[Plura-list] Podcasting "Let the Platforms Burn"
Cory Doctorow
doctorow at craphound.com
Tue Jul 18 12:19:45 EDT 2023
Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/18/urban-wildlife-interface/
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Tonight (Jul 18), I'm hosting the first Clarion Summer Write-In Series, an hour-long, free drop-in group writing and discussion session. It's in support of the Clarion SF/F writing workshop's fundraiser to offer tuition support to students:
https://mailchi.mp/theclarionfoundation/clarion-write-ins
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Today's links
* Podcasting "Let the Platforms Burn": It's past time to evacuate the fire-zone.
* Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
* This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018
* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading
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👩🏿🦱 Podcasting "Let the Platforms Burn"
This week on my podcast, I read "Let the Platforms Burn," 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:
https://doctorow.medium.com/let-the-platforms-burn-6fb3e6c0d980
The platforms used to be source of online stability, and many argued that by consolidating the wide and wooly web into a few "curated" 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 Facebook's tightly managed "simplicity" 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 response - beloved of Big Tech's boosters and critics alike - is to impose rules on the platforms to make them more hospitable places for the billions they've engulfed. But I think that will fail. Instead, I think we should make the platforms *less important places* by *freeing those billions*.
That's the argument of the column.
Think of California's 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 fire - literally: the California redwood can't reproduce without it:
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/giant-sequoia-needs-fire-grow/15094/
But this ended centuries ago, when settlers stole the land and declared an end to "cultural burning" 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 they've set up a vicious cycle: fire suppression creates the illusion that it's safe to live at the wildlife urban interface. Taken in by this illusion, more people move to the fire zone - and their presence creates political pressure for even *more* heroic measures.
The thing is, fire suppression doesn't mean no fires - it means *wildfires*. The fire debt mounts and mounts, and without an orderly bankruptcy - controlled burns - we 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, we're 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 that's what we need to do with the platforms.
For most of the history of consumer tech and digital networks, fire was the norm. New platforms - PC companies, operating systems, online services - would 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:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay
This dynamic - network effects growth and low switching costs contraction - is why we think of tech as so *dynamic*. It's companies like DEC were able to turn out minicomputers that shattered the dominance of mainframes. But it's also why DEC was brought so low that a PC company, Compaq - was able to buy it for pennies on the dollar. Compaq - a company that built an empire by making interoperable IBM PC clones - was itself "disrupted" a few years later, and HP bought *it* for spare change found in the sofa cushions.
But HP *didn't* fall to Compaq's fate. It survived - as did IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google and Facebook. Somehow, the cycle of "good fire" that kept any company from growing too powerful was interrupted.
Today's tech giants run "walled gardens" 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 "five giant websites filled with screenshots from the other four?"
https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040
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 years' worth of sabotage).
This allowed tech to "merge to monopoly." Google built a single successful product - a search engine - and then conquered the web by buying other peoples' companies, even as their own internal product development process produced a nearly unbroken string of flops. Apple buys 90 companies a year - Tim Cook brings home a new company more often than you bring home a bag of groceries:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/6/18531570/apple-company-purchases-startups-tim-cook-buy-rate
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 competitors - by buying them out, not by being better than them. As Zuckerberg says, "It is better to buy than compete":
https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/29/21345723/facebook-instagram-documents-emails-mark-zuckerberg-kevin-systrom-hearing
As tech consolidated into a cozy oligopoly whose execs hopped from one company to another, they rigged the game. They colluded on a criminal "no-poach" deal to suppress their workers' wages:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation
And they colluded to illegally rig the ad-market:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue
This collusion is the inevitable result of market concentration. 100 squabbling tech companies will be at each others' 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 they'll quickly converge on a single hymn and twine their voices in eerie harmony:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/16/compulsive-cheaters/#rigged
Eliminating antitrust enforcement - letting companies buy and merge with competitors, permitting predatory pricing and other exclusionary tactics - was 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 tech's oligarchs have spent decades both suppressing laws that would limit their extractive profits (there's a reason there's no US federal privacy law!), *and*, crucially, getting new law made to limit anyone from "disrupting" them as they disrupted their forebears.
Today, a thicket of laws and rules - patent, copyright, anti-circumvention, tortious interference, trade secrecy, noncompete, etc - have 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 platforms' 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:
https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/publication/lawful-awful-control-over-legal-speech-platforms-governments-and-internet-users
We get laws requiring platforms to "balance" the ideology of their content moderation:
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/09/16/texas-social-media-law/
But not laws that require platforms to make it easy to seek out a new server whose moderation policies are more hospitable to your ideas:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/right-or-left-you-should-be-worried-about-big-tech-censorship
The platforms insist - with some justification - that we can't ask them to both *control* their users *and* give their users more freedom. If we want a platform to detect and block "bad content," we can't also require the platform to let third party interoperators plug into the system and exchange messages with it.
They're right - but that doesn't mean we should defend them. The problem with the platforms isn't merely that they're bad at defending their users' interests. The problem is that they *can't* defend those interests. Mark Zuckerberg isn't 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 don't need a *better* Mark Zuckerberg. We need *no* Mark Zuckerbergs. We don't need to perfect Zuck - we 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 users - and the network effects meant it happened *fast*, with 30m signups in the first morning:
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/07/06/meta-launches-threads-and-its-important-for-reasons-that-most-people-wont-care-about/
Meta says it was able to do this because it owns both Insta and Threads. But Meta doesn't own the list of accounts that you trust and value enough to follow, or the people who feel the same way about you. That's *yours*. We could and should force Meta to let you have it.
But that's 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 "Twitter alternative you would order from Brookstone," but there are already tens of millions of people establishing relationships with each other there:
https://jogblog.substack.com/p/facebooks-threads-is-so-depressing
When they get tired of "brand-safe vaporposting," they'll 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:
https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-algorithmic-anti-culture-of-scale
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):
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/platforms-decay-lets-put-users-first
Zuck founded an empire of oily rags, and so of course it's always on fire. We can't make it safe to stay, but we can make it easy to leave:
https://locusmag.com/2018/07/cory-doctorow-zucks-empire-of-oily-rags/
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 danah boyd recounts, this is what happened when Myspace imploded:
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2022/12/05/what-if-failure-is-the-plan.html
> 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 didn’t think that was enough. A few months later, the site started to unravel.
Platforms collapse "slowly, then all at once." The only way to prevent sudden platform collapse syndrome is to block interoperability so users can't 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 "good fire" that ended with the growth of financialized Big Tech empires. We should aim for soft landings for users, and stop pretending that there's any safe way to life in the fire zone.
We should let the platforms *burn*.
Here's the podcast:
https://craphound.com/news/2023/07/16/let-the-platforms-burn-the-opposite-of-good-fires-is-wildfires/
And here's a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the @InternetArchive; they'll host your stuff for free, forever):
https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_446/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_446_-_Let_the_Platforms_Burn.mp3
And here's my podcast feed:
https://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast
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👩🏿🦱 Hey look at this
* Alternative app that can unlock VanMoof bikes more popular amid bankruptcy fears https://nltimes.nl/2023/07/15/alternative-app-can-unlock-vanmoof-bikes-popular-amid-bankruptcy-fears (h/t Gianfranco Cecconi)
* Talking about a ‘schism’ is ahistorical https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/talking-about-a-schism-is-ahistorical-3c454a77220f (h/t John Naughton)
* Hollywood’s Future Belongs to People—Not Machines https://www.wired.com/story/hollywoods-future-belongs-to-people-not-machines/
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👩🏿🦱 This day in history
#20yrsago Crows use tools https://web.archive.org/web/20030811085621/http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/data/crow/index.html
#20yrsago AOL to renege on IM interop promises? https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-jul-16-fi-aol16-story.html
#20yrsago MSFT DRM infringes on Sony/Philips DRM https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-jul-16-fi-patent16-story.html
#20yrsago A Brief History of Negative Space https://www.revolutionsf.com/fiction/negativespace/01.html
#20yrsago Mickey Mouse offs himself https://memex.craphound.com/2003/07/17/mickey-mouse-offs-himself/
#20yrsago How the Nerds Were Having A Perfectly Good Time Until The Businesspeople And Lawyers Showed Up And Ruined Everything http://www.onlisareinsradar.com/archives/001529.php#001529
#15yrsago I am the Very Model of a Modern SF Novelist https://jimhines.livejournal.com/382703.html
#15yrsago Cop busts guy for taking his pic: “It’s illegal to take a picture of a law enforcement officer… if you don’t give it to me, you’re going to jail” https://web.archive.org/web/20080717072712/http://www.tricities.com/tri/news/local/article/man_arrested_for_unlawful_photography/11576/
#15yrsago Progressive geek looking for 3,000 people to help him win Kansas election against dinosauric anti-science/pro-surveillance dude http://seantevis.com/kansas/3000/running-for-office-xkcd-style/
#10yrsago EFF files huge lawsuit against NSA on behalf of broad coalition https://www.eff.org/press/releases/unitarian-church-gun-groups-join-eff-sue-nsa-over-illegal-surveillance
#10yrsago London police sorry for stealing dead kids’ identities for 40 years https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/jul/16/met-chief-spies-dead-children-identities
#10yrsago Raising a reader: how comics can help kids learn to love reading https://cbldf.org/2013/07/cbldf-releases-raising-a-reader-a-resource-for-parents-and-educators/
#10yrsago Anil Dash’s 10 Rules of Internet https://web.archive.org/web/20130721034729/http://dashes.com/anil/2013/07/rules-of-internet.html
#10yrsago Apple’s mobile devices have a secret list of “sensitive” words that don’t autocomplete https://web.archive.org/web/20130722005603/https://newsbeastlabs.tumblr.com/post/55590097779/today-we-published-a-data-story-looking-at-how-ios
#10yrsago Don’t worry, we only spy on terrorists (worry, because everyone we don’t like is a “terrorist”) https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/07/mission-creep-when-everything-is-terrorism/277844/
#10yrsago Death toll from the American anti-vaccine movement https://web.archive.org/web/20130714203456/https://www.jennymccarthybodycount.com/Anti-Vaccine_Body_Count/Home.html
#10yrsago Why librarians are needed more than ever in the 21st century https://web.archive.org/web/20130719020216/http://www.bookpage.com/the-book-case/2010/04/14/neil-gaiman-talks-about-his-love-of-libraries/
#10yrsago Toronto’s Honest Ed’s will go https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/07/16/honest_eds_is_up_for_sale.html
#5yrsago Hackers say they stole tens of thousands of health records of Ontario home-care patients and they want to get paid https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/carepartners-data-breach-ransom-patients-medical-records-1.4749515
#5yrsago Leading voting machine company admits it lied, reveals that its voting machines ship backdoored, with pre-installed remote access software https://www.vice.com/en/article/mb4ezy/top-voting-machine-vendor-admits-it-installed-remote-access-software-on-systems-sold-to-states
#5yrsago UK railway arches, the last bastion of publicly owned commercial space, engines of small business, about to be killed by privatization https://theconversation.com/britains-railway-arches-are-being-sold-off-and-small-businesses-could-be-forced-out-99907
#5yrsago They said Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s message wouldn’t play in the midwest, now she and Bernie are headed to Kansas https://theintercept.com/2018/07/17/brent-welder-kansas-primary-3rd-district-ocasio-cortez-bernie-sanders/
#5yrsago China uses sewage surveillance to detect drugs in urine and feces https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05728-3
#5yrsago Venmo’s “public by default” transactions reveal drug deals, breakups, more https://22-8miles.com/public-by-default/
#5yrsago Pounded in the butt by my own dark SEO: the weird, true story of #Cockygate https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/16/17566276/cockygate-amazon-kindle-unlimited-algorithm-self-published-romance-novel-cabal
#5yrsago Portuguese translation of Zuck’s Empire of Oily Rags https://memex.craphound.com/2018/07/16/portuguese-translation-of-zucks-empire-of-oily-rags/
#5yrsago The MEP behind Europe’s proposed copyright censorship proposal can’t explain all the copyrighted images in his social media https://www.techdirt.com/2018/07/16/guy-charge-pushing-draconian-eu-copyright-directive-evasive-about-his-own-use-copyright-protected-images/
#5yrsago Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez moots a “progressive caucus” of bloc-voting Democratic congresspeople https://theintercept.com/2018/07/16/ocasio-cortez-floats-a-sub-caucus-of-progressives-willing-to-vote-together-as-a-bloc/
#5yrsago McMansion meanings: why do America’s jumbo-sized status homes have useless “formal spaces?” https://archive.curbed.com/2018/7/11/17536876/great-room-house-size-design-square-footage
#5yrsago China’s super-rich get the lion’s share of British plutocrat visas https://www.scmp.com/news/world/europe/article/2155390/chinas-super-rich-lead-way-applications-british-millionaire-visas
#5yrsago Podcast: Zuck’s Empire of Oily Rags https://ia802809.us.archive.org/7/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_296/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_296_-_Zucks_Empire_of_Oily_Rags.mp3
#5yrsago More than a million Europeans spoke out to stop internet-destroying censorship rules, but the fight’s not over https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/07/key-victory-against-european-copyright-filters-and-link-taxes-whats-next
#5yrsago Record numbers of Americans believe climate change is real, and a majority understand that humans are to blame https://web.archive.org/web/20180711151351/https://closup.umich.edu/files/ieep-nsee-2018-spring-climate-belief.pdf
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👩🏿🦱 Colophon
Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
* A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
* Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW
* The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW
* Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. ON SUBMISSION
* Moral Hazard, a short story for MIT Tech Review's 12 Tomorrows. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION
* Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. ON SUBMISSION
Latest podcast: Let the Platforms Burn: The Opposite of Good Fires is Wildfires https://craphound.com/news/2023/07/16/let-the-platforms-burn-the-opposite-of-good-fires-is-wildfires/
Upcoming appearances:
* Clarion Summer Write-In Series, Jul 18
https://mailchi.mp/theclarionfoundation/clarion-write-ins
* Comic-Con (San Diego), Jul 20-23
https://www.comic-con.org/cci/programming-schedule
* Decentralization of the Internet Research Group (IETF-117)
https://dirk-kutscher.info/events/dinrg-ietf-117/
* Midsummeer Scream (Long Beach), Jul 30
https://midsummerscream.org/
* Armadillocon (Austin), Aug 4-6
https://armadillocon.org/d45/
* Defcon (Las Vegas), Aug 10-13
https://defcon.org/
Recent appearances:
* UCL Peter Kirstein Lecture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn47ptAtVH0
* The Homeless Romantic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXn9wy5bHq0
* Why the internet is getting worse
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/209-front-burner/episode/15992083-why-the-internet-is-getting-worse
Latest books:
* "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.
* "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59 (print edition: https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.
Upcoming books:
* The Internet Con: A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech, Verso, September 2023
* The Lost Cause: a post-Green New Deal eco-topian novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias, Tor Books, November 2023
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