Catch me in Miami! I'll be attending a book and book event in Coral Gables on January 22nd at 8 p.m. .
We live in the Enshittocene, where the forces of Enshittification have turned everything from cars to streaming services, dishwashers, and thorough noisy piles of crap. It's called the great great word.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain
How did we get to this point? Is it the end of zero rates and policies? Did companies we once valued lead to a worsening situation by forcing changes in leadership? Is mercury in retrograde?
None of the above. There were many times when investors demanded higher returns from companies but many founders refused to dramatically worsen the product. Furthermore, leaders overseeing the rapid, uncorrected decay of once beloved products are the same people supervising the golden age. As for mercury? Well, I'm cancer, and as everyone knows, cancer doesn't believe in astrology.
The great lineage is not precipitated by the changes of greedy and cold-hearted corporate leaders. Rather, that change is what allows greedy and cold-hearted corporate leaders to escape.
Capitalists hate capitalism. For corporate executives, the goal is not to do good, make customers happy, pay workers, or beat competitors; it's all about bugs. The best business is worrying that people will simply pay you money without doing anything or eventually stop. In other words, UBI for the investor class.
Douglas Rushkoff calls this "Going Meta." Instead of selling things, provide platforms for people to sell things. Instead of providing platforms, invest in platforms. Instead of investing in platforms, buy options on the platform. Instead of buying options, buy option derivatives.
A more accurate analysis invokes the analysis of Yanis Varoufakis, an economist. Varoufakis emphasizes the distinction between profit and rent. Profit is the income that capitalists extract by mobilizing workers to do productive work and sifting through the surplus created by labor.
In contrast, rent is income derived from simply owning what capitalists or workers need for productivity. The entrepreneur who opens a coffee shop profits from the surplus value created by the barista. The landlord who owns the building collects coffee shop rent simply for owning the building.
The coffee shop owner can never rest. At any moment, another coffee shop can open down the street and lure customers and baristas. When that happens, the coffee shop bursts and the owner is ruined. But not the landlord! When the coffee shop bursts, the landlord's asset is worth more. There's an empty store right below the city's most popular coffee shop.
Capitalists hate capitalism. Faced with the choice of paying fair wages and treating workers well to retain them or facing the impossibility of working for others in the same field, they have made workers sad by not paying tens of thousands of dollars in obligations without competition. Training "they will take the latter every time the boss will take the latter every time. Meta, baby.
Competition is the same. Facing competition where even the biggest competitors of competitors dominate the landscape of our company until all companies have the dominant company that the dominant company has, choosing competition to win most customers with the best products or facing competition that can merge so that customers can go elsewhere, think: Facebook-Instagram. Disney Fox. Microsoft-Activision :
https://locusmag.com/2021/07/cory-doctorow-tech-monopolies-and-the-inficessity-of-interoperability/
Enshittification has a complex underlying dynamics and a reliable matrix of stages, but its effects are very simple. When the people who use them and the suppliers who make them get worse, the situation gets worse, but users continue to use and suppliers maintain. supply.
There are four forces standing in the way of dedicated interference, and as each force weakens, absorbency spreads.
The first and most important of these constraints is competition. Capitalists claim to love competition because companies sharpen due to competition. They must constantly improve products, cut costs, or be swept away by superior alternatives. There is a degree of truth here, but it is not the whole story.
First, competition can "improve" what we see. In Europe, however, these companies were the most serious violators of personal information protection. This is because the dominant position of US-based large tech surveillance companies was lacking.
Those who had the least to lose were the most reckless with personal information breaches. But they also could not afford the expensive enablers of giant corporate law firms to hold European regulators. As long as privacy is respected, the lack of competition is fine. We do not want competition in the field of "most efficient at violating our human rights."
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/04/fighting-floc-and-fighting-monopoly-are-ly-catible
But there is another benefit to competition: Ewa. Sectors with hundreds of medium-sized competing companies are unruly for annual conferences. Industries dominated by a few companies present a unified front to policymakers as a cartel, and commercial coziness provides a vast war chest to deal with governments and capture regulators.
https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/
Competition is the first constraint. When there is competition, corporate managers fear paying money to competitors through defects. They do not care about your satisfaction, but they are interested in your money, and competition forces them to satisfy you in order to receive your money.
Competition has been circling the drain for 40 years since Reagan's judicial wizards at the University of Chicago School of Economics hatched the "consumer welfare" antitrust theory. This theory argues that monopoly is evidence of "efficiency." When everyone shops at one store, it's not evidence of foul play, it's evidence of the best store.
For 40 years, we have been able to violate antitrust laws by merging with major competitors, acquiring upstart rivals, and using investor cash to prevent others from entering the market. This has produced today's incestuous industry behemoths, with five or fewer companies dominating everything from eyeglasses to banking to maritime cargo to pro wrestling.
https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers
Due to the endless erosion of competition, the corporate laureate of the role of AT&T spokesperson in Lily Tomlin's logic said, "We don't care. We don't need to. We're the phone company.":
https://vimeo.com/355556831
But the decline of competition has also enabled regulatory capture by turning the cut's adversaries into kiss cousins. These companies have persuaded regulators not to enforce privacy, consumer protection, or labor laws if total violations of these laws are achieved through apps.
The bosses running these companies have digital backends that can change the rules, not more noble or wicked than the barons of old, but equipped with digital backends for businesses that can change the rules.
Labor law thought: GIG-Work Company, as written by Veena Dubal, implements algorithmic wage discrimination, turning into a slot machine that pays more when you work more selectively when you pay more when you work more selectively, and discrimination in response to the app's currency for which side pays a little, in small units, is less discriminatory.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men
This is a clear violation of labor law, but the fiction that gig workers are contractors combines the opacity and speed of the wage discrimination backend, allowing companies to escape.
But the monster that spawned this fraud is no worse than its ancestors and no smarter. The coal boss of the black heart celebrated in Tennessee Ford Song would have willingly implemented algorithmic wage discrimination. But the green-eyed shade accountant in the back office couldn't afford enough, but changed the payment from 2 seconds to a second.
I call this "twiddling" - continually adjusting the business logic of the backend.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/
Twiddling is everywhere and is possible because it has been accepted by regulators as not a crime when we use apps. The deceptive search results that Amazon's "price is destructive" also allow the company to offer lower prices but charge higher costs.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens
The first constraint on hate is competition. The fear of losing money when hateful customers do business elsewhere. The second constraint is regulation. The fear that the penalties of regulators will eat up all the expected benefits in remedial measures or exceed those benefits and cause a net loss.
But as competition decreases in the sector, it becomes easier for the remaining companies to capture regulators. Say goodbye to the second constraint.
But there is another constraint. There is a unique and truly exceptional constraint in technology. That's self-help. Digital technology is so infinitely flexible that managers can tap business logic and change the rules at will.
But it's a double-edged sword. Users can back off. The universal nature of digital products always means that it is possible to unlock products experienced in the world technically. Want Mercedes to charge you rent for the accelerator pedal through a monthly subscription? Toggle the "subscription paid" bit and get the car in mode and the accelerator for free.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon
Is HP deceiving you to install a "security update" that secretly disables the ability of printers to recognize and use third-party ink? Roll back the operating system and you don't have to spend $10,000/gallon to print boarding passes and shopping lists.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer
Adversarial Interoperability, also known as "Adversarial Interoperability," is not a way to ignore the greedy choices of corporate sadists. It's a way to check those sadists. It's a constraint.
Imagine someone talking about a boardroom. "We calculate that if we make ads 25% more intrusive and annoying, we can get 2% more ads." If you think of business as a transhuman colonial organism that exists to maximize shareholder value, this is not an easy task.
But now consider the joy. "We calculate that if we make ads 25% more annoying, 50% of users will search for 'how to block ads?' on the search engine. When this happens, losing the expected 2% additional revenue is not the case. The income of that user drops to eternally 0."
Self-help is the third constraint on modification. However, when competition fails and regulatory capture continues, companies do not gain the ability to violate the law but wield the law.
Tech companies have cultivated thick laws, rules, and regulations that make self-help measures very illegal. This thicket is better known as "IP." It is best understood as "all policies that can control the actions of competitors, customers, and critics."
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
To put an ad blocker in an app, you have to reverse engineer it. To do that, you have to decrypt and decompile it. This step is a felony under Section 1201 of the DMCA, punishable by five years in prison and a $500,000 fine. In addition, blocking ads in an app can lead to liability under trademark, copyright, and patent claims, as well as claims of "tortious interference" under computer fraud and abuse laws (laws inspired by the movie War Games).
More than 50% of web users have installed ad blockers.
https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-bycott-doing/
However, 0% of app users have installed ad blockers. Because they don't exist. Apps are packed with enough IP to make adding an ad blocker a felony.
This is why the third constraint of self-help no longer applies. When corporate sadists say, "Let's make 25% more revenue by making ADS 25% more toxic. Instead, the response is, "Let's make ads 100% more toxic and increase revenue by 8%!"
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/16/23763227/uber-video-advertising-ads-taxi-food-delivery-apps
That brings me to the final constraint: labor.
Tech workers have historically wielded tremendous bargaining power due to a serious shortage of qualified personnel. As a result, tech workers were able to command high wages and humble benefits, but many workers began to think of themselves as entrepreneurs waiting in the wings and not as workers.
As a result, tech workers became highly exploitable. Their bosses could sell them on the idea that they were doing heroic work. Working in an environment where deadlines and shipping products ("real artist ships" - S. Jobs) were part of harassment and predation. Workers who started working in 2018 or later at Google were an important step in replacing the system that limited the importance of instant decisions about boss plans based on group identity.
But the flip side of this appeal to heroism is that workers have only worked as much as they have truly cared about what they have created. When you mourn your mother's funeral and miss your children to meet deadlines and ship products, the prospect of worsening the product is unthinkable.
Faced with the moral injury of rescuing the products you care about and harming the users you see as representing yourself, many tech workers have been caught in the prospect. With a shortage of tech workers and many employment prospects for those who quit, bosses could actually prevent the product from deteriorating.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification
But those days are behind us. The mass layoffs of tech workers have raised the confidence of tech workers. Google offers shareholders two benefits when it releases 12,000 tech workers a few months after redeeming stock for the next 27 years. It's not just a short-term gain in financial engineering, but a long-term gain in worker power and the removal of the final obstacle.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/
No matter how powerful the bargaining power of individual tech workers, it has always been easy to break. Long before Googlers were fired in a 5-digit cohort, they were working in an environment where harassment and predation were part of the job. Starting work in 2018, more than 20,000 Googlers were an important step in replacing the system that limited the importance of instant decisions about boss plans based on group identity.
Only through collective action and solidarity (unions) could tech workers hope to truly resist all the moral injuries of their bosses. So tech unions are on the rise.
https://abookapart.com/products/you-deserve-a-tech-union
But what's a little surprising? -What happens when techies start identifying themselves as workers. They come to understand that they share a common cause with other workers at the bottom of the tech stack. Think of Amazon's tech workers walking out in solidarity with Amazon's warehouse workers.
https://gizmodo.com/tech-workers-speak--in-support-of-amazon-warehouse-s-1842839301
Superficially, the lowest ranks of the tech industry are different from imaginable tech workers. Tech workers are officially employed with stock options, health care, and employment at a theme park "campus" with gyms and gourmet restaurants.
Performance workers who pack, drive, deliver, and support tech products are not employees. They are classified as contractors. They don't get free massages - they get AI bosses that monitor their eyes and give them pay cuts for bathroom breaks and docking for urine.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-Scintole-My-jerb/#computer-says--no
Performance workers are desperate for unions, but they also get special benefits from self-help measures. Another app can make all the difference in working conditions if the app is the boss. By using the app Para, which fights against algorithmic wage discrimination, allowing performance workers to collectively and automatically reject jobs that pay less than a certain threshold, algorithms are forced to pay more to everyone.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/tech-rights-are-workers-rights-doordash-edition
Para is fighting a brutal legal and technical battle against companies like Doordash. Companies like Doordash rely on atomized apps with atomized workers that prohibit retaliation against margins. Surprisingly, this is an effective tactic. In Indonesia, performance workers create the "Tuyul" app suite that modifies the behavior of the boss's app, securing concessions that lack bargaining power in other ways.
https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek
Tuyul apps and other forms of twiddling are not a substitute for labor unions but an adjunct to them. Union negotiators who can monitor and control labor conditions by modifying apps rank and file operate from a position of strength. "Give my members more bathroom breaks" is much weaker than "my members stop hacking the app and get angry when needed and take official bathroom breaks."
This leads to solidarity between high-paid tech workers and low-paid tech workers on keyboards. Together, they can get more concessions from bosses. But unionized coders can increase the bargaining leverage of all workers in the unionized front line and provide apps when bosses of unionized coders force them to take counter-apples that release them.
Other sectors are already working through versions of this. The ouster of the old corrupt leadership of the team led to historic wage and labor condition benefits for drivers and ultimately ushered in a new radical era that tried to dismantle the 2-step contract system that destroyed all unions attempting it.
Team members organized Harvard graduate students and leadership change was possible because Harvard kids memorized the union rulebook. In a historic meeting where the old guard was abolished, it was teamwork between union class and file and Harvard's rule knowledge individuals, and it turned the process around.
https://theintercept.com/2023/04/07/deconstructed-union-dhl-teamsters-uaw/
We are deeply immersed in the Enshittocene and it is terribly disheartening. However, by understanding the constraints that have maintained the structures, we can rebuild them and dismiss them. Labor organization all types of tech workers are not only a way for those workers to get a better deal, but also the core of our entire lives' separations.
I am starting the sequel to the Red Team Blues' Bazel's audiobook.
To read or share the essay format version of this post, here is the link to Pluralistic.net.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/13/solidarity-forever/#tech-unions