Enshittification
Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
Cory Doctorow 2025 . 338p . no index . no references beyond
- Tigard Library 174.9 DOC 338p
- No Index . No separate reference section in back . 60+ scattered footnotes
p07 Thumbtack
- p08 footnote ."Chokepoint Capitalism" 2022, Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin
- p09 five or fewer firms, like shipping and finance
- p09 majors: 5 publishers, four studios, three labels, two app companies, one ebook/audiobook company
p11 Facebook beginnings: nonconsensual sex ratings (citation needed) of Harvard undergrads
p12 2006: comparison to MySpace "owned by Rupert Murdoch, and he spies on you"
p12 2006: "Come to Facebook, where we will never spy on you.
p12 footnote . Dina Srinivasan, "The Antitrust Case Against Facebook: A Monopolists's Journey Towards Pervasive Surveillance in Spite of Consumer Preference for Privacy" Berkeley Business Law Journal 16, no. 1 (2019)
p13 Facebook network effect, more useful if big, but higher switching costs
- p15 stories about lies to users and advertisers and publishers
p16 footnote . Lauren Johnson, "When Procter & Gamble Cut $200M in Digital Ad Spend, It Increased It's Reach 10%" Adweek, March 1, 2018
- p17 brittle equilibrium, one effective whistleblower and users leave, faster and faster
- p19 2022 less than expected growth, $250B stock selloff (current market cap $1592B )
p20 Amazon original name relentless
p21 all audiobooks, movies, most ebooks permanently locked to Amazon with DRM
p22 Amazon flywheel
- p23 Jimmy Carter against antitrust?
p24 footnote . Matt Stoller, The FTC Sues to Break Up Amazon over an Economy-Wide 'Hidden Tax'
- p24 Amazon bypasses original merchants, pushes them to the last search results
- p25 Amazon merchant fee is 45% to 51%
- p25 merchants required to raise prices everywhere, even in their own direct-sale stores
- p25 The first Amazon links are 25% higher than the best match
- p26 merchants pay Amazon $38B/y for placement, aren't the best matches for customers
p26 footnote . Rory Van Loo and Nikita Aggarwal, "Amazon's Pricing Paradox," Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 37, no 1 (Fall 2023)
- p26 Amazon search by price also manipulated
- p27 top scoring items are paid reviews
- suggested alternatives, Cory?
p29 Case Study: iPhone
- p29 walled garden, only runs Amazon apps
p30 Android more open, users can install third party "insecure?" apps
- p33 Apple 2021 "one-click opt-out" from app-based surveillance, 96% of owners chose it
- p34 Apple choked off other company apps, continued to surveil their own apps
- p34 Apple doubled third party app processing fee to 30%
p34 footnote . Ideas Have Consequences Elliott Ash, Daniel L. Chen & Suresh Naidu, 2022
- p35 wholesale discount for audiobooks is only 20%, other vendors paying 30% to Apple leave the App store
- p36 Uber and Lyft exempt from fees
- p37 Case Study: Twitter
- p37 Twitter was an API
- p39 RT = retweet, #QT quote tweeting
- p40 2022 Elon Musk pays $44B for Twitter, $22.4B borrowed
- p42 Musk shed most of moderation team
p42 Musk tells Disney CEO Bob Iger "Fuck you" and "Go fuck yourself".
p44 Blue ticks
- p44 2011 Doctorow impersonated, blue check mark required fax of ID
- "I couldn't send them a fax because my time machine was broken"
Bullshit, there are MANY places to send faxes in London, copy shops and FedEx and individuals like me with fax cards in their Linux PCs. Modern fax machines are interoperable everywhere; before 2011 I was sending and receiving faxes with companies and colleagues in Japan.
p46 Musk suspended account for users listing accounts on rivals like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads.
- p46-50 more complaints about Twitter/X
- p50 Fiddler on the Roof musical
- p51 Tevye's in-law in New York, "I hate him, but a relative is a relative."
- p52 Platform users can't live without one another and don't know how to leave.
Part Two, The Pathology
p55 2008 ZIRP, goodies given away
- p56 2022 ZIRP ends
- p56 Zuck ruler-for-life at Meta
p57 Doctorow: I'm a Cancer, and Cancers don't believe in astrology
- p58 two forces on every company and industry, competition and regulation
- p58 for tech, also self-help and tech workers
- p59 every Turing-complete computer is capable of running every computer program we know how to write, computers are universal.
- p59 huge incentives for many companies to make better faster computer chips, so we put them in everything
p60 Lexmark tried to kill Taiwanese toner company Static Control Components, which now owns Lexmark
p60 KPI key performance indicator measure of organizational success
- p61 vignette about Musk, worsening product drives away users
- p62 adversarial interoperability and fleeing users limits enshittification
p62 footnote . Doctorow, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation 2024 paperback
- p62 scarce tech workers had enormous bargaining power
- p63 tech bosses fostered sense of mission into tech workers
p64 librarian-theorist Fobazi Ettarh vocational awe
p65 internet end-to-end principle applications implemented at the communicating ends, not in the network itself
- Doctorow's version: networks should be designed to transmit data from willing senders to willing receivers as efficiently and reliably as possible
- these very different descriptions, there is no requirement for Doctorow's goals in the internet design, and that is the crux of the matter. My take: if you don't like internet results, choose different ends.
- p65 "end of rackets" like the Bell System and its addon fees.
- Not a racket; you try implementing touch-tone with relays and individual transistors (and vacuum tubes only before that).
- p66 If an internet provider charges $6.50 for "From", Doctorow will choose a different provider.
"From" is built into legitimate internet endpoint software. Sadly, there is no way to guarantee legitimacy with the internet; with the phone company, caller ID began as an addon that required extra hardware in each NEW subscriber line card in every participating phone system, and was not standardized until 1993. There was not one single protocol for legacy telephone systems.
p67 Doctorow assumes tech bosses manipulate esprit de corps in tech workers; no, tech workers are drawn to places that seem to share their values. The problem comes later, when bosses and workers and shareholders and customers and products and technology all diverge, stretching teams until they break.
p71 Starting with Carter, shift to "consumer welfare standard theory of antitrust law".
KHL contra rule of reason and restraint of trade, which held sway from 1700s, made explicit by the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act
p75 Ed Zitron Ed Zitron Where's Your Ed At
p75 Ben Gomes (was) Google head of search
p75 Prabhakar Raghavan was head of ads, make search worse to deliver more ads
p78 Kagi uses Google for backend
p78 FTC lawyer Megan Gray - claims Google silently appends advertiser brand names to searches
- p79 exhibited in secret court trial ... heresay? confirmation?
- p81 Apple brags "not Google", but sells Safari search box to Google for $20B/year - citation needed
- p82 also tracks you in Chrome - citation also needed
- p82 Apple IOS also tracks, ignoring a privacy checkbox that 96% of users choose
- p83 Apple media served and stored encrypted on iPhone
- p83 app store 30% commission on every purchase
p83 Visa antitrust
- post pandemic charge increase 1.4x to between 2% and 5%
- p87 12 years of US antitrust action against IBM, first PC was commodity parts with OS outsourced to fledgling Microsoft
1981 MS-DOS was Seattle Computer Products QDOS
p87 footnote . Tim Wu, "Tech Dominance and the Policeman at the Elbow" Columbia Law School Scholarship Archive 2020
- p89 Internet Explorer hooks coded into Windows, degraded Netscape
p92 2004 Mac iWork Suite fully interoperable
- p93 Microsoft new versions broke iWork briefly, were quickly reverse-engineered into iWork
p93 Microsoft relented, Office file formats standardized, also used by Google Docs and LibreOffice
p94 Adobe cloud versions lock up content
p94 Pantone colors licensed through Adobe, otherwise not displayed
p95 spot colors special inks rather than pixelized RGB
- p96 2022 Adobe stopped paying Pantone, cloud users pay $21/mo Pantone license
p98 Amazon can delete content on individual Kindles
p98 Amazon deleted "certain copies"(? - actually, copies that Amazon sold without permission) of 1984 from Kindles at behest if Orwell estate
- p99 Adobe trains AI with content stored by users in Adobe Creative Cloud and required users to agree
p101 Unity video game development tools added a sales royalty (called a runtime fee)
- p102 Microsoft Office "migrated to the cloud", you can no longer buy the tools, only subscribe to them
p103 Goodhardt's Law "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
- p106-107 why regulation is good (if it is good, but what if it is bad)
p108 footnote . Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo 2023
- p108 regulation relies on competitor criticism
- p109 hundreds of companies disagree on almost anything
p109 footnote . EssilorLuxottica many brands, owns retailers Sunglass Hut LensCrafters Glasses.com raised price of glasses 10x over the last decade
p110 Regulatory Capture
- p111 underregulation against captured industry, overregulation against enemies of capture
- p112 obfuscatory "apps" shield unregulated hotels (Airbnb), banks (fintech), securities (cryptocurrency), taxis (Uber),
- p113 It's not a crime if we do it with an app, but it IS a crimbe if you fix our app to defend yourself from us.
- p115 Uber algorithm offers different wages to different drivers
- p115-6 Facebook bots preferentially linked to longer excerpts, so publishers posted longer excerpts
does this increase publisher sales? that's what matters, website hits aren't revenue
p117 Canadian National Exposition CNE 18 days
p117 Canadian Labour Day
- p118 5 balls tossed in basket earns HUGE teddy bear
- carnie "discounts" for mark who carries bear around fair all day - cheap advertising for carnie.
p118 Uber rewards a few drivers who are prolific on social media, the rest enticed for >sub-starvation wages<
- hyperbole - lousy wages doesn't mean people starve, indeed most people buy way too many cheap calories
p120 Amazon Delivery Service Partners DSPs
- p121 AI-equipped cameras monitor drivers
p122 Amazon running out of workers to hire
not C.D.'s "using up every single eligible worker in the United States
p123 Jonathan Butram and struggling poultry farmers
p124 Amazon Delivery Service Partners (DSP) must buy Amazon Vans
p126 Arise call center "independent contractors" pay a "service fee" to work, and pay a fee if they quit
p127 Twiddling shit products for the weak
p128 Jedi Blue Google Meta advertising collusion
p128 demand-side targeting Demand-side platform, DSP
- p129 surveillance lag; slow loading while advertisement space on web page is auctioned
p129 Google + Meta ad-tech duopoly 51% of total advertising revenue
- p131 most ads not shown to anyone.
- p131 Only liars and cranks claim to control our behavior.
p132 half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, ... don't know which half ... fiendish ad execs convinced John Wanamaker that all money was NOT wasted
p132 footnote . How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism 2020
p133 footnote . Polish Cipher Bureau
p137 Blackstone property ... that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe
p138 DMCA 1201 Circumvention of copyright protection systems
- printer cartridge chip code is copyrighted, defeating that is "circumventing an access control" and a DMCA felony.
- p139 "Smart" objects designed trigger DMCA to enforce manufacturer usage restrictions, "bypass (otherwise unnecessary) digital lock"
p139 VIN locking ties individual parts to specific individual cars
- p140 "smart" devices intrinsically enshittified
- p142 Digital textbooks with DRM require password to access course materials
p143 Anova sous vide cookers retroactive $2/month fee to use 10-year-old devices, because spyware was no longer generating enough revenue
p145 tarnishment claimed if used Apple components are used to repair an Apple product
p146 Reverse-engineering an app (allegedly) creates CFAA 1986 and DMCA liability
- p146 entertainment industry expanded IP law to fight technology, now tech uses those expansions
- p149 Doctorow forbids DRM, so he pays for alternate audiobook production. Ton of work, lost revenue ... but retained decency. Which Cory can write about and increase sales to his core supporters. Which is excellent.
- p150 Copyright was a system to help creators ... DMCA 1201 weaponizes copyright against creators.
- p151 Decades ago, dozens of New York trade publishers. Mergers reduced that to FIVE. More mergers to resist Amazon.
- p152 Penguin Random House 30 mergers, but tiny compared to Amazon
p152 KKR dollar stores? perhaps Dollar General
- 81 DG stores in Oregon smaller towns. One in Eugene, none within 20 miles of Portland.
- p153 CD claims that if part of a supply chain monopolizes, the whole chain must. BS
p153 footnote . Beacon Press owned by Unitarians
- p155 After 1990s, exit for VCs and founders was acquisition by Big Tech company
p156 startup perk: every kind of kombucha known to humankind
- p162 footnote . every single Social Security number ever issue on the darknet
- p164 burner phones in trees near Amazon warehouses, priority for new delivery jobs
- p165 tuyul apps modify gig platform apps, such as magnifying screens for older motorbike delivery riders
p165 footnote . tuyul
p171 footnote . BBC News Wikiproxy
p172 PageRank chose sites with more links, scammers created link farms, Google analysis grew complicated
- p173 few free speech rights for solving an "equation"
- p173 legal demands to alter Google rankings for "bad" websites
p174 Google math expresses qualitative judgement, not truth
- p175 most websites embed Google assets like tracking, fonts, or ads
p178 footnote . State of Texas et al. v. Google LLC
- p179 when Google stopped growing it started "squeezing", worse for users, better for shareholders
- p179 Google search, app, and cloud services not offered in China, because state hackers broke in to identify dissidents
p182 2018 Google’s TensorFlow AI is being used by US military drone programme
p182 Google trying to catch up with Gemini AI
- p183 Employees stop accepting shares instead of cash salaries if share prices don't increase. Paying cash erodes balance sheet and share prices drop. Key workers lost, infrastructure maintenance suffers
- p183 Military and helping China search for dissidents also discourages Google employees
p184 2018, Project Maven boss Diane Greene resigns in disgrace
p185 contracts of adhesion - not negotiable by employees
p186 Arbitrators mostly find for Google? If the employee is the one bringing suit, they can choose the arbitrator. If the employee was well paid and saved most, they can hire a good one. They can also pool money with other involved employees. Government courts are way more expensive, so the employee's chances of winning there are SMALLER. Arbitration WINS may be smaller than government courts; but are we after justice or a lottery ticket here? If Google mistreats MANY employees, the wins stack up to big money and angry shareholders.
- Doctorow may not understand this, or see it through a veil of "red anger".
- p187 "Google heard complaints" "Google knowingly allowed (Andy Rubin) to terrorize an employee"
Not true (the "knowingly allowed" words). The Wikipedia article presents a more nuanced story. The harassed employee did report Rubin, and AFTER an investigation Larry Page asked him to resign. Rubin exited with a huge wad of cash that he was already contractually entitled to; breaking the contract could have made the outcome worse. The real problem is that Google did not have the foresight to PREVENT this class of problem with better training, supervision, and clear written guidelines; I presume that is now a priority.
- p187 "culture of misogynist impunity". Nope. The same mistake repeated multiple times is a "culture". Many different mistakes a few times each is "learning and improving." Small scale ethical decisions are relatively easy compared to the "N squared" interactions of 50,000 employees and millions of customers/users.
- If you've never been wrong, you've never been right.
p188 Timnit Gebru
p191 buybacks classed as illegal stock manipulation until 1982, 16 years before Google was founded. Sergey Brin and Larry Page were 9 years old when those rules changed, and they probably never knew different.
- why buy back? It increases share price and stockholder value without taxable dividends. Perhaps it should be taxed as a "proxy transaction", but that would impose significant accounting burdens on stockholders, even small stockholders.
p192 10 year firings and layoffs history
- more than one million and less than two million per month
- 22 million in March and April 2020 (last year of Trump-1, but we did not know that yet). Perhaps a contributor to Trump losing a second term in November 2020.
- p192 In 2020s (under Biden), firing workers was no longer "the very last resort".
- KHL perhaps due to a weak economy, automation, and increasing costs and legal liabilities per employee
p193 Jason Calacanis about Twitter Sharpen your blades boys
p194 Technofeudalism
Technofeudalism What Killed Capitalism Varoufakis, Yanis 2024 wccls
p195 rents vs. profits ... Enclosure appropriation of common land, removal of common rights
p196 Luddites opposed machinery that reduced employment
- p196 capitalist / landowner conflict tale.
- Where are the craftsmen, wagon-men, and other new jobs emerging from division of labor? Do authors build their own typewriters, PCs, text phones?
p197 "For capitalists to win, rentiers had to lose."
- what's with this "win and lose" conflict? I buy food from Kroger, from farmer's markets, and grow some food myself. Specialization allows each source to focus on improvement, not "I win you lose" conflict
- p197 C.D. "free markets" meant free from "rents", not regulation. BULLSHIT. I rent a (regulated) post office box. I own stuff, and can do many things with the stuff - and CANNOT (legally) use that stuff to create harm (unless the stuff is a CO₂ spewing engine, a hopefully temporary market/legal failure).
- p197 "majority of Big Tech revenue from rents" er, no, rent-generating activity is ipso facto classified as Big Tech
- Intel's "big tech" is billion dollar machines and know-how; TSMC's BIGGER tech is more machines and know-how
- p198 Amazon can charge for cloud computing because that costs less than individual data centers. Asian cloud computing may soon cost less than Amazon's cloud.
- p198 Amazon's retail dominance is mostly storefront retail obsolescence, remediable by innovations "we" don't know about yet.
p200 Andy Jassy
- p201 jailbreaking tools violate DMCA, but what if they are sourced and supported overseas?
p201 not-used bookstoresSeattle Third Place Books fiction? Vroman's Pasadena
p203 Non Practicing Entities NPEs Patent Trolls
- p204 triple damages for patent infringement
- p204 cheaper to pay small fee than ask a lawyer
p204 Acacia Research "bullshit streaming video patent" granted long after advent of streaming video
p205 Marshall, Texas headquarters for patent litigation
p206 Prenda Law called racketeering enterprise in 2013
p206 posted porn on Bittorrent harvested IP addresses of blackmail targets
p207 2003 Creative Commons licenses
- p208 Early CC licenses flawed, missing steps could trigger breach of license
p209 Copyleft trolling
p210 Marco Verch called "copyleft" troll
p210 pixsy
p211 Stafford Beer: The purpose of a system is what it does
- p214-216 more Unity game engine
p216 Happiest Baby robot baby rocker
p218 end-to-end principle
p219 Mike Masnick blog Techdirt email is "a protocol, not a product"
p221 Crad Kilodney sold self-published books on Toronto street corners, wore signs like MARGARET ATWOOD
- bitter, weird, middle age writer with a pipe
p221 Margaret Atwood wore a "SHABBY NO-NAME WRITER" sign
p222 intermediaries powerful enough to help (some) writers and readers, but not rip us off
p224 TINA (There Is No Alternative) Thatcher
p224 Dan Davies The Unaccountability Machine 2024 "accountability sink"
p225 1998 PageRank paper by Brin and Page
- p226 can't bear the cost of leaving
- p227 Four Forces: Competition, Regulation, Interoperability, Tech worker power
p228 European Commission 2024 Digital Services Act Digital Markets Act
p233 Canada June 2024 amendments to the Competition Act
- p235 footnote . repeat of p34 footnote
p235 2021 Executive Order on Promoting Competion in the American Economy written by Tim Wu
p235 Jen Howard
- p236 financial comparison shopping sites bribed for placement
- p236 CFPB compelled one-click bank account migration tools
- p237 "Milton Friedman-pilled weirdos"
p238 2024 Supreme Court Loper Bright decision killed 1994 Chevron deference
p240 2017 Lina Khan Amazon's Antitrust Paradox
p242 WSJ claims opposing monopolies disqualified FTC chair Lina Khan from prosecuting monopolies
- p244 ? minwage contracts demanding K$ worker if fired or quit
- p244 ? nursing home employees 36 hour shifts, criminal abandonment charges if they quit
p244 Andrew Ferguson Trump FTC chair fight wokeness
- p250 "exclusive non-overlapping"; we have two "cable" companies here, fiber and coax
- also, we can vpn/wireguard to anywhere, a provider in Europe or Australia if desirable
p256 want privacy law with private right of action
p257 hyperbolic claim; ambulance chaser (1897) == corporations above the law
- p259 European Union corruption different than US corruption
p260 EU 2016 GDPR
- p262 Largest American surveillance companies pretend to be Irish (citation needed)
p264 structural separation in OECD
p264 separation of investment banks and retail banks ended by 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley act
p265 led to 2008 financial crisis? that was home property value speculation and mortgage-backed securities
p265 Supreme Court ethics conflict of interest
- p266-7 make platforms less powerful, controlling users foolish
- p269 regulatory rules protecting users from bad content hard to adminster
- p270 harrassment example: define? test? investigate? are procedures adequate and followed correctly?
- p271 fact intensive rulesprofoundly unsuitable
p272 make platform switching easier, i.e. Mastodon
p274 servers can defederate/block other servers like Truth Social
p275 Doctorow is @pluralistic@mamot.fr
p275 Mastodon built on open standard ActivityPub, freedom of movement between servers
- p278 end-to-end intermediary, providers can't force "premium" service
- p279 rule: a service connects senders and willing recipients efficiently and reliably
p280 "give customers what they ask" stifles innovation in fraud
p296 footnote . Doctorow novel Little Brother ????
p310 footnote . From Businesses and Banks to Colleges and Churches: Americans' Views of U.S. Institutions Pew Research Center, February 2024