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Hey, babe. Am I in heaven or is it just your smile that's making me feel like I'm in another world?
Some relationships you just know are never going to work out.
You just made my day, honey. Now I'm going to make your night.
Yeah, it just all feels wrong.
Hello, this is Future Tense. I'm Anthony Fennell.
Sleaze, deception and that feeling that you're trapped in a one-way relationship you just don't seem to be able to get out of.
We're not really talking about nightclub liaisons or dating app hookups. We're talking about platforms.
Come on, you know what I mean.
Amazon now feels more like a racket than an open shopping platform.
You can't find posts from your friends on Facebook because it's clogged with unsolicited advertising.
And Uber? Well, Uber no longer seems like a cool, efficient taxi service.
It's morphed instead into a global machine for turning gig workers into the new underclass.
It's all part of a process Cory Doctorow has dubbed enshitification.
In this feature interview, the best-selling Canadian sci-fi author, journalist and digital rights activist
explains why the digital world seems so exploitive and tawdry.
But he has optimism for how things might be improved in the future. Cory Doctorow.
Enshitification describes the decay of platforms.
And platforms are the iconic business form of the Internet where you have buyers and sellers and the platform mediating between them.
And when a platform starts out, it needs to bring in users. So it often offers them a very good deal.
It may even subsidize that deal. So think of how when Amazon started out, it didn't just take a small margin on the products it sold.
It actually was willing to lose its investors money for many years to bring in customers.
And as those customers pile in, the business tries to find some way to lock them in as well.
So in Amazon's case, you can think of Prime as a way of getting you to pre-commit to shop on Amazon for the next year because you've already paid for the shipping.
Or every time you buy a book on Amazon, it comes locked to their platform with their digital rights management,
the encryption that makes it illegal to bring that book into an app that Amazon hasn't given its approval to.
So you can never break up with Amazon without saying goodbye to your audiobooks and your ebooks.
You know, Apple sells you apps that only work on its iPhones. And with social media, they encourage you to get your friends involved.
And once your friends are involved, you can never go because you have this awful collective action problem where even if you all agree that you're kind of sick of Facebook,
you'll never agree on when it's time to go or if you do, where you should go afterwards.
I mean, you can't even agree on like what movie to watch when you're all over together having a beer.
So you're not going to agree on how to leave.
And so once those users are all locked in, the business tries to take away some of the stuff that it gave to the users and gives it instead to the business customers.
So Facebook, for example, started out as a platform that promised that it would only show you the stuff that you asked to see.
You know, if you show up at Facebook and tell it who matters to you, they'll show you the posts that those people make.
They also promised that they would be a much better service than Myspace, where an evil Australian billionaire spied on you with every hour that God sent.
Facebook was going to be the social media service that never spied on you back in 2006.
And once people were locked in, it, you know, did the Darth Vader MBA thing.
You know, I've altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further and started spying on you and also showing you a bunch of stuff you never asked to see.
Some of that was ads that it targeted with the surveillance data and some of it was media content that you never asked to see, but that it boosted into your feed as a way of convincing media companies to pile into the platform, too.
And as both of those groups of business users, advertisers and publishers, got increasingly locked into Facebook, Facebook made things worse for them.
If you're an advertiser, the prices went up and the degree to which Facebook policed ad fraud went down.
So you paid more to place ads, but there was a lower chance that anyone would ever actually see them.
And if you're a publisher, you had to put more and more of your article to have it show up even for the people who subscribe to you.
Eventually it got to the point where Facebook wouldn't show you your article to anyone who subscribed to you unless you put the whole article there and unless you didn't link back to your own website.
It stopped being a funnel for you to make money on your own website and became a replacement for your website.
So you were dependent on Facebook.
Facebook then took it one step further and did something similar to what Elon Musk is doing now with Twitter, where they said, oh, we're not even going to show it to the people who subscribe to you unless you pay us.
Twitter calls it paying for verification.
Facebook calls it paying for boosting.
But it comes out to the same thing, a kind of ransom.
And so once users and business customers are locked in and the value has been withdrawn for them, the platform tries to establish this equilibrium where there's as little value left as possible as is needed to keep you from going.
But no more, where all the additional value can be handed off to its shareholders.
That's a very, very brittle equilibrium to maintain.
You know, the difference between nearly so bad that you leave and so bad that you leave, it's very close.
And all it takes is one livestream mass shooting, one whistleblower, one Cambridge Analytica scandal, and you go from, God, how am I ever going to leave this to God, why did I stay so long?
And you go somewhere else.
Which is why you talk about users and businesses in this certification process as mutual hostages.
That's right, yeah.
We are mutual hostages to each other, so the business customers are dependent on the end users, but also the end users are dependent on each other as well.
They can't go because they're all there because their friends are there and their friends are there because they're there.
And you know, so much of the way that we think about platforms is about making them better.
And so little of what we do is thinking about making them easier to leave.
And I think that it's a mistake, right?
The problem isn't that the wrong Mark Zuckerberg has appointed themselves social media czar for life for three billion people.
The problem is that anyone has that job.
And so, you know, as we contemplate these harmful content rules and other rules that are supposed to make the platforms better, including even things like news bargaining codes,
we should be really focused on letting people and business customers, including publishers, just leave the platform.
You know, treat them as damage and route around them rather than treating them as an eternal verity that has to be perfected.
It's been very damaging for individual users.
It's turned a lot of people off.
I mean, I know lots of people who are just very unhappy with all of the platforms, essentially, that they use.
But for businesses, for some of them, it's actually been existentially destructive, hasn't it?
And is there a sense there that once they've been caught into the process, it's not that they don't realize, but they just don't have any other idea of how to engage with the customer base in the modern world.
So they continue to be caught.
Well, you know, it's funny, just before we started talking, I was, as you do, reviewing the filings in the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's case against Facebook.
That's my idea of a good time.
There's a really remarkable exchange, these internal memos that the FTC published, where a Facebook product manager is describing how they're going to design features in both the address book and the photo service that Facebook was launching at the time.
And they said, you know, if we make it really easy for users to put this very important data in, you know, they're family photos, but we make it very hard for them to take it out, they won't be able to leave.
And, you know, if the users can't leave, then the business customers can't leave because they have to be where the users are.
So a good example of this is how Amazon deals with its business customers.
Amazon has this huge number of business sellers who sell on the platform.
And when they first showed up, Amazon gave them a really good deal.
It gave them very, very cheap shipping, access to all of its customers, and this great search interface where, like, if you search for a specific product and there was a seller selling it, it was right there at the top.
Since then, Amazon piled in all of these junk fees, including search advertising, so $31 billion advertising market.
But it's not advertising like Google or Facebook offers, which, you know, they have their own problems.
What they call advertising is the right to buy your way to the top of the search results, even if you're not what the user searched for, which is why, you know, common searches on Amazon will now return five screens where the first one is just all ads.
And the next four screens are 50% ads before you get to the things that are actually matches for what you searched for.
And Amazon takes those business sellers and it says, we require you to offer what's called most favored nation status.
If you want to sell on our platform and reach all those customers who prepaid for a year shipping on Prime and aren't going to go anywhere else.
And most favored nation status means that the seller has to offer the same price everywhere as they offer on Amazon.
So if you think about most businesses, they don't have 51% margins.
So if Amazon is sucking up 51 cents out of every dollar, they have to raise prices on Amazon.
But we don't see the prices being higher on Amazon because most favored nation means that they have to charge more everywhere.
And so the prices at every shop, you know, from Willys to Target go up because Amazon has this most favored nation status and it extracts more money.
Or you can think about what Uber does with its drivers.
So Uber drivers, they have these two categories for themselves.
They call themselves either ants or pickers.
An ant is a driver who takes every single ride and a picker is a driver who waits for the really good rides and only takes those.
And Uber's dispatch algorithm is always trying to find ways to turn pickers into ants.
They want drivers to just circle around forever, representing a kind of cloud of probabilistic capacity.
So that any customer who wants a ride can instantly get a car to show up because these drivers are bearing the cost of driving around without any any rides in it.
So what they do is they offer much higher prices per ride to pickers than they do to ants.
This is called algorithmic wage discrimination, where two people doing the same job get paid a radically different sum to do it.
And if a picker gets a lot of these high value, high payout rides and is so convinced by them, they start taking more rides.
By the time they've become an ant, Uber starts paying them less per ride until they're getting paid ant scale for it.
But whatever it was that picker was doing before they became an ant in order to make up the wages that they weren't getting from Uber, they've stopped doing those things.
Right. They've quit those other jobs.
And so it's much harder for them to go back and become a picker again.
It's kind of a one way transition. And now they're stuck grinding out pennies as ants.
So at the centre of this is exploitation, isn't it? Exploitation of the vulnerability that people have of workers, but also of businesses.
You know, and I'm thinking of the media industry, both the commercial media industry and the public media industry,
and the vulnerability that they have felt because of their interactions with these platforms, always trying to second guess where they should be in the need to get eyeballs.
Yeah. You know, this is I call it platform Kremlinology.
You know, back in the Soviet Union, everyone was always trying to read the smoke signals coming out of the Politburo, out of the Kremlin, to figure out what it was they needed to do in order to be in the favour of powerful people or not to get banished to the gulag.
And when you look at how online performers, you know, who work on TikTok or YouTube or even OnlyFans, how they talk about their jobs, you know,
they work for a boss who takes money out of every paycheck for having violated rules that they're not allowed to know.
You know, you work for days or weeks or months, you spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a video and then only a small subset of the people who subscribe to you actually get it in their feeds.
And it's because something in the algorithm has detected something that you've done. And because of that reason, your reach is limited.
And, you know, your boss in this case, the platform says, well, if I tell you what rule you broke, then you'll figure out how to break the rule without me detecting it.
So I can't tell you what rule you broke. You're just going to have to take my word for it.
And, you know, this highlights a really important difference between digital platform operation and other abusive business practices.
Because, you know, like John D. Rockefeller and Carnegie and so on, all these these robber barons of the past, they would have loved to have had the nimbleness of a digital platform.
You know, imagine if they could have said, oh, well, you know, this ferry line is competing with my own freight service.
Let's put them out of business by temporarily installing a railroad spur that allows me to offer deep discount freight until the ferry line goes out of business.
And then, you know, I'll click a mouse and my rail will disappear.
Well, that wasn't something John D. Rockefeller or Andrew Carnegie could do.
But, you know, Jeff Bezos can. Jeff Bezos, he owns two different grocery stores.
He owns Whole Foods, you know, which is these big physical grocery stores, and he owns Amazon Fresh, which are digital grocery stores.
And if Jeff Bezos wants to raise the price of eggs, you know, we just had terrible eggflation in the United States.
And if Jeff Bezos wants to raise the price of eggs at Whole Foods, he needs an army of teenagers on roller skates to go around and resticker all those prices with a pricing gun.
But when he wants to change the prices at Amazon Fresh, he just moves a slider, twiddles a knob.
And this twiddling on the back end allows the platforms to change the rules from moment to moment and second to second.
So you can never tell if you're an ant or a picker. You can never tell if you're getting a good deal or bad.
And, you know, the people who perform on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, they often come up with pretty plausible explanations for why people are not getting the reach that they think they should.
But those explanations inevitably turn out not to be true forever, that, you know, maybe it's incomplete.
Maybe they've only derived a part of the rule through experimentation.
What's much more likely is that someone has reached in and just twiddled a knob, changed the rules for the payout.
It's like a fruit machine where the payout just gets adjusted constantly by a kind of capricious casino owner who can change the odds from second to second and minute to minute and make it impossible for you to get a winning game.
And, you know, the other half of this is that governments all over the world, including in Australia, have passed laws making it illegal for the users to twiddle back.
So the U.S.-Australia Free Trade Agreement includes an anti-circumvention rule that makes it illegal to bypass copyright lock on a platform.
And what that practically means is you can't reverse engineer the Uber app to find out whether or not you're getting your wages stolen.
And if you're a writer who sells your books on Amazon and wants to leave and give your readers a tool so they can unlock their books from Amazon's apps and move them to a rival app, providing that tool is illegal.
It's actually punishable by higher fines and even prison sentences than you would get for merely stealing the book.
In the United States, providing as an author, if I provide you with a tool to let you unlock one of the books that I wrote so that you can leave Amazon and go to a rival platform, that's a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine.
That's far more than you would get for merely pirating the book or even supplying it to other people, pirating it to other people on your own website.
It's more illegal for the author to let their readers do something legal than it is to be an actual pirate.
So without a change in that particular area, is any hope of future effective regulation, whether it's the United States or Europe or Australia, is it just not realistic?
Well, look, I think the regulation needs to fall into three buckets, and one is common across all of our sectors, so that for 40 years, we've really just not enforced competition law.
We've allowed firms to merge to monopoly. This is a problem in Australia, obviously. It's a problem everywhere. It's very much a problem in the arts.
We have five giant publishers, four giant studios, three giant labels, two giant ad tech companies, and one company that does all the ebooks and audiobooks.
And so there is now an increased interest in blocking mergers and unwinding the mergers that already occurred.
As I speak, the US Federal Trade Commission has joined the UK Competition and Markets Authority in blocking the merger of Activision and Microsoft.
Even in China, we're seeing some pretty muscular action to break up big tech and bring it to heel.
So we need to do the traditional competition stuff, block mergers, break up mergers, and so on.
And then we need to limit the ability of these big tech platforms to twiddle. We need privacy laws. We need fair wages laws for gig workers.
We need laws that prevent unfair and deceptive practices like showing you ads for products that aren't the ones you search for rather than the one that you did search for.
All of those things, I think, will go a long way to limiting the ability of platforms to do bad things to you.
And then we also need to re-legalize the self-help measures that users have always relied on.
You know, back when Microsoft was trying to kill Apple by making the Apple version of Microsoft Office worse and worse and worse,
so that you had to buy a Windows machine in order to exchange Word documents and Excel documents and PowerPoint files with your colleagues,
Apple solved that problem by reverse engineering Microsoft Office and making pages, numbers, and Keynote, the iWork suite, that just interoperates with all of that.
We should re-legalize the practice of making interoperable products, especially ones that let you leave.
So, you know, when Facebook started, one of the ways they made it easier for people to leave MySpace was by giving them a tool.
You could leave MySpace, give this tool your login and password, and it would go back to MySpace and pretend to be you
and grab all the messages waiting for you that your friends had left and put them in your Facebook inbox.
And you could reply to them and you could push them back out to Facebook.
If you did that to Facebook today, they would reduce you to radioactive rubble.
They'd say you violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,
that you were tortuously interfering with the contracts they had with their users, and so on.
So we need to restore the ability of users to leave and to find ways to curb the excesses of the platforms.
And if we do all three of those things, breaking up the monopolies and ending the merger mania,
limiting the power of monopolies to change the rules in unfair and deceptive ways,
and restoring to users the right to unilaterally alter the technology that they use,
to seize the means of computation so that they can reconfigure those tools to suit their needs
and not the needs of the shareholders of the company that made it,
I think with all three of those, we can create a much better future.
And our guest today on Future Tense is Cory Doctorow, best-selling sci-fi author,
journalist and special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Cory Doctorow, for the better part of two decades, we've seen that these companies,
companies like Facebook and Amazon, have had access to cheap capital.
What kind of difference did that make?
Did it allow them to grow and perfect this certification process, this approach,
because they could afford to take massive losses for very long periods of time?
Yeah, yeah, I think that this is a very important element of it, right?
So, you know, one of the ways that Uber got a lot of drivers into cars
and a lot of passengers into cars was spending about $30 billion of its investors' money,
most of it coming from the Saudi royal family,
and losing 41 cents on every dollar of every ride for more than a decade.
And, you know, this fenced out traditional taxi companies.
A lot of them went bust. A lot of those drivers left the field.
And it also created a kind of lost decade for public transit investment.
There's lots of places where buses, light rail, and undergrounds were not built,
and still more where, in fact, existing services were drawn down in favor of subsidies for Uber.
There's plenty of little towns all around the world where they were built by fast-talking Uber executives
into just subsidizing rides for local people to get an Uber from A to B instead of taking a bus.
And, you know, Uber resolved the cost problems with that by chaining up these rides.
So that, you know, you would call for a ride, but you would have to wait
while the driver picked up two or three other passengers,
and eventually they got those drivers to drive bigger and bigger vehicles,
and they would pick up all the passengers and drop them off,
which is to say they reinvented buses, you know.
But buses is subsidized initially by the Saudi royals
and then by city fathers using their local tax money.
And, you know, if they hadn't been able to do that subsidy at the beginning,
it would have been very hard for them to con people.
You know, there's this kind of thing.
When you have a service that just seems impossible but has this big pile of benefit,
you end up with this thing where it's like someone assumes that a pile of shit that's big enough
has to have a pony underneath it, right?
Like, how could they be doing this for so many years
if they didn't have a path to profitability?
And, of course, this also let the people who originally put that money in
and lost all that money, that let them get out
because when they had their stock offering, their IPO,
you had a bunch of people who made the same assumption that this pile of shit is so big
that it must be full of ponies, and they piled into the IPO,
and they spent a lot of money over the odds,
and all those original money losers made out like bandits.
They got their money back and then some,
and they left everyday retail investors just trying to spend some money
so that they could get a dignified retirement, left them holding the bag.
Will the fact that a lot of that cheap capital seems to be drying up,
will that have an impact, or is the process just too set in place?
You know, I think it's certainly driving the platforms to turn the screws very quickly.
We thought it was quite an aberration when Twitter did it.
The thing that Musk did for us that previous platform owners hadn't done
is rather than introducing these negative reforms and anti-features
and dribs and drabs that you hardly noticed they were happening,
Musk came in, and a bit like Donald Trump,
instead of drawing with a fine charcoal line,
he just grabbed a big fat crayon in his fist and scrawled with it like a toddler
so he could all see what was going on.
But he was the first and not the last.
You know, you have Twitter laying off 12,000 workers,
you have mass layoffs at Facebook, you have Twitch and Discord and Reddit
all making things significantly and precipitously worse
for end users and business customers all at once
because they are chasing returns in a market that is much harder to get returns out of
where the free money tap has been turned off.
And, you know, again, this is why wise policy is to make it easier for people to leave,
to have a soft landing when the platform that they rely on collapses
rather than trying to make the platform behave better.
Those platforms aren't going to behave better.
Those platforms, to the extent that they do behave better,
it's going to be largely because they're disciplined by the threat of competition.
You know, it's going to be very hard for Reddit to have a successful IPO
if their cash basis is as bad as it is now,
but it's going to be even harder for them to have a successful IPO if no one uses Reddit.
And so if they have to worry about people leaving,
if there's regulation that eases the departure by forcing Reddit to be interoperable with rival platforms,
you can leave Reddit but stay in touch with the people and the communities that matter to you,
then Reddit is going to have to stay its own hand and consider the possibility
that if it makes things worse for users that the users will simply walk away
rather than putting up with it because the people that are there matter too much to them to leave.
And we have seen that recently to an extent, haven't we, with Twitter,
but how widespread can that user kickback be, if you like,
that user frustration as a power for change, given that, as you pointed out,
we're not just talking about one or two platforms.
It seems that almost every platform is now adopting this approach.
You know, if this were 20 years ago, back before we made it illegal
to displease the shareholders of dominant tech companies,
you would expect that entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who funded them
would look at this situation where everyone hated all the platforms they were stuck to
and would just make a kind of meta platform that said,
like, here's one tool that will gather together every message that you're getting,
every interaction that you're getting on all these platforms that are abusing you.
Just give us your login and password. We'll work it out on the back end.
We'll just reverse engineer them and devote a big team to continually reverse engineering them,
playing guerrilla warfare with them, cat and mouse.
And you can just move here and tell you what, we're going to make this an open protocol
so that if we ever do to you what all these other platforms are doing,
you can just do to us what we're doing to them.
And that kind of promise would be a way to get all kinds of users to pile in.
It's the fact that doing that is now radioactively illegal that keeps those users locked in.
You know, you can think of these platforms as doing a kind of max min calculation
where on one axis you have how much we can piss off our users before they leave.
And on the other axis, we have like how hard it is for them to leave.
And, you know, what they want is for it to be much harder for users to leave
because the harder it is for a user to leave, the more they can piss their users off,
not in the name of sadism, but in the name of getting more money out of them.
You know, like literally can be as something as simple as
how many ads can we show you before you stop using the service, right?
What percentage of your feed can be ads before you quit?
This is a thing that YouTube keeps experimenting with.
Every now and again, you'll hear these stories where people will say,
oh, I just logged into my YouTube and I saw 10 ads in a row.
And other people will pop and say, yeah, I'm getting the same thing.
And then you'll get an article that says YouTube is trying out an experiment
to see how many users bail if they show 10 ads in a row.
And, you know, if it turns out that showing 10 ads in a row
cost them a third of their users,
but the remaining two thirds make 20% more money for them,
that's the direction they're going to go in.
Well, if it's much easier for users to leave
and it costs them three quarters of their users to show 10 ads in a row
because those users can leave but fetch those ads from a rival service that does ad blocking,
then YouTube is going to have to stay its own hand.
It's going to have to exert discipline,
and it's going to have to balance the needs of its performers and its end users
in figuring out how much it's going to extract from both of them.
This is not about YouTube not being able to extract anything.
This is about YouTube being able to act like the canteen
on the other side of the security gate at the airport,
which knows that you can't leave and can crank the price of a flat white up to $11.
And just finally, we've talked about the cost to users,
we've talked about the cost to businesses.
There's also an opportunity cost here, isn't there, for society?
The potential that we saw not so many years ago
for the way we could operate in a digital world
really does seem like a distant dream in lots of ways, doesn't it?
Wishful, hopeful thinking.
Well, we can get it back.
We're still pretty early days here on this whole digital revolution thing,
and I do think that there is plenty of time for us to claw back power,
and in fact, quite an urgency to do it,
because the way we're going to organize ourselves
to get out of the climate emergency
and make the other reforms that are so urgent and necessary
is going to be with digital tools.
Speaking as someone who spent a lot of his teen years
riding around on a bicycle wheat-pasting posters
to try and get people out to protests on lampposts around Toronto,
I'm here to tell you that there is no comparison
between the job of organizing people digitally
versus organizing people in the physical world,
and those digital tools are really important.
We can't afford to give up on them.
We need to seize the means of computation.
We need to take that power back.
And I think that you're right that we have had a lost decade of technology.
The devolution of the Internet into what Tom Eastman calls
five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of text from the other four,
you know, has been very sad to watch,
but it can inspire us to do something better.
Well, Corey Doctorow, it's been a fascinating conversation.
Thank you very much for joining us.
Thank you very much. It's been absolutely my pleasure.
And Corey is a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
He's also a very successful writer of science fiction,
and his latest work, Red Team Blues, is out now.
You'll find a link to his blog on the Future Tense website.
Karen Savanovitz was the producer for this program.
I'm Anthony Fennell.
Until next time.