Cory Doctorow at DEFCON: Disenshittify or Die

Cory Doctorow, a renowned science fiction author and journalist, gave an enthralling speech at the recently concluded DEF CON. titled ‘DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE’. The word enshittification may seem alien to most people and it probably can’t be contained in a simpler definition.

It is an entire process of exploiting end-users through a series of steps. Consider this: when the Internet first came into existence, the platforms were very simple.

But is it the same now? A big NO, take Microsoft for example. Now, they allow you to use apps on the cloud, and track the features that are most important to you. They then take those features out of the basic package and sell them to you separately.

This is called enshittification.

Stage One – Businesses Being Good to Their Users

The first step of this enshittification process starts with businesses appearing to be good to their end users. For example, Facebook shows you what you want to see, Uber charges less for cabs, and Amazon subsidizes goods and returns, and puts the best match of products at the top of the search results.

However, there’s a hidden, more sinister part of stage one – locking in users. Now, there are several ways a platform can lock users in.

Apple parts also use parts pairing, which is DRM handshakes between subcomponents and the main device, so that you cannot use third-party parts to fix a broken device. Plus, every part of the device has a microscopic Apple logo, so third-party parts are subject to trademark violation.

Stage Two – Making Things Worse For the End-User

Once businesses have locked users in, they start making things worse for users and better for themselves.

For instance, platforms poison their search results with ads. Let’s take Amazon for example, who sells its search results, making $38 billion every year.

And this costs a ton of money for businesses. Around 45% of the price of these products goes to Amazon. As a result, businesses have to increase the prices to make up for the lost margin. But that’s not the end.

Amazon has a policy called the ‘Most Favoured Nation Status’ which means that the cheapest price they offer must be matched on Amazon. So what’s the solution? Businesses raise their prices everywhere – Target, Walmart, and your local shops.

Similarly, Facebook poisons your feed too. It shows you less of the content from the people you follow and more of sponsored content and boosted posts.

There’s an old adage that says “If you’re not paying for the product, then you’re the product”. However, Cory does not agree with this.

Apple once offered a one-click option to opt out of app-based surveillance and 96% opted out. But now. Apple has turned on iOS spying, which collects users’ data for ad targeting with no option to opt out. So, even after paying $1,000 for the phone, you’re still the product. The same goes for Facebook’s ad business.

Phase Three – Take All the Value For Yourself

This is the phase where businesses suck out all the utility from their products leaving users trapped. They do so through twiddling.

With this, businesses alter the service backend to change its operations, costs, prices, search ranking, and other foundation aspects of the system. Digital platforms have made twiddling very easy.

The same goes for YouTube videos. After spending thousands of dollars on a video, it is the algorithm that decides who watches them. In many cases, these videos don’t even reach the subscribers.

However, there are some upsides to twiddling as well. Forbes’ Emily Baker White revealed that TikTok has a feature called the heating tool. When applied to a user’s account, this tool boosts videos from that particular creator, which reaches millions of users, irrespective of the recommendation algorithm.

But why does TikTok do this? Let’s say TikTok wants more sports content on its platform. They randomly pick an account and heat it up so that the content gets a lot of traction. When other creators see this, they think that sports content is in trend and they start making similar content.

And quite naturally, they do not get the traction similar to the first creator and they end up thinking that they’re missing something and doing TikTok wrong.

The same thing goes for Uber drivers making $100,000 a year, sub-stackers rolling in dough, or Joe Rogan’s Spotify payout.

Why Is It Happening?

The reason is pretty simple – the less value a business gives to suppliers, customers, and workers, the more value is left to be divided between the shareholders and executives.

But, the real question is why NOW? Earlier there were consequences to enshittification. For example, companies like MySpace and Yahoo Search are down in the dumps, since they enshittified their products way too early. But now, there are no consequences of enshittification.

Let’s explain the lack of consequences. There are four forces that discipline tech companies:

Competition

Your customers should not find it easy to leave you and switch to a rival product. For example, the network effect of Facebook has prevented its users from leaving. But the main question is whether there’s an alternative.

Similarly, Apple, Microsoft, and Google aren’t making things companies but buying them, which has led to a monopolistic market economy.

This, in turn, has been made possible due to the government’s unexplained tolerance towards anti-competitive mergers and acquisitions, predatory pricing, and market-distorting exclusivity deals, which are prohibited by antitrust laws.

This has made companies too big to fail, which in turn, has made them too big to care.

And once companies realize that you’ve nowhere to go and no alternative in sight, they start treating you badly.

Regulation

When the government stopped caring about antitrust laws, they killed all hopes of regulation. Regulation is only meaningful when the regulator is more powerful than the companies it regulates. When the companies become bigger than the government, it becomes almost impossible to regulate them, irrespective of their crimes.

And this hefty risk paid off for IBM when Ronald Reagan became the President. Regan believed in a monopoly-driven economy and dropped the case on IBM.

Interoperability

Let’s take the example of an industry where there are 100 companies, each fighting for a share of the market. These businesses are too busy thinking about snatching the food off others’ plates and poaching employees and customers.

This cut-throat competition is good for the economy – the prices stay competitive, the quality improves, and most importantly, no company is big enough to control its regulators. Plus, it is very difficult for 100 businesses to agree on something and thus, there’s a level of interoperability in the market.

Now imagine these 100 companies merging into five giant corporations, which basically become a ‘cartel’. Now, getting a consensus becomes easier and so does capturing the regulators.

This has given them the power to escape privacy or labor rights, just because they do it with an app. For example, spying on your phone activities doesn’t seem to be a privacy violation to businesses just because they do so with an app. The same goes for algorithmic wage violations.

So once the competition was killed and cartels overtook regulators, there was still something that could be done – disenshittification. In the tech field, every enshittificatory alteration can be disenshittified.

So, every time HP sells you expensive ink, it is inviting a third-party seller to sell a refill kit. Or when Tesla installs codes that do not let you charge your whole battery, it is inviting a competitor to sell you a jailbreaking kit.

Once the customer finds ways to disenshittify the enshittified product, that customer is lost forever. This is exactly how interoperability works and is a major check on enshittification.

Tech workers 

Tech workers have always been in short supply, which gives them an upper hand. And to make these workers work crazy hours, businesses came up with a trick – vocational awe. Businesses appealed to their love for technology and managed to convince them that they were the heroes of the digital transformation.

This whole vocation awe worked for a while – employees did put in some hard hours. But, it also backfired for businesses. Since the supply was still short, there was always another employer ready to pay them just as much.

But eventually, supply caught up with the demand. Last year, 260,000 tech workers were fired and the businesses gained the upper hand.

Why Now?

Businesses and bosses have always been like this. They want to charge hefty prices, while delivering the least value and share as little as possible with workers, users, suppliers, and customers.

However, earlier when they tried to enshittify their business, constraints like competition, regulation, interop, and workers stopped them. But now, when all these forces have melted away, the enshittification lever is free to move.

The New Good Internet

During the end of this speech, Cory called for the formation of a new good internet. But for that, the four constraints should be reinstated.

Competition

The first constraint is competition. After almost 40 years of lull, antitrust is finally coming back. For example, Wiz refused to be merged with Google, which was supposed to be the largest merger in history.. New merger guidelines are being rolled out by the FTC and the DoJ.

Countries like the USA, UK, Australia, Canada, Japan, and South Korea are taking more antitrust action in the last 4 years than they did during the past 40 years.

Regulation

The EU passed the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which requires a dominant platform to open up APIs so that third-party businesses can offer interoperable services.

But that’s not the case with the DMA, it is called an ‘Act’, which means it is enforced in the EU’s federal courts and not Ireland. Even US lawmakers are working towards creating new privacy laws.

Interoperability

There has been a movement called the Right to Repair led by the Repair Coalition. In fact, in Oregon, a state R2R bill has been passed that bans parts pairing, where DRMs prevented using new parts unless it was authorized by a technician code.

Tech Workers

Tech workers were for long made to believe that they were ‘entrepreneurs in making’. But the reality was that workers’ power was because of scarcity and when that ended, layoffs started, and workers lost their edge.

The solution is simple – union. Cory referred to the Tech Workers Coalition and Tech Solidarity organization and called for tech workers to get organized.

In the end, Cory stressed the fact that it is possible to create a good new internet, with the ‘technological self-determination of the old internet’.

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