Header image: KF in Dall-E
(Jan 30, 2004) Pluralistic: My McLuhan lecture on enshittification
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/
Transcript of the session ⬆
Video of the session⬇
My notes ⬇
Enshittification: 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.
- 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.
- Facebook is a company that was founded to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of Harvard undergrads, and it only got worse after that.
- 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.
- 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.
- If users can’t leave because everyone else is staying, then when everyone starts to leave, there’s no reason not to go, too.
- digital companies are constrained by the fear that some enshittificatory maneuver will prompt their users to google, ‘How do I disenshittify this?’
- 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 what Elon Musk calls being ‘extremely hardcore.’
- 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?
- 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.
- 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
There are four constraints that prevent enshittification: competition, regulation, self-help and labor
- when a sector dwindles to a bare handful of dominant firms, it ceases to be a rabble and it becomes a cartel.
- 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.
- 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 other EU 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.
- On average you have to go seventeen items down to find the best deal on Amazon.
- 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.
‘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 in enough IP to make it a felony to mod it to protect the labor, consumer and privacy rights of its user.’
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.
- 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.
- … med-tech monopolists who are locking their insulin pumps to their glucose monitors, turning people with diabetes into walking inkjet printers.
- But even in the USA, there’s a massive surge in tech unions. Tech workers are realizing that they aren’t founders in waiting.
- NB: “John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” ― Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress
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.