Enshittification - Tumblr Posts
Removed Most Social Media-Thoughts
Right at the beginning I want to mention that this is not a sweeping piece about how social media and algorithms are ruining our lives and culture. I'm not that dramatic, but I do have moderate thoughts about it and it may find its way onto another post.
But over time I've been cleansing myself of my social media accounts and reducing access to others (I'm on tumblr for 20 minutes a day). And trying to not use algorithmic aspects to apps like Spotify and tv streaming.
My biggest concern of course was missing out on events that happen and staying in the loop on a lot of things and communicating with my friends. I'm happy to report that this has not been the case. In fact, I've been more engaged than ever.
I've been thinking a lot about news sources and what I need to be reading. I've manged to find news outlets I trust and some less so, but still feel relevant so I know what's being discussed. In addition to a solid variety of news outlets (and news letters), I've been hitting up more library resources including JStor and Newsbank to read more about topics that pique my interest. I feel more informed because I'm not being overwhelmed with oversimplification and headlines built to elicit a strong emotional response.
Instead of hitting up playlists that the algorithm recommends I have a list of film and albums I want to listen to or explore. It's been great to find these books, movies and albums on my own (or through these same sources), and I've stopped rating things on goodreads and letterboxd. I merely use them to track and put my thoughts down on the things I consume.
I've had more time to read and do deep dives. It has given me time to tackle things that matter. Instead of doom scrolling through nothing I can meditate or tackle things like writing, journaling, and other projects I have going on. If i just have my phone, I enjoy chess.com and mango language apps. I've been organizing my email and beefing who I actually want to receive alerts from.
Speaking of other projects, the extra time I have is able to be used to further the groups I'm apart of. This includes the contract team for my union, my union's women's committee, and the voting rights group I'm apart of. I making deadlines stress free, and more engaged than ever. The involvement in this and being able to plan time to go to protests at the Israeli consulate and Atlanta City Hall (Cop City) has been great to be out in the community and doing even more work than before.
And there's my mental health. I am bipolar type 2 and its caused a lot of anxiety and depression. My meds have been somewhat helpful, but reducing my screen time has been incredible. The big benefit has been my attention span. I can engage more deeply with long form content and even just quiet moments where I don't feel the need for a dopamine hit from social media. I feel better about the fact that I'm more focused and getting more done. It gives me time to bike, walk or take public transit to see more of the world. I've been using my pass to the museum more too.
I've also spent less money on things that don't matter. No more being hit with algorithms and ads for things I don't need. I do get texts from my favorite t-shirt company (nothing can stop me from buying black t-shirts). But I can now track plane tickets on apps and concerts coming into town. I'm following local groups to see local shows.
As far as friends go, I don't communicate with people like I used to, but that's for a best. Instead of things getting posted in front of me, I get to hear about life events and things my acquaintances are into from them directly when I do see them. As far as my friends, I've been texting, emailing and sending them snail mail more than ever which give me more wonderful feed back and communication. I do love to send the occasional meme, but actually having conversations has been great for my relationships.
Everyone has their own relationships with social media. I'm fortunate that I don't live too far from my family (6 hours), and I have access to a vehicle and public transport in a pretty large city. I have a union job, which my finances have taken a massive hit after the writers strike, but I do work for decent wages that allows me to have a savings account and get out every so often. But overall, cutting these apps out or down has been successful and easy to replace. I'll probably post more about each of these aspects, but I just wanted to share my thoughts somewhere.
If y'all have questions, please message me or comment below.
The enshittification of the internet has been restoring my excitement in the printed word. We already had solutions to a lot of this before, so we don't have to rely on a platform that's getting steadily worse.
When the language learning app I was using laid off a bunch of people in favor of generated sentences, I found books on language learning.
When hiking apps started summarizing reviews and obscuring trail data, I found hiking maps at outdoors stores.
When I got tired of skipping past people's life stories and murder confessions on cooking blogs, there are plenty of fun, diverse, ethnic, and even themed cook books which play, less iron chef with the ingredients in the fridge, and more help me make my grocery list.
I'd say it's just a one time cost, but honestly I could probably go to a library and find a lot of these resources for free. It doesn't show me ads. It doesn't affect my browsing history or track my data. Been, seriously rekindling my faith in books where before I used to think, I can just search for that so why buy one?
My McLuhan lecture on enshittification
IT'S THE LAST DAY for the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.
Last night, I gave the annual Marshall McLuhan lecture at the Transmediale festival in Berlin. The event was sold out and while there's a video that'll be posted soon, they couldn't get a streaming setup installed in the Canadian embassy, where the talk was held:
https://transmediale.de/en/2024/event/mcluhan-2024
The talk went of fabulously, and was followed by commentary from Frederike Kaltheuner (Human Rights Watch) and a discussion moderated by Helen Starr. While you'll have to wait a bit for the video, I thought that I'd post my talk notes from last night for the impatient among you.
I want to thank the festival and the embassy staff for their hard work on an excellent event. And now, on to the talk!
Last year, I coined the term 'enshittification,' to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers, it really hit the zeitgeist. I mean, the American Dialect Society made it their Word of the Year for 2023 (which, I suppose, means that now I'm definitely getting a poop emoji on my tombstone).
So what's enshittification and why did it catch fire? It's my theory explaining how the internet was colonized by platforms, and why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, and why it matters – and what we can do about it.
We're all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit.
It's frustrating. It's demoralizing. It's even terrifying.
I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the 'great forces of history,' and into the material world of specific decisions made by named people – decisions we can reverse and people whose addresses and pitchfork sizes we can learn.
Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It's not just a way to say 'things are getting worse' (though of course, it's fine with me if you want to use it that way. It's an English word. We don't have der Rat für Englisch Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).
But in case you want to use enshittification in a more precise, technical way, let's examine how enshittification works.
It's a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Let's do a case study. What could be better than Facebook?
Facebook is a company that was founded to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of Harvard undergrads, and it only got worse after that.
When Facebook started off, it was only open to US college and high-school kids with .edu and k-12.us addresses. But in 2006, it opened up to the general public. It told them: “Yes, I know you’re all using Myspace. But Myspace is owned by Rupert Murdoch, an evil, crapulent senescent Australian billionaire, who spies on you with every hour that God sends.
“Sign up with Facebook and we will never spy on you. Come and tell us who matters to you in this world, and we will compose a personal feed consisting solely of what those people post for consumption by those who choose to follow them.”
That was stage one. Facebook had a surplus — its investors’ cash — and it allocated that surplus to its end-users. Those end-users proceeded to lock themselves into FB. FB — like most tech businesses — has network effects on its side. A product or service enjoys network effects when it improves as more people sign up to use it. You joined FB because your friends were there, and then others signed up because you were there.
But FB didn’t just have high network effects, it had high switching costs. Switching costs are everything you have to give up when you leave a product or service. In Facebook’s case, it was all the friends there that you followed and who followed you. In theory, you could have all just left for somewhere else; in practice, you were hamstrung by the collective action problem.
It’s hard to get lots of people to do the same thing at the same time. You and your six friends here are going to struggle to agree on where to get drinks after tonight's lecture. How were you and your 200 Facebook friends ever gonna agree on when it was time to leave Facebook, and where to go?
So FB’s end-users engaged in a mutual hostage-taking that kept them glued to the platform. Then FB exploited that hostage situation, withdrawing the surplus from end-users and allocating it to two groups of business customers: advertisers, and publishers.
To the advertisers, FB said, 'Remember when we told those rubes we wouldn’t spy on them? We lied. We spy on them from asshole to appetite. We will sell you access to that surveillance data in the form of fine-grained ad-targeting, and we will devote substantial engineering resources to thwarting ad-fraud. Your ads are dirt cheap to serve, and we’ll spare no expense to make sure that when you pay for an ad, a real human sees it.'
To the publishers, FB said, 'Remember when we told those rubes we would only show them the things they asked to see? We lied!Upload short excerpts from your website, append a link, and we will nonconsensually cram it into the eyeballs of users who never asked to see it. We are offering you a free traffic funnel that will drive millions of users to your website to monetize as you please, and those users will become stuck to you when they subscribe to your feed.' And so advertisers and publishers became stuck to the platform, too, dependent on those users.
The users held each other hostage, and those hostages took the publishers and advertisers hostage, too, so that everyone was locked in.
Which meant it was time for the third stage of enshittification: withdrawing surplus from everyone and handing it to Facebook’s shareholders.
For the users, that meant dialing down the share of content from accounts you followed to a homeopathic dose, and filling the resulting void with ads and pay-to-boost content from publishers.
For advertisers, that meant jacking up prices and drawing down anti-fraud enforcement, so advertisers paid much more for ads that were far less likely to be seen by a person.
For publishers, this meant algorithmically suppressing the reach of their posts unless they included an ever-larger share of their articles in the excerpt, until anything less than fulltext was likely to be be disqualified from being sent to your subscribers, let alone included in algorithmic suggestion feeds.
And then FB started to punish publishers for including a link back to their own sites, so they were corralled into posting fulltext feeds with no links, meaning they became commodity suppliers to Facebook, entirely dependent on the company both for reach and for monetization, via the increasingly crooked advertising service.
When any of these groups squawked, FB just repeated the lesson that every tech executive learned in the Darth Vader MBA: 'I have altered the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.'
Facebook now enters the most dangerous phase of enshittification. It wants to withdraw all available surplus, and leave just enough residual value in the service to keep end users stuck to each other, and business customers stuck to end users, without leaving anything extra on the table, so that every extractable penny is drawn out and returned to its shareholders.
But that’s a very brittle equilibrium, because the difference between “I hate this service but I can’t bring myself to quit it,” and “Jesus Christ, why did I wait so long to quit? Get me the hell out of here!” is razor thin
All it takes is one Cambridge Analytica scandal, one whistleblower, one livestreamed mass-shooting, and users bolt for the exits, and then FB discovers that network effects are a double-edged sword.
If users can’t leave because everyone else is staying, when when everyone starts to leave, there’s no reason not to go, too.
That’s terminal enshittification, the phase when a platform becomes a pile of shit. This phase is usually accompanied by panic, which tech bros euphemistically call 'pivoting.'
Which is how we get pivots like, 'In the future, all internet users will be transformed into legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon characters in a virtual world called "metaverse," that we ripped off from a 25-year-old satirical cyberpunk novel.'
That's the procession of enshittification. If enshittification were a disease, we'd call that enshittification's "natural history." But that doesn't tell you how the enshittification works, nor why everything is enshittifying right now, and without those details, we can't know what to do about it.
What led to the enshittocene? What is it about this moment that led to the Great Enshittening? Was it the end of the Zero Interest Rate Policy? Was it a change in leadership at the tech giants? Is Mercury in retrograde?
None of the above.
The period of free fed money certainly led to tech companies having a lot of surplus to toss around. But Facebook started enshittifying long before ZIRP ended, so did Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
Some of the tech giants got new leaders. But Google's enshittification got worse when the founders came back to oversee the company's AI panic (excuse me, 'AI pivot').
And it can't be Mercury in retrograde, because I'm a cancer, and as everyone knows, cancers don't believe in astrology.
When a whole bunch of independent entities all change in the same way at once, that's a sign that the environment has changed, and that's what happened to tech.
Tech companies, like all companies, have conflicting imperatives. On the one hand, they want to make money. On the other hand, making money involves hiring and motivating competent staff, and making products that customers want to buy. The more value a company permits its employees and customers to carve off, the less value it can give to its shareholders.
The equilibrium in which companies produce things we like in honorable ways at a fair price is one in which charging more, worsening quality, and harming workers costs more than the company would make by playing dirty.
There are four forces that discipline companies, serving as constraints on their enshittificatory impulses.
First: competition. Companies that fear you will take your business elsewhere are cautious about worsening quality or raising prices.
Second: regulation. Companies that fear a regulator will fine them more than they expect to make from cheating, will cheat less.
These two forces affect all industries, but the next two are far more tech-specific.
Third: self-help. Computers are extremely flexible, and so are the digital products and services we make from them. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing-complete Von Neumann machine, a computer that can run every valid program.
That means that users can always avail themselves of programs that undo the anti-features that shift value from them to a company's shareholders. Think of a board-room table where someone says, 'I've calculated that making our ads 20% more invasive will net us 2% more revenue per user.'
In a digital world, someone else might well say 'Yes, but if we do that, 20% of our users will install ad-blockers, and our revenue from those users will drop to zero, forever.'
This means that digital companies are constrained by the fear that some enshittificatory maneuver will prompt their users to google, 'How do I disenshittify this?'
Fourth and finally: workers. Tech workers have very low union density, but that doesn't mean that tech workers don't have labor power. The historical "talent shortage" of the tech sector meant that workers enjoyed a lot of leverage over their bosses. Workers who disagreed with their bosses could quit and walk across the street and get another job – a better job.
They knew it, and their bosses knew it. Ironically, this made tech workers highly exploitable. Tech workers overwhelmingly saw themselves as founders in waiting, entrepreneurs who were temporarily drawing a salary, heroic figures of the tech mission.
That's why mottoes like Google's 'don't be evil' and Facebook's 'make the world more open and connected' mattered: they instilled a sense of mission in workers. It's what Fobazi Ettarh calls 'vocational awe, 'or Elon Musk calls being 'extremely hardcore.'
Tech workers had lots of bargaining power, but they didn't flex it when their bosses demanded that they sacrifice their health, their families, their sleep to meet arbitrary deadlines.
So long as their bosses transformed their workplaces into whimsical 'campuses,' with gyms, gourmet cafeterias, laundry service, massages and egg-freezing, workers could tell themselves that they were being pampered – rather than being made to work like government mules.
But for bosses, there's a downside to motivating your workers with appeals to a sense of mission, namely: your workers will feel a sense of mission. So when you ask them to enshittify the products they ruined their health to ship, workers will experience a sense of profound moral injury, respond with outrage, and threaten to quit.
Thus tech workers themselves were the final bulwark against enshittification,
The pre-enshittification era wasn't a time of better leadership. The executives weren't better. They were constrained. Their worst impulses were checked by competition, regulation, self-help and worker power.
So what happened?
One by one, each of these constraints was eroded until it dissolved, leaving the enshittificatory impulse unchecked, ushering in the enshittoscene.
It started with competition. From the Gilded Age until the Reagan years, the purpose of competition law was to promote competition. US antitrust law treated corporate power as dangerous and sought to blunt it. European antitrust laws were modeled on US ones, imported by the architects of the Marshall Plan.
But starting in the neoliberal era, competition authorities all over the world adopted a doctrine called 'consumer welfare,' which held that monopolies were evidence of quality. If everyone was shopping at the same store and buying the same product, that meant it was the best store, selling the best product – not that anyone was cheating.
And so all over the world, governments stopped enforcing their competition laws. They just ignored them as companies flouted them. Those companies merged with their major competitors, absorbed small companies before they could grow to be big threats. They held an orgy of consolidation that produced the most inbred industries imaginable, whole sectors grown so incestuous they developed Habsburg jaws, from eyeglasses to sea freight, glass bottles to payment processing, vitamin C to beer.
Most of our global economy is dominated by five or fewer global companies. If smaller companies refuse to sell themselves to these cartels, the giants have free rein to flout competition law further, with 'predatory pricing' that keeps an independent rival from gaining a foothold.
When Diapers.com refused Amazon's acquisition offer, Amazon lit $100m on fire, selling diapers way below cost for months, until diapers.com went bust, and Amazon bought them for pennies on the dollar, and shut them down.
Competition is a distant memory. As Tom Eastman says, the web has devolved into 'five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four,' so these giant companies no longer fear losing our business.
Lily Tomlin used to do a character on the TV show Laugh In, an AT&T telephone operator who'd do commercials for the Bell system. Each one would end with her saying 'We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.'
Today's giants are not constrained by competition.
They don't care. They don't have to. They're Google.
That's the first constraint gone, and as it slipped away, the second constraint – regulation – was also doomed.
When an industry consists of hundreds of small- and medium-sized enterprises, it is a mob, a rabble. Hundreds of companies can't agree on what to tell Parliament or Congress or the Commission. They can't even agree on how to cater a meeting where they'd discuss the matter.
But when a sector dwindles to a bare handful of dominant firms, it ceases to be a rabble and it becomes a cartel.
Five companies, or four, or three, or two, or just one company finds it easy to converge on a single message for their regulators, and without "wasteful competition" eroding their profits, they have plenty of cash to spread around.
Like Facebook, handing former UK deputy PM Nick Clegg millions every year to sleaze around Europe, telling his former colleagues that Facebook is the only thing standing between 'European Cyberspace' and the Chinese Communist Party.
Tech's regulatory capture allows it to flout the rules that constrain less concentrated sectors. They can pretend that violating labor, consumer and privacy laws is fine, because they violate them with an app.
This is why competition matters: it's not just because competition makes companies work harder and share value with customers and workers, it's because competition keeps companies from becoming too big to fail, and too big to jail.
Now, there's plenty of things we don't want improved through competition, like privacy invasions. After the EU passed its landmark privacy law, the GDPR, there was a mass-extinction event for small EU ad-tech companies. These companies disappeared en masse, and that's fine.
They were even more invasive and reckless than US-based Big Tech companies. After all, they had less to lose. We don't want competition in commercial surveillance. We don't want to produce increasing efficiency in violating our human rights.
But: Google and Facebook – who pretend they are called Alphabet and Meta – have been unscathed by European privacy law. That's not because they don't violate the GDPR (they do!). It's because they pretend they are headquartered in Ireland, one of the EU's most notorious corporate crime-havens.
And Ireland competes with the EU other crime havens – Malta, Luxembourg, Cyprus and sometimes the Netherlands – to see which country can offer the most hospitable environment for all sorts of crimes. Because the kind of company that can fly an Irish flag of convenience is mobile enough to change to a Maltese flag if the Irish start enforcing EU laws.
Which is how you get an Irish Data Protection Commission that processes fewer than 20 major cases per year, while Germany's data commissioner handles more than 500 major cases, even though Ireland is nominal home to the most privacy-invasive companies on the continent.
So Google and Facebook get to act as though they are immune to privacy law, because they violate the law with an app; just like Uber can violate labor law and claim it doesn't count because they do it with an app.
Uber's labor-pricing algorithm offers different drivers different payments for the same job, something Veena Dubal calls 'algorithmic wage discrimination.' If you're more selective about which jobs you'll take, Uber will pay you more for every ride.
But if you take those higher payouts and ditch whatever side-hustle let you cover your bills which being picky about your Uber drives, Uber will incrementally reduce the payment, toggling up and down as you grow more or less selective, playing you like a fish on a line until you eventually – inevitably – lose to the tireless pricing robot, and end up stuck with low wages and all your side-hustles gone.
Then there's Amazon, which violates consumer protection laws, but says it doesn't matter, because they do it with an app. Amazon makes $38b/year from its 'advertising' system. 'Advertising' in quotes because they're not selling ads, they're selling placements in search results.
The companies that spend the most on 'ads' go to the top, even if they're offering worse products at higher prices. If you click the first link in an Amazon search result, on average you will pay a 29% premium over the best price on the service. Click one of the first four items and you'll pay a 25% premium. On average you have to go seventeen items down to find the best deal on Amazon.
Any merchant that did this to you in a physical storefront would be fined into oblivion. But Amazon has captured its regulators, so it can violate your rights, and say, "it doesn't count, we did it with an app"
This is where that third constraint, self-help, would sure come in handy. If you don't want your privacy violated, you don't need to wait for the Irish privacy regulator to act, you can just install an ad-blocker.
More than half of all web users are blocking ads. But the web is an open platform, developed in the age when tech was hundreds of companies at each others' throats, unable to capture their regulators.
Today, the web is being devoured by apps, and apps are ripe for enshittification. Regulatory capture isn't just the ability to flout regulation, it's also the ability to co-opt regulation, to wield regulation against your adversaries.
Today's tech giants got big by exploiting self-help measures. When Facebook was telling Myspace users they needed to escape Rupert Murdoch’s evil crapulent Australian social media panopticon, it didn’t just say to those Myspacers, 'Screw your friends, come to Facebook and just hang out looking at the cool privacy policy until they get here'
It gave them a bot. You fed the bot your Myspace username and password, and it would login to Myspace and pretend to be you, and scrape everything waiting in your inbox, copying it to your FB inbox, and you could reply to it and it would autopilot your replies back to Myspace.
When Microsoft was choking off Apple's market oxygen by refusing to ship a functional version of Microsoft Office for the Mac – so that offices were throwing away their designers' Macs and giving them PCs with upgraded graphics cards and Windows versions of Photoshop and Illustrator – Steve Jobs didn't beg Bill Gates to update Mac Office.
He got his technologists to reverse-engineer Microsoft Office, and make a compatible suite, the iWork Suite, whose apps, Pages, Numbers and Keynote could perfectly read and write Microsoft's Word, Excel and Powerpoint files.
When Google entered the market, it sent its crawler to every web server on Earth, where it presented itself as a web-user: 'Hi! Hello! Do you have any web pages? Thanks! How about some more? How about more?'
But every pirate wants to be an admiral. When Facebook, Apple and Google were doing this adversarial interoperability, that was progress. If you try to do it to them, that's piracy.
Try to make an alternative client for Facebook and they'll say you violated US laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and EU laws like Article 6 of the EUCD.
Try to make an Android program that can run iPhone apps and play back the data from Apple's media stores and they'd bomb you until the rubble bounced.
Try to scrape all of Google and they'll nuke you until you glowed.
Tech's regulatory capture is mind-boggling. Take that law I mentioned earlier, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA. Bill Clinton signed it in 1998, and the EU imported it as Article 6 of the EUCD in 2001
It is a blanket prohibition on removing any kind of encryption that restricts access to a copyrighted work – things like ripping DVDs or jailbreaking a phone – with penalties of a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine for a first offense.
This law has been so broadened that it can be used to imprison creators for granting access to their own creations
Here's how that works: In 2008, Amazon bought Audible, an audiobook platform, in an anticompetitive acquisition. Today, Audible is a monopolist with more than 90% of the audiobook market. Audible requires that all creators on their platform sell with Amazon's "digital rights management," which locks it to Amazon's apps.
So say I write a book, then I read it into a mic, then I pay a director and an engineer thousands of dollars to turn that into an audiobook, and sell it to you on the monopoly platform, Audible, that controls more than 90% of the market.
If I later decide to leave Amazon and want to let you come with me to a rival platform, I am out of luck. If I supply you with a tool to remove Amazon's encryption from my audiobook, so you can play it in another app, I commit a felony, punishable by a 5-year sentence and a half-million-dollar fine, for a first offense.
That's a stiffer penalty than you would face if you simply pirated the audiobook from a torrent site. But it's also harsher than the punishment you'd get for shoplifting the audiobook on CD from a truck-stop. It's harsher than the sentence you'd get for hijacking the truck that delivered the CD.
So think of our ad-blockers again. 50% of web users are running ad-blockers. 0% of app users are running ad-blockers, because adding a blocker to an app requires that you first remove its encryption, and that's a felony (Jay Freeman calls this 'felony contempt of business-model').
So when someone in a board-room says, 'let's make our ads 20% more obnoxious and get a 2% revenue increase,' no one objects that this might prompt users to google, 'how do I block ads?' After all, the answer is, 'you can't.'
Indeed, it's more likely that someone in that board room will say, 'let's make our ads 100% more obnoxious and get a 10% revenue increase' (this is why every company wants you to install an app instead of using its website).
There's no reason that gig workers who are facing algorithmic wage discrimination couldn't install a counter-app that coordinated among all the Uber drivers to reject all jobs unless they reach a certain pay threshold.
No reason except felony contempt of business model, the threat that the toolsmiths who built that counter-app would go broke or land in prison, for violating DMCA 1201, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, trademark, copyright, patent, contract, trade secrecy, nondisclosure and noncompete, or in other words: 'IP law.'
'IP' is just a euphemism for 'a law that lets me reach beyond the walls of my company and control the conduct of my critics, competitors and customers.' And 'app' is just a euphemism for 'a web-page wrapped enough IP to make it a felony to mod it to protect the labor, consumer and privacy rights of its user.'
We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.
But what about that fourth constraint: workers?
For decades, tech workers' high degrees of bargaining power and vocational awe put a ceiling on enshittification. Even after the tech sector shrank to a handful of giants. Even after they captured their regulators so they could violate our consumer, privacy and labor rights. Even after they created 'felony contempt of business model' and extinguished self-help for tech users. Tech was still constrained by their workers' sense of moral injury in the face of the imperative to enshittify.
Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over?
Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion.
Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.
And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired last year six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.
Workers are no longer a check on their bosses' worst impulses
Today, the response to 'I refuse to make this product worse' is, 'turn in your badge and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.'
I get that this is all a little depressing
OK, really depressing.
But hear me out! We've identified the disease. We've traced its natural history. We've identified its underlying mechanism. Now we can get to work on a cure.
There are four constraints that prevent enshittification: competition, regulation, self-help and labor.
To reverse enshittification and guard against its reemergence, we must restore and strengthen each of these.
On competition, it's actually looking pretty good. The EU, the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, Japan and China are all doing more on competition than they have in two generations. They're blocking mergers, unwinding existing ones, taking action on predatory pricing and other sleazy tactics.
Remember, in the US and Europe, we already have the laws to do this – we just stopped enforcing them in the Helmut Kohl era.
I've been fighting these fights with the Electronic Frontier Foundation for 22 years now, and I've never seen a more hopeful moment for sound, informed tech policy.
Now, the enshittifiers aren't taking this laying down. The business press can't stop talking about how stupid and old-fashioned all this stuff is. They call people like me 'hipster antitrust,' and they hate any regulator who actually does their job.
Take Lina Khan, the brilliant head of the US Federal Trade Commission, who has done more in three years on antitrust than the combined efforts of all her predecessors over the past 40 years. Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal has run more than 80 editorials trashing Khan, insisting that she's an ineffectual ideologue who can't get anything done.
Sure, Rupert, that's why you ran 80 editorials about her.
Because she can't get anything done.
Even Canada is stepping up on competition. Canada! Land of the evil billionaire! From Ted Rogers, who owns the country's telecoms; to Galen Weston, who owns the country's grocery stores; to the Irvings, who basically own the entire province of New Brunswick.
Even Canada is doing something about this. Last autumn, Trudeau's government promised to update Canada's creaking competition law to finally ban 'abuse of dominance.'
I mean, wow. I guess when Galen Weston decided to engage in a criminal conspiracy to fix the price of bread – the most Les Miz-ass crime imaginable – it finally got someone's attention, eh?
Competition has a long way to go, but all over the world, competition law is seeing a massive revitalization. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher put antitrust law in a coma in the 80s – but it's awake, it's back, and it's pissed.
What about regulation? How will we get tech companies to stop doing that one weird trick of adding 'with an app' to their crimes and escaping enforcement?
Well, here in the EU, they're starting to figure it out. This year, the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act went into effect, and they let people who get screwed by tech companies go straight to the federal European courts, bypassing the toothless watchdogs in Europe's notorious corporate crime havens like Ireland.
In America, they might finally get a digital privacy law. You people have no idea how backwards US privacy law is. The last time the US Congress enacted a broadly applicable privacy law was in 1988.
The Video Privacy Protection Act makes it a crime for video-store clerks to leak your video-rental history. It was passed after a right-wing judge who was up for the Supreme Court had his rentals published in a DC newspaper. The rentals weren't even all that embarrassing!
Sure, that judge, Robert Bork, wasn't confirmed for the Supreme Court, but that was because he was a virulently racist loudmouth and a crook who served as Nixon's Solicitor General.
But Congress got the idea that their video records might be next, freaked out, and passed the VPPA.
That was the last time Americans got a big, national privacy law. Nineteen. Eighty. Eight.
It's been a minute.
And the thing is, there's a lot of people who are angry about stuff that has some nexus with America's piss-poor privacy landscape. Worried that Facebook turned Grampy into a Qanon? That Insta made your teen anorexic? That TikTok is brainwashing millennials into quoting Osama Bin Laden?
Or that cops are rolling up the identities of everyone at a Black Lives Matter protest or the Jan 6 riots by getting location data from Google?
Or that Red State Attorneys General are tracking teen girls to out-of-state abortion clinics?
Or that Black people are being discriminated against by online lending or hiring platforms?
Or that someone is making AI deepfake porn of you?
Having a federal privacy law with a private right of action – which means that individuals can sue companies that violate their privacy – would go a long way to rectifying all of these problems. There's a big coalition for that kind of privacy law.
What about self-help? That's a lot farther away, alas.
The EU's DMA will force tech companies to open up their walled gardens for interoperation. You'll be able to use Whatsapp to message people on iMessage, or quit Facebook and move to Mastodon, but still send messages to the people left behind.
But if you want to reverse-engineer one of those Big Tech products and mod it to work for you, not them, the EU's got nothing for you.
This is an area ripe for improvement, and I think the US might be the first ones to open this up.
It's certainly on-brand for the EU to be forcing tech companies to do things a certain way, while the US simply takes away tech companies' abilities to prevent others from changing how their stuff works.
My big hope here is that Stein's Law will take hold: 'Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop'
Letting companies decide how their customers must use their products is simply too tempting an invitation to mischief. HP has a whole building full of engineers thinking of new ways to lock your printer to its official ink cartridges, forcing you to spend $10,000/gallon on ink to print your boarding passes and shopping lists.
It's offensive. The only people who don't agree are the people running the monopolies in all the other industries, like the med-tech monopolists who are locking their insulin pumps to their glucose monitors, turning people with diabetes into walking inkjet printers.
Finally, there's labor. Here in Europe, there's much higher union density than in the US, which American tech barons are learning the hard way. There is nothing more satisfying in the daily news than the latest salvo by Nordic unions against that Tesla guy (Musk is the most Edison-ass Tesla guy imaginable).
But even in the USA, there's a massive surge in tech unions. Tech workers are realizing that they aren't founders in waiting. The days of free massages and facial piercings and getting to wear black tee shirts that say things your boss doesn't understand are coming to an end.
In Seattle, Amazon's tech workers walked out in sympathy with Amazon's warehouse workers, because they're all workers.
The only reason the tech workers aren't monitored by AI that notifies their managers if they visit the toilet during working hours is their rapidly dwindling bargaining power. The way things are going, Amazon programmers are going to be pissing in bottles next to their workstations (for a guy who built a penis-shaped rocket, Jeff Bezos really hates our kidneys).
We're seeing bold, muscular, global action on competition, regulation and labor, with self-help bringing up the rear. It's not a moment too soon, because the bad news is, enshittification is coming to every industry.
If it's got a networked computer in it, the people who made it can run the Darth Vader MBA playbook on it, changing the rules from moment to moment, violating your rights and then saying 'It's OK, we did it with an app.'
From Mercedes renting you your accelerator pedal by the month to Internet of Things dishwashers that lock you into proprietary dishsoap, enshittification is metastasizing into every corner of our lives.
Software doesn't eat the world, it enshittifies it
But there's a bright side to all this: if everyone is threatened by enshittification, then everyone has a stake in disenshittification.
Just as with privacy law in the US, the potential anti-enshittification coalition is massive, it's unstoppable.
The cynics among you might be skeptical that this will make a difference. After all, isn't "enshittification" the same as "capitalism"?
Well, no.
Look, I'm not going to cape for capitalism here. I'm hardly a true believer in markets as the most efficient allocators of resources and arbiters of policy – if there was ever any doubt, capitalism's total failure to grapple with the climate emergency surely erases it.
But the capitalism of 20 years ago made space for a wild and wooly internet, a space where people with disfavored views could find each other, offer mutual aid, and organize.
The capitalism of today has produced a global, digital ghost mall, filled with botshit, crapgadgets from companies with consonant-heavy brand-names, and cryptocurrency scams.
The internet isn't more important than the climate emergency, nor gender justice, racial justice, genocide, or inequality.
But the internet is the terrain we'll fight those fights on. Without a free, fair and open internet, the fight is lost before it's joined.
We can reverse the enshittification of the internet. We can halt the creeping enshittification of every digital device.
We can build a better, enshittification-resistant digital nervous system, one that is fit to coordinate the mass movements we will need to fight fascism, end genocide, and save our planet and our species.
Martin Luther King said 'It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.'
And it may be true that the law can't force corporate sociopaths to conceive of you as a human being entitled to dignity and fair treatment, and not just an ambulatory wallet, a supply of gut-bacteria for the immortal colony organism that is a limited liability corporation.
But it can make that exec fear you enough to treat you fairly and afford you dignity, even if he doesn't think you deserve it.
And I think that's pretty important.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel/a>
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works in India. I added it to my firfox webbrowser on phone. This is how you do it:
Open your firfox and press the three buttons. Go to settings. There, in general you got the search option and within that your default search engine is selected, Google, Bing Yahoo whatever.
Within that, what you do now is, add the new search engine udm14. While adding a new search engine it gonna ask you a name for the search engine (udm14) + what is the search engine website url when you do search something. Add the following to the url part: (https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14) and you're all set!
Select udm14 now as your default browser and you're good to go!
Google de-shitification
Do you use Google? Do you want to search without the always-wrong AI inserting itself and fucking over your search results?
https://udm14.com/
This is an easy way to add &udm=14 to your Google query, which will remove the AI and also put it very much like it would have been back when it actually did not suck.
Note that it just submits to Google with &udm=14 at the end of the URL. If you know how to edit URL's, you can just add it yourself and it should have the same effect.
Doesn't work in all regions, for all users, etc. but it worked for me.
hey, so people need to be aware that youtube is now (randomly) holding basic features for ransom (such as being able to pin comments under your own videos) in exchange for Your State ID/Drivers License, or a 30 Second Video Of Your Face.
not to pull a "think of the children," but No Actually. I've been making videos as a hobby since 2015 (and I've had my channel since middle school), I was a minor when I started and I'm not sure I would have understood the kind of damage something a seemingly simple as a video of your face can do.
this is a Massive breach of privacy and over-reach on google's part No Matter What, but if they're going to randomly demand a state ID or license then they absolutely should not allow minors to be creators.
google having a stockpile of identifying information on teenagers is bad enough, but the Alternative of recording your face and handing it over to be filed away is Alarming considering it opens the gates for minors who Aren't old enough to have a license.
and yes, there is a third option, but it's intentionally obtuse. a long wait period (2 months), with no guarantee of access (unlike, say, the convenience of using your phone's cameras for either of the other two), with absolutely No elaboration on what the criteria is or how it's being measured.
it's the same psychological effect that mobile games rely on. offer a slow, unreliable solution with no payment to make the Paid instant gratification look more appealing (the "payment" in this case being You. you are the product being offered).
and it's Particularly a system that (I think intentionally) disadvantages people who don't treat their channels like a job. hobbyists or niche creators who don't create regularly enough or aren't popular enough to meet whatever Vague criteria needs to be met to pass.
markiplier would have no problem passing, your little brother might not be able to. and while Mark's name is already out there there's no reason why your little brother's should be too.
something like pinned comments may seem simple, you don't technically Need it. but it's a feature that's been available for years. most people don't look at descriptions anymore. so when there's relevant information that needs to be delivered then the pinned comment is usually the go to.
for my little channel that information is about the niche series I create for. guides on how to get into the series, sources on where to find the content At All (and reliably so). for other creators it can be used for things Much More Important.
Moreover, if we let them get away with cutting away "small" features and selling it back to you for the price of your privacy, then they Will creep further. they Will take more.
"The enshittification of the internet"
Monetization. The word you're looking for is monetization. The idea that all websites and apps and social media must be profitable is why the internet sucks so bad. Monetization kills human expression.
from @jv
Okay with the caveat that I have not personally verified this, but it does appear to be supported by google support threads and their abuse policy--
User sloan_spencer_author on instagram reports that another author they know had their Google docs access suspended for sharing explicit content.
I know that lots of y'all on f1blr use google docs, so I'd encourage you to back up your work locally (on your hard drive/an external drive). I don't know what a good alternative is--I've been using Proton Drive (since I already pay for a Proton email) and I don't see anything in the terms of service about prohibiting explicit content, so. Maybe that and Word or OfficeLibre? Man, I don't know. Our cyberpunk dystopia sucks.
Unpersoned
Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!
My latest Locus Magazine column is "Unpersoned." It's about the implications of putting critical infrastructure into the private, unaccountable hands of tech giants:
https://locusmag.com/2024/07/cory-doctorow-unpersoned/
The column opens with the story of romance writer K Renee, as reported by Madeline Ashby for Wired:
https://www.wired.com/story/what-happens-when-a-romance-author-gets-locked-out-of-google-docs/
Renee is a prolific writer who used Google Docs to compose her books, and share them among early readers for feedback and revisions. Last March, Renee's Google account was locked, and she was no longer able to access ten manuscripts for her unfinished books, totaling over 220,000 words. Google's famously opaque customer service – a mix of indifferently monitored forums, AI chatbots, and buck-passing subcontractors – would not explain to her what rule she had violated, merely that her work had been deemed "inappropriate."
Renee discovered that she wasn't being singled out. Many of her peers had also seen their accounts frozen and their documents locked, and none of them were able to get an explanation out of Google. Renee and her similarly situated victims of Google lockouts were reduced to developing folk-theories of what they had done to be expelled from Google's walled garden; Renee came to believe that she had tripped an anti-spam system by inviting her community of early readers to access the books she was working on.
There's a normal way that these stories resolve themselves: a reporter like Ashby, writing for a widely read publication like Wired, contacts the company and triggers a review by one of the vanishingly small number of people with the authority to undo the determinations of the Kafka-as-a-service systems that underpin the big platforms. The system's victim gets their data back and the company mouths a few empty phrases about how they take something-or-other "very seriously" and so forth.
But in this case, Google broke the script. When Ashby contacted Google about Renee's situation, Google spokesperson Jenny Thomson insisted that the policies for Google accounts were "clear": "we may review and take action on any content that violates our policies." If Renee believed that she'd been wrongly flagged, she could "request an appeal."
But Renee didn't even know what policy she was meant to have broken, and the "appeals" went nowhere.
This is an underappreciated aspect of "software as a service" and "the cloud." As companies from Microsoft to Adobe to Google withdraw the option to use software that runs on your own computer to create files that live on that computer, control over our own lives is quietly slipping away. Sure, it's great to have all your legal documents scanned, encrypted and hosted on GDrive, where they can't be burned up in a house-fire. But if a Google subcontractor decides you've broken some unwritten rule, you can lose access to those docs forever, without appeal or recourse.
That's what happened to "Mark," a San Francisco tech workers whose toddler developed a UTI during the early covid lockdowns. The pediatrician's office told Mark to take a picture of his son's infected penis and transmit it to the practice using a secure medical app. However, Mark's phone was also set up to synch all his pictures to Google Photos (this is a default setting), and when the picture of Mark's son's penis hit Google's cloud, it was automatically scanned and flagged as Child Sex Abuse Material (CSAM, better known as "child porn"):
https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/22/allopathic-risk/#snitches-get-stitches
Without contacting Mark, Google sent a copy of all of his data – searches, emails, photos, cloud files, location history and more – to the SFPD, and then terminated his account. Mark lost his phone number (he was a Google Fi customer), his email archives, all the household and professional files he kept on GDrive, his stored passwords, his two-factor authentication via Google Authenticator, and every photo he'd ever taken of his young son.
The SFPD concluded that Mark hadn't done anything wrong, but it was too late. Google had permanently deleted all of Mark's data. The SFPD had to mail a physical letter to Mark telling him he wasn't in trouble, because he had no email and no phone.
Mark's not the only person this happened to. Writing about Mark for the New York Times, Kashmir Hill described other parents, like a Houston father identified as "Cassio," who also lost their accounts and found themselves blocked from fundamental participation in modern life:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html
Note that in none of these cases did the problem arise from the fact that Google services are advertising-supported, and because these people weren't paying for the product, they were the product. Buying a $800 Pixel phone or paying more than $100/year for a Google Drive account means that you're definitely paying for the product, and you're still the product.
What do we do about this? One answer would be to force the platforms to provide service to users who, in their judgment, might be engaged in fraud, or trafficking in CSAM, or arranging terrorist attacks. This is not my preferred solution, for reasons that I hope are obvious!
We can try to improve the decision-making processes at these giant platforms so that they catch fewer dolphins in their tuna-nets. The "first wave" of content moderation appeals focused on the establishment of oversight and review boards that wronged users could appeal their cases to. The idea was to establish these "paradigm cases" that would clarify the tricky aspects of content moderation decisions, like whether uploading a Nazi atrocity video in order to criticize it violated a rule against showing gore, Nazi paraphernalia, etc.
This hasn't worked very well. A proposal for "second wave" moderation oversight based on arms-length semi-employees at the platforms who gather and report statistics on moderation calls and complaints hasn't gelled either:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/12/move-slow-and-fix-things/#second-wave
Both the EU and California have privacy rules that allow users to demand their data back from platforms, but neither has proven very useful (yet) in situations where users have their accounts terminated because they are accused of committing gross violations of platform policy. You can see why this would be: if someone is accused of trafficking in child porn or running a pig-butchering scam, it would be perverse to shut down their account but give them all the data they need to go one committing these crimes elsewhere.
But even where you can invoke the EU's GDPR or California's CCPA to get your data, the platforms deliver that data in the most useless, complex blobs imaginable. For example, I recently used the CCPA to force Mailchimp to give me all the data they held on me. Mailchimp – a division of the monopolist and serial fraudster Intuit – is a favored platform for spammers, and I have been added to thousands of Mailchimp lists that bombard me with unsolicited press pitches and come-ons for scam products.
Mailchimp has spent a decade ignoring calls to allow users to see what mailing lists they've been added to, as a prelude to mass unsubscribing from those lists (for Mailchimp, the fact that spammers can pay it to send spam that users can't easily opt out of is a feature, not a bug). I thought that the CCPA might finally let me see the lists I'm on, but instead, Mailchimp sent me more than 5900 files, scattered through which were the internal serial numbers of the lists my name had been added to – but without the names of those lists any contact information for their owners. I can see that I'm on more than 1,000 mailing lists, but I can't do anything about it.
Mailchimp shows how a rule requiring platforms to furnish data-dumps can be easily subverted, and its conduct goes a long way to explaining why a decade of EU policy requiring these dumps has failed to make a dent in the market power of the Big Tech platforms.
The EU has a new solution to this problem. With its 2024 Digital Markets Act, the EU is requiring platforms to furnish APIs – programmatic ways for rivals to connect to their services. With the DMA, we might finally get something parallel to the cellular industry's "number portability" for other kinds of platforms.
If you've ever changed cellular platforms, you know how smooth this can be. When you get sick of your carrier, you set up an account with a new one and get a one-time code. Then you call your old carrier, endure their pathetic begging not to switch, give them that number and within a short time (sometimes only minutes), your phone is now on the new carrier's network, with your old phone-number intact.
This is a much better answer than forcing platforms to provide service to users whom they judge to be criminals or otherwise undesirable, but the platforms hate it. They say they hate it because it makes them complicit in crimes ("if we have to let an accused fraudster transfer their address book to a rival service, we abet the fraud"), but it's obvious that their objection is really about being forced to reduce the pain of switching to a rival.
There's a superficial reasonableness to the platforms' position, but only until you think about Mark, or K Renee, or the other people who've been "unpersonned" by the platforms with no explanation or appeal.
The platforms have rigged things so that you must have an account with them in order to function, but they also want to have the unilateral right to kick people off their systems. The combination of these demands represents more power than any company should have, and Big Tech has repeatedly demonstrated its unfitness to wield this kind of power.
This week, I lost an argument with my accountants about this. They provide me with my tax forms as links to a Microsoft Cloud file, and I need to have a Microsoft login in order to retrieve these files. This policy – and a prohibition on sending customer files as email attachments – came from their IT team, and it was in response to a requirement imposed by their insurer.
The problem here isn't merely that I must now enter into a contractual arrangement with Microsoft in order to do my taxes. It isn't just that Microsoft's terms of service are ghastly. It's not even that they could change those terms at any time, for example, to ingest my sensitive tax documents in order to train a large language model.
It's that Microsoft – like Google, Apple, Facebook and the other giants – routinely disconnects users for reasons it refuses to explain, and offers no meaningful appeal. Microsoft tells its business customers, "force your clients to get a Microsoft account in order to maintain communications security" but also reserves the right to unilaterally ban those clients from having a Microsoft account.
There are examples of this all over. Google recently flipped a switch so that you can't complete a Google Form without being logged into a Google account. Now, my ability to purse all kinds of matters both consequential and trivial turn on Google's good graces, which can change suddenly and arbitrarily. If I was like Mark, permanently banned from Google, I wouldn't have been able to complete Google Forms this week telling a conference organizer what sized t-shirt I wear, but also telling a friend that I could attend their wedding.
Now, perhaps some people really should be locked out of digital life. Maybe people who traffick in CSAM should be locked out of the cloud. But the entity that should make that determination is a court, not a Big Tech content moderator. It's fine for a platform to decide it doesn't want your business – but it shouldn't be up to the platform to decide that no one should be able to provide you with service.
This is especially salient in light of the chaos caused by Crowdstrike's catastrophic software update last week. Crowdstrike demonstrated what happens to users when a cloud provider accidentally terminates their account, but while we're thinking about reducing the likelihood of such accidents, we should really be thinking about what happens when you get Crowdstruck on purpose.
The wholesale chaos that Windows users and their clients, employees, users and stakeholders underwent last week could have been pieced out retail. It could have come as a court order (either by a US court or a foreign court) to disconnect a user and/or brick their computer. It could have come as an insider attack, undertaken by a vengeful employee, or one who was on the take from criminals or a foreign government. The ability to give anyone in the world a Blue Screen of Death could be a feature and not a bug.
It's not that companies are sadistic. When they mistreat us, it's nothing personal. They've just calculated that it would cost them more to run a good process than our business is worth to them. If they know we can't leave for a competitor, if they know we can't sue them, if they know that a tech rival can't give us a tool to get our data out of their silos, then the expected cost of mistreating us goes down. That makes it economically rational to seek out ever-more trivial sources of income that impose ever-more miserable conditions on us. When we can't leave without paying a very steep price, there's practically a fiduciary duty to find ways to upcharge, downgrade, scam, screw and enshittify us, right up to the point where we're so pissed that we quit.
Google could pay competent decision-makers to review every complaint about an account disconnection, but the cost of employing that large, skilled workforce vastly exceeds their expected lifetime revenue from a user like Mark. The fact that this results in the ruination of Mark's life isn't Google's problem – it's Mark's problem.
The cloud is many things, but most of all, it's a trap. When software is delivered as a service, when your data and the programs you use to read and write it live on computers that you don't control, your switching costs skyrocket. Think of Adobe, which no longer lets you buy programs at all, but instead insists that you run its software via the cloud. Adobe used the fact that you no longer own the tools you rely upon to cancel its Pantone color-matching license. One day, every Adobe customer in the world woke up to discover that the colors in their career-spanning file collections had all turned black, and would remain black until they paid an upcharge:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process
The cloud allows the companies whose products you rely on to alter the functioning and cost of those products unilaterally. Like mobile apps – which can't be reverse-engineered and modified without risking legal liability – cloud apps are built for enshittification. They are designed to shift power away from users to software companies. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it. A cloud app is some Javascript wrapped in enough terms of service clickthroughs to make it a felony to restore old features that the company now wants to upcharge you for.
Google's defenstration of K Renee, Mark and Cassio may have been accidental, but Google's capacity to defenstrate all of us, and the enormous cost we all bear if Google does so, has been carefully engineered into the system. Same goes for Apple, Microsoft, Adobe and anyone else who traps us in their silos. The lesson of the Crowdstrike catastrophe isn't merely that our IT systems are brittle and riddled with single points of failure: it's that these failure-points can be tripped deliberately, and that doing so could be in a company's best interests, no matter how devastating it would be to you or me.
If you'd like an e ssay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/22/degoogled/#kafka-as-a-service
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It’s literally such an absurd race to the bottom right now that the recent series of events and the hellsite’s status can best be summed up like
I cannot express how much I love that between four major social media websites, the one proving to be the fittest is the one full of queer people who worship frogs. Like.. Yes! Fucking rightfully so! Natural selection!
The reason people miss Vine (and the reason it was so good) was because it was the last gasp of the golden age of online interaction.
Because you only had six seconds to play with, you had to be succinct, eye-catching, unique, and memorable. It rewarded originality, encouraged absurdity, and fostered creativity.
It couldn't be monetised. It allowed freedom of expression. It didn't allow videos to be remixed and stitched and duetted and become a petri dish for ten thousand people, all far less talented than the creator, to dilute the original. It was too short for videos to become rambles or contain misinformation. It couldn't encourage crazes or trends or act as an online playground for peer pressure. It didn't target children. It didn't encourage doomscrolling. It was the perfect medium for creative expression in the social media age and, in a world that was careening towards making the internet a hellish, moribund place to be, it was doomed.
It's said often as a joke but it's true: never forget what they have taken from you. The internet is one of the greatest things mankind has ever invented and if powerful people get their way it will be neutered and miserable.
I did this compilation right after Vine went down, and I thought I lost it, but I finally found it
I'll never forgive those vampires at Hewlett Packard. Their little arms race of "how ludicrously hard can we gouge these peasants" has brought me the closest I've been to going full chaotic tinkerer and just tearing out that proprietary Ink Cop crap and coding a humane replacement, then daring a court to convict me once HPs pillaging is laid bare. until then, When my current printer dies, I'll just pick up another one off the side of the road, and it'll last me another 5 years. except oh wait that one I found in hard rubbish is ~20 years old so it's probably better made than most nowadays. isn't society fun and not at all rotten to its core, hidden only by a thin shiny veneer? yay!
A sexy, skinny defeat device for your HP ink cartridge
Animals keep evolving into crabs; it's a process called "carcinisation" and it's pretty weird. Crabs just turn out to be extremely evolutionarily fit for our current environment:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-animals-keep-evolving-into-crabs/
By the same token, all kinds of business keep evolving into something like a printer company. It turns out that in this enshittified, poorly regulated, rentier-friendly world, the parasitic, inkjet business model is extremely adaptive. Printerinisation is everywhere.
All that stuff you hate about your car? Trapping you into using their mechanics, spying on you, planned obsolescence? All lifted from the inkjet printer business model:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon
That GE fridge that won't make ice or dispense water unless you spend $50 for a proprietary charcoal filter instead of using a $10 generic? Pure printerism:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/12/digital-feudalism/#filtergate
The software update to your Sonos speakers that makes them half as useful and takes away your right to play your stored music, forcing you to buy streaming music subscriptions? Straight out of the HP playbook:
https://www.wired.com/story/sonos-admits-its-recent-app-update-was-a-colossal-mistake/
But as printerinized as all these gadgets are, none can quite attain the level of high enshittification that the OG inkjet bastards attain on a daily basis. In the world championships of effortlessly authentic fuckery, no one can lay a glove on the sociopathic monsters of HP.
For example: when HP wanted to soften us all up for a new world of "subscription ink" (where you have to pre-pay every month for a certain number of pages' worth of printing, which your printer enforces by spying on you and ratting you out to HP over the internet), they offered a "lifetime subscription" plan. With this "lifetime" plan, you paid just once and your HP printer would print out 15 pages a month for so long as you owned your printer, with HP shipping you new ink every time you ran low.
Well, eventually, HP got bored of not making you pay rent on your own fucking printer, so they just turned that plan off. Yeah, it was a lifetime plan, but the "lifetime" in question was the lifetime of HP's patience for not fucking you over, and that patience has the longevity of a mayfly:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/06/horrible-products/#inkwars
It would take many pages to list all of HP's sins here. This is a company that ships printers with half-full ink cartridges and charges more than the printer cost to buy a replacement set. The company that won't let you print a black-and-white page if you're out of yellow ink. The company that won't let you scan or send a fax if you're out of any of your ink.
They make you "recalibrate" your printer or "clean your heads" by forcing you to print sheets of ink-dense paper. They also refuse to let you use your ink cartridges after they "expire."
HP raised the price of ink to over $10,000 per gallon, then went to war against third-party ink cartridge makers, cartridge remanufacturers, and cartridge refillers. They added "security chips" to their cartridges whose job was to watch the ink levels in your cartridge and, when they dip below a certain level (long before the cartridge is actually empty), declare the cartridge to be dry and permanently out of use.
Even if you refill that cartridge, it will still declare itself to be empty to your printer, which will therefore refuse to print.
Third party ink companies have options here. One thing they could do is reverse-engineer the security chip, and make compatible ones that say, "Actually, I'm full." The problem with this is that laws like Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) potentially makes this into a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine, for a first offense.
DMCA 1201 bans bypassing "an effective means of access control" to a copyrighted work. So if HP writes a copyrighted "I'm empty" program for its security chip and then adds some kind of access restriction to prevent you from dumping and reverse-engineering that program, you can end up a felon, thanks to the DMCA.
Another countermove is to harvest security chips out of dead cartridges that have been sent overseas as e-waste (one consequence of HP's $10,000/gallon ink racket is that it generates mountains of immortal, toxic e-waste that mostly ends up poisoning poor countries in the global south). These can be integrated into new cartridges, or remanufactured ones.
In practice, ink companies do all of this and more, and total normie HP printer owners go to extremely improbable lengths to find third party ink cartridges and figure out how to use them. It turns out that even people who find technology tinkering intimidating or confusing or dull can be motivated to learn and practice a lot of esoteric tech stuff as an alternative to paying $10,000/gallon for colored water.
HP has lots of countermoves for this. One truly unhinged piece of fuckery is to ask Customs and Border Patrol to block third-party ink cartridges with genuine HP security chips that have been pried loose from e-waste shipments. HP claims that these are "counterfeits" (because they were removed and re-used without permission), even though they came out of real HP cartridges, and CBP takes them at their word, seizing shipments.
Even sleazier: HP pushes out fake security updates to its printers. You get a message telling you there's an urgent security update, you click OK, and your printer shows you a downloading/installing progress bar and reboots itself. As far as you can tell, nothing has changed. But these aren't "security" updates, they're updates that block third-party ink, and HP has designed them not to kick in for several months. That way, HP owners who get tricked into installing this downgrade don't raise hell online and warn everyone else until they've installed it too, and it's too late:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer
This is the infectious pathogen business model: one reason covid spread so quickly was that people were infectious before they developed symptoms. That meant that the virus could spread before the spreader knew they had it. By adding a long fuse to its logic bomb, HP greatly increases the spread of its malware.
But life finds a way. $10,000/gallon ink is an irresistible target for tinkerers, security researchers and competitors. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but the true parent of jaw-dropping ingenuity is callous, sadistic greed. That's why America's army of prisoners are the source of so many of the most beautiful and exciting forms of innovation seen today:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/09/king-rat/#mother-of-invention
Despite harsh legal penalties and the vast resources of HP, third-party ink continues to thrive, and every time HP figures out how to block one technique, three even cooler ones pop up.
Last week, Jay Summet published a video tearing down a third-party ink cartridge compatible with an HP 61XL:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0ya184uaTE
The third-party cartridge has what appears to be a genuine HP security chip, but it is overlaid with a paper-thin, flexible, adhesive-backed circuit board that is skinny enough that the cartridge still fits in an HP printer.
This flexible circuit board has its own little microchip. Summet theorizes that it is designed to pass the "are you a real HP cartridge" challenge pass to the security chip, but to block the followup "are you empty or full?" message. When the printer issues that challenge, the "man in the middle" chip answers, "Oh, I'm definitely full."
In their writeup, Hackaday identifies the chip as "a single IC in a QFN package." This is just so clever and delightful:
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/28/man-in-the-middle-pcb-unlocks-hp-ink-cartridges/
Hackaday also notes that HP CEO Enrique J Lores recently threatened to brick any printer discovered to be using third-party ink:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/hp-ceo-blocking-third-party-ink-from-printers-fights-viruses/
As William Gibson famously quipped, "the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." As our enshittification-rich environment drives more and more companies to evolve into rent-seeking enterprises through printerinisation, HP offers us a glimpse of the horrors of the late enshittocene.
It's just as Orwell prophesied: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a HP installing malware on your printer to force you to spend $10,000/gallon on ink – forever."
Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/30/life-finds-a-way/#ink-stained-wretches
Image: Jay Summet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0ya184uaTE
Look. I'm not here to start anything. But...
The Planet Isn't Dying, It's Being Killed, And Those Who Are Killing It Have Names And Addresses.
Utah Phillips
To understand what's going on here, know these things:
OpenAI is the company that makes ChatGPT
A spider is a kind of bot that autonomously crawls the web and sucks up web pages
robots.txt is a standard text file that most web sites use to inform spiders whether or not they have permission to crawl the site; basically a No Trespassing sign for robots
OpenAI's spider is ignoring robots.txt (very rude!)
the web.sp.am site is a research honeypot created to trap ill-behaved spiders, consisting of billions of nonsense garbage pages that look like real content to a dumb robot
OpenAI is training its newest ChatGPT model using this incredibly lame content, having consumed over 3 million pages and counting...
It's absurd and horrifying at the same time.
@flyoctoflyy (just for you 💖)
