Cory Doctorow Explains Why Big Tech Is Making the Internet Terrible

Cory Doctorow

I think we should thank Elon Musk for what he’s doing because I think a lot of the decay of platforms and the abuses that enable that decay is undertaken slowly and with the finest of lines, so that it’s very hard to point at it and say that it’s happening. And Musk, a bit like Donald Trump, instead of moving slowly and with a very fine-tip pencil, he kind of grabs a crayon in his fist and he just scrawls. This can help to bring attention to issues on which it would otherwise be difficult to reach a consensus.

With Musk and with Trump, it’s much easier to identify the pathology at play and do something about it — and actually get people to understand what the struggle’s contours are and to join the struggle. I think in a very weird way, we should be thankful to Musk and Trump for this.

The pathology that I think that Musk is enacting in high speed is something I call “enshitification.” Enshitification is a specific form of monopoly decay that is endemic to digital platforms. And the platform is the canonical form of the digital firm. It’s like a pure rentier intermediary business where the firm has a set of users or buyers and it has a set of business customers or sellers, and it intermediates between them. And it does so in a low competition environment where antitrust law or competition laws are not vigorously enforced.

To the extent that it has access to things like capital, it can leverage its resources to buy potential competitors or use predatory pricing to remove potential competitors from the market. Think about Uber losing forty cents on the dollar for thirteen years to just eliminate yellow cabs and starve public transit investment by making it seem like there’s a viable alternative in rideshare vehicles. And we see predatory pricing and predatory acquisition in many, many, many domains.

Just look at grocery stores in Canada. Loblaws is buying its competitors, engaged in predatory pricing, and abusing both its suppliers and customers to extract monopoly rents and leave everyone worse off. But there’s a thing that happens in the digital world that’s different. Digital platforms have a high-speed flexibility that is not really present in analog businesses.

John D. Rockefeller was doing all this stuff one hundred twenty years ago, but if Rockefeller was like, “I secretly own this train line and I use the fact that it’s the only way to get oil to market to exclude my rivals, and I’m worried that there’s a ferry line coming that will offer an alternate route that will be more efficient,” he can’t just click a mouse and build another train line that offers the service more cheaply until the ferry line goes out of business and then abandon the train line. The non-digital example is capital intensive, and it demands incredibly slow processes. With digital, you can do a thing that I call “twiddling,” which is just changing the business logic really quickly.

Jeff Bezos is a grocer twice over. He runs a company called Amazon Fresh that’s an all-digital grocer and he runs a company called Whole Foods that’s an analog grocer. And if Amazon Fresh wants to gouge on the price of eggs, he just clicks a mouse and the price of eggs changes on the platform; he can even change the price for different customers or at different times of the day. If Whole Foods wants to change the price of eggs, they need teenagers on roller skates with pricing guns. And so, the ability to play the shell game really quickly is curtailed in the analog world.

The digital world does the same things that mediocre sociopath monopolists did in the Gilded Age, but they do it faster and with computers. And in some ways, this contributes to the kind of mythology surrounding the digital world’s Gilded Age equivalents. They can compose themselves as super geniuses because they’re just doing something fast and with computers that makes it look like an amazing magic trick, even though it’s just the same thing, but fast. And the way that this cycle unfolds is you use this twiddling to allocate surpluses — that is, to give goodies to end users so they come into the platform. This is things like loss-leaders and subsidized shipping.

In the case of Facebook or Twitter, it’s “you tell us who you want to hear from and we’ll tell you when they say something new.” That’s a valuable proposition; that’s a cool and interesting technology. And then you want to bring business customers onto the platform. And so, you’ve got to withdraw some surplus from the end users. So, you start spying on end users and using that to make algorithmic recommendations.

Privacy is a classic consumer surplus. It’s a thing that you have that someone else can expropriate from you and use to benefit at your expense. Platforms like Twitter start spying on you and targeting ads to you. And they can allocate surplus to advertisers by saying, “hey, just like we have been historically reliably delivering updates from people that our users follow, we can reliably deliver updates to those users from you based on your targeting criteria.”

They can also bring in publishers: “Hey, we will be the funnel for your website. You just post excerpts or links to your content. We will use our surveillance to displace the things our users have asked us to show” — the updates from their followers — “and replace them with not just ads, but links to your website. And some of those things might be things that users want to see, so they might subscribe to you.”  You, the end user, are now on the receiving end of this funnel.

In the next stage of monopoly decay, the surpluses are withdrawn from users and from business customers to the point where there’s only enough surplus left in the platform to keep them locked in, but not so much that anything is left on the table that could otherwise go to the shareholders. And that’s what we’re seeing Twitter do. How many ads can they cram into your feed? How little can they show you of what you’ve asked to see? How few of the users that have subscribed to your feed can be shown what you update so that you can be charged to boost it or pay for Twitter Blue as a way of reaching your own followers. And that’s just one way to rug pull.

Musk did this open-sourcing of the algorithm and a lot of the rules got a lot of attention. I think the one that was most important didn’t get enough attention at all, which is that links off-platform get down-ranked. So, if you’re Jacobin and you’ve got a post in your feed that reads, “Here’s our new article and here’s a link to it,” that has a lower chance of showing up in your follower’s feeds than if instead you recapitulate that article without a link back to the article. This means that your opportunity to derive revenue from your content is firmly locked to the platform.

One of the things that platforms do when they reach this stage is they start undermining both the revenue that publishers get from advertising — they’ll pay you less of the money that they collect from advertisers to show you content associated with your material — and they also charge advertisers more and deliver it less reliably.

Facebook and Google had an illegal collusive arrangement they called Jedi Blue to raise the price of ads but lower the delivery of ads and lower the share paid out to publishers. And this came out in the Texas attorney general’s lawsuit. That is classic enshitification.

When you look just at what Musk is doing overtly, I’ll bet you anything that he’s doing some of this covertly — that he’s doing things like charging for ads that never get displayed; that he is charging more for ads than would be paid on an honest basis; or not delivering things that he’s promising advertisers and charging them for. I mean, not because he’s especially wicked, but because that’s what Facebook and Google already do. Musk’s problem, I think, is that he’s especially careless. It won’t require the Texas attorney general to depose their executives and do discovery on their internal memos. I think Musk will fat-finger it and post it at two in the morning when he is coming down off fucking DMT or something. That’s how we’ll find out about it with Musk.

And so that’s where we see Twitter going.

The second part of your question, “Is there something better coming?” I think it’s Mastodon; and I think it’s Mastodon for a bunch of reasons. One is that the Mastodon standard was developed when the tech platforms were totally disinterested and didn’t have their fingers on the scale. ActivityPub, which is the standard that governs Mastodon, happened in this moment of reduced scrutiny and interference. The people who made it were ideologically committed to decentralization and technological self-determination, and they made it without interference from large firms that otherwise would’ve found it relatively easy to capture the process.

So, it’s a very good standard and it has a lot of very good characteristics. One of them is that it has the right to exit built in. The standard ensures any user can export not just the list of people they follow, but the list of people who follow them. Users can automatically update all of those people in instances when they quit a server and go to another one.

One of the reasons that people still use Twitter, even though its quality has been manifestly degraded, is because they like the people who follow them and who they follow. It’s of value to them; that plays into Musk’s calculus. He’s trying to find an equilibrium where he’s enshitifying the platform to the point where it is almost useless to you but not totally useless. And one of the things that affects that calculus is what self-help measures you can take. If you can’t leave Twitter, then Musk can do bad things to you and assume that you won’t go because the value of your followers is more than the pain that Musk is inflicting on you. If it’s easier for you to take your followers with you, then the pain he can inflict on you is smaller. And that’s also true of the administrators of these small servers.

The other thing that Mastodon embodies is something called end-to-end, which is that the default posture for Mastodon is connecting willing senders with willing receivers. If the two try to communicate, in other words — if I post something for my followers and you follow me — Mastodon delivers it. The default of Mastodon is that things that are sent by senders are received by receivers — provided that both parties consent to that process. What that means is that the process by which you extort money from media brands — by telling them that they can’t see followers, won’t see their updates — that’s just off the table. And it means that a lot of the privacy-invasive conduct and advertising conduct that contributes to enshitfication, it’s just not tractable in the way that it is on Twitter.

Finally, crafting and enforcing a regulation that keeps things this way is pretty straightforward. A lot of people have said, “Oh, well, there should be a regulation that prevents Twitter from allowing harassment on the platform.” But that would require us to make factual determinations about whether conduct rises to the level of harassment. If you make fun of Elon Musk, is that harassment? If so, it would require that we have some kind of finding of fact to determine whether they could have prevented it or could have done something more; whether they acted in good faith. And all of that might take five years to determine. Meanwhile, you’re still being harassed. Whereas saying you just have to let people leave, and you also have to deliver messages from willing senders to willing receivers, is really easy to administer.

If you quit, say, Mastodon.lol and you complain that the administrator never gave you your data, and you go to the privacy commissioner who handles things like access to user data and you say, “Hey, I want to lodge a complaint because the administrator of Macedon.lol never gave my data.” They don’t have to do any finding of fact. They just send a letter to that administrator saying, “Just send him another copy of the data. I know you say you sent it, and he says he didn’t get it. Just send another copy.” And how do we know if end-to-end is being enforced? I send a message and you tell me whether you received it. And, so, we don’t need to depose Facebook engineers to do end-to-end. We can test it ourselves.