But HP is still in business. Apple is still in business. Google is still in business. Microsoft is still in business. IBM is still in business. Facebook is still in business.
We donât have those controlled burns anymore. Yesterdayâs giants tower over all, forming a thick canopy. The internet is âfive giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four.â
These tech companies have produced a lot of fire-debt. Over and over, they erupt in flamesâin this short decade alone, every one of our tech giants has experienced a privacy scandal that should have permanently disqualified it from continuing to enjoy our patronage (and I do mean every one of them, including the one that spends millions telling you that itâs the pro-privacy alternative to the others).
Privacy is just one way that these firms are enshittifying themselves. There are the ghastly moderation failures, the community betrayals, the frauds and the billions squandered on follies.
We hate these companies. We hate their products. They are always on fire. They canât help it. Itâs the curse of bigness.
Companies cannot unilaterally mediate the lives of hundreds of millions â or even billions â of people, speaking thousands of languages, living in hundreds of countries.
- Let the Platforms Burn: The Opposite of Good Fires is Wildfires
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I love when Calcifer says that in English as he sticks out his tongue to catch falling eggshells. His "agugugu"s in German once smooched however are my favorite of his many sounds. WOW.
Frank Wilhoit described conservativism as âexactly one propositionâ:
There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.This is likewise the project of corporatism. Tech platforms are urgently committed to ensuring that they can do anything they want on their platforms â and theyâre even more dedicated to the proposition that you must not do anything they donât want on their platforms.
They can lock you in. You canât unlock yourself. Facebook attained network-effects growth by giving its users bots that logged into Myspace on their behalf, scraped the contents of their inboxes for the messages from the friends they left behind, and plunked them in their Facebook inboxes.
Facebook then sued a company that did the same thing to Facebook, who wanted to make it as easy for Facebook users to leave Facebook as it had been to get started there.
Apple reverse-engineered Microsoftâs crown jewels â the Office file-formats that kept users locked to its operating systems â so it could clone them and let users change OSes.
Try to do that today â say, to make a runtime so you can use your iOS apps and media on an Android device or a non-Apple desktop â and Apple will reduce you to radioactive rubble.
- Let the Platforms Burn: The Opposite of Good Fires is Wildfires
Tech bosses know the only thing protecting them from sudden platform collapse syndrome are the laws that have been passed to stave off the inevitable fire.
They know that platforms implode âslowly, then all at once.âThey know that if we werenât holding each other hostage, weâd all leave in a heartbeat.
But anything that canât go on forever will eventually stop.
Suppressing good fire doesnât mean âno fires,â it means wildfires. Itâs time to declare fire debt bankruptcy. Itâs time to admit we canât make these combustible, tinder-heavy forests safe.
Itâs time to start moving people out of the danger zone.
Itâs time to let the platforms burn.
- Let the Platforms Burn: The Opposite of Good Fires is Wildfires
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This week on my podcast, I read âLet the Platforms Burn,â a recent Medium column making the case that we should focus more on making it easier for people to leave platforms, rather than making the platforms less terrible places to be:
The platforms used to be source of online stability, and many argued that by consolidating the wide and wooly web into a few âcuratedâ silos, the platforms were replacing chaos with good stewardship. If we wanted to make the internet hospitable to normies, we were told, we had to accept that Apple and Facebookâs tightly managed âsimplicityâ were the only way to get there.
But today, all the platforms are on fire, all the time. They are rocked by scandals every bit as awful as the failures of the smaller sites of yesteryear, but while harms of a Geocities or Livejournal moderation failure were confined to a small group of specialized users, failures in the big silos reach hundreds of millions or even billions of people.
What should we do about the rolling crisis of the platforms? The default responseâââbeloved of Big Techâs boosters and critics alikeâââis to impose rules on the platforms to make them more hospitable places for the billions theyâve engulfed. But I think that will fail. Instead, I think we should make the platforms less important places by freeing those billions.
Thatâs the argument of the column.
Think of Californiaâs wildfires. While climate change has increased the intensity and frequency of our fires, climate (and neglect by PG&E) is merely part of the story. The other part of the story is fire-debt.
For millennia, the original people of California practiced controlled burns of the forests they lived, hunted, and played in. These burns cleared out sick and dying trees, scoured the forest floor of tinder, and opened spaces in the canopy that gave rise to new growth. Forests need fireâââliterally: the California redwood canât reproduce without it:
But this ended centuries ago, when settlers stole the land and declared an end to âcultural burningâ by the indigenous people they expropriated, imprisoned, and killed. They established permanent settlements within the fire zone, and embarked on a journey of escalating measures to keep that smouldering fire zone from igniting.
These heroic measures continue today, and theyâve set up a vicious cycle: fire suppression creates the illusion that itâs safe to live at the wildlife urban interface. Taken in by this illusion, more people move to the fire zoneâââand their presence creates political pressure for even more heroic measures.
The thing is, fire suppression doesnât mean no firesâââit means wildfires. The fire debt mounts and mounts, and without an orderly bankruptcyâââcontrolled burnsâââwe get chaotic defaults, the kind of fire that wipes out whole towns.
Eventually, we will have to change tacks: rather than making it safe to stay in the fire zone, weâre going to have to make it easy to leave, so that we can return to those controlled burns and pay down those fire-debts.
And thatâs what we need to do with the platforms.
For most of the history of consumer tech and digital networks, fire was the norm. New platformsâââPC companies, operating systems, online servicesâââwould spring up and grow with incredible speed, only to collapse, seemingly without warning.
To get to the bottom of this phenomenon, you need to understand two concepts: network effects and switching costs.
Network effects: A service enjoys network effects if it increases in value as more people use it. AOL Instant Messenger grows in usefulness every time someone signs up for it, and so does Facebook. The more users, the more reasons to join. The more people who join, the more people will join.
Switching costs: The things you have to give up when you leave a product or service. When you quit Audible, you have to throw away all your audiobooks (they will only play on Audible-approved players). When you leave Facebook, you have to say goodbye to all the friends, family, communities and customers that brought you there.
Tech has historically enjoyed enormous network effects, which propelled explosive growth. But it also enjoyed low switching costs, which underpinned implosive contraction. Because digital systems are universal (all computers can run all programs; all nodes on the network can connect to one another), it was historically very easy to switch from one service to another.
Someone building a new messenger service or social media platform could import your list of contacts, or even use bots to fetch the messages left for you on the old service and put them in the inbox on the new one, and then push your replies back to the people you left behind. Likewise, when Apple made its iWork office suite, it could reverse-engineer the Microsoft Office file formats so you could take all your data with you if you quit Windows and switched to MacOS:
This dynamicââânetwork effects growth and low switching costs contractionâââis why we think of tech as so dynamic. Itâs companies like DEC were able to turn out minicomputers that shattered the dominance of mainframes. But itâs also why DEC was brought so low that a PC company, Compaqâââwas able to buy it for pennies on the dollar. Compaqâââa company that built an empire by making interoperable IBM PC clonesâââwas itself âdisruptedâ a few years later, and HP bought it for spare change found in the sofa cushions.
But HP didnât fall to Compaqâs fate. It survivedâââas did IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google and Facebook. Somehow, the cycle of âgood fireâ that kept any company from growing too powerful was interrupted.
Todayâs tech giants run âwalled gardensâ that are actually walled prisons that entrap their billions of users by imposing high switching costs on them. How did that happen? How did tech become âfive giant websites filled with screenshots from the other four?â
The answer lies in the fact that tech was born as antitrust was dying. Reagan hit the campaign trail the same year the Apple ][+ hit shelves. With every presidency since, tech has grown more powerful and antitrust has grown weaker (the Biden administration has halted this decay, but it must repair 40 yearsâ worth of sabotage).
This allowed tech to âmerge to monopoly.â Google built a single successful productâââa search engineâââand then conquered the web by buying other peoplesâ companies, even as their own internal product development process produced a nearly unbroken string of flops. Apple buys 90 companies a yearâââTim Cook brings home a new company more often than you bring home a bag of groceries:
When Facebook was threatened by an upstart called Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg sent a middle-of-the-night email to his CFO defending his plan to pay $1b for the then-tiny company, insisting that the only way to secure eternal dominance was to eliminate competitorsâââby buying them out, not by being better than them. As Zuckerberg says, âIt is better to buy than competeâ:
As tech consolidated into a cozy oligopoly whose execs hopped from one company to another, they rigged the game. They colluded on a criminal âno-poachâ deal to suppress their workersâ wages:
This collusion is the inevitable result of market concentration. 100 squabbling tech companies will be at each othersâ throats, unable to agree on catering for their annual meeting much less a common lobbying agenda. But boil those companies down to a bare handful and theyâll quickly converge on a single hymn and twine their voices in eerie harmony:
Eliminating antitrust enforcementâââletting companies buy and merge with competitors, permitting predatory pricing and other exclusionary tacticsâââwas the first step towards unsustainable fire suppression. But, as on the California wildland-urban interface, this measure quickly gave way to ever-more-extreme ones as the fire debt mounted.
The techâs oligarchs have spent decades both suppressing laws that would limit their extractive profits (thereâs a reason thereâs no US federal privacy law!), and, crucially, getting new law made to limit anyone from âdisruptingâ them as they disrupted their forebears.
Today, a thicket of laws and rulesâââpatent, copyright, anti-circumvention, tortious interference, trade secrecy, noncompete, etcâââhave been fashioned into a legal superweapon that tech companies can use to control the conduct of their competitors, critics and customers, and prevent them from making or using interoperable tools to reduce their switching costs and leave their walled gardens:
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
Today, these laws are being bolstered with new ones that make it even more difficult for users to leave the platforms. These new laws purport to protect users from each other, but they leave them even more at the platformsâ mercy.
So we get rules requiring platforms to spy on their users in the name of preventing harassment, rather than laws requiring platforms to stand up APIs that let users leave the platform and seek out a new online home that values their wellbeing:
The platforms insistâââwith some justificationâââthat we canât ask them to both control their users and give their users more freedom. If we want a platform to detect and block âbad content,â we canât also require the platform to let third party interoperators plug into the system and exchange messages with it.
Theyâre rightâââbut that doesnât mean we should defend them. The problem with the platforms isnât merely that theyâre bad at defending their usersâ interests. The problem is that they canât defend those interests. Mark Zuckerberg isnât merely monumentally, personally unsuited to serving as the unelected, unaacountable social media czar for billions of people in hundreds of countries, speaking thousands of languages. No one should have that job.
We donât need a better Mark Zuckerberg. We need no Mark Zuckerbergs. We donât need to perfect Zuckâââwe need to abolish Zuck.
Rather than pouring our resources into making life in the smoldering wildlife-urban interface safe, we should help people leave that combustible zone, with policies that make migration easy.
This month, we got an example of how just easy that migration could be. Meta launched Threads, a social media platform that used your list of Instagram followers and followees to get you set up. Those low switching costs made it easy for Instagram users to become Threads usersâââand the network effects meant it happened fast, with 30m signups in the first morning:
Meta says it was able to do this because it owns both Insta and Threads. But Meta doesnât own the list of accounts that you trust and value enough to follow, or the people who feel the same way about you. Thatâs yours. We could and should force Meta to let you have it.
But thatâs not enough. Meta claims that it will someday integrate Threads into the Fediverse, the collection of services based on the ActivityPub standard, whose most popular app is Mastodon. On Mastodon, you not only get to export your list of followers and followees with one click, but you can import those followers and followees to a new server with one click.
Threads looks incredibly stupid, a âTwitter alternative you would order from Brookstone,â but there are already tens of millions of people establishing relationships with each other there:
When they get tired of âbrand-safe vaporposting,â theyâll have to either give up those relationships, or resign themselves to being trapped inside another walled-garden-cum-prison operated by a mediocre tech warlord:
But what if, instead of trying to force Zuck to be a better emperor-for-life, we passed rules requiring him to let his subjects flee his tyrannical reign? We could require Threads to stand up a Fediverse gateway that let users leave the service and set up on any other Fediverse servers (we could apply this rule to all Fediverse servers, preventing petty dictators from tormenting their users, too):
This is the thing platforms fear the most. Network effects work in both directions: if your service grows quickly because people value one another, then it will shrink quickly when the people your users care about leave. As @zephoria-blogâ recounts, this is what happened when Myspace imploded:
When I started seeing the disappearance of emotionally sticky nodes, I reached out to members of the MySpace team to share my concerns and they told me that their numbers looked fine. Active uniques were high, the amount of time people spent on the site was continuing to grow, and new accounts were being created at a rate faster than accounts were being closed. I shook my head; I didnât think that was enough. A few months later, the site started to unravel.
Platforms collapse âslowly, then all at once.â The only way to prevent sudden platform collapse syndrome is to block interoperability so users canât escape the harms of your walled garden without giving up the benefits they give to each other.
We should stop trying to make the platforms good. We should make them gone. We should restore the âgood fireâ that ended with the growth of financialized Big Tech empires. We should aim for soft landings for users, and stop pretending that thereâs any safe way to life in the fire zone.
Tonight (July 18), Iâm hosting the first Clarion Summer Write-In Series, an hour-long, free drop-in group writing and discussion session. Itâs in support of the Clarion SF/F writing workshopâs fundraiser to offer tuition support to students:
This is a vicious cycle: massive fire suppression efforts creates the illusion that people can safely live at the wildlandâurban interface. Taken in by this illusion, more people move to this combustible zone. The presence of these people in the danger zone militates for more extreme fire-suppression, which makes the illusion all the more tempting. Yielding to temptation, more people move to the fire zone.
But the opposite of controlled burns isnât no burns, itâs out-of-control burns: wildfires.
Fires that erase whole towns. Fires that burn unchecked. Anything that canât go on forever will eventually stop. Fire debt mounts. When the interest payments get too high to bear, we go into chaotic default.
California needs to burn. It needs an orderly bankruptcy. It needs to revive the controlled âgood fireâ that kept the land safe and healthy and allowed humans and forests to peacefully co-exist.
The alternative to letting California burn in an orderly, controlled fashion is for California to burn anyway. Itâs wildfire. Itâs tragedy and destruction.
- Let the Platforms Burn: The Opposite of Good Fires is Wildfires
playboy bunny + one nice fire. October/November has been fun so far. I had a lovely conversation with my dad about our family history and lore around this fire.
