Post ArVsfCQ4vBTO8bwbxY by pluralistic@mamot.fr
(DIR) More posts by pluralistic@mamot.fr
(DIR) Post #ArVsf51iPMpFD1UYVs by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:06:57Z
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Last night, I traveled to Toronto to deliver the annual Ursula Franklin Lecture at the University of Toronto's Innis College:https://vimeo.com/event/4945872--If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/#enshittification-eh1/
(DIR) Post #ArVsf6LFWE2rHtdfbE by syntaxseed@phpc.social
2025-02-26T12:32:41Z
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@pluralistic OMG this bit here is NUTS!! đ±đ€ŹI'm going to share this story everywhere.
(DIR) Post #ArVsfCQ4vBTO8bwbxY by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:07:53Z
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The lecture was called "With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It." It's the latest major speech in my series of talks on the subject, which started with last year's McLuhan Lecture in Berlin:https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfelAnd continued with a summer Defcon keynote:https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess2/
(DIR) Post #ArVsfJ549hpAnTAQgC by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:08:09Z
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This speech specifically addresses the unique opportunities for disenshittification created by Trump's rapid unscheduled midair disassembly of the international free trade system. The US used trade deals to force nearly every country in the world to adopt the IP laws that make enshittification possible, and maybe even inevitable. 3/
(DIR) Post #ArVsfP7lgZYDXaTfiy by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:08:21Z
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As Trump burns these trade deals to the ground, the rest of the world has an unprecedented opportunity to retaliate against American bullying by getting rid of these laws and producing the tools, devices and services that can protect every tech user (including Americans) from being ripped off by US Big Tech companies.I'm so grateful for the chance to give this talk. 4/
(DIR) Post #ArVsfVjv5ddM3eNE1Y by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:08:28Z
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I was hosted for the day by the Centre for Culture and Technology, which was founded by Marshall McLuhan, and is housed in the coach house he used for his office. The talk itself took place in Innis College, named for Harold Innis, who is *definitely* the thinking person's Marshall McLuhan. What's more, I was mentored by Innis's daughter, Anne Innis Dagg, a radical, brilliant feminist biologist who pretty much invented the field of giraffology:https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/#annedagg5/
(DIR) Post #ArVsfcOYLThYhPQlBw by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:08:50Z
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But with all respect due to Anne and her dad, Ursula Franklin is the thinking person's Innis. A brilliant scientist, activist and communicator who dedicated her life to the idea that the most important fact about a technology wasn't what it did, but who it did it *for* and who it did it *to*. Getting to work out of McLuhan's office to present a talk in Innis's theater that was named after Franklin? Swoon!https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_FranklinHere's the text of the talk, lightly edited:6/
(DIR) Post #ArVsfjCP338rnknej2 by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:09:05Z
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I know tonightâs talk is supposed to be about decaying tech platforms, but I want to start by talking about nurses.A January 2025 report from Groundwork Collective documents how increasingly nurses in the USA are hired through gig apps - "Uber for nursesâ - so nurses never know from one day to the next whether they're going to work, or how much they'll get paid.7/
(DIR) Post #ArVsfruIfj0coDOpG4 by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:09:12Z
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There's something high-tech going on here with those nurses' wages. These nursing apps - a cartel of three companies, Shiftkey, Shiftmed and Carerev - can play all kinds of games with labor pricing.Before Shiftkey offers a nurse a shift, it purchases that worker's credit history from a data-broker. Specifically, it pays to find out how much credit-card debt the nurse is carrying, and whether it is overdue. 8/
(DIR) Post #ArVsfz6FvfjR7K2yMi by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:09:19Z
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The more desperate the nurse's financial straits are, the lower the wage on offer. Because the more desperate you are, the less you'll accept to come and do the gruntwork of caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying.Now, there are lots of things going on here, and they're all terrible. What's more, they are emblematic of âenshittification,â the word I coined to describe the decay of online platforms. 9/
(DIR) Post #ArVsg5pUuNUBzNGBiS by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:09:27Z
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When I first started writing about this, I focused on the external symptology of enshittification, a three stage process:First, the platform is good to its end users, while finding a way to lock them inLike Google, which minimized ads and maximized spending on engineering for search results, even as they bought their way to dominance, bribing every service or product with a search box to make it a Google search box.10/
(DIR) Post #ArVsgCePXzmF917vuK by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:09:34Z
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So no matter what browser you used, what mobile OS you used, what carrier you had, you would always be searching on Google by default.This got so batshit that by the early 2020s, Google was spending enough money to buy a whole-ass Twitter, every year or two, just to make sure that no one ever tried a search engine that wasn't Google.That's stage one: be good to end users, lock in end users.11/
(DIR) Post #ArVsgJoauX59McwfFg by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:09:42Z
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Stage two is when the platform starts to abuse end users to tempt in and enrich business customers. For Google, thatâs advertisers and web publishers. An ever-larger fraction of a Google results page is given over to ads, which are marked with ever-subtler, ever smaller, ever grayer labels. Google uses its commercial surveillance data to target ads to us.So that's stage two: things get worse for end users and get better for business customers. 12/
(DIR) Post #ArVsgQlf3ptYvYcv9U by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:09:49Z
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But those business customers *also* get locked into the platform, dependent on those customers. Once businesses are getting as little as 10% of their revenue from Google, leaving Google becomes an existential risk. We talk a lot about Google's "monopoly" power, which is derived from its dominance as a *seller*. But Google is also a *monopsony*, a powerful buyer. 13/
(DIR) Post #ArVsgXVG1Dvtoi0Q3U by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:10:01Z
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So now you have Google acting as a monopolist to its users (stage one), nd a monoposonist for its business customers (stage two) and here comes stage three: where Google claws back all the value in the platform, save a homeopathic residue calculated to keep end users locked in, and business customers locked to those end users.Google becomes enshittified.In 2019, Google had a turning point. Search had grown as much as it possibly could. 14/
(DIR) Post #ArVsgeSKAWkJNdgfxI by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:10:11Z
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More than 90% of us used Google for search, and we searched for *everything*. Any thought or idle question that crossed our minds, we typed into Google. How could Google grow? There were no more users left to switch to Google. We weren't going to search for more things. What could Google do?Well, thanks to internal memos published during last year's monopoly trial against Google, we know what they did. 15/
(DIR) Post #ArVsglRsAbXn4GWuiu by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:10:24Z
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They made search *worse*. They reduced the system's accuracy it so you had to search twice or more to get to the answer, thus doubling the number of queries, and doubling the number of ads.Meanwhile, Google entered into a secret, illegal collusive arrangement with Facebook, codenamed Jedi Blue, to rig the ad market, fixing prices so advertisers paid more and publishers got less. 16/
(DIR) Post #ArVsgsR4C03gjnCrwG by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:10:40Z
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And that's how we get to the enshittified Google of today, where every query serves back a blob of AI slop, over five paid results tagged with the word AD in 8-point, 10% grey on white type, which is, in turn, over ten spammy links from SEO shovelware sites filled with more AI slop.And yet, we still keep using Google, because we're locked into it. That's enshittification, from the outside. A company that's good to end users, while locking them in. 17/
(DIR) Post #ArVsgzHkj1ldyvu1tQ by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:10:47Z
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Then it makes things worse for end users, to make things better for business customers, while locking *them* in. Then it takes all the value for itself and turns into a giant pile of shit.Enshittification, a tragedy in three acts.I started off focused on the outward signs of enshittification, but I think it's time we start thinking about what's going in *inside* the companies to make enshittification possible.18/
(DIR) Post #ArVsh6FAr0rdYxkZLU by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:10:53Z
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What is the *technical* mechanism for enshittification? I call it *twiddling*. Digital businesses have infinite flexibility, bequeathed to them by the marvellously flexible digital computers they run on. That means that firms can twiddle the knobs that control the fundamental aspects of their business. Every time you interact with a firm, everything is different: prices, costs, search rankings, recommendations.19/
(DIR) Post #ArVshDIGduUvQaFddg by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:11:00Z
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Which takes me back to our nurses. This scam, where you look up the nurse's debt load and titer down the wage you offer based on it in realtime? That's twiddling. It's something you can only do with a computer. The bosses who are doing this aren't more evil than bosses of yore, they just have better tools.Note that these aren't even tech bosses. These are health-care bosses, who happen to have tech.20/
(DIR) Post #ArVshM4Q0lleeEqCno by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:11:07Z
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Digitalization - weaving networked computers through a firm or a sector - enables this kind of twiddling that allows firms to shift value around, from end users to business customers, from business customers back to end users, and eventually, inevitably, to themselves.And digitalization is coming to every sector - like nursing. Which means enshittification is coming to every sector - like nursing.21/
(DIR) Post #ArVshScfeKjOyCue1Y by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:11:14Z
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The legal scholar Veena Dubal coined a term to describe the twiddling that suppresses the wages of debt-burdened nurses. It's called "Algorithmic Wage Discrimination," and it follows the gig economy.The gig economy is a major locus of enshittification, and itâs the largest tear in the membrane separating the virtual world from the real world. Gig work, where your shitty boss is a shitty app, and you aren't even allowed to call yourself an employee.22/
(DIR) Post #ArVshZddZ8fCjEQ10C by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:11:30Z
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Uber invented this trick. Drivers who are picky about the jobs the app puts in front of them start to get higher wage offers. But if they yield to temptation and take some of those higher-waged option, then the wage starts to go down again, in random intervals, by small increments, designed to be below the threshold for human perception. 23/
(DIR) Post #ArVshgoWt2XGz2ZJS4 by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:11:40Z
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Not so much boiling the frog as poaching it, until the Uber driver has gone into debt to buy a new car, and given up the side hustles that let them be picky about the rides they accepted. Then their wage goes down, and down, and down. Twiddling is a crude trick done quickly. Any task that's simple but time consuming is a prime candidate for automation, and this kind of wage-theft would be unbearably tedious, labor-intensive and expensive to perform manually. 24/
(DIR) Post #ArVshnYpnn8luOHNSa by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:11:52Z
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No 19th century warehouse full of guys with green eyeshades slaving over ledgers could do this. You need digitalization.Twiddling nurses' hourly wages is a perfect example of the role digitization pays in enshittification. Because this kind of thing isn't just bad for nurses - it's bad for patients, too. 25/
(DIR) Post #ArVshuAHFUekOFqMee by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:12:02Z
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Do we really think that paying nurses based on how desperate they are, at a rate calculated to increase that desperation, and thus decrease the wage they are likely to work for, is going to result in nurses delivering the best care?Do you want to your catheter inserted by a nurse on food stamps, who drove an Uber until midnight the night before, and skipped breakfast this morning in order to make rent?26/
(DIR) Post #ArVsi0ez6EmgXEFyLo by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:12:09Z
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This is why itâs so foolish to say "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." âIf youâre not paying for the productâ ascribes a mystical power to advertising-driven services: the power to bypass our critical faculties by surveilling us, and data-mining the resulting dossiers to locate our mental bind-spots, and weaponize them to get us to buy anything an advertiser is selling.27/
(DIR) Post #ArVsi7lcfxFmZqPsAa by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:12:23Z
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In this formulation, we are complicit in our own exploitation. By choosing to use "free" services, we invite our own exploitation by surveillance capitalists who have perfected a mind-control ray powered by the surveillance data we're voluntarily handing over by choosing ad-driven services.28/
(DIR) Post #ArVsiENQ6L3L4o98uu by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:12:34Z
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The moral is that if we only went back to paying for things, instead of unrealistically demanding that everything be free, we would restore capitalism to its functional, non-surveillant state, and companies would start treating us better, because we'd be the customers, not the products.That's why the surveillance capitalism hypothesis elevates companies like Apple as virtuous alternatives. 29/
(DIR) Post #ArVsiLPRxBpst89MYK by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:12:41Z
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Because Apple charges us money, rather than attention, it can focus on giving us better service, rather than exploiting us.There's a superficially plausible logic to this. After all, in 2022, Apple updated its iOS operating system, which runs on iPhones and other mobile devices, introducing a tick box that allowed you to opt out of third-party surveillance, most notably Facebookâs.30/
(DIR) Post #ArVsiS2fIIllSUXlVg by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:12:55Z
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96% of Apple customers ticked that box. The other 4% were, presumably drunk, or Facebook employees, or Facebook employees who were drunk. Which makes sense, because if I worked for Facebook, I'd be drunk all the time.So on the face of it, it seems like Apple isn't treating its customers like "the product." 31/
(DIR) Post #ArVsiYkqKxfmHFG8Ce by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:13:12Z
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But *simultaneously* with this privacy measure, Apple was secretly turning on its own surveillance system for iPhone owners, which would spy on them in exactly the way Facebook had, for exactly the same purpose: to target ads to you based on the places you'd been, the things you'd searched for, the communications you'd had, the links you'd clicked.Apple didn't ask its customers for permission to spy on them. It didn't let opt out of this spying. 32/
(DIR) Post #ArVsife0ilMne57H1c by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:13:25Z
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It *didnât even tell them* about it, and when it was caught, Apple *lied* about it. It goes without saying that the $1000 Apple distraction rectangle in your pocket is something you paid for. The fact that you've paid for it doesn't stop Apple from treating you as the product. 33/
(DIR) Post #ArVsinLW5PKJX2WcJE by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:13:33Z
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Apple treats its business customers - app vendors - like the product, screwing them out of 30 cents on every dollar they bring in, with mandatory payment processing fees that are 1,000% higher than the already extortionate industry norm.Apple treats its end users - people who shell out a grand for a phone - like the product, spying on them to help target ads to them. Apple treats *everyone* like the product.34/
(DIR) Post #ArVsiuR5j4wfWMBfTE by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:13:46Z
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This is what's going on with our gig-app nurses: the nurses are the product. The patients are the product. The hospitals are the product. In enshittification, "the product" is anyone who can be productized.Fair and dignified treatment is not something you get as a customer loyalty perk, in exchange for parting with your money, rather than your attention. How do you get fair and dignified treatment? Well, I'm gonna get to that, but let's stay with our nurses for a while.35/
(DIR) Post #ArVsj1hehtM23kzUlE by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:13:54Z
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The nurses are the product, and they're being twiddled, because they've been conscripted into the tech industry, via the digitalization of their own industry.It's tempting to blame digitalization for this. But tech companies were not born enshittified. They spent years - decades - making pleasing products. If you're old enough to remember the launch of Google, you'll recall that, at the outset, Google was *magic*. 36/
(DIR) Post #ArVsj7x7TJHzRSGvhI by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:14:05Z
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You could Ask Jeeves questions for a million years, you could load up Altavista with ten trillion boolean search operators meant to screen out low-grade results, and never come up with answers as crisp, as useful, as helpful, as the ones you'd get from a few vaguely descriptive words in a Google search-bar.There's a reason we all switched to Google. Why so many of us bought iPhones. Why we joined our friends on Facebook. 37/
(DIR) Post #ArVsjEMrcVRnL2MZeq by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:14:18Z
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All of these services were born digital. They could have enshittified at any time. But they didn't - until they did. And they did it all at once.If you were a nurse, and every patient that staggered into the ER had the same dreadful symptoms, you'd call the public health department and report a suspected outbreak of a new and dangerous epidemic.Ursula Franklin held that technology's outcomes were not preordained. They are the result of deliberate choices. 38/
(DIR) Post #ArVsjKsdPIQTXJH20m by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:14:30Z
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I like that very much, it's a very science fictional way of thinking about technology. Good science fiction isn't merely about what the technology does, but who it does it for, and who it does it to.Those social factors are far more important than the mere technical specifications of a gadget. 39/
(DIR) Post #ArVsjRixxdqqlLnuPg by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:14:37Z
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They're the difference between a system that warns you when you're about to drift out of your lane, and a system that tells your insurer that you nearly drifted out of your lane, so they can add $10 to your monthly premium.Theyâre the difference between a spell checker that lets you know you've made a typo, and bossware that lets your manager use the number of typos you made this quarter so he can deny your bonus.40/
(DIR) Post #ArVsjYfK9a66I59bCy by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:14:46Z
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Theyâre the difference between an app that remembers where you parked your car, and an app that uses the location of your car as a criteria for including you in a reverse warrant for the identities of everyone in the vicinity of an anti-government protest.I believe that enshittification is caused by changes not to technology, but to the policy environment. 41/
(DIR) Post #ArVsjfW0gbo3XDqlA8 by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:14:54Z
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These are changes to the rules of the game, undertaken in living memory, by named parties, who were warned at the time about the likely outcomes of their actions, who are today very rich and respected, and face no consequences or accountability for their role in ushering in the enshittocene. They venture out into polite society without ever once wondering if someone is sizing them up for a pitchfork.42/
(DIR) Post #ArVsjmsFKKkiMDJ7IG by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:15:07Z
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In other words: I think we created a crimogenic environment, a perfect breeding pool for the most pathogenic practices in our society, that have therefore multiplied, dominating decision-making in our firms and states, leading to a vast enshittening of everything.43/
(DIR) Post #ArVsju4CaHTWfJxGOu by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:15:15Z
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And I think there's good news there, because if enshittification isn't the result a new kind of evil person, or the great forces of history bearing down on the moment to turn everything to shit, but rather the result of specific policy choices, then we can reverse those policies, make better ones and emerge from the enshittocene, consigning the enshitternet to the scrapheap of history, a mere transitional state between the old, good internet, and a new, good internet.44/
(DIR) Post #ArVsk1c8WVmM4asxlY by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:15:28Z
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I'm not going to talk about AI today, because oh my god is AI a boring, overhyped subject. But I *will* use a metaphor about AI, about the limited liability company, which is a kind of immortal, artificial colony organism in which human beings serve as a kind of gut flora. My colleague Charlie Stross calls corporations "slow AI.âSo you've got these slow AIs whose guts are teeming with people, and the AI's imperative, the paperclip it wants to maximize, is profit.45/
(DIR) Post #ArVsk8j84uX28JD98a by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:15:37Z
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To maximize profits, you charge as much as you can, you pay your workers and suppliers as little as you can, you spend as little as possible on safety and quality.Every dollar you don't spend on suppliers, workers, quality or safety is a dollar that can go to executives and shareholders. So there's a simple model of the corporation that could maximize its profits by charging infinity dollars, while paying nothing to its workers or suppliers, and ignoring quality and safety.46/
(DIR) Post #ArVskFKZWc30cAm8Ke by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:15:49Z
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But that corporation wouldn't make any money, for the obvious reasons that none of us would buy what it was selling, and no one would work for it or supply it with goods. These constraints act as disciplining forces that tamp down the AI's impulse to charge infinity and pay nothing.47/
(DIR) Post #ArVskMCfyMtHvi8QUq by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:15:56Z
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In tech, we have four of constraints, anti-enshittificatory sources of discipline that make products and services better, pay workers more, and keep executivesâ and shareholders' wealth from growing at the expense of customers, suppliers and labor.The first of these constraints is markets. All other things being equal, a business that charges more and delivers less will lose customers to firms that are more generous about sharing value with workers, customers and suppliers.48/
(DIR) Post #ArVskTSB18RuPoRP84 by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:16:06Z
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This is the bedrock of capitalist theory, and it's the ideological basis for competition law, what our American cousins call "antitrust law." The first antitrust law was 1890's Sherman Act, whose sponsor, Senator John Sherman, stumped for it from the senate floor, saying:> If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life.49/
(DIR) Post #ArVska6oGyW73ZUwIS by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:16:14Z
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> If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.âSenator Sherman was reflecting the outrage of the anitmonopolist movement of the day, when proprietors of monopolistic firms assumed the role of dictators, with the power to decide who would work, who would starve, what could be sold, and what it cost.50/
(DIR) Post #ArVskhAG2YQywIAI8u by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:16:25Z
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Lacking competitors, they were too big to fail, too big to jail, and too big to care. As Lily Tomlin used to put it in her spoof AT&T ads on SNL: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.âSo what happened to the disciplining force of competition? We killed it. Starting 40-some years ago, the Reagaonomic views of the Chicago School economists transformed antitrust. 51/
(DIR) Post #ArVskoV4lYFJgsxW40 by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:16:36Z
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They threw out John Sherman's idea that we need to keep companies competitive to prevent the emergence of "autocrats of trade,"and installed the idea that monopolies are efficient.In other words, if Google has a 90% search market share, which it does, then we must infer that Google is the best search engine ever, and the best search engine *possible*. 52/
(DIR) Post #ArVskvaePDrfgCcZE0 by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:16:45Z
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The only reason a better search engine hasn't stepped in is that Google is so skilled, so efficient, that there is no conceivable way to improve upon it.We can tell that Google is the best because it has a monopoly, and we can tell that the monopoly is good because Google is the best.So 40 years ago, the US - and its major trading partners - adopted an explicitly PRO-monopoly competition policy.53/
(DIR) Post #ArVsl2byIi53SKIDku by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:17:46Z
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Now, you'll be glad to hear that this isn't what happened to Canada. The US Trade Rep didn't come here and force us to neuter our competition laws. But don't get smug! The reason that didn't happen is that it didn't have to. Because Canada had no competition law to speak of, and never has. 54/
(DIR) Post #ArVsl9QAyxnwZlpOqG by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:18:04Z
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In its *entire history*, the Competition Bureau has challenged *3* mergers, and it has halted precisely *0* mergers, which is how we've ended up with a country that is beholden to the most mediocre plutocrats imaginable like the Irvings, the Westons, the Stronachs, the McCains and the Rogerses.The only reason these chinless wonders were able to conquer this country Is that the Americans had been crushing their monopolists before they could conquer the US and move on to us. 55/
(DIR) Post #ArVslGCFn7pLacMsc4 by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:18:14Z
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But 40 years ago, the rest of the world adopted the Chicago School's pro-monopoly "consumer welfare standard,â and we got...monopolies.Monopolies in pharma,beer, glass bottles, vitamin C, athletic shoes, microchips, cars, mattresses, eyeglasses, and, of course, professional wrestling. Remember: these are specific policies adopted in living memory, by named individuals, who were warned, and got rich, and never faced consequences. 56/
(DIR) Post #ArVslMXkC8aBH0T7wW by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:18:27Z
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The economists who conceived of these policies are still around today, polishing their fake Nobel prizes, teaching at elite schools, making millions consulting for blue-chip firms. When we confront them with the wreckage their policies created, they protest their innocence, maintaining - with a straight face - that there's no way to affirmatively connect pro-monopoly policies with the rise of monopolies. 57/
(DIR) Post #ArVslSqkkNLwphPOPA by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:18:37Z
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It's like we used to put down rat poison and we didn't have a rat problem. Then these guys made us stop, and now rats are chewing our faces off, and they're making wide innocent eyes, saying, "How can you be sure that our anti-rat-poison policies are connected to global rat conquest? Maybe this is simply the Time of the Rat! Maybe sunspots caused rats to become more fecund than at any time in history! 58/
(DIR) Post #ArVslZ7HRq8eGhBg00 by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:18:45Z
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And if they bought the rat poison factories and shut them all down, well, so what of it? Shutting down rat poison factories after you've decided to stop putting down rat poison is an economically rational, Pareto-optimal decision."Markets don't discipline tech companies because they don't compete with rivals, they buy them. That's a quote, from Mark Zuckerberg: âIt is better to buy than to compete.â59/
(DIR) Post #ArVslftMG0A3HXj9lo by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:18:54Z
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Which is why Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram for a billion dollars, even though it only had 12 employees and 25m users. As he wrote in a spectacularly ill-advised middle-of-the-night email to his CFO, he had to buy Instagram, because Facebook users were leaving Facebook for Instagram. By buying Instagram, Zuck ensured that anyone who left Facebook - the platform - would still be a prisoner of Facebook - the company. 60/
(DIR) Post #ArVslmug9UNR3fOoIi by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:19:04Z
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Despite the fact that Zuckerberg put this confession in writing, the Obama administration let him go ahead with the merger, because every government, of every political stripe, for 40 years, adopted the posture that monopolies were efficient.Now, think about our twiddled, immiserated nurses. Hospitals are among the most consolidated sectors in the US. 61/
(DIR) Post #ArVslu3RbIY1CsYPR2 by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:19:15Z
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First, we deregulated pharma mergers, and the pharma companies gobbled each other up at the rate of naughts, and they jacked up the price of drugs. So hospitals *also* merged to monopoly, a defensive maneuver that let a single hospital chain corner the majority of a region or city and say to the pharma companies, "either you make your products cheaper, or you can't sell them to *any of our hospitals."62/
(DIR) Post #ArVsm16tMsSt5bDlHU by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:19:56Z
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Once this mission was accomplished, the hospitals started screwing the insurers, who staged their own incestuous orgy, buying and merging until most Americans have 3 or 2 options. This let the insurers fight back against the hospitals, but left patients and health care workers defenseless against the consolidated power of hospitals, pharma companies, pharmacy benefit managers, group purchasing organizations, and other health industry cartels, duopolies and monopolies.63/
(DIR) Post #ArVsm84JUrYsfd4IjY by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:20:04Z
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Which is why nurses end up signing on to work for hospitals that use these ghastly apps. Remember, there's just three of these apps, replacing dozens of staffing agencies that once competed for nurses' labor. Meanwhile, on the patient side, competition has never exercised discipline. No one ever shopped around for a cheaper ambulance or a better ER while they were having a heart attack. The price that people are willing to pay to not die is âeverything they have.â64/
(DIR) Post #ArVsmEanF16iu6JKC0 by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:20:14Z
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So you have this sector that has no business being a commercial enterprise in the first place, losing what little discipline they faced from competition, paving the way for enshittification. But I said there are four forces that discipline companies. The second one of these forces is regulation, discipline imposed by states. Itâs a mistake to see market discipline and state discipline as two isolated realms. 65/
(DIR) Post #ArVsmL4n8OfV0sOMme by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:20:22Z
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They are intimately connected. Because competition is a necessary condition for effective regulation.Let me put this in terms that even the most ideological libertarians can understand. Say you think there should be precisely one regulation that governments should enforce: honoring contracts. For the government to serve as referee in that game, it must have the power to compel the players to honor their contracts. 66/
(DIR) Post #ArVsmS671sssn041JY by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:20:31Z
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Which means that the smallest government you can have is determined by the largest corporation you're willing to permit.So even if you're the kind of Musk-addled libertarian who can no longer open your copy of *Atlas Shrugged* because the pages are all stuck together, who pines for markets for human kidneys, and demands the right to sell yourself into slavery, you should *still* want a robust antitrust regime, so that these contracts can be enforced.67/
(DIR) Post #ArVsmYV9DiTWeNp6Aa by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:20:44Z
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When a sector cartelizes, when it collapses into oligarchy, when the internet turns into "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four," then it captures its regulators.After all, a sector with 100 competing companies is a rabble, at each others' throats. They can't agree on anything, especially how they're going to lobby.While a sector of five companies - or four - or three - or two - or one - is a cartel, a racket, a conspiracy in waiting. 68/
(DIR) Post #ArVsmfkeGU298U84no by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:20:57Z
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A sector that has been boiled down to a mere handful of firms can agree on a common lobbying position.What's more, they are so insulated from "wasteful competition" that they are aslosh in cash that they can mobilize to make their regulatory preferences into regulations. In other words, they can capture their regulators. âRegulatory capture" may sound abstract and complicated, so let me put it in concrete terms. 69/
(DIR) Post #ArVsmpUM3uwTKqaCnI by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:21:08Z
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In the UK, the antitrust regulator is called the Competition and Markets Authority, run â until recently - by Marcus Bokkerink. The CMA has been one of the world's most effective investigators and regulators of Big Tech fuckery. Last month, UK PM Kier Starmer fired Bokkerink and replaced him with Doug Gurr, the former head of Amazon UK. Hey, Starmer, the henhouse is on the line, they want their fox back.70/
(DIR) Post #ArVsmwsMb3J2FKrygi by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:21:22Z
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But back to our nurses: there are plenty of examples of regulatory capture lurking in that example, but I'm going to pick the most egregious one, the fact that there are data brokers who will sell you information about the credit card debts of random Americans.71/
(DIR) Post #ArVsn3frJwSlKa4afY by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:21:36Z
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This is because the US Congress hasn't passed a new consumer privacy law since 1988, when Ronald Reagan signed a law called the Video Privacy Protection Act that bans video store clerks from telling newspapers which VHS cassettes you took home. The fact that Congress hasn't updated Americans' privacy protections since *Die Hard* was in theaters isn't a coincidence or an oversight. 72/
(DIR) Post #ArVsnAmUtevrNCEUUK by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:21:46Z
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It is the expensively purchased inaction of a heavily concentrated - and thus wildly profitable - privacy-invasion industry that has monetized the abuse of human rights at unimaginable scale. The coalition in favor of keeping privacy law frozen since the season finale of *St Elsewhere* keeps growing, because there is an unbounded set of way to transform the systematic invasion of our human rights into cash. 73/
(DIR) Post #ArVsnHX9n5owJe6q36 by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:21:54Z
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There's a direct line from this phenomenon to nurses whose paychecks go down when they can't pay their credit-card bills.So competition is dead, regulation is dead, and companies aren't disciplined by markets or by states.But there are *four* forces that discipline firms, contributing to an inhospitable environment for the reproduction of sociopathic. enshittifying monsters.74/
(DIR) Post #ArVsnNmcYVkthLOGzA by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:22:01Z
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So let's talk about those other two forces. The first is interoperability, the principle of two or more things working together. Like, you can put anyone's shoelaces in your shoes, anyone's gas in your gas tank, and anyone's lightbulbs in your light-socket. In the non-digital world, interop takes a lot of work, you have to agree on the direction, pitch, diameter, voltage, amperage and wattage for that light socket, or someone's gonna get their hand blown off.75/
(DIR) Post #ArVsnV1lcb1wALWy48 by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:22:10Z
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But in the digital world, interop is built in, because there's only one kind of computer we know how to make, the Turing-complete, universal, von Neumann machine, a computing machine capable of executing every valid program. Which means that for any enshittifying program, there's a counterenshittificatory program waiting to be run. When HP writes a program to ensure that its printers reject third-party ink, someone else can write a program to disable that checking. 76/
(DIR) Post #ArVsnc3RUlWtxZMu9I by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:22:18Z
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For gig workers, antienshittificatory apps can do yeoman duty. For example, Indonesian gig drivers formed co-ops, that commission hackers to write modifications for their dispatch apps. For example, the taxi app won't book a driver to pick someone up at a train station, unless they're right outside, but when the big trains pull in that's a nightmare scene of total, lethal chaos.77/
(DIR) Post #ArVsnj6XHfABpBryRU by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:23:12Z
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So drivers have an app that lets them spoof their GPS, which lets them park up around the corner, but have the app tell their bosses that they're right out front of the station. When a fare arrives, they can zip around and pick them up, without contributing to the stationside mishegas.In the USA, a company called Para shipped an app to help Doordash drivers get paid more. 78/
(DIR) Post #ArVsnq0PcpQNEE3gMy by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:23:22Z
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You see, Doordash drivers make most of their money on tips, and the Doordash driver app hides the tip amount until you accept a job, meaning you don't know whether you're accepting a job that pays $1.50 or $11.50 with tip, until you agree to take it. So Para made an app that extracted the tip amount and showed it to drivers *before* they clocked on. But Doordash shut it down, because in America, apps like Para are illegal. 79/
(DIR) Post #ArVsnwqOCUZARAQHDc by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:23:39Z
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In 1998, Bill Clinton signed a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and section 1201 of the DMCA makes is a felony to "bypass an access control for a copyrighted work," with penalties of $500k and a 5-year prison sentence for a first offense. So just the act of reverse-engineering an app like the Doordash app is a potential felony, which is why companies are so desperately horny to get you to use their apps rather than their websites. 80/
(DIR) Post #ArVso3A6i5u623h6mm by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:23:47Z
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The web is open, apps are closed. The majority of web users have installed an ad blocker (which is also a privacy blocker). But no one installs an ad blocker for an app, because it's a felony to distribute that tool, because you have to reverse-engineer the app to make it. An app is just a website wrapped in enough IP so that the company that made it can send you to prison if you dare to modify it so that it serves your interests rather than theirs. 81/
(DIR) Post #ArVso9mG79zEY7af5M by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:23:54Z
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Around the world, we have enacted a thicket of laws, we call âIP laws,â that make it illegal to modify services, products, and devices, so that they serve your interests, .rather than the interests of the shareholders. Like I said, these laws were enacted in living memory, by people who are among us, who were warned about the obvious, eminently foreseeable consequences of their reckless plans, who did it anyway.82/
(DIR) Post #ArVsoGPpQxCh8a9Lay by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:24:05Z
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Back in 2010, two ministers from Stephen Harper's government decided to copy-paste America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act into Canadian law. They consulted on the proposal to make it illegal to reverse engineer and modify services, products and devices, and they got an earful! 6,138 Canadians sent in negative comments on the consultation.83/
(DIR) Post #ArVsoN3kjQhjk8sJeq by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:24:15Z
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They warned that making it illegal to bypass digital locks would interfere with repair of devices as diverse as tractors, cars, and medical equipment, from ventilators to insulin pumps.These Canadians warned that laws banning tampering with digital locks would let American tech giants corner digital markets, forcing us to buy our apps and games from American app stores, that could cream off any commission they chose to levy . 84/
(DIR) Post #ArVsoTbIPd6K1ucBm4 by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:24:26Z
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They warned that these laws were a gift to monopolists who wanted to jack up the price of ink; that these copyright laws, far from serving Canadian artists would lock us to American platforms. Because every time someone in our audience bought a book, a song, a game, a video, that was locked to an American app, it could never be unlocked.So if we, the creative workers of Canada, tried to migrate to a Canadian store, our audience couldn't come with us. 85/
(DIR) Post #ArVsoaBJwbTyRNW2l6 by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:24:54Z
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They couldn't move their purchases from the US app to a Canadian one.6,138 Canadians told them this, while just 54 respondents sided with Heritage Minister James Moore and Industry Minister Tony Clement. Then Moore gave a speech, at the International Chamber of Commerce meeting in Toronto, where he said he would only be listening to the 54 cranks who supported his terrible ideas, on the grounds that the 6,138 people who disagreed with him were "babyish...radical extremists."86/
(DIR) Post #ArVsogkzUta2pkFcBs by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:25:37Z
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So in 2012, we copied America's terrible digital locks law into the Canadian statute book, and now we live in James Moore and Tony Clement's world, where it is illegal to tamper with a digital lock. So if a company puts a digital lock on its product they can do *anything* behind that lock, and it's a crime to undo it.87/
(DIR) Post #ArVsoni3eCOSOfvs5g by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:25:46Z
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For example, if HP puts a digital lock on its printers that verifies that you're not using third party ink cartridges, or refilling an HP cartridge, it's a crime to bypass that lock and use third party ink. Which is how HP has gotten away with ratcheting the price of ink up, and up, and up.Printer ink is now the most expensive fluid that a civilian can purchase without a special permit. 88/
(DIR) Post #ArVsouS0aGiNIvTeXw by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:25:57Z
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It's colored water that costs $10k/gallon, which means that you print out your grocery lists with liquid that costs more than the semen of a Kentucky Derby-winning stallion.That's the world we got from Clement and Moore, in living memory, after they were warned, and did it anyway. 89/
(DIR) Post #ArVsp1llNDfy0Dm1oG by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:26:06Z
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The world where farmers can't fix their tractors, where independent mechanics can't fix your car, where hospitals during the pandemic lockdowns couldn't service their failing ventilators, where every time a Canadian iPhone user buys an app from a Canadian software author, every dollar they spend takes a round trip through Apple HQ in Cupertino, California and comes back 30 cents lighter.90/
(DIR) Post #ArVsp8skvcQe3w6DBI by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:26:15Z
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Let me remind you this is the world where a nurse can't get a counter-app, a plug-in, for the âUber for nursesâ app they have to use to get work, that lets them coordinate with other nurses to refuse shifts until the wages on offer rise to a common level or to block surveillance of their movements and activity.Interoperability *was* a major disciplining force on tech firms. 91/
(DIR) Post #ArVspG5m7c0CQLFCwi by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:26:25Z
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After all, if you make the ads on your website sufficiently obnoxious, some fraction of your users will install an ad-blocker, and you will never earn another penny from them. Because no one in the history of ad-blockers has ever *uninstalled* an ad-blocker.m But once it's illegal to make an ad-blocker, there's no reason not to make the ads as disgusting, invasive, obnoxious as you can, to shift *all* the value from the end user to shareholders and executives.92/
(DIR) Post #ArVspMlTJUv97Onals by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:27:24Z
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So we get monopolies and monopolies capture their regulators, and they can ignore the laws they don't like, and prevent laws that might interfere with their predatory conduct - like privacy laws - from being passed. They get new laws passed, laws that let them wield governmental power to prevent other companies from entering the market.So three of the four forces are neutralized: competition, regulation, and interoperability. 93/
(DIR) Post #ArVspTRsSkPFqegXhY by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:27:33Z
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That left just one disciplining force holding enshittification at bay: labor.Tech workers are a strange sort of workforce, because they have historically been very powerful, able to command high wages and respect, nut they did it without joining unions. Union density in tech is abysmal, almost undetectable. Tech workers' power didn't come from solidarity, it came from scarcity. 94/
(DIR) Post #ArVspaZDzpRVvTB0cq by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:27:45Z
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There weren't enough workers to fill the jobs going begging, and tech workers are unfathomnably productive. Even with the sky-high salaries tech workers commanded, every hour of labor they put in generated far more value for their employers. Faced with a tight labor market, and the ability to turn every hour of tech worker overtime into gold, tech bosses pulled out all the stops to motivate that workforce. 95/
(DIR) Post #ArVsphDrFfViZEEXnE by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:28:09Z
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They appealed to workers' sense of mission, convinced them they were holy warriors ushering in a new digital age. Google promised them they'd "organize the world's information and make it useful.â Facebook promised them they'd âmake the world more open and connected."There's a name for this tactic: the librarian Fobazi Ettarh calls it "vocational awe." Thatâs where an appeal to a sense of mission and pride is used to motivate workers to work for longer hours and worse pay. 96/
(DIR) Post #ArVspoXG3wBjFQMdVI by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:29:11Z
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There are all kinds of professions that run on vocational awe: teaching, daycares, eldercare, and of course, nursing.Techies are different from those workers though, because they've historically been incredibly scarce, so while bosses could motivate them to work on projects they believed in for long hours, the minute bosses ordered them to enshittify the projects they'd missed their mums' funerals to hit deadline on these workers would tell their bosses to fuck off.97/
(DIR) Post #ArVspvOIZeBGVfE50i by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:29:20Z
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If their bosses persisted in these demands, the techies would walk off the job, cross the street, and get a better job the same day.So for many years, tech workers were the fourth and final constraint, holding the line after the constraints of competition, regulation and interop slipped away. But then came the mass tech layoffs. 260,000 in 2023; 150,000 in 2024; tens of thousands this year, with Facebook planning a 5% headcount massacre while doubling its executive bonuses.98/
(DIR) Post #ArVsq2LihdHG5h4cSm by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:29:28Z
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Tech workers can't tell their bosses to go fuck themselves anymore, because there's ten other workers waiting to take their jobs.Now, I promised I wouldn't talk about AI, but I have to break that promise a little, just to point out that the reason tech bosses are so horny for AI Is because they think it'll let them fire tech workers and replace them with pliant chatbots who'll never tell them to fuck off99/
(DIR) Post #ArVsq9C3FyhdJjbUrg by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:29:34Z
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So that's where enshittification comes from: multiple changes to the environment. The fourfold collapse of competition, regulation, interoperability and worker power creates an enshittogenic environment, where the greediest, most sociopathic elements in the body corporate thrive at the expense of those elements that act as moderators of their enshittificatory impulses.100/
(DIR) Post #ArVsqFXBgJAsz1XSds by pluralistic@mamot.fr
2025-02-26T11:29:42Z
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We can try to cure these corporations. We can use antitrust law to break them up, fine them, force strictures upon them. But until we fix the environment, other the contagion will spread to other firms.So let's talk about how we create a hostile environment for enshittifiers, so the population and importance of enshittifying agents in companies dwindles to 1990s levels. We won't get rid of these elements. 101/