Reivew: Disenshittify Or Die!
How hackers can seize the means of computation
Cory Doctorow - DEF CON 32
- Starts off with "What the fuck happened to the old, good internet?" - love that.
- Google search used to work and Facebook used to give you a feed with the things you actually asked to see
- Microsoft used to sell software. Now they sell subscriptions to the cloud where they watch what you do, pull it out, and then sell it back to you as an upsell.
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What Enshittification looks like:
- State 1: you see a business that's being good to its end-users.
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Stage 1a: (which you don't see) is where they are figuring out how to lock you into their service. Easy with things like network effects. But with network effects come a collective action problem. "Sure, you all agree Facebook sucks, but can you all agree on when it's time to leave or even where to go? No way."
"You're stuck. Because, even though Facebook use comes at a high cost to you -- your privacy, your dignaty, your sanity -- it's still less than the switching cost you'd have to endure if you went somewhere else."
Sometimes it's things combined: you need Apple hardward to use Apple Apps and you need Apple Apps to use Apple Media like the songs and books you buy in their store.
Getting you locked in completes phase one of the enshittificaiton.
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Stage 2: Things are made worse for you as and end users to make things better for the other companies they are making money from.
e.g. Google poisioning their search results page by selling more and more of it to advertisers
e.g. Amazon selling ads on their searches where they make 38 billion a year. The first row is more expensive than the best product and the best results is, on average 17 places down on the search results page.
e.g. Facebook reducing and reducing the content from the folks you asked to follow in favor of ad shit and boosted posts.
- Says the idea of "if you're not paying for the product, you are the product" is bullshit. The people who buy google ads pay more per year for worse targeting. or the publishers who have to pay to reach you even though you've asked to subscribe to them.
- Amazon binds their sellers to a most favored nation status thing where the prices folks other than amazon charge has to be the same
- We pay a grand for our apple devices, but we're still the product (e.g. vai their survailance).
- So, yeah, if you aren't paying for the product, you are the product. But, even if you are paying for the product, you're still playing the part of a product.
- Mentions how tractor companies won't let folks fix their own tractors without paying them for the repair via an unlock code. i.e. even if you give Deere a half million for a tractor, you're still the product.
- Stage 3: screw everybody and take all the value for yourself. Leave behind the absolute bare minimum of utility so that everyone stays locked in, but now it's a pile of shit
- Enshittification: A tragedy in three acts.
- Calls the internal process of enshittificaiton "twiddling" - when someone is altering the back-end of an operation to change the way the business works. it's prices, costs, search rankings, etc..
- A grocer would need an army of kids to reprice everything dynamically the way online stores can. e.g a company that works with McDonalds that advertises that they can figure out when someone got paid and charge them more for their food.
- Of course, with digital pricing tags, grocers can twiddle tags in real time. There's some places in Norway where they are changing prices up to 2K times a day.
- Law professor Vina Dugal(sp?) calls things like uber chaning prices it pays to drivers based on how desperate they are "Algorithmic Wage Discrimination"
- Content Moderation is the only security discipline which we still say there is obscurity through obscurity.
- YouTube is like a shitty boss who docks your pay check every week for violating rules, but won't tell you what those rules are to prevent you from figuring them out so you can work around them next week without getting docked.
- Sometimes the twiddling is in favor of the users. Emilly Baker White broke a story about TikTok's "Heating Tool" which sends content creators into feeds even if the algo wouldn't have done it.
- Talks about the person walking around a fair with the Giant Teddy Bear for the game that's almost impossible to win becasue a carny gave him a break on the rules. They do that becuase the guy with the bear is now a walking billboard.
- With TicTok, if they want more sports stuff, they heat one person to make them famous. Other folks try to do the same thing but it doesn't work. They think they're doing it wrong, but it's not that. It's that they didn't get any heat.
- Uber Drives how are making 100K, or substacker who are rolling in money. They are all like the teddy bear. Works great for the businesses because every buck they spend on a teddy bear becomes 5-10 of free labor from folks who think they have a shot at earning it too
- As for the "why" of it. The more value businesses take from their customers and suppliers, the more they have for their execs and shareholders
- But, why now? Well, it used to be that if you enshittified, bad things would happen to your company. Now, there aren't any real consiquences.
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There are four forces that diciplies tech companies:
- competition
- TODO: Pick up at 19min into the video