choices **[11:55]** that I hope the book actually really does reveal for readers, the policy decisions that are quite concrete and have a really clear bright line from making this decision to these firms going sour on us, right? When we say, okay, well, we're going to let you buy your competitors, there's nowhere for your users to go. We make it easier for the platforms to treat us worse. When we say we're going to change IP law so you can block reverse engineering. So, if people still want to use the part of your platform that's good, they can't block the part of your platform that's bad, we invite them to make the part of their platform that's bad worse in order to make **[12:26]** themselves richer. So, it's it's frustrating because it would be really nice if you could just like have seven weird tricks or 11 beneficial companies. And like, you know, by all means, if you think Twitter sucks and is bad for your mental health and you'd rather be on, you know, Blue Sky or Mastodon or whatever, like go off, but like that's not going to it's not going to fix the problem. It just might make your life a little better, which, you know, not a terrible goal. But, you know, at the same time, this is a thing from Zephyr Teachout's great book, uh, Break 'Em Up. If there's a big demonstration down at **[12:56]** the Amazon warehouse and you miss it because you don't want to buy your markers from Amazon. And so, you drive around for 2 hours looking for an artisanal stationer to buy your markers at to make your protest sign, you miss the protest, Amazon won, right? So, like don't worry too much about your consumption choices. Do what is nice, like buy from the people you like, who you want to keep in business. Buy from the shops in your neighborhood if you can, right? Like do all of that stuff, but like organize yourself around like political change. That's that's the thing you should be devoting your energy to. So, **[13:27]** you know, Electronic Frontier Foundation, we have this national network of activist groups, the Electronic Frontier Alliance. If you go to efa.eff.org, you can find groups in your town that are working on everything from like uh, digital abortion privacy to uh, you know, drone regulation to uh, you know, ending the use of digital technology for ICE raids to uh, right to repair legislation at the state level or right to repair rules for domestic procurement. So, like your your town's not going to buy cars for its motor pool unless they don't have DRM on the engine, so any mechanic can fix it. **[13:58]** That's how you make a systemic difference. It's not uh, by like shopping really hard. >> [laughter] >> I mean, I I think I I agree with the spirit of that, but it does feel like there is something to the idea of like if not voting with your wallet, then sort of voting with your your feet in some ways, right? Cuz I think a point you make in the book, um, that I think is very true and that we don't necessarily talk about enough is that there is this constant push and pull between I hate being on Twitter and **[14:28]** there are people of incredible value to me on Twitter, right? And so, it's like if if you could all at once sort of engineer the network effects to be like we're all today going to leave Twitter, you could make a lot of real progress on a sort of person-by-person what website do I go to today. It's just that doing that is impossible, right? And I think the thing that we've seen, like this is where Cambridge Analytica comes up for me all the time. It's like that was the moment that I think frankly even more than was rational, everybody lost their minds about **[14:58]** >> Sure. Sure. I don't believe in Cambridge Analytica's marketing hype, but I do think that they're terrible for making that hype and for selling it to other people. Right. And and it was like it was very it got people up in arms about a specific platform in a way that I really have never seen before or since. And yet everybody stayed on Facebook. And so, that was the moment where I was like, okay, we're did this idea of sort of suddenly we're all going to leave may just be irrelevant. But then I come to things like Amazon. Where like Amazon has no my my friends are not on **[15:29]** Amazon in some way that is like important and meaningful [clears throat] to me. It's pretty easy to pick up and leave Gmail. So, I think like you talk a lot about sort of the the caught switching costs of a lot of these things, but I do wonder there are some things that it feels like it ought to be pretty easy for me to buy toilet paper from somewhere else, right? Like why why isn't it worth pushing people harder to do that? I just think that like there's a limited number of hours in the day and a limited number of things that people can care about. And, you know, the making making your own life a lot harder **[16:00]** to eke out a very very small incremental advantage. You know, one of the problems with Amazon is that because we're again very lax about enforcing antitrust, we let them corner a bunch of markets uh, and force a lot of firms out of business. They sort of finished what Walmart started, right? Uh, and it is very hard not to shop on Amazon. And like you can, right? If it's if your hobby is finding places to shop that aren't Amazon, then you can probably assemble a pretty good list. Maybe someone could make things easier. But I'm, you know, call me a solutionist, **[16:32]** but I'm interested in how technology could solve this. So, in the case of Amazon, I don't know if you've ever seen there's these browser plugins you can get that if you're looking at a book on Amazon because ISBNs are a completely standard identifier, it'll put a uh, reserve this at your local library button in the place of the buy it on Amazon button. Oh, I love that. >> Really cool, right? So, ASINs, right? The stock keeping units that Amazon uses, they represent an uncopyrightable database. Databases don't attract a copyright. Uh, and in theory, you could **[17:02]** uh, start a co-op in your uh, town or that helps uh, produce software that works with like the four giant point of sale apps that exist today in the market because this is one of the weird things about monopolies is that often times the solutions are a little easier, at least as a technical matter, cuz everything is the same. So, imagine now you've got neighborhood co-ops that are just like data co-ops that allow you to list your inventory in a database that translates UPCs to ASINs. And then whenever you're **[17:35]** on Amazon shopping, it just says like buy it at the corner store if it's there, right? And like you could imagine something very similar for Uber, right? Where like the one of the problems with a co-op uh, platform for uh, gig riders is that there's a kind of chicken and egg problem. Why would a uh, passenger install an app when there's no drivers who have the app? Why would a driver install the app when there's no passengers install the app? But what if instead like when my phone fires off a request to Uber and your phone accepts it, uh, both of our phones are running another app that **[18:06]** uploads the details of that as like hashes to a server. And if it detects that we both have the co-op app, it tears down the Uber ride and rebuilds it as a co-op ride. So, all this stuff is like technically possible, it's just illegal. It's illegal because this reverse engineering violates section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bans most forms of reverse engineering. And I want to say, by way of closing the loop on this, Facebook never organized an everyone leave MySpace day. What Facebook did was gave everyone on **[18:38]** MySpace who wanted to go to Facebook a scraper, a bot. You gave that bot your login and password and it went to MySpace several times a day pretending to be you. It grabbed all the messages in your MySpace feed and put them in your Facebook feed so you could reply to them and then it pushed them back out to MySpace. So, you know, there is the you you said organizing the everybody leave Facebook day is impossible, but it might also be irrelevant, right? Maybe we don't need that, right? Maybe we can just change the in shitogenic policy environment so that we can do unto Mark Zuckerberg as Mark Zuckerberg did unto **[19:10]** Rupert Murdoch when he owned MySpace. Right. And the difference, to your point, is that since then Facebook and others have worked very hard to make it illegal to do that thing. They they they did it and then they pulled up the ladder behind them. >> Yeah. It's this kind of mesh woven of IP law interpretations and contracts that that make, you know, modifying a thing you own illegal if it's bad for the shareholders of the company that made it. And we see that in right to repair a lot with like things like tractors and we see it with printers that we talked about before. **[19:40]** And we see it with service design. We see it with, you know, the stuff that's here now. Okay, so the thing about a lot of what you just described is that the there's this like concept that I've always found really interesting and all the like designers on Twitter always talking about this and they're like, oh, embrace friction, right? Like it is actually good to make your life a little bit harder. And I think I find the argument very compelling that we as a society have accepted everything in order to get slightly more convenience. That like we we anything that makes something faster or easier for us we will do and we'll figure out **[20:12]** all the downstream consequences later. And so the idea that actually like you should go out of your way to make life harder I find very compelling in a sort of like, you know, meditative way. I also think it's practically impos- It's just not how anyone lives their life. Like you're you're very hard pressed to find somebody who's going to like deliberately choose the harder way to do just about anything. >> look, if you choose the friction of shopping really hard or like trying really hard to get off Facebook or whatever, then you lose the time for the friction of making sourdough with your 5-year-old. Right? Like it's like it's it's a it's zero sum. There's I'm not **[20:44]** I'm not like saying everything should just be like, as they used to say in the '70s, a zipless [ __ ] right? I you know, uh I I but I am saying that you should choose where your friction is. That like you can't have friction for everything. Right? >> Right. Right. But I think the the thing that seems true, or at least has pretty much always been true, is that the big huge all-encompassing nightmare hellscape surveillance platforms are the easiest ones and the best ones to use. They are like it is it **[21:15]** is faster to make a Twitter account than to make a Mastodon account. Uh and and part of me wonders like is there something structural about the better way that is just always going to be a little harder and a little worse? Or is it just that no one has ever been able to or has successfully tried? So, I'm I'm interested in this I mean, we're getting into the weeds now with Mastodon and and Twitter design, right? So, I don't think actually these days it's been a while since I set up a Mastodon **[21:46]** account. I don't think it's actually harder than setting up a Twitter account except to the extent that you might want to choose a different server than the one that they default you into. I think what they do now is they >> the existence of that choice is harder than making a Twitter account. >> have to know about it, right? You can just go to Mastodon and ignore the fine print that says other servers are available. All right, you can just take you can just go default default default. I think the thing that is harder is the um uh algorithmic suggestions cuz they don't exist in Mastodon. So, Mastodon in a state of nature uh has like when you open an account de **[22:16]** novo, you don't see anything except for like people on your home server. I actually just set up a Pixelfed uh account. So, Pixelfed is like Instagram but runs on ActivityPub. And I have this problem. I subscribe to like 25 people and they're okay, but they're not great. It's and uh and then um I've been trying to find other people to subscribe to. I look at like my home server feed. I look at the universal feed. I look at the local and it's just not as good. And so, if there was a way to get recommendations, I would probably take it. Now, there was a way that people were finding really easy to go to Mastodon at one point, which was uh when **[22:48]** the Twitter API existed, you could just run a like a little app that found all the people that you followed on Twitter that had a Mastodon account and just signed up to them. That's that's a thing that we cut off. So, if we want to talk about like a policy prescription here, there's a a thing built into ActivityPub, which is which is the protocol Mastodon runs on, where if you want to change servers, you uh click a link in your account settings or your profile and it dumps out a little text file that has everyone you follow, everyone who follows you, your mutes and your blocks, all that stuff. And if and if you sign **[23:20]** up for another server, it's it asks you like, are you coming from another server? And you say yes, and you move that file there, and then all that stuff moves over. So, it's like when you're switching uh from like Verizon to T-Mobile, you you do like 5 minutes administrative work and your phone number pops over. No one cares which network you're on. No one calls a friend and says, dude, you would not believe whose SIM is in my phone today, right? It's just just irrelevant. And we can talk about friction being a big deal, but I'll tell you what, when number porting came in with cell phones, it really did change the competitive nature of that market. Um it's why we have all **[23:52]** these VNMOs, right? You know, these these Ryan Reynolds phone company and whatever, right? It's because you can now really easily switch among carriers. And so, uh if we said as a policy matter, uh the legacy platforms, Facebook, Twitter, maybe TikTok, have to um provide you with a file that lets you um follow all the people that you were following on Twitter when you move to Mastodon or Blue Sky or anywhere else, right? Because it's a standard protocol, anyone could support it. Uh and show the messages that you **[24:24]** post to them if they're still following you. If If we made that, not only would that go a long way to resolving that issue, make it really easy to go from one place to another, but it would also be really easy to enforce. And so, unlike say a hate speech rule, which is one of the things we've tried to do to make places like Twitter more viable. We have it in Canada, Australia, Europe, they've got various harmful content rules. The UK has just got this new online harms act and so on. Leaving aside all the other questions, right? About like whether it's a good idea or bad idea. If you like the idea of a hate speech rule, you still have to **[24:56]** agree on what hate speech is. You have to evaluate every accusation of hate speech to see if it satisfies your definition. You have to do a technical investigation to see whether the platform has taken reasonable steps to avert that hate speech incident. And this is like a 7-year fact-intensive deep investigation that you have to do for something that happens a hundred times a minute on these platforms. Meanwhile, if you just say like you can leave. You can leave, it's really easy. If you go, you still follow all the people that were follow- you were following, they all follow you. It's **[25:27]** it's like the work of a few seconds. You know, you were you resolve a seeming paradox, right? The paradox I alluded to at the start here, this revealed preference paradox, which is like, why would a member of a disfavored minority who faces endless harassment and hate speech on Twitter stay on Twitter? Well, it's because the only thing worse than being a member of that disfavored minority and being showered in abuse is being a member of a disfavored minority showered in abuse and being isolated from your community, right? >> Right. Right? So, let them go. Let let people go somewhere else. Just just like let's not rely on Mark Zuckerberg and **[25:59]** Elon Musk being better at being the unelected absolute dictator of people's social media lives. Let's just abolish that job. Yeah, I mean, I think the the only the only thing that comes to mind for me there is that that that way you're thinking about it sort of assumes there is good stuff on the other end if only it were easy for us to get there. But this is where I come back to like, why isn't anybody building the better products? Oh, cuz people can't leave. That Right. I I do wonder that is like back to chicken and egg problems, right? It's like I think the the hardest part of **[26:29]** uh like I I am, you know, we could spend forever talking about how terrific I think the fediverse is and I'm going to try very hard not to do that while we're sitting here. But uh I think the the thing that is so frustrating to me about the fediverse is that is that there no one has yet quite built the thing. And and everything I hear from people is like, well, nobody's going to build the thing because there's no business in building the thing because how on earth are you going to Yeah. You just can't do it. There's no business in competing with these because it is a mix of illegal and impossible. Yeah. And if we So, and I guess your **[27:01]** argument would be that's why we have to start with the policies. And that you're >> that requires confidence on your side that if we even if we just sort of removed the gate, that suddenly there is this like huge latent supply of great stuff that would immediately come to existence off the platform. So, I I I mean, look, I I don't know that the platforms' management always knows what's best for their own firms, but they sure act like if you made it possible to go, you would leave. Right? Think about it. >> Agreed. You know, it's this is an argument that comes up a lot with right to repair. **[27:32]** You know, there's the there's the kind of no true Scotsman version of the Apple fanboy, which is just like no one who owns an iPhone wants to use a third-party app store or take their phone anywhere but an Apple store to get it fixed. It's like, wow, if that were true, it would seem like Apple uh wouldn't need to spend tens of millions of dollars >> Right. making >> He's done a lot of work he didn't need to do in that case, yeah. Yeah, and so like maybe they're I mean, sure, they might be making some foolish choices there and and misallocating their capital, but I don't think it's the case. I think that um we should take them at their word. I think that they do **[28:02]** understand that people would want to go. You know, um the Berlin Wall was said by the uh commissars of the of the German Democratic Republic was said to be there to keep people out of the Soviet uh socialist utopia and not to keep people in. And yet they sure act like the reason the wall was there is to keep people in. I also think that there's like um a growing geopolitical case outside of the US to get off American platforms. Uh and you know, you have this effort now in Europe called Euro **[28:33]** stock. Tons of capital going into cloning uh American services because Donald Trump has made it really clear that America doesn't have trading partners, it doesn't have allies, it has rivals. And those rivals uh will be uh neutralized with American tech companies. So, when the International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor swore to warn against Bibi Netanyahu for genocide, Trump denounced it and then Microsoft terminated his Outlook account. And the chief prosecutor of the ICC lost all of his email archives, his address book, his **[29:03]** calendar, and access to all the working files of the International Criminal Court. And I think a lot of policy makers in Europe were like, oh, wait, we need to do something about this. And then thing was the German regulators asked Microsoft, hey, just to be clear, if an American spy agency asks you for access to a European uh data repository on a server stored in Europe, you're not going to give it to them, right? And they were like, oh, no, we'll probably give it to them and we won't tell you and we may not ask for a warrant. And so, there's just like a **[29:35]** very strong case for getting the hell off of these platforms. And uh I think as they build these um duplicate platforms, they're going to run up against a wall, which is that there's no way for people to get their data out. All right, like no one's going to copy and paste a million documents out of a ministry into uh you know, from Outlook or G Docs into like a Euro stock equivalent. You need to be able to like run virtual phones in a cloud and autopilot an app, and you need to be able to like jailbreak things and do on-device bridging and and scrape and **[30:06]** like all this other stuff. That's the only way we're going to get data out of it. It's a very honorable tradition. People have been doing this with online services like since the IBM 360. It's it's a totally reasonable thing to say that people have their data on one platform should be able to take it to another platform without the first platform's permission or cooperation. It's nice if they do that, but they don't you shouldn't have to rely on it. And I I liken it to like the EU observing a housing crisis in East Germany and then building a lot of great housing in West Germany. And [laughter] **[30:38]** and then like and then being like, "Well, why is no one moving into this great housing?" Right? Eventually you have to look over at that wall, notice that, and tear it down. All right, we're going to take a break and then we're going to get back to Cory Doctorow. Support for this show comes from Shopify. One of the most exciting parts of starting a business is when the sales start coming in. If your business is looking to start selling online, Shopify has everything you need to create your online store. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world **[31:08]** and 10% of all e-commerce in the US, from household names like Mattel and Gymshark, to brands just getting started. With hundreds of ready-to-use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand style. And Shopify is packed with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography. >> [music] >> And best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert with world-class expertise in everything from managing inventory >> [music] >> to international shipping to processing **[31:40]** returns and beyond. Turn those dreams into and give them the best shot at success with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com/virgecast. Go to shopify.com/virgecast. shopify.com/virgecast. Support for this show comes from Grammarly. You'd be surprised at just how much writing goes into a podcast. Sure, what you hear is a lot of audio, **[32:11]** but the amount of time spent crafting concise emails or proofreading proposals or even finishing a poignant presentation is a lot. Frankly, doing all that can feel like a waste of time, especially when Grammarly has features that are tailor-made for working professionals, so you can get all of your writing done from start to finish all in one place. Grammarly brings more polish and impact to your emails, presentations, and proposals without switching between tools and tabs, all while amplifying your voice and moving your ideas forward. >> [music] >> Your time is valuable and you don't want **[32:42]** to waste it on some second-rate program. That's why Grammarly is designed to help professionals with real-time writing support on any project, email, and more. When you open a new doc, start typing right away or ask Grammarly's AI chat to help anytime, whether to kick off your ideas or polish them. One easy place to get quick help from AI whenever you're writing. Sign up for free and experience how Grammarly can elevate your professional writing from start to finish. [music] Visit grammarly.com/podcast. That's grammarly.com/podcast. **[33:19]** Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24/7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. [music] That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, >> [music] >> share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with **[33:49]** deep candidate insights. Either post your job for free or pay to promote. Promoted jobs get three times more qualified applicants. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your small business is the quality of candidates. And with LinkedIn, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72% [music] of SMBs using LinkedIn say that it helps them find high-quality candidates. Find out why more than 2 and 1/2 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on **[34:19]** LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com/track. That's linkedin.com/track to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. All right, we're back. Let's just dive right back in with Cory Doctorow. Here it goes. I've become sort of fascinated by the local-first software movement and apps like this app Obsidian, where it's like the the thesis behind these things is what I have is a folder full of text files, and what you provide is a way to manipulate that folder full of text **[34:49]** files, but they're still a bunch of text files on my computer. And that is such a complete 180° inversion of how we think about most software now that is like what actually happens is I am logging into something that is at a data center very far away. Uh-huh. Uh like we're talking, you know, not that long after this huge AWS failure, and one of the things that fascinates me about those is everybody then has this moment of like, "Oh my god, none of my stuff is mine." Sure. All of my stuff is somewhere else. And you have this visceral moment of like, I get on my computer and I don't I don't have anything that I think is like **[35:21]** those those moments are very eye-opening to people. But like is there a way we can start to solve this stuff in product by just being like like Tim Berners-Lee I know talks about this with the the solid protocol stuff, and I think that is like an interesting idea that I haven't seen anyone other than Tim Berners-Lee talk about, but uh this idea that like we have to start from a new premise of whose data is whose and where, and if we can build different software on top of it, maybe that starts to solve some of this problem, too. I just think you end up with this problem of how you get the data out, right? And how you um **[35:53]** how you manage the awkward transition. Cuz right, if we're going to go back to friction, that's the source of friction. There's a little bit of friction in like learning to use a different app, right? Being like, "Oh, you know, Adobe." One of the stories I tell in the book is like Adobe decided it didn't want to keep paying the license fee for uh Pantone and decided to shove it off onto Adobe customers, so you're going to have to suddenly pay 21 bucks a month for the rest of your life to see the Pantone colors in your own files. And >> Including all of your old files, which are now what was it, black Yeah, they would go black if you didn't **[36:24]** pay 21 bucks a month. And you know, you go like, "Okay, I'm going to download all my files and I'm going to learn to use the GIMP." Right? But like you you've that's a little bit of friction, right? Learning some new key combinations and stuff. The real friction is like getting all the data out, reworking all your workflows, collaborating with other people, you know, like you think about like G Docs. The the value of G Docs isn't editing in a browser, it's uh editing with other people in a browser. >> Yes. You know, so how do you how do you move all that stuff over? How do you **[36:55]** maintain the permissions? You know, all of that stuff is the source of friction. We need to we need to address that part. I'm all for like holding things locally. Actually, you're reminding me we gave a presentation 20 years ago at the O'Reilly OS 10 Con about now that the Mac is a Unix machine, here's a really easy way to build an IMAP server on your own computer. Oh, interesting. >> And you can pop your mail into uh like an inbox file, and then you can use any mail client you want **[37:27]** with IMAP pointed at your hard drive. Uh and so you can like use mail.app for reading and composing, you use Thunderbird for searching, you can use Pine for something else, right? Like it's the the apps are really small and the repos there and depending on how you like configure it, you wouldn't necessarily have to make multiple copies of your mail. And you know, it's it's very cool and you could even imagine having like two IMAPs, right? One on the one in the cloud, one on your computer. Those two are kept in sync and then you've got five POP clients on your computer if you want to use them, use **[37:57]** them for different reasons. Right? Like all of that's like fine. You know, maybe that maybe there are people listening to this are going, "Well, that's insane." But if you're like me and you live in email, and I absolutely live in email, then you have a lot of archives, you have a lot of workflow recorded, and like you know, as you say, like a folder full of text files in your hard drive is a very powerful repo that lots of different programs can act on. And one of the nice things about a folder full of text files in your hard drive is that we have some very standard utilities **[38:28]** like rsync that will keep them connected to something else that you can do encrypted syncs with and that allows you to have like a hybrid world where you can access your files remotely and or even do things like um you know, leave your laptop at home, take a burner when you go across a border, Mhm. uh and configure the IMAP server. So this is a thing that Google used to do when Googlers probably still do, when Googlers had to go to China, they would give you a burner and it would only access like the last three days of your IMAP and not like the whole **[38:58]** spool, and you just like your IT department wouldn't let you look at that file. So if Chinese authorities made you unlock your laptop at the border, you just handed it to them. I have a friend who used to go to China for Google quite a lot, and he says that when he got back, the Chromebook would just go in a shredder cuz they would just assume that it had been compromised in his hotel room or whatever. Wow. That's that's wild. Well, we're going to have to talk more about that some other time. But I think like as you talk about that, it just makes me think again we're in this place of like how much is it is the **[39:30]** onus on me to sort of think differently about what I'm doing versus should all of this stuff just work better? And I think I think you're of the mind of all of this stuff should work better. I think it's It's for you to think differently if everything works better. Yeah. Right? It's like it's it's very hard to imagine the thing that doesn't exist and that isn't in the world. We've been going back and back and back to Larry Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, which is just still such an important work. Talks about these four forces that regulate our our world. There's code, law, norms, and and **[40:01]** markets, right? So, code, things that are technologically possible, uh can happen, right? It sounds very tautological, but like you can pass a law requiring the repeal of the of gravity, but if no one's built an anti-gravity engine, it doesn't matter what the law says. So, you can't really like ban or or mandate the use of a technology that doesn't exist. Or you can ban it, but it doesn't matter, right? Banning time machines doesn't matter. Um and and uh when things are profitable, it's easier to get them legalized. **[40:32]** Uh and once they're legalized, if they are profitable, it's harder to ban them. Uh and once things are normative, right? Once things are like considered reasonable, it's harder to ban them, and it's easier to legalize them, and it's easier to sell them. So, you you have these things kind of going around and around and cyclically reinforcing themselves. Yeah, by all means, like let's have a norm that says asking somebody to use Facebook to book the kids' little league for for, you know, the carpools is like asking someone to like sit in the smoking area to plan, you know, the **[41:03]** little league thing. Yeah, sure. >> Yes. Fine, right? >> Clip that, put it on social media. Yes, that is how everyone should treat Facebook groups about anything. >> Yeah, but at the same time, like look, I there's a wonderful person called Andrea Downing who runs a nonprofit called the Light Collective. And Andrea is a breast cancer previvor. So, this means that she has the gene for breast cancer. Uh and she's part of a group on Facebook for this. And they were um lured to Facebook. They were courted by Facebook in the early 2010s when Facebook actively went around to different medical communities online and said, **[41:34]** "Come on Facebook, we have all these features for you that will make things better for you." And being a breast cancer previvor previvor is a very medically consequential and socially important thing, right? So, you're making a bunch of choices like should I have my uterus, my ovaries, and my breasts removed? Uh you're also dealing with the sickness and death of your daughters, your sisters, your aunts, your grandmothers, your mothers, right? So, this is this is like a really important group to these people. And Andrea, not a security researcher by training, but she was poking around on Facebook one day and noticed that you **[42:05]** could enumerate the full membership of every Facebook group, even if you weren't a member of it. Including her group, which obviously this is a bad thing. So, she tells Facebook about it. She files a bug report, and they won't fix it. They said, "Oh, no, no, that's part of the ad tech stack. It's a feature, not a bug." So, they sued Facebook, and when the FTC under Obama settled all claims outstanding against Facebook with a big fine, they settled this case. And they're still on Facebook. Right? And they're still on Facebook because as much as they hate Mark Zuckerberg and the way that he runs that platform, they **[42:36]** love each other and are important to each other in a way that outstrips it. And yet they are still hamstrung by this collective action problem. Right? So, you know, like yeah yeah, let's say like we should all get off the platform, but once we make it easy to leave, right? Like if you could go to Blue Sky or Mastodon and see the messages in that Facebook group and reply to them, people would trickle out. And if we make it easier for people to go, the people for whom things are intolerable will leave. And then maybe the company that's running the firm will **[43:07]** or the service, rather, will get uh the message and make things more tolerable for the people they haven't lost, or maybe what'll happen to them is what happened to Rupert Murdoch and MySpace, which is that we'll like double-tap it and stuff it in the shallow grave it deserves to be in. Which is a a pretty solid outcome in a lot of cases. >> It's a great outcome. >> [laughter] >> Who cares, right? It's not the Mona Lisa. We don't need to preserve it forever. It's fine. So long as the people can leave, right? Like the demise of LiveJournal is fine. The **[43:37]** destruction of the communities on LiveJournal is a tragedy. If we could have gotten rid of my LiveJournal, which was like a a and you know, it's still around as part of VKontakte, but which is like which was like under management that manifestly was not suited to continue running with LiveJournal. If we could have gotten rid of that and gotten rid of that and kept the communities, that would have been the best of all outcomes. Yes, and I think to the extent that you have if like if you wanted to pick one single solution that solves that, it's let us move the communities. I I I totally agree with you on that. And I think I mean, the the step beyond **[44:08]** that even then is like this is where you get real fediverse, where it's like actually it shouldn't the the community should just be the size of the internet, and we should not like I shouldn't even have to know what platform you're on. >> Uh but that I think is like that's yet another sort of product bridge that we're going to have to figure out. >> care which email client you use, right? Like we I don't care which browser you use. >> Yeah. You know, we can Yeah. >> Exactly. We have solved this problem before. >> Yeah. Okay. So, I I'm curious. I want to **[44:38]** talk a little bit on the sort of flip side, which is like from the the product makers' side. And I think uh you you bring up a couple examples in the book of companies doing things that are somewhere between uh delightful and disliked by major platforms and illegal, but they're doing it anyway. Um tell me about this company at Para that's doing really fascinating stuff on top of DoorDash that I think is a pretty good example of a lot of the possibilities of what you're talking about. >> Yeah, so Para it it started off as a um **[45:08]** an app to uh help DoorDash drivers uh not get cheated by the platform. So, the way the DoorDash platform would dispatch a job to a driver is they would expose the base pay, but not the tip. And the tip was like the majority of compensation. Like often times the base pay would be like a buck 50, and the tip would be 10 bucks. And you wouldn't find out what the tip was until you clocked on the job. So, it was like a blind box, right? It was like uh it was like a a a slot machine. Uh and if you saw the total pay for the job, and then you **[45:41]** changed your mind and you canceled the job, and you did that too often, you'd get taken off the app because you were booking jobs and then canceling them. So, it turns out DoorDash wasn't very good at this. And the JSON object that they transmitted to your phone just had the tip in the clear text. And so, >> were just like hiding it with CSS on the page, basically. >> [laughter] >> Yeah, exactly. Cool. So, yeah. So, so Para was just an app that extracted that value and and showed you an overlay that was like, "This is an $11 job. This is a $1 job." You know, from from DoorDash's perspective, you can think about it this **[46:12]** way. Like if you as a customer can lowball the tip and still get a delivery, then you will be more likely to be a DoorDash customer, right? Uh and if um no drivers clock on because the tip is too small, and DoorDash doesn't want to live you lose you as a customer, they have to take some of the junk fees they've taken off of the customer and give it to a driver. So, if they can just blind that transaction until after it's been locked in, then they can just take more value from drivers for themselves. Which is like pure stage **[46:44]** three enshittification. Like that is that is exactly what that is. Yeah, yeah, 100%. Okay. So, uh they rolled this out. DoorDash accused them of uh stealing uh drivers' social security numbers, which is amazing because if your DoorDash app is storing your social security number, that's bad. >> [laughter] >> Yeah, if I can get it from DoorDash, we have a real big problem. >> Yeah. Yeah, uh and empirically it wasn't happening. Uh and because you we could see what the app was doing. And then they threw 40 full-time engineers at it. **[47:15]** They eventually like basically crushed it. But partly the reason they crushed it, I think, is that Para couldn't raise the capital to hire 80 engineers because there was this there was there were all these legal threats hanging over it, too, where it was a it was quite a capital risk. So, DoorDash these days, what they want to do is um pry open multiple offers from uh all the gig platforms on your phone, and then uh let you figure out which one you're willing to take based on the one with the highest compensation. And and you should **[47:46]** One of the things if you've never done work on a gig platform that people don't always appreciate is that you get an offer, and you only have a few seconds to decide whether to take it. And you know how like um if you go to the grocery store, they put unit pricing on the shelf, so you know, the the raisins are like four bucks, but they're 3 cents a gram or whatever, 3 cents an ounce. Uh you don't get that breakdown. So, you don't see what your mileage and your minutes are being paid. You just see a total. You have to try and do that math in your head. And you can imagine like if you're a Dasher and **[48:17]** an Uber driver and a Lyft driver, and you're also doing like three other kinds of delivery work on your phone, uh it might be really hard to do the sums in your head. And so, one of the things that Para can do is just normalize those values and show you like a true unit cost for this, right? Which like again, like it's it's very weird that we would try and make it illegal for worker to know the unit costs of their labor offer, right? Like this whole argument **[48:47]** for piecework, which, you know, allows the firms bidding out the piecework to avoid insurance and overtime and whatever, is that uh the um seller of the labor can make their own choice, that it's paternalistic to make the choice for them. Okay, but like I'm not I don't think it's paternalistic to say doing a whole bunch of algebra in your head in real time while driving a car is a thing that most of us can't do, and like maybe we should have a computer do that for you, you know? Computers are pretty good at that. I agree. **[49:17]** >> Yeah. So, my the reason I'm bringing this up is because my sense throughout the book is this is the sort of thing you'd like to see a million of across every possible platform. Like you you talk a lot about, you know, jailbreaking and the the concept of adversarial interoperability. And it's like what what it until we get these big policy swings, like what we what we need is to just poke and prod at every available piece. Well, and to get the policy swings. Well, right. I guess we need the one to make that legal again. **[49:49]** And then but then the the way to pry this open is not to like build another Amazon. It's to just tear Amazon into a thousand pieces with a thousand different kinds of apps, right? >> Yeah. Yeah, what I mean why wouldn't you know what Jeff Bezos said when he started the business? Your margin is my opportunity. Right. Right? So, just raid their margins. And and I think this is like back to geopolitics, right? So, Canada's response to the tariffs, like a lot of countries, has been retaliatory tariffs, uh which is another way of saying things in Canada now cost more because we **[50:20]** import a lot of finished goods from America. Also, we have to drink shitty rye instead of delicious bourbon, right? And uh It is a lot of like self-owns in the name of geopolitics in modern in >> a very weird way to punish America, right? It's like punching yourself in the face really hard and hoping the downstairs neighbor says, "Ouch." Meanwhile, we could consume the accumulated monopoly rents of these tech platforms that have been extracted from Canadians and other people in the world and not only realize a consumer surplus where these goods are cheaper, but we could create export markets for disenshitifying software. Right? And uh **[50:52]** and and that's stuff that everyone in the world would want. And if Canada doesn't do it, someone else will. So, there's this kind of interesting equilibrium where if anyone defects, that defector, the first defector, reaps a huge benefit and the all the subsequent defectors reach a reap a much smaller benefit, right? Like so, consuming the accumulated monopoly rents of American tech platforms as fuel for a single-use rocket to boost Canada's tech sector, which used to be very big. We used to have a a company that made all the world's smartphones called Research In Motion, right? To to boost that into **[51:24]** a stable orbit on on on a better cash basis, right? Because selling app stores for iPhones that uh loot the hundred-billion-dollar per year transaction fee business that Apple takes out of the iPhone without incurring the hardware costs that Apple is bearing. That is a very good opportunity. That margin could be our opportunity. And if we don't take it, someone else will. And if that's not enough, if you remember when those Russian soldiers looted those Ukrainian tractors and they were all LoJacked by **[51:55]** John Deere and they showed up in in Chechnya, and then the John Deere dealership in Kyiv uh bricked the tractors. And everyone was like, "Haha, dumb looters. You got your comeuppance from John Deere." Well, it does mean that Donald Trump could order any country's tractors immobilized, right? So, there's like a geopolitics case for this. This is what we were told that Huawei was going to do to our critical infrastructure. And it's what American tech companies have done to the world's critical critical infrastructure. And I say that first because it's scary and **[52:26]** bad in an era of Trumpism, but second because like as Putin showed us after invading Ukraine and accelerating the European transition to solar by 15 years in five, uh when the devil's at the door, a lot of the things that used to seem like burdens you could never hurdle uh or or barriers you could never hurdle are suddenly things that you can just jump over with ease. They're just not that big a deal. You know, the US trade representative says, "Well, unless you have these IP laws, we're going to hit **[52:57]** you with tariffs." And then they hit you with tariffs, right? Well, like someone threatens to burn your house down unless you do as they say, and then you do it, and then they burn your house down, you're kind of a sucker if you keep doing what they say. So, I'm quite excited by this moment, like not about Trump broadly, but about this specific thing that this thing I've worked on for a quarter of a century and more than half my adult life is actually closer to being realized, I think, like having has better a more fertile soil to grow than at any time. And as Americans, we're **[53:27]** going to be able to import those tools because, you know, if you've got a payment method and an internet connection, you can download jailbreaking tools, you know. It's easier than getting cheap insulin from Canada, getting good software from Canada, you know? Yeah, that was one of the things you said in the book that I thought was really interesting is that that actually this is a we're going to have a global solution to an American problem because there's no incentive to play nice in in geopolitics right now. Um last thing real quick and then I know you have to go. Um I'm I couldn't tell throughout the whole book whether you **[53:57]** think that under sort of the current conditions i- enshitification is essentially inevitable. That if I build a thing that is successful enough that it is inevitably going to go this way because, you know, money and power corrupt the same way that they always do. So, I'm I'm curious like what you would tell startup founders and people who are like new at this and are saying, "I don't I don't want to I want to do a good job and not build a horrible enshitified platform." Is there is there a way out other than **[54:28]** you just like holding their heads in both hands and being like, "Don't be an asshole."? >> No, you got to you got you got to hack your future self. So, the Ulysses Pact is named after one of the most important hackers, Ulysses, who uh you know, was was in this situation where he was going to sail onto the sea of the sirens. And if you heard the siren song, you would jump in the water and drown. And so, the accepted protocol was to fill your ears with wax, but he wanted to hear what the song sounded like cuz it was probably amazing. So, he anticipated his future weakness and he had his his uh sailors tie him to the mast so that he could **[55:00]** hear the song but not jump in. So, a Ulysses Pact is anytime you take a course of action off the table at a moment of strength because you anticipate your future moment of weakness. So, being strong is not being infallible. It's in fact recognizing your own fallibility. And so, if you think about the forces that led to enshitification, right? Monopolization, regulatory capture, a weak workforce, the ability to modify products after their uh sale and make them worse, what you need to do is I create the circumstances where neither the devil on **[55:31]** your left shoulder whispering things in your ear nor the VC threatening to pull the plug on you can force you to do something that today seems like a bad idea. So, unionize your workforce so that they can tell you to [ __ ] off if you tell them to enshitify things and make it stick. Um make all your software irrevocably open source. Uh create APIs and make sure that at least you know, 51% of your users are API users off platform. So, if you shut the API down in the future, you go out of business instantaneously, right? Like all this stuff may sound like a big lift. It is a **[56:02]** big lift, right? But you you do this stuff not even you can pressure yourself into enshitifying your product without immediately going out of business. And so, that's how you do it. Ulysses taught us how to do it. Now we know. I like it. >> All right, Cory, thank you so much for doing this. This is really fun. >> Thanks, Dave. All right, thank you again to Cory for being here with us. That was super fun. I learned a ton from that conversation and I kind of have come to think differently about how I exist on the internet. I've been noodling on that interview for a couple of weeks now and **[56:32]** I think the way that I approach these services is already starting to change. If you want to talk about enshitification, if you have thoughts, if you have feelings, get at me. I want to hear all about it. firstgottotheverge.com, call the hotline. And speaking of, we're going to take a break and we're going to do a hotline question. We'll be right back. >> [music] >> Support for the show comes from Crucible Moments, a podcast from Sequoia Capital. We have all had pivotal decision points in our lives that, whether we know it or not at the time, changed everything. This is especially true in business. **[57:02]** Like did you know that autonomous drone delivery company Zipline originally produced a robotic toy? Or that Bolt went from an Estonian transportation company to one of the largest ride-share and food delivery platforms in the world? That's what Crucible Moments is all about, [music] deep diving into make-or-break moments that set the course for some of the most important tech companies of our time [music] with interviews from some of the key players that made these companies a success. Hosted by Sequoia Capital's managing partner, Roelof Botha, Crucible Moments is back for a new season with stories of **[57:34]** companies as they navigated the most consequential crossroads in their journeys. Hear conversations with leaders at Zipline, Stripe, Palo Alto Networks, Klarna, Supercell, and more. [music] Subscribe to season 3 of Crucible Moments and catch up on seasons 1 and 2 at cruciblemoments.com, on YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. >> [music] >> Listen to Crucible Moments today. Support for the show comes from Rippling. Is your business paying for 20 **[58:05]** tools to do the job of one? That doesn't exactly sound like it's software as a service. It actually sounds like it's sad. [music] Software as a disservice. It's time to replace your stitched-together tech stack with one platform for all of your departments with Rippling. Rippling is the unified platform for global HR, payroll, IT, and finance. They've helped millions replace their mess of cobbled-together tools with one system designed to give leaders clarity, speed, and control. By uniting your employees, teams, and departments in one system, Rippling can remove the **[58:37]** bottlenecks, busywork, and silos your software might have created. Automated, perfectly in sync, and seriously simple to use, Rippling gives your company one source of truth for your people, their data, and everything they touch. With Rippling, you can run your entire HR, IT, and finance operations as one. Or, pick and choose the products that best fill the gaps in your software stack. And right now, you can get 6 months for free when you go to rippling.com/verge. Learn more at r i p p l i n g.com/verge. **[59:13]** That's rippling.com/verge for 6 months free. Terms and conditions apply. >> [music] >> Millions of players. One world. No lag. How's it done? AWS is how. Epic [music] Games turned to AWS to scale to more than 100 million Fortnite players worldwide. So they can [music] stay locked in with battle-tested reliability. AWS is how leading businesses power **[59:45]** next-level innovation. >> [music] >> All right, we're back. Vergecast hotline time. The number, as always, 866-VERGE11. The email, [email protected]. I'm davidpierce.11 on Signal. Get at us. I want to hear all of your questions, all of your thoughts, all the other feelingsy tech books that you think I should read. I want to hear about it. And we got a question about an episode we recorded a couple weeks ago that I think is like perfectly on brand for **[60:17]** this conversation that we're having right now. So, let me just play it right here. Hey, this is Matt from Springfield, Missouri. I was listening to the episode where it's discussing how Amazon is in a lawsuit with Perplexity. And I actually sell old manuals for machinery on my own personal website, Amazon, and eBay. And actually, if I'm seeing an increase in sales from referral links from these AI agents on my personal website. Actually, I would prefer uh these AI agents uh people to shop that way **[60:47]** because then I wouldn't have to spend more time and resources to be diversified on different markets and I could just keep it on my website. I also sell my products cheaper on my website because I don't have to pay for the Amazon and eBay fees. Anyway, that's my two cents. Thanks for the show. I was really struck by this question because I think that we have come to see Amazon in particular as like the platform on which you sell stuff, right? And there is this sense that if you can't compete on Amazon, you can't win. Amazon, in so **[61:20]** many ways, has set it up to be that way, right? Like there's an antitrust case against Amazon because of the practices that it used to monitor prices around the internet and actually penalize sellers for having lower prices elsewhere than they had on Amazon. This is the kind of thing that Amazon has done to preserve itself as like the only place that people can reasonably go to shop. The other thing is that it's really hard to make a good shopping experience somewhere else, right? I think Shopify has done a really interesting job of just sort of taking pieces of the puzzle **[61:51]** and making it simpler. So, now like I can have a website, but Shopify handles all of the actual logistics of selling. That's really interesting, right? Like I think if we can sort of pull the catalog apart, but make all of the logistics centralized, there's something really interesting there. But this is a total inversion of that. That is like, okay, what if instead of having a central platform where all this stuff was, we had a central shopper that could go all of the places. And instead, as a seller, I can have my website and trust that there **[62:22]** will be agents and there will be these autonomous bots that come around and find things on my website to buy. Maybe that's a better outcome here. It's at least a very different outcome than this incredible centralization that we've had. And this is something that I hear from the AI people who are web defenders. And to be totally honest, I'm very skeptical of those people. I think it's very hard to think the open web is a good idea and that everything should be intermediated by AI. But there is something to this idea that **[62:54]** actually what we need is a new way of finding stuff on the web that is not just about finding stuff, right? Because it's one thing to say, okay, we're going to show you the coolest coat you've ever seen, but you have to set up an account, you have to enter your credit card details, you have to enter into a relationship with a new company that's going to send you emails all the time, you have to wait weeks because they're not as sophisticated a shipping operation as Amazon or Walmart. So, there are a lot of reasons that like just purely logistically and in a convenience sense, it makes sense for **[63:27]** everything to have been totally centralized. But if you if you match this idea of now I have an AI agent that is capable of finding these sort of product needles in haystacks for me with now there are these tools like Shopify that are starting to centralize some of the the like boring grunt work logistics of it all in such a way that it is easy for me to track my packages, is it is easy for me to know my credit card is secure, it is easy for me to get things quickly, but I don't have to just do it through the one player. All that is super **[63:58]** interesting, right? And this is like classic bundling and unbundling. Amazon was a complete bundling phase of the internet where it said, we're going to take every single piece of the puzzle and we're going to do it all in one place. And what happens when you get a big bundle is people start to just pull parts of that out, right? There's no way that one company can do every single thing the best. And so you take a company like Shopify, not to keep bringing up Shopify, that is like, well, we're going to take a part of this and do it better or differently or more accessibly to more people. Or you get companies like Walmart who are like, **[64:29]** we're going to compete on having this sort of premium bundle that gets you lots of other stuff. There are just a lot of things about Amazon that we're starting to see people pull apart and make better products individually out of. The question then is, what is the thing that knits all of those things together if it's not just another huge Amazon-style platform? Maybe it could be AI. I I'm I am skeptical of AI agents in every single way, including their ability to find good, interesting products and not just the same products **[65:00]** that they would find on Amazon or the products that they have made corporate deals with. But but in a world in which there is a a like truly neutral, truly useful agent that knows what I like, knows the full catalog of the internet, and can handle the logistics because there are ways to handle the logistics, that becomes a really fascinating shopping system. And so I think the idea that there are people out there who are saying, I have been selling things and I'm starting to see an uptick on my website, not just on the other platforms **[65:30]** that I am forced to play with because of AI agents, that's a huge win. There there are lots of complicated downstream effects, but like that thing by itself, I take as a victory. And that's really interesting. And I think in in the sort of enshittification universe, the thing after enshittification is unbundling, right? And and I think in a certain tiny, small way, this is what that looks like. Anyway, Matt, thank you for calling in. Th- This one sort of broke my brain open in a really fun way and I appreciate you calling in. Anyway, that's it for the **[66:01]** Vergecast. I got to go finish moving. I got to stop talking because this cold is just going [music] to destroy me. So, we're going to get out of here. As always, if you have thoughts, feelings, questions, other books I should read, feelings about AI agents, tell us everything. 866-VERGE11 is the hotline. [music] [email protected] is the email. We want to hear everything from you, absolutely all of the time. The Vergecast is Verge Productions, part [music] of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will be back on Friday with I don't even know what, a bunch of fun stuff. We're also shooting Verge **[66:33]** History all of this week. I'm going to be in New York, so I'll be in the studio with Nilay for Friday's show. We have a ton of fun stuff coming up for you. Th- This like holiday season of podcasts from the Verge is going to be great. I'm looking forward to it. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.