[Plura-list] Don't Be Evil
Cory Doctorow
doctorow at craphound.com
Wed Nov 22 07:27:53 EST 2023
Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/22/who-wins-the-argument/
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Tonight (November 22), I'll be joined by Vass Bednar at the Toronto Metro Reference Library for a talk about my new novel, The Lost Cause, a preapocalyptic tale of hope in the climate emergency:
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/705457551527?aff=oddtdtcreator
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Today's links
* Don't Be Evil: My new Locus Column.
* Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
* This day in history: 2003, 2013, 2018, 2022
* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading
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🦵🏿 Don't Be Evil
My latest *Locus Magazine* column is "Don't Be Evil," a consideration of the forces that led to the Great Enshittening, the a dizzying, rapid transformation of formerly useful services went from indispensable to unusable to actively harmful:
https://locusmag.com/2023/11/commentary-by-cory-doctorow-dont-be-evil/
While some services have fallen harder and/or faster, they're *all* falling. When a whole cohort of services all turn sour in the same way, at the same time, it's obvious that something is happening *systemically*.
After all, these companies are still being led by the same people. The leaders who presided over a period in which these companies made good and useful services are also presiding over these services' decay. What factors are leading to a pandemic of rapid-onset enshittification?
Recall that enshittification is a three-stage process: first surpluses are allocated to users until they are locked in. Then they are withdrawn and given to business-customers until *they* are locked in. Then all the value is harvested for the company's shareholders, leaving just enough residual value in the service to keep both end-users and business-customers glued to the platform.
We can think of each step in that enshittification process as the outcome of an *argument*. At some product planning meeting, one person will propose doing something to materially worsen the service to the company's advantage, and at the expense of end-users or business-customers.
Think of Youtube's decay. Over the past year, Google has:
* Dramatically increased the cost of ad-free Youtube subscriptions;
* Dramatically increased the number of ads shown to non-subscribers;
* Dramatically *decreased* the amount of money paid to Youtube creators;
* Added aggressive anti-adblock;
Then, this week, Google started adding a five-second blanking interval for non-Chrome users who have adblockers installed:
https://www.404media.co/youtube-says-new-5-second-video-load-delay-is-supposed-to-punish-ad-blockers-not-firefox-users/
These all smack of Jenga blocks that different product managers are removing in pursuit of their "key performance indicators" (KPIs):
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/
We can think of each of these steps as the outcome of an argument. Someone proposes a Youtube subscription price-hike, and other internal stakeholders object. These objections fall into two categories:
* We shouldn't do this because it will make the product worse; and/or
* We should do this because it will reduce the company's earnings.
Lots of googlers sincerely care about product quality. People like doing a good job, and they take pride in making good things. Many have sacrificed something that mattered in the service of making the product better. It's bad enough to miss your kid's school play so you can meet a work deadline - but imagine making that sacrifice and then having the excellent work you put in deliberately degraded.
I have been around Google's orbit since its early days, going to the odd company Christmas party in the early 2000s and giving talks at Google offices in cities all over the world. I've known hundreds of skilled googlers who passionately cared about making the best products they could.
For most of Google's history, those googlers won the argument. But they didn't do so merely by appealing to their colleagues' professional pride in a job well-done. For most of Google's history, the winning argument was a combination of "doing this bad thing would make me sad," and "doing this bad thing will make Google poorer."
Companies are disciplined by three forces:
I. Competition (the fear of losing business to a rival);
II. Regulation (the fear of legal penalties that would exceed the expected profits from a given course of action);
III. Self-help (the fear that customers or users will change their behavior, say, by installing an ad-blocker).
The ability of googlers to win enshittification arguments by appealing to the company's bottom line was a function of one or more of these three disciplining factors. The weakening of each of these factors is the reason that every tech company is sliding into enshittification at once.
For example, when Google contemplates raising the price of a Youtube subscription, the dissent might say, "Well, this will reduce viewership and might shift viewers to rivals like Tiktok" (competition). But the price-hiking side can counter, "No, because we have a giant archive, we control 90% of searches, we are embedded in the workflow of vloggers and other creators who automatically stream and archive to Youtube, and Youtube comes pre-installed on every Android device." Even if the company leaks a few viewers to Tiktok, it will still make more money in aggregate. Prices go up.
When Google contemplates increasing the number of ads shown to nonsubscribers, the dissent might say, "This will incentivize more users to install ad-blockers, and then we'll see *no* ad-revenue from them." The pro-ad side can counter, "No, because most Youtube viewing is in-app, and reverse-engineering the Youtube app to add an ad-blocker is a felony under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. As to non-app viewers: we control the majority of browser installations and have Chrome progressively less hospitable to ad-blocking."
When Google contemplates adding anti-adblock to its web viewers, the dissent might say, "Processing users' data in order to ad-block them will violate Europe's GDPR." The anti-adblock side can counter, "But we maintain the fiction that our EU corporate headquarters is in the corporate crime-haven of Ireland, where the privacy regulator systematically underenforces the GDPR. We can expect a very long tenure of anti-adblock before we are investigated, and we might win the investigation. Even if we are punished, the expected fine is less than the additional ad-revenue we stand to make."
When Google contemplates stealing performers' wages through opaque reshufflings of its revenue-sharing system, the dissent might say, "Our best performers have options, they can go to Twitch or Tiktok." To which the pro-wage-theft side can counter, "But they have no way of taking their viewers with them. There's no way for them to offer their viewers on Youtube a tool that alerts them whenever they post a new video to a rival platform. Their archives are on Youtube, and if they move them to another platform, there's no way redirect users searching for those videos to their new homes. What's more, any attempt to unilaterally extract their users' contact info, or redirect searchers or create a multiplatform client, violates some mix of our terms of service, our rights under DMCA 1201, etc."
It's not just Google. For every giant platform, the threats of competition, regulation and self-help have been in steady decline for years, as acquisitions, underenforcement of privacy/labor/consumer law, and an increase in IP protection for incumbents have all mounted:
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
When internal factions at tech companies argue about whether to make their services worse, there's a heavy weight tilting the scales towards enshittification. The lack of competition, an increase in switching costs for users and business-customers, and broad powers to prevent users from modifying the service for themselves all mean that even when a product gets worse, profits can still go up.
This is the culprit: monopoly, and its handmaiden, regulatory capture. That's why today's antimonopoly movement - and the cases against all the tech giants - are so important. The old, good internet was built by flawed tech companies whose internal ranks included the same amoral enshittifiers who are gobbling up the platforms' seed corn today. The thing that stood in their way before wasn't merely the moral character of colleagues who shrank away from these cynical maneuvers: it was the economic penalties that befell those who enshittified too rashly.
Incentives matter. Money talks and bullshit walks. Enshittification isn't due to the moral failings of individuals in tech companies. It's possible to have a good internet run by flawed people. But to get that new, good internet, we have to support technologists of good will and character by terrorizing their venal and cynical colleagues by hitting them where they live: in their paychecks.
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🦵🏿 Hey look at this
* The Corporate Takeover of Music (Lessons From Bandcamp) https://player.fm/1BZsQSX (h/t Nancy Lizza)
* Rising Juniors and Seniors – Do you want to make an impact with public interest technology this summer? https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2023/11/20/rising-juniors-and-seniors-do-you-want-to-make-an-impact-with-public-interest-technology-this-summer/
* A Perfectly Designed Climate Report Cover https://kottke.org/23/11/a-perfect-climate-report-cover
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🦵🏿 This day in history
#20yrsago Lessig: Towns should own their fiber https://www.wired.com/2003/12/fiber-to-the-people/
#10yrsago Germany threatens to jail Carl Malamud for making the law available for free https://law.resource.org/pub/de/
#10yrsago WordPress joins its users in court to fight bogus, censoring copyright claims https://wordpress.com/blog/2013/11/21/striking-back-against-censorship/
#10yrsago Wikimedia sends legal threat to WikiPR over sockpuppetry and meatpuppetry https://diff.wikimedia.org/2013/11/19/wikimedia-foundation-sends-cease-and-desist-letter-to-wikipr/
#5yrsago CBC’s longstanding tech columnist condemns the broadcaster’s cozy relationship with Facebook https://memex.craphound.com/2018/11/22/cbcs-longstanding-tech-columnist-condemns-the-broadcasters-cozy-relationship-with-facebook/
#5yrsago Let’s get artists paid by making Big Tech pay them, not by creating EU copyright filters https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/11/article-13-if-you-want-force-google-pay-artists-more-force-google-pay-artists-more
#1yrago Tax prep services send sensitive financial info to Facebook https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/22/free-file-now/#still-the-product
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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. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025
* The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2024
* Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM
* Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM
Latest podcast: Moral Hazard (from Communications Breakdown) https://craphound.com/stories/2023/11/12/moral-hazard-from-communications-breakdown/
Upcoming appearances:
* Generation of Lost Causes, Nov 22 (Toronto)
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/705457551527?aff=oddtdtcreator
* Who Is Watching Big Tech? Nov 27 (Toronto)
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/who-is-watching-big-tech-tickets-707927880347
* The Lost Cause at The Strand (NYC), Nov 29
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-the-lost-cause-tickets-734958008187
* The Lost Cause at Flyleaf Books (Chapel Hill), Dec 5
https://www.flyleafbooks.com/doctorow-2023
Recent appearances:
* Digital Markets Act; Interoperability; Entrenchment; Copyright; "What-About-Ism" (Digital Markets Research Hub)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm23pO5_WKM
* Science fiction for a dystopian present (Institute of Art and Ideas)
https://iai.tv/video/science-fiction-for-a-dystopian-present-cory-doctorow?_auid=2020
* Pushing back on unconstrained capitalism (Changelog)
https://changelog.com/podcast/565
Latest books:
* "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)
* "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
* "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?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (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 Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books, February 2024
* Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025
* Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025
This work - excluding any serialized fiction - is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.
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"*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
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