I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me next in SALT LAKE CITY (Feb 21, Weller Book Works) and SAN DIEGO (Feb 22, Mysterious Galaxy). After that, it's LA, Seattle, Portland, Phoenix and more!
Enshittification describes how platforms go bad, which is also how the internet goes bad, because the internet is made of platforms, which is weird, because platforms are intermediaries and we were promised that the internet would disintermediate the world:
The internet did disintermediate a hell of a lot of intermediaries – that is, "middlemen" – but then it created a bunch more of these middlemen, who coalesced into a handful of gatekeepers, or as the EU calls them "VLOPs" (Very Large Online Platforms, the most EU acronym ever).
Which raises two questions: first, why did so many of us end up flocking to these intermediaries' sites, and how did those sites end up with so much power?
To answer the first question, I want you to consider one of my favorite authors: Crad Kilodney (RIP):
https://archive.org/details/thecradkilodneypapers
When I was growing up, Crad was a fixture on the streets of Toronto. All through the day and late into the evening, winter or summer, Crad would stand on the street with a sign around his neck ("Very famous Canadian author, buy my books, $2" or sometimes just "Margaret Atwood, buy my books, $2"). He wrote these deeply weird, often very funny short stories, which he edited, typeset, printed, bound and sold himself, one at a time, to people who approached him on the street.
I had a lot of conversations with Crad – as an aspiring writer, I was endlessly fascinated by him and his books. He was funny, acerbic – and sneaky. Crad wore a wire: he kept a hidden tape recorder rolling in his coat and he secretly recorded conversations with people like me, and then released a series of home-duplicated tapes of the weirdest and funniest ones:
But – and this is the crucial part – there are writers out there I want to hear from who couldn't do what Crad did. Maybe they can write books, but not edit them. Or edit them, but not typeset them. Or typeset, but not print. Or print, but not spend the rest of their lives standing on a street-corner with a "PUTRID SCUM" sign around their neck.
Which is fine. That's why we have intermediaries. I like booksellers (I was one!). I like publishers. I like distributors. I like their salesforce, who go forth and convince the booksellers of the world to stock books like mine. I have ten million things I want to do before I die, and I'm already 52, and being a sales-rep for a publisher isn't on my bucket list. I am so thankful that someone else wants to do this for me.
That's why we have intermediaries, and why disintermediation always leads to some degree of re-intermediation. There's a lot of explicit and implicit knowledge and specialized skill required to connect buyers and sellers, creators and audiences, and other sides of two-sided markets. Some producers can do some of this stuff for themselves, and a very few – like Crad – can do it all, but most of us need some help, somewhere along the way. In the excellent 2022 book Direct, Kathryn Judge lays out a clear case for all the good that middlemen can do:
So why were we all so anxious for disintermediation back in the late 1990s? Here's a hint: it wasn't because we hated intermediaries – it was because we hated powerful intermediaries.
The point of an intermediary is to serve as a conduit between producers and consumers, buyers and sellers, audiences and creators. When an intermediary gains power over the audience – say, by locking them inside a walled garden – and then uses that lock-in to screw producers and appropriate an ever larger share of the value going between them, that's when intermediaries become a problem.
The problem isn't that someone will handle ticketing for your gig. The problem is that Ticketmaster has locked down all the ticketing, and the venues, and the promotions, and it uses that power to gouge fans and rip off artists:
The problem isn't that there's a well-made website that lets you shop for goods sold by many small merchants and producers. It's that Amazon has cornered this market, takes $0.51 out of every dollar you spend there, and clones and destroys any small merchant who succeeds on the platform:
The problem isn't that there's a website where you can stream most of the music ever recorded. It's that Spotify colludes with the Big Three labels to rip off artists and sneaks crap you don't want to hear into your stream in order to collect payola:
The problem isn't that there's a website where you can buy any audiobook you want. It's that Amazon's Audible locks every book to its platform forever and steals hundreds of millions of dollars from creators:
The problem, in other words, isn't intermediation – it's power. The thing that distinguishes a useful intermediary from an enshittified bully is power. Intermediaries gain power when our governments stop enforcing competition law. This lets intermediaries buy each other up and corner markets. Once they've formed cozy cartels, they can capture their regulators and commit rampant labor, privacy and consumer violations with impunity. That capture also lets them harness governments to punish smaller players that want to free workers, creators, audiences and customers from walled gardens. It also hands them a whip-hand over their workers, so that any worker who refuses to aid in these nefarious plans can be easily fired:
A world with intermediaries is a better world. As much as I love Crad Kilodney's books, I wouldn't want to live in a world where the only books on my shelves came from people prepared to stand on a street-corner wearing a "FOUL PUS FROM DEAD DOGS" sign.
The problem isn't intermediaries – it's powerful intermediaries. That's why the world's surging antitrust movement is so exciting: by reinstating competition law, we can keep intermediaries small and comparatively weak, so that creators and audiences, drivers and riders, sellers and buyers, and other groups seeking to connect will not find themselves made subservient to middlemen.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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Next TUESDAY (May 14), I'm on a livecast about AI AND ENSHITTIFICATION with TIM O'REILLY; on WEDNESDAY (May 15), I'm in NORTH HOLLYWOOD with HARRY SHEARER for a screening of STEPHANIE KELTON'S FINDING THE MONEY; FRIDAY (May 17), I'm at the INTERNET ARCHIVE in SAN FRANCISCO to keynote the 10th anniversary of the AUTHORS ALLIANCE.
Like Oscar Wilde, "I can resist anything except temptation," and my slow and halting journey to adulthood is really just me grappling with this fact, getting temptation out of my way before I can yield to it.
Behavioral economists have a name for the steps we take to guard against temptation: a "Ulysses pact." That's when you take some possibility off the table during a moment of strength in recognition of some coming moment of weakness:
Famously, Ulysses did this before he sailed into the Sea of Sirens. Rather than stopping his ears with wax to prevent his hearing the sirens' song, which would lure him to his drowning, Ulysses has his sailors tie him to the mast, leaving his ears unplugged. Ulysses became the first person to hear the sirens' song and live to tell the tale.
Ulysses was strong enough to know that he would someday be weak. He expressed his strength by guarding against his weakness. Our modern lives are filled with less epic versions of the Ulysses pact: the day you go on a diet, it's a good idea to throw away all your Oreos. That way, when your blood sugar sings its siren song at 2AM, it will be drowned out by the rest of your body's unwillingness to get dressed, find your keys and drive half an hour to the all-night grocery store.
Note that this Ulysses pact isn't perfect. You might drive to the grocery store. It's rare that a Ulysses pact is unbreakable – we bind ourselves to the mast, but we don't chain ourselves to it and slap on a pair of handcuffs for good measure.
People who run institutions can – and should – create Ulysses pacts, too. A company that holds the kind of sensitive data that might be subjected to "sneak-and-peek" warrants by cops or spies can set up a "warrant canary":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary
This isn't perfect. A company that stops publishing regular transparency reports might have been compromised by the NSA, but it's also possible that they've had a change in management and the new boss just doesn't give a shit about his users' privacy:
Likewise, a company making software it wants users to trust can release that code under an irrevocable free/open software license, thus guaranteeing that each release under that license will be free and open forever. This is good, but not perfect: the new boss can take that free/open code down a proprietary fork and try to orphan the free version:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39772562
A company can structure itself as a public benefit corporation and make a binding promise to elevate its stakeholders' interests over its shareholders' – but the CEO can still take a secret $100m bribe from cryptocurrency creeps and try to lure those stakeholders into a shitcoin Ponzi scheme:
A key resource can be entrusted to a nonprofit with a board of directors who are charged with stewarding it for the benefit of a broad community, but when a private equity fund dangles billions before that board, they can talk themselves into a belief that selling out is the right thing to do:
Ulysses pacts aren't perfect, but they are very important. At the very least, creating a Ulysses pact starts with acknowledging that you are fallible. That you can be tempted, and rationalize your way into taking bad action, even when you know better. Becoming an adult is a process of learning that your strength comes from seeing your weaknesses and protecting yourself and the people who trust you from them.
Which brings me to enshittification. Enshittification is the process by which platforms betray their users and their customers by siphoning value away from each until the platform is a pile of shit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
Enshittification is a spectrum that can be applied to many companies' decay, but in its purest form, enshittification requires:
a) A platform: a two-sided market with business customers and end users who can be played off against each other;
b) A digital back-end: a market that can be easily, rapidly and undetectably manipulated by its owners, who can alter search-rankings, prices and costs on a per-user, per-query basis; and
c) A lack of constraint: the platform's owners must not fear a consequence for this cheating, be it from competitors, regulators, workforce resignations or rival technologists who use mods, alternative clients, blockers or other "adversarial interoperability" tools to disenshittify your product and sever your relationship with your users.
he founders of tech platforms don't generally set out to enshittify them. Rather, they are constantly seeking some equilibrium between delivering value to their shareholders and turning value over to end users, business customers, and their own workers. Founders are consummate rationalizers; like parenting, founding a company requires continuous, low-grade self-deception about the amount of work involved and the chances of success. A founder, confronted with the likelihood of failure, is absolutely capable of talking themselves into believing that nearly any compromise is superior to shuttering the business: "I'm one of the good guys, so the most important thing is for me to live to fight another day. Thus I can do any number of immoral things to my users, business customers or workers, because I can make it up to them when we survive this crisis. It's for their own good, even if they don't know it. Indeed, I'm doubly moral here, because I'm volunteering to look like the bad guy, just so I can save this business, which will make the world over for the better":
(En)shit(tification) flows downhill, so tech workers grapple with their own version of this dilemma. Faced with constant pressure to increase the value flowing from their division to the company, they have to balance different, conflicting tactics, like "increasing the number of users or business customers, possibly by shifting value from the company to these stakeholders in the hopes of making it up in volume"; or "locking in my existing stakeholders and squeezing them harder, safe in the knowledge that they can't easily leave the service provided the abuse is subtle enough." The bigger a company gets, the harder it is for it to grow, so the biggest companies realize their gains by locking in and squeezing their users, not by improving their service::
That's where "twiddling" comes in. Digital platforms are extremely flexible, which comes with the territory: computers are the most flexible tools we have. This means that companies can automate high-speed, deceptive changes to the "business logic" of their platforms – what end users pay, how much of that goes to business customers, and how offers are presented to both:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/
This kind of fraud isn't particularly sophisticated, but it doesn't have to be – it just has to be fast. In any shell-game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye:
Under normal circumstances, this twiddling would be constrained by counterforces in society. Changing the business rules like this is fraud, so you'd hope that a regulator would step in and extinguish the conduct, fining the company that engaged in it so hard that they saw a net loss from the conduct. But when a sector gets very concentrated, its mega-firms capture their regulators, becoming "too big to jail":
Thus the tendency among the giant tech companies to practice the one lesson of the Darth Vader MBA: dismissing your stakeholders' outrage by saying, "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":
Where regulators fail, technology can step in. The flexibility of digital platforms cuts both ways: when the company enshittifies its products, you can disenshittify it with your own countertwiddling: third-party ink-cartridges, alternative app stores and clients, scrapers, browser automation and other forms of high-tech guerrilla warfare:
But tech giants' regulatory capture have allowed them to expand "IP rights" to prevent this self-help. By carefully layering overlapping IP rights around their products, they can criminalize the technology that lets you wrestle back the value they've claimed for themselves, creating a new offense of "felony contempt of business model":
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
A world where users must defer to platforms' moment-to-moment decisions about how the service operates, without the protection of rival technology or regulatory oversight is a world where companies face a powerful temptation to enshittify.
That's why we've seen so much enshittification in platforms that algorithmically rank their feeds, from Google and Amazon search to Facebook and Twitter feeds. A search engine is always going to be making a judgment call about what the best result for your search should be. If a search engine is generally good at predicting which results will please you best, you'll return to it, automatically clicking the first result ("I'm feeling lucky").
This means that if a search engine slips in the odd paid result at the top of the results, they can exploit your trusting habits to shift value from you to their investors. The congifurability of a digital service means that they can sprinkle these frauds into their services on a random schedule, making them hard to detect and easy to dismiss as lapses. Gradually, this acquires its own momentum, and the platform becomes addicted to lowering its own quality to raise its profits, and you get modern Google, which cynically lowered search quality to increase search volume:
And you get Amazon, which makes $38 billion every year, accepting bribes to replace its best search results with paid results for products that cost more and are of lower quality:
Social media's enshittification followed a different path. In the beginning, social media presented a deterministic feed: after you told the platform who you wanted to follow, the platform simply gathered up the posts those users made and presented them to you, in reverse-chronological order.
This presented few opportunities for enshittification, but it wasn't perfect. For users who were well-established on a platform, a reverse-chrono feed was an ungovernable torrent, where high-frequency trivialities drowned out the important posts from people whose missives were buried ten screens down in the updates since your last login.
For new users who didn't yet follow many people, this presented the opposite problem: an empty feed, and the sense that you were all alone while everyone else was having a rollicking conversation down the hall, in a room you could never find.
The answer was the algorithmic feed: a feed of recommendations drawn from both the accounts you followed and strangers alike. Theoretically, this could solve both problems, by surfacing the most important materials from your friends while keeping you abreast of the most important and interesting activity beyond your filter bubble. For many of us, this promise was realized, and algorithmic feeds became a source of novelty and relevance.
But these feeds are a profoundly tempting enshittification target. The critique of these algorithms has largely focused on "addictiveness" and the idea that platforms would twiddle the knobs to increase the relevance of material in your feed to "hack your engagement":
Less noticed – and more important – was how platforms did the opposite: twiddling the knobs to remove things from your feed that you'd asked to see or that the algorithm predicted you'd enjoy, to make room for "boosted" content and advertisements:
Users were helpless before this kind of twiddling. On the one hand, they were locked into the platform – not because their dopamine had been hacked by evil tech-bro wizards – but because they loved the friends they had there more than they hated the way the service was run:
On the other hand, the platforms had such an iron grip on their technology, and had deployed IP so cleverly, that any countertwiddling technology was instantaneously incinerated by legal death-rays:
Newer social media platforms, notably Tiktok, dispensed entirely with deterministic feeds, defaulting every user into a feed that consisted entirely of algorithmic picks; the people you follow on these platforms are treated as mere suggestions by their algorithms. This is a perfect breeding-ground for enshittification: different parts of the business can twiddle the knobs to override the algorithm for their own parochial purposes, shifting the quality:shit ratio by unnoticeable increments, temporarily toggling the quality knob when your engagement drops off:
All social platforms want to be Tiktok: nominally, that's because Tiktok's algorithmic feed is so good at hooking new users and keeping established users hooked. But tech bosses also understand that a purely algorithmic feed is the kind of black box that can be plausibly and subtly enshittified without sparking user revolts:
Back in 2004, when Mark Zuckerberg was coming to grips with Facebook's success, he boasted to a friend that he was sitting on a trove of emails, pictures and Social Security numbers for his fellow Harvard students, offering this up for his friend's idle snooping. The friend, surprised, asked "What? How'd you manage that one?"
Infamously, Zuck replied, "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me.' Dumb fucks."
This was a remarkable (and uncharacteristic) self-aware moment from the then-nineteen-year-old Zuck. Of course Zuck couldn't be trusted with that data. Whatever Jiminy Cricket voice told him to safeguard that trust was drowned out by his need to boast to pals, or participate in the creepy nonconsensual rating of the fuckability of their female classmates. Over and over again, Zuckerberg would promise to use his power wisely, then break that promise as soon as he could do so without consequence:
Zuckerberg is a cautionary tale. Aware from the earliest moments that he was amassing power that he couldn't be trusted with, he nevertheless operated with only the weakest of Ulysses pacts, like a nonbinding promise never to spy on his users:
But the platforms have learned the wrong lesson from Zuckerberg. Rather than treating Facebook's enshittification as a cautionary tale, they've turned it into a roadmap. The Darth Vader MBA rules high-tech boardrooms.
Algorithmic feeds and other forms of "paternalistic" content presentation are necessary and even desirable in an information-rich environment. In many instances, decisions about what you see must be largely controlled by a third party whom you trust. The audience in a comedy club doesn't get to insist on knowing the punchline before the joke is told, just as RPG players don't get to order the Dungeon Master to present their preferred challenges during a campaign.
But this power is balanced against the ease of the players replacing the Dungeon Master or the audience walking out on the comic. When you've got more than a hundred dollars sunk into a video game and an online-only friend-group you raid with, the games company can do a lot of enshittification without losing your business, and they know it:
A tech company that seeks your trust for an algorithmic feed needs Ulysses pacts, or it will inevitably yield to the temptation to enshittify. From strongest to weakest, these are:
Not showing you an algorithmic feed at all;
https://joinmastodon.org/
"Composable moderation" that lets multiple parties provide feeds:
Maturity lies in being strong enough to know your weaknesses. Never trust someone who tells you that they will never yield to temptation! Instead, seek out people – and service providers – with the maturity and honesty to know how tempting temptation is, and who act before temptation strikes to make it easier to resist.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
This week on my podcast, I read “Twiddler,” a recent Medium column in which I delve more deeply into enshittification, and how it is a pathology of digital platforms, distinct from the rent-seeking of the analog world that preceded it:
https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Enshittification, you’ll recall, is the lifecycle of the online platform: first, the platform allocates surpluses to end-users; then, once users are locked in, those surpluses are taken away and given to business-customers. Once the advertisers, publishers, sellers, creators and performers are locked in, the surplus is clawed away from them and taken by the platforms.
Facebook is the poster-child for enshittification. When FB welcomed the general public in 2006, it sold itself as the privacy-respecting alternative to Myspace, promising users it would never harvest their data. The FB feed consisted of the posts that the people you’d followed — the people you cared about — published.
FB experienced explosive growth, thanks to two factors: “network effects” (every new user was a draw for other users who wanted to converse with them), and “switching costs” (it was practically impossible to convince all the people you wanted to hear from to leave FB, much less agree on what platform to go to next). In other words, every new user who joined FB both attracted more users, and made it harder for those users to leave.
FB attained end-user lockin and was now able to transfer users’ surpluses to business customers. First, it started aggressively spying on users and offered precision targeting at rock-bottom prices to advertisers. Second, it offered media companies “algorithmic” boosting into the feeds of users who hadn’t asked to see their posts.
Media companies that posted brief excerpts to FB, along with links to their sites on the real internet were rewarded with floods of traffic, as their posts were jammed into the eyeballs of millions of FB users who never asked to see them. Media companies and advertisers went all-in for FB, integrating FB surveillance beacons in their presence on the real internet, hiring social media specialists who’d do Platform Kremlinology in order to advise them on the best way to please The Algorithm.
Once those business customers — creators, media companies, advertisers — were locked into FB, the company harvested their surplus, too. On the ad side, FB raised rates and decreased expensive anti-fraud measures, meaning that advertisers had to pay more, even as an increasing proportion of their ads were either never served, or never seen.
With media companies and creators, FB not only stopped jamming their content in front of people who never asked to see it, they actively suppressed the spread of business users’ posts even to their own subscribers. FB required media companies to transition from excerpts to fulltext feeds, and downranked or simply blocked posts that linked back to a business user’s own site, be it a newspaper’s web presence or a creator’s crowdfunding service. Business users who wanted to reach the people who had explicitly directed FB to incorporate their media in users’ feeds had to pay to “boost” their materials.
This is the (nearly) complete enshittification cycle: having harvested the surplus from users and business customers, FB is now (badly) attempting to surf the line where nearly all the value in the service lands in its shareholders’ pockets, with just enough surplus left behind to keep end-users and business-users locked in (see also: Twitter).
There have been lots of other abusive “platform” businesses in the past — famously, 19th century railroads and their robber-baron owners were so obnoxiously abusive that they spawned the trustbusting movement, the Sherman Act, and modern competition law. Did the rail barons do enshittification, too?
Well, yes — and no. I have no doubt that robber barons would have engaged in zuckerbergian shenanigans if they could have — but here we run up against the stubborn inertness of atoms and the slippery liveliness of bits. Changing a railroad schedule to make direct connections with cities where you want to destroy a rival ferry business (or hell, laying track to those cities) is a slow proposition. Changing the content recommendation system at Facebook is something you do with a few mouse-clicks.
Which brings me to the thesis of “Twiddler”: enshittification doesn’t arise from the special genius or the unique wickedness of tech barons — rather, it’s the product of the ability to twiddle. Our discourse has focused (rightly) on the extent to which platforms are “instrumented” — that is, the degree to which they spy on and analyze their users’ conduct.
But the discussion of what the platforms do with that data — the ways they “react” to it — has echoed the platforms’ own boasts of transcendental “behavior modification” prowess (c.f. “Surveillance Capitalism”) while giving short shrift to the extremely mundane, straightforward ways that the ability to change the business-logic of a platform lets it allocate and withdraw surpluses from different kinds of users to get them on the hook, reel them in, and then skin and devour them.
The Twiddler thesis, in other words, is a counter to the narrative of Maria Farrell’s Prodigal Tech Bros, who claim that they were once evil sorcerers, but, having seen the error of their ways, vow to be good sorcerers from now on, forswearing “hacking our dopamine loops” like vampires swearing off blood:
People who repeat the claims of Prodigal Tech Bros are engaging in criti-hype, Lee Vinsel’s term for criticism that repeats tech’s own mystical narratives of their own superhuman prowess, rather than grappling with the mundanity of doing old conjurer’s tricks very quickly, with computers:
That’s what twiddling is — doing the same things that grocery store monopolists and rail monopolists and music label monopolists have always done, but very quickly, with computers. Whether it’s Amazon rooking sellers and authors, or Apple and Google’s App Stores rooking app creators, or Tiktok and Youtube rooking performers, or Uber rooking drivers, the underlying pattern of surplus-harvesting is the same, and so is the method. They do the same thing as their predecessors, but very quickly, with computers.
A grocer who wants to price-gouge on eggs needs to dispatch an army of low-waged employees with pricing guns. AmazonFresh does the same thing in an eyeblink, by typing a new number into a field on a web-form and clicking submit. As is so often the case when a magic trick is laid bare, the actual mechanic is very, very boring: the way to make a nickel appear to vanish is to spend hundreds of hours practicing before a mirror while you shift so it is clenched between your fingers, and protrudes from behind your hand (sorry, spoiler alert).
The trick can be baffling and marvellous when you see it, but once you know how it’s done, it’s pretty obvious — the difference is that most sleight-of-hand artists don’t think they’re sorcerers, while plenty of tech bros believe their own press.
There’s a profound irony in twiddling’s role in enshittification: early internet scholarship rightly hailed the power of twiddling for internet users. Theorists like Aram Sinnreich described this as configurability — the ability of end-users (aided by tinkerers, small businesses, and co-ops) to modify the services they used to suit their own needs:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vk8c2
Arguably the most successful configurability story is ad-blocking, which Doc Searls calls “the biggest boycott in human history.” Billions of end-users of the web have twiddled their browsers so that they aren’t tracked by ad-tech and don’t see ads:
Configurability was at the heart of early hopes for mass disintermediation, because audiences and performers (or sellers and producers) could go direct to one another, assembling a customized, un-capturable conduit composed of an a-la-carte selection of payment processors, webstores, mail and web hosts, etc. Whenever one of these utilities tried to capture that relationship and harvest an unfair share of the surplus, both ends of the transaction could foil them by blocking, reverse-engineering, modding, or mashing them up, wriggling off the hook before it could set its barbs.
But — as we can all see — a funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century. The platforms seized the internet, turning it into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”:
1. They were able to buy or merge with every major competitor, and where that failed them, they were able to use predatory pricing to drive competitors out of the market:
2. They were able to twiddle their services, setting them a-bristle with surveillance beacons and digital actuators that could rearrange the virtual furniture every time some knob-jockey touched their dial:
https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6
3. They were able to hoard the twiddling, using laws like the DMCA, CFAA, noncompetes, trade secrecy, and other “IP” laws to control the conduct of their competitors, critics and customers:
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
That last point is very important: it’s not just that big corporations twiddle us to death — it’s that they have made it illegal for us to twiddle back. Adblocking is possible on the open web, but to ad-block your Iphone, you must first jailbreak it, which is a crime. Yes, Apple will block Facebook from spying on you — but even if you opt out of tracking, Apple still spies on you in exactly the same way Facebook did, to power their own ad-targeting business:
This is what Jay Freeman calls “felony contempt of business-model” — the literal criminalization of configuration. When Netflix wants to decide who is and isn’t a member of your family, they just twiddle their back-end to block the child that moves back and forth between your home and your ex’s, thanks to your joint custody arrangement:
But woe betide the parent who twiddles back to restore their child’s service, by jailbreaking an app or the W3C’s official, in-browser DRM, EME — trafficking in a tool to bypass EME and reconfigure your browser to suit your needs, rather than Netflix’s, is a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine, under Section 1201 of the DMCA:
This is the supreme irony of twiddling: Big Tech companies love to twiddle you, but if you touch your own knob, they call it a crime. Just as Big Tech firms turned “free software” into “open source” and then took all the software freedom for themselves, configurability is now the exclusive purview of corporations — those transhuman, immortal colony paperclip maximizers that treat humans as inconvenient gut-flora:
2. Anti-twiddling laws for businesses: A federal privacy law with a private right of action, labor protections, and other rules that take knobs away from tech platforms:
Monopolists and their handmaidens — witting and unwitting — want you to believe that their dominance is inevitable (shades of Thatcher’s “there is no alternative”), because the great forces of history, the technical characteristics of digital technology, and the sorcerous mind-control of dopamine-hackers.
But the reality is much more mundane. Digital freedom was never a mirage. Indeed, it is a prize of enormous value — that’s why the platforms are so intent on hoarding it all for themselves.
Here’s this week’s podcast episode:
https://craphound.com/news/2023/02/27/twiddler/
And here’s a direct link to download the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the Internet Archive ; they’ll host your media for free, forever):
TK
Here’s the direct feed to subscribe to my podcast:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast
And here’s the original “Twiddler” article on Medium:
https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6
Image:
Stephen Drake (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Analog_Test_Array_modular_synth_by_sduck409.jpg
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https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en
This Thu (Mar 2) I’ll be in Brussels for Antitrust, Regulation and the Political Economy, along with a who’s-who of European and US trustbusters. It’s livestreamed, and both in-person and virtual attendance are free. On Fri (Mar 3), I’ll be in Graz for the Elevate Festival.
[Image ID: A mandala made from a knob and button-covered control panel.]
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With great pleasure we unveil Dreammaker; a Multipurpose Cooperative Society registered under the Federal Capital Development Authority (FCDA), to promote the economic interests of her Members.
At Dreammaker, we are committed to wealth creation and we bring your dreams to life, building brick by brick. Our four pronged focus on; Savings, Micro lending, Intermediation and Synergg is designed to…
Spring break came up so quickly after my start that is slightly snapped my attention span. But the beat goes on.
have already mentioned in previous posts, though one of which beares re-mentioning here. Because black doctors in the South weren’t allowed by law and custom to join state medical societies, they also couldn’t join the national AMA (nor could they practice in white hospitals, but…
