To kick off our Good Web series, Cory Doctorow joined us for a deep dive into his enshittification theory, and how regulation, labor power, competition, and user self-help will make it a thing of the past. We also got him to tell us a little bit about his new novel The Bezzle.
Cory first joined us prior to coining the term “enshittification” for a conversation about adversarial interoperability and Right to Repair. He is a prolific blogger and microblogger, and you can find him on Craphound and Pluralistic. And read Cory’s new novel!
Transcript
Ethan Zuckerman:
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Reimagining the Internet. I am your erstwhile host, Ethan Zuckerman. I am here with a wonderful guest, an acclaimed science fiction author, Cory Doctrow. Cory is so many different things. He’s a special advisor to the EFF. He writes really wonderful books. He’s an incredibly prolific and thoughtful writer and columnist. At the moment, he has just published a book that I was singing the praises of called The Bezzle: A Martin Hench Novel. And lately, he has been a really interesting coiner of words with which to talk about our modern society. Cory, there’s a lot of other stuff in there. Welcome back to the show. It’s wonderful to have you here.
Cory Doctrow:
What a treat to be on. And thank you. Yes, certainly coining some weird words these days. I’ve always done it. But every now and again, other people think that my coinage are as good as I do. So it’s always very gratifying.
Ethan Zuckerman:
There is a particular coinage that we will definitely spend time on today, which is enshittification. The American Dialect Society made it its word of the year for 2023. That’s not bad. But I actually wanted to start by talking about the term bezzle, which turns out is a word that you did not coin. But man, it’s an awfully good get. Cory, what is a bezzle and who came up with that term?
Cory Doctrow:
So because this is an audio medium, let me spell the word first. It’s not bezel, which would be the black rectangle around your phone screen. It’s b-e-z-z-l-e, like embezzle without the em. And it was coined by the great economist John Kenneth Galbraith. And it describes, he says, the magic interval after the con artist has your money, but before you know it’s a con. And the important thing about that moment is it’s a moment where everyone feels richer. The con artist feels richer because he’s got your money and you feel richer because you think you’re getting it back.
Right. You don’t realize that you’ve just been robbed. You’re actually probably feeling pretty good about things. And he’s using it specifically about embezzlement. So usually this is your inside running a business. Someone has just offered to fix your books for you. They’ve done wonderful things. They look better than they ever have. What got you to adopt this term as the title for this excellent new book?
Cory Doctrow:
Well, the thing about the bezzle is that it enlists the scammy because there’s only settlement of the bezzle. The bezzle is only manifested. The national supply of happiness only goes down after you try to withdraw your money, right? After you try to recover the money. So long as you never ask Sam Bankman-Fried for the money back, he will tell you that he’s about to get it back, right? He made some bad bets, but he’ll make some good bets. And then everyone will have the money. The problem for Sam Bankman-Fried wasn’t that he gambled away everyone else’s money. It was that the federal government made him stop before he could win it back. And they’re the ones who made everyone poorer. And I think in these scams, there’s lots of people who just don’t want to look too hard at the scam in case they realize that their suspicions are correct. Now, the era in which this book is set is an era that I think of as a long bezzle. It was the recovery after the dot-com crash up to the great financial crisis. [1]
Ethan Zuckerman:
And you actually describe it as the 2000s were the decade of the bezzle.
Cory Doctrow:
Damn right they were, right. There’s this long period where there’s all of this money- I’m going to say money on paper. I don’t mean dollar bills. I mean, there’s a lot of spreadsheet entries that make it look like everyone’s better off. And so long as you can keep rolling over those mortgages, so long as Yahoo Share price keeps going up, so long as nobody asks for a final settlement, no one says, right, poker game’s over. I’m cashing out my chips. We can ignore the fact that there’s a lot more chips on the table than there is cash to redeem them.
Ethan Zuckerman:
Corey, let’s talk about how you got here because my producer was asking me before this, how long we’ve known each other. The answer is somewhere 20 plus years.
Cory Doctrow:
I don’t remember where we met.
Ethan Zuckerman:
I don’t either, but it was somewhere in the copyright wars. It was somewhere early in the IP trenches where you were really a frontline fighter and I was involved with many other different things, mostly trying to get people to pay attention beyond the US. You started with a fairly narrow range of topics. You seem to be spreading ever outward. Over the last 24 months or so, you’ve been writing, I think some of the most thoughtful stuff about how the internet has gotten as bad as it has. And then reading this book, I sort of feel like you’re zooming a little bit further out and essentially saying almost everything that financialized logic has touched is starting to decay and fall apart to one extent or the other. Are you okay?
Cory Doctrow:
I’m more okay than I’ve been in a long time, I would say. I actually think that I’ve thought through all of this ferment, I’ve figured out some stuff. You know, so maybe it’s a good bridge to enshittification maybe. And maybe explaining how I got there is useful. So, enshittification, you know, it’s this dirty word I coined. I’m gonna get a poop emoji on my headstone. And at first it was describing pathology, right?
So the first big enshittification essays describe a certain pattern that can be observed from the outside of conduct by firms that have been enshittified. And so it’s this pattern where companies allocate value to the end users, then they claw it back once the end users are locked in and give it to business customers. And then they claw it back when those business customers are locked in and then they give it to themselves and then the platform turns into a pile of shit. And that pattern, you know, you can superimpose it over lots of online businesses that we used to get a lot of value out of and that we’re still locked into. –
Ethan Zuckerman:
You’d use Facebook, I would say that I think Amazon is actually perhaps–
Cory Doctrow:
Amazon’s a good example.
Ethan Zuckerman:
–the best example of this. I think a company that at some point, many of us felt quite good about, I think very few of us feel good about at this point in part because it’s actually very hard to use at this point because so many people are selling so much crap on it. And then before you try to get angry at the Chinese sellers selling crap on it, you realize that they’re paying something like 60% in fees to Amazon for the right to sell the crap to you. One interesting thing about this is in your original formulation of this, you said they get to the point where there’s no value for anyone and then they die. When do these platforms die, Corey?
Cory Doctrow:
Well, historically they died. So far they’re shambling on like zombies. And in fact, this brings me to sort of the next phases of the thesis, right? So the next thing I sort of interrogated is like, how do they do this, right? What is the thing that distinguishes a digital business that does this from an analog business that does this? Cause there, you know, some of these things there are analogies to in the analog world, grosser sell end caps, which means that the stuff at eye height is not the stuff that’s best, it’s the stuff that paid the highest bribe to be there. But digital platforms, they’re able to do this thing I call twiddling, which is just changing the business logic really quickly, right?
Cory Doctrow:
You have the mechanism, which is the computer’s ability to act as a pump that moves value very quickly between business customers and users and shareholders. Just like just back and forth really fast in ways that you can’t with a hard goods business. And then you get to the epidemiology cause obviously the pump’s been there since day one. You’ve had platforms with two-sided markets that would benefit from using the pumps in this way since day one. Why did they all change? And why did they all change now? Right, like what made this possible? The four things that stop this disease from spreading.
Ethan Zuckerman:
You’ve got four of these that you spell out starting with competition. And competition no longer works the way that it used to.
Cory Doctrow:
So yeah, and this is, I think, why they’re also not dying. So historically, you know, the purpose of competition law in America won’t surprise you to hear was to encourage competition. But that changed, right? The Chicago School Ronald Reagan, they hit on this idea that the purpose of competition law was to sort of perfect the business. And so if you found a business that had extinguished all of its competitors, right? Like if everybody had to shop at one store and everybody bought the same product there, it wasn’t because they cheated. It was because someone had made the perfect business that was selling the perfect product. And the last thing the government should do is punish that company for having done so very well and please people so very much, right?
So we stopped enforcing antitrust law and we let companies buy each other. Apple buys 90 companies a year. Tim Cook is bringing home a new company for his shareholders more often than any of us bring home a bag of groceries for our families, right? Google is a company that made one successful product 25 years ago, and ran a really good search engine. And then everything they’ve done internally, almost with that exception has failed and all of their growth, the mobile stack, the ad stack, the server management, docs, maps, all of it.
Ethan Zuckerman:
All of it is the acquisition.
Cory Doctrow:
It’s acquisitions, which we would have prohibited. And so what this does is it lets companies kind of shambles on after they would have been killed off. Think about the antitrust suit against Google right now where it turns out that Google is spending something like one Twitter a year, making sure that nobody ever tries a search engine that’s not Google. Now cast your mind back to being an AltaVista user and trying Google and never going back, right? So Google could make sure that someone who tried another search engine would just go back to Google right away. And the way they could do that is by being the best search engine.
Cory Doctrow:
So they can either spend the money being better or they can spend the money making sure no one tries a search engine that’s not Google. And they just did the math, right? It’s cheaper to just make sure no one tries a search engine that’s not Google and it creates the kill zone. No investor will invest in a search engine that’s not Google because no one can try a search engine that’s not Google. So we don’t get a search engine that’s not Google. –
Ethan Zuckerman:
And very quickly you end up with Google that isn’t very good at being Google anymore.
So competition no longer works the way that it does. Regulation is apparently terrified of this space. We’ve gone through a long trend in the United States of essentially being terrified of regulating this. Our European friends are finally getting around to doing something regulatory, but it does seem like it’s coming very late in the game. I know you’re a big Lina Kahn fan. What’s been the state of regulation around these enshittified platforms? Is that likely to change?
Cory Doctrow:
Yeah, so regulatory capture is misunderstood or only partially understood. And the thing that most people miss is the relationship between regulatory capture and market concentration. So when a sector is big and disorganized, it’s very hard for that sector to have market discipline or message discipline when it’s trying to lobby for policy. And even when it does, one of the things about a disorganized sector is they compete. And so they don’t have as much profits to mobilize in service to whatever their lobbying goals are.
So you mentioned the copyright wars. If you remember, the seven entertainment companies fighting the tech sector were much smaller and aggregate than the tech sector was. But the tech sector was hundreds of companies that hated each other’s guts and they had no message discipline. They told judges, they told policymakers, they told regulators different things, contradictory things. And none of them had the access profits to plow into lobbying because they were all fighting each other. They were all cutting prices and offering higher wages to their workers to fight each other.
Tom Eastman, the New Zealand software developer, says “the web today is five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four.” And the result of that is that when regulators come for tech companies, tech companies say, I know it looks like we’re violating privacy of consumer protection or labor law, but we’re not ’cause we’re doing it with a NAP. And that shouldn’t fly. And the fact that it does tells you the regulators are captured.
Now, the regulation that makes the other regulations possible is antitrust. And so you mentioned Lina Khan. Lina Khan and the other agency people, Jonathan Kanter at the DOJ, Rohit Chopra at the CFPB, they’re doing more in just a few years than their predecessors have done in generations. And that’s how we see these big antitrust cases against Google, Facebook, Apple. It’s happening in Europe too. It’s happening in the UK. It’s also happening in China. You know, take privacy, right? The last time America got a consumer privacy law was in 1988, it’s a law called the Video Privacy Protection Act. [2]
Cory Doctrow:
So the third constraint was self-help. And like, here’s a little parable about self-help, right? So I sometimes call this adversarial interoperability. It’s just like hacking or tweaking or reconfiguring or modding a service, right? Or a product. And companies had to contend with the fact that the same flexibility that makes this twiddling possible also makes it possible for users of platforms and the technologists who want to serve them either ’cause they want to sell them something or just ’cause they like them to change how the service works, to claw back the value that’s being clawed away from them, to disenshittifiy them.
So you’re at a boardroom table and you’re thinking about ads. And someone says, “Guys, I’ve come up with this really cool thing called a pop-up ad or a banner ad”. I’ve come up with a banner ad. I think that if we make these ads 20% more obnoxious, “we can get 2% more revenue.” Well, someone else at that table who doesn’t give a shit about the users of their wellbeing might still say, “Ethan, I love your idea.” But what if 40% of our users type, “How do I block ads into a search engine?” You know, that means revenue from those users, it doesn’t stay at 100%. It certainly doesn’t go up to 102%. It goes to zero, it stays there, and it never comes back because no one is ever going back to the search engine to type, “How do I start seeing ads again?” And so you raise the price of Ink enough people figure out third-party ink. You know, make the DRM onerous enough, people figure out how to jailbreak their videos or whatever, right?
So this is always the kind of outer perimeter of the boardroom calculus. And yeah, you know, you’re not gonna lose money betting against the hubris of tech leaders. So maybe sometimes they would go ahead and do the obnoxious thing, but when they did, you actually got something that our friends at the University of Chicago predicted you might get, which is a market correction, right? People would take action.
Ethan Zuckerman:
So I mean, this is a place where we are trying in our own small way to arm some people for battle. We’ve been working for years now on a piece of software called Gobo. It can talk to Mastodon and Blue Sky if we’re willing to cross swords with Twitter. It can talk to Twitter depending on exactly what meta means by federation. It may be able to talk to threads. And once you’re there, you can choose your own algorithms or no algorithm at all to try to find your way through social media. Putting aside how hard this has been to write, putting aside how difficult it is to launch this out into the world, you are not enormously optimistic that self-help is gonna level the playing field here.
Cory Doctrow:
Oh, I think self-help could level the playing field, but only, but if it works, then they’ll sue you into a crater, right? That’s the part that I think, I actually think self-help is the only thing that’s gonna make it work. There’s a thing people say that I think isn’t true or entirely true that lawmakers just move too slow to deal with technological change. That’s not really true. Lawmakers can deal with technological change sometimes, but sometimes there’s a little lag. In that lag, self-help fills the void, right? You know, and I think what self-help, you know, generally an interoperability broadly does is it makes it cheaper and easier to leave a platform. You know, we stay on platforms, you know, not because we’ve been mesmerized by them, but because our friends are there. And our friends are there ’cause we are there and coordinating with our friends we love very much, but who are all stubborn and wanna do things their own way is really hard. If you can’t agree with the six people in your group chat where you’re going for dinner this Friday, there is no way in hell that you’re all gonna agree on when it’s time to leave Facebook or where to go next, or whether you’re all gonna use the same logins so that you can find each other, you know? And so people get stuck to the platform as mutual hostage taking. But if you let people leave onesie-twosie, right? You go to Blue Sky, I go to Mastodon.
Ethan Zuckerman:
And I can still follow you and it feels like we’re having the same conversation.
Cory Doctrow:
Yeah, you don’t even notice. You know, that’s how you make it work, right? That’s why everybody leaves college, but they’re still in the same social media space. It’s really different to how it was 20 years ago when everybody left college and you had to like save everyone’s address and have it in a dress book and write letters to their parents’ house to be forwarded on to wherever they’d moved to, right? We live in an age paradoxically where it should be easier than ever to leave and where it’s become harder than ever.
Ethan Zuckerman:
So we’re getting pieces of hope in this, which is great, cause we’re gonna return to that. I wanna get through the four steps of the regulatory state. So we have enshitification, I think most of us have a good sense of it. It’s coming about at this moment in time because we don’t have as much competition because regulation up until very recently has been quite hands off because certain protections that came in mostly around copyright have made interoperability, have made these helper apps very very difficult to write. As we well know, you also hold out some hope for the tech industry itself and for labor power.
Cory Doctrow:
Yeah, so that’s the fourth constraint. There’s this weird paradox about tech labor power. So tech workers have had a lot of power, right? Because there’s a shortage. It’s like the reason your boss lets you show up for work with like a nose piercing and a black t-shirt that says something that he doesn’t understand is not because like, you know, he’s a good natured slob who doesn’t wanna impose the same sadistic stuff that they impose on the, you know, outsource cleaning company that shows up and humiliating tabards and, you know, uniforms and has a strict dress code and strict grooming code and so on. It’s just ’cause he knows you can quit and walk across the street and get a better job. So your boss wants to motivate you. And historically the way that tech bosses motivated their workers was by appealing to their sense of mission.
You know, Fobazi Ettarh calls it vocational awe. Like you are part of a mission to bring a technological future to bear. The problem from the boss’s perspective is that if you appeal to your worker’s sense of mission in order to get them to, you know, work these long hours, they will experience a sense of mission. And when you say, all right, time to enshitifiy the product, you missed your mother’s funeral for it, they’re gonna say, fuck you, no, I quit. The guy across the street’s gonna give me a better job.
Ethan Zuckerman:
Unfortunately, at the moment, the guy across the street does not appear to be hiring.
Cory Doctrow:
Doesn’t want to hire you. Labor power that comes from scarcity only lasts until other workers enter the field or the field becomes less important. Labor power that comes from unions lasts irrespective of those factors. And so the rise and rise of tech labor unions right now. And in particular, the green shoots of solidarity between tech labor unions and other labor unions that are within the tech sector. And the smart ones have figured out that that day is coming soon.
Ethan Zuckerman:
Well, and this is this interesting moment, right? Because with the rise of AI, it does look like some tech jobs are gonna be able to be done a lot more efficiently. I use efficient in quotes. But surely you know a lot of people who are coding with an AI over their shoulder. I know a lot of people who are coding with an AI over their shoulder. That combined with a huge surge in everybody moving into computer science does seem like it would be weakening labor. So we have the green shoot of workers starting to find their rights. We have the green shoot of finally, and maybe temporarily, having some people in positions of power who are trying to use the regulatory structures. Is anyone succeeding in unshittifiying yet? Have we seen unshittification yet, Corey?
Cory Doctrow:
No.
Ethan Zuckerman:
Okay.
Cory Doctrow:
But I’ll tell you, like what we are seeing, so we talked about adversarial interoperability and where it’s going. So I think that our enemy here, our adversary, which is the companies that are using the fact that they have the legal right to determine how you use a product after they sell it to you to just fuck you and fuck you and fuck you, that it’s just reached a breaking point.
I’m a big fan of Stein’s law of finance. Anything that can’t go on forever eventually stops. And people are just furious. And so you’re getting these rights to repair bills that are all over the place. And the companies that hate repair, Apple is the kind of poster child here, they really lead the pack in sabotaging repair. They came up with all of these gambits where they pretended to like repair, but had this way that they could still stop it. And with the latest bill signed in Oregon, it’s just dead, right? Like the Oregon bill, they figured out all of the gambits and they said, “Fine, we’re gonna do it.” And then critically, Google defected.
So Google had been Apple’s partner in fighting repair. And Google, this shows you how even very limited competition, duopoly competition can make a difference. Google defected. And so with a divided record about whether it was even technically possible to impose these kinds of restrictions. And I won’t get too deep on this, but the Oregon bill says, “You can’t put digital rights management on parts.” So this was Apple’s kind of final gambit here, right? We’re going to, we’re gonna make a screen that has digital rights management on it. And so if you take a screen from a dead iPhone and put it in one that needs a new screen.
Ethan Zuckerman:
It’s not gonna work anymore.
Cory Doctrow:
It won’t work. And they can’t repeal the DMCA that says, “You’re not allowed to break DRM “because it’s a federal law.” Right? So this Oregon can’t do it. So what they said instead is, “You’re not allowed to use DRM.” It’s not that DRM still gets all the protection under the sun, you just can’t use it. And this is really interesting because it’s a wedge for other kinds of repair. So we have DRM in like powered wheelchairs and cars and smart toasters and smart wash dishwashers and smart kitty litter boxes. And it’s really, it’s proliferated. And so this is a really interesting thing that has happened. I think if there, we’re gonna get another one of these next, like if there’s another crack that’s gonna open in the wall, it’s gonna be printers. Because HP, like you, could not write HP’s villain.
Like it is amazing. People hate their printers. I can tell you from experience. Every time I write about printers, I get 10 times more mail than I get if I write about anything else.
This is the low-hanging fruit. And again, like it can become, to mix a metaphor, it’s a low-hanging fruit that can be the thin edge of the wedge. It’s that we can establish a beachhead with our thin edge of a wedge on the low-hanging fruit. We can make a policy that is aimed at printers but actually strikes at industry-wide conduct.
Ethan Zuckerman:
So part of the hope here is by finding the things that we really, truly hate. The things that really are unworkable are that people are simply passionate about how miserable they make them. Maybe this is the moment where we start getting substantial rebellion. And maybe this rebellion is what leads the HP workers to conclude that they need the union and maybe this is what gets us to the helper apps, whether it’s the third-party toner cartridges or whether it’s the way that we find ways of escaping the apps on our phone. Is this, I mean, you seem to be saying that we hit a point in the economy where suddenly it made sense for everyone to enshitifiy. And I certainly think you captured a moment of zeitgeist. Like I think there was a moment two or so years ago where it just really felt like everything online was getting pretty terrible. Do you think we’re hitting a similar tipping point as far as trying to fight back?
Cory Doctrow:
Yeah, so I think this maybe this is a good place to talk about why I think we might get a privacy law after this drought since 1988. At EFF, we recently published a paper called Privacy First. And what we point out is that there’s people who are really angry about a lot of tech stuff who disagree with each other about everything, including whether or not they really even have a problem. But all of their problems start with the fact that there’s a lot of commercial surveillance. So these people might disagree about everything else, but they will agree that their problem could be solved if we could do something about commercial surveillance.
So if you think Mark Zuckerberg made grampy into a QAnon, or if you think Insta made your teenager anorexic, or if you think that TikTok is convincing millennials to quote Osama bin Laden, right? Or if you think that it’s ugly that red state attorneys general are following teenagers into out-of-state abortion clinics, or that Google reverse warrants reveal the identity of everyone in a black lives matter demonstration or for that matter, the January 6th riots, or if you are worried about deep fake porn, or if you’re worried that people of color are having the surveillance data captured about them mobilized to discriminate against them in employment and financial products, right? All of these different things all start with cutting off the supply of surveillance data.
Ethan Zuckerman:
So talk to me for a moment about what there is to say. And let me set this up by telling you about the piece of research that we’ve been doing that makes me the happiest. Our lab has managed to produce a tool to take a pure random sample of YouTube. So a real true core sample. We are getting the videos that have only been seen 10 times as well as the ones that have been seen 100 million times.
So rather than understanding YouTube in terms of Mr. Beast and all of these, let me burn a giant pile of money and then I’ll make a giant pile of money while you watch me burning a giant pile of money, we’re seeing everything from people’s wedding videos, people taking fishing trips, people’s homework assignments, so many people streaming video games. And it’s actually been this very interesting return for me to the pre-commercial days of the web. It’s been this interesting taste of the 1990s.
And for the first time in a couple of years, I’ve actually felt a little bit of hope because I’m feeling like it’s actually all in there. We just don’t know how to find it anymore. What’s giving you hope at this point?
Cory Doctrow:
Oh, what gives me hope? So I think of hope as the idea that if I can see a course of action that I can take that has a high chance of materially improving the circumstances that I’m in, like getting me towards the future I wanna live in, that I am willing to believe or at least expect that when I reach that new vantage point that there will be revealed to me terrain that was occluded from where I am now and other paths that I can take that like this is my heuristic, right? Climb the slope towards the world I wanna be in on the highest gradient I can find when I can’t go any further, take stock and see if there’s another direction I can go in that I couldn’t see from where I was before. I’m given a lot of thought to like now that we’re getting right to repair in Oregon and the right to repair law in Oregon, Apple freaked out and among other things said, well, this means we’re gonna have to change the way we make iPhones everywhere in the world to which the rest of us said, don’t throw at me with a good time. But if this, like getting the law passed in Oregon, fixes iPhones everywhere in the world, what can we do that’s like a printer version, right?
And I’m also thinking about like the Digital Markets Act and in the EU and how it’s gonna force them to open up to other app stores and how to use the fact that Apple’s compliance plan as have Google and Facebook’s compliance plan been so bad like such a just a big middle finger to the European Union, like sure, you’ve got 500 million people, we’ve got $3 trillion, go fuck yourself, right? That it’s really one of those moments about rage, right?
So I’m working on a piece right now about how Margrethe Vestager and Thierry Breton, the competition commissioners in the EU need to make an example out of Apple, Google and Facebook. They need to kick the shit out of them because the reason Apple, Google and Facebook are doing this is because they think that if they can make the EU back down that Japan, the UK, China, the US and Canada will not even try, right? This is meant to be mandatory, right? Like it’s meant to be deterrence, right? That’s why they’re spending all this money. So we need deterrence. We need to show them that they can do it. And the Europeans, as you point out, they’re not kidding around.
Ethan Zuckerman:
They are definitely not kidding around. I just got back from France. One of my happiest moments of that trip was speaking at Sciences Po where I often work. We had invited Benoit Loutrel, who is now my single favorite regulator, with ACROM in France. And he got up on stage and basically said, “Look, the reason we passed the DSA “is that none of us have good answers “to whether these platforms are good or bad for us. “We are counting on you, the academics, “to help us figure out to what extent “these platforms are good and bad for us.” Which means we passed this legislation because it is a wish list for what you need to figure out these algorithms.
Now let’s be clear, there’s a long way between the DSA and actually being able to answer those questions. But it was utterly astounding to hear a regulator phrase this in terms of, “Hey, academics, we are doing this and now it’s time for you to do your jobs.” It was one of the most genuinely heartwarming things I’ve heard for a very long time. And I’m finding myself wanting to shout it from rooftops. I think in the same way that, as you described the local maxima solution, right? Stand on the Oregon victory, look to see what’s the next horizon. You can see DSA is increasingly feeling like that local maxima for me, where there might be something helpful to look at.
Cory Doctrow:
Yeah, I mean, the DSA, I think is the more mixed bag of the two only because, and I think that there’s a certain, you can see in the DSA and the DMA, the tension between what I think of as the, make the platforms better and make the platforms less important approaches.
Ethan Zuckerman:
Yes.
Cory Doctrow:
I think that elements of the DSA, the elements of the DSA that require platforms to exert control over their users to prevent them from harming other users are going to be an excuse and not even a bad one for not doing anything on interoperability. They’re gonna say, “How do we observe and control our users if we have to allow third parties to access our platform?” They’re not wrong. Like that is not an unreasonable thing to say, right?
And I think that between the two, I’m more interested in letting people leave platforms that do a bad job of protecting users than I am in making sure that platforms do a good job of protecting users. I don’t think they can, right? Like I think that on the one hand, like Mark Zuckerberg is just manifestly unqualified to be the unelected social medias are for the life of four billion people. But I also think that no one should have that job. I don’t want a better Zuck. I want to abolish Mark Zuckerberg[3] .
And while I think that, you know, it’s good to have protections for people who aren’t ready to leave the platform yet, especially in this area where it’s not easy to leave the platform, that our emphasis should be on evacuating the platforms, right? In the same way that we want fire suppression at the urban wildlife interface where people are living and where we get wildfires. What we really want to do is get people to stop living at the urban wildlife interface. We need to come up with equitable ways for people to escape those places that are intrinsically unsafe.
Ethan Zuckerman:
So I’m going to bring this all the way back to The Bezzle with one more reminder to readers that you should pick this up, whether you pick this up from Tor Books in actual book form, whether you buy it in the various non-DRM protected ways that Cory makes the book available, whether you listen to the wonderful Wil Wheaton read it, all of those are options. The Bezzle is this very dark picture in my mind that I think points to a world where things are starting to fall apart.
And I am starting to wonder if we’re starting to see, you know, Trotsky, right? Like the moment where the systems start coming apart and revolution is actually possible. Is that a possible moment of hope to take at this moment? Things have gotten so bad that we’re starting to see those seeds of revolution.
Cory Doctrow:
Well, I like that idea. I mean, I was raised by Trotsky, yes. So that’s quite funny. I guess I’ll steer clear of ice picks.
Ethan Zuckerman:
There is something very moving about thinking about this end of life, running from Stalin while still having, you know, visions of an international revolution. I too, you know, wish you an ice pick free future. But I do wonder whether that’s the moment of hope, whether the moment of hope is looking at things instead of feeling like, finally we’ve gotten to the point where you can refer to things as enshittification. And, you know, even, you know, Brooke Gladstone at NPR uses the term because there’s just no other way to describe the moment that we’re living in.
Ethan Zuckerman:
He is Cory Doctrow. I am Ethan Zuckerman. You have been listening to Reimagining the Internet. This is the beginning of our series on The Good Web. This is the beginning of our series on hope, on looking for visions of what could be better. Cory, this has been a wonderful way to start this conversation. Keep your head down and avoid ice picks.
Cory Doctrow:
Thank you, Ethan.
add back in
maybe cut
Title lol
