Why is Everything You Love Getting Worse? Ft. Cory Doctorow

0:00Have you noticed how just about every product and service that we've come to rely on in the digital age is getting worse? from Google search results that don't give you any actual results to$1 ,800 connected refrigerators that serve you ads. Ads in your kitchen. They could be coming to your fridge. Watch this strut. These heels feel better than my sneakers. You're killing it. Work it, Jake. Critics have dubbed it AI slop because it's quick and easy to produce and created by artificial intelligence. Who's having a royal time? Mercedes has come up with a plan to make even more money from Ben's owners.

0:40Drivers can pay a fee for some extra horsepower with a monthly subscription. If you own something and it breaks, should you be allowed to repair it? It's almost impossible to actually do it. Apple is treating everyone like the product. Everyone is the product. Everyone gets twiddled because you have been conscripted into the tech industry because your industry was digitalized. Welcome to the era of inshittification.

1:08Good day from Newsweek headquarters at the top of the World Trade Center here in New York City. This is the 1600. And I am Carlo Versano, and we're going to take a little bit of a break from the mayhem of the day-to-day politics of the Trump era today to dig into something that's a little bit of a hobby horse of mine. We've discussed this in the newsletter lots of different times. and basically why the user experience on the Internet seems to be getting so bad, why it just seems to be degrading pretty much everywhere you go these days. And it's really not even just the Internet. It's not really just a problem for the digital era.

1:42You know, you've got cars now that require subscriptions to start them remotely. You've got a television viewing experience that I'm sure many others would agree is infuriating at best. the decay in our day-to-day lives, it's noticeable, and it really is everywhere you look. And there's a term for this. It's called inshittification, and it was coined by the author, tech critic, and the longtime blogger Cory Doctorow. Cory's with us today. His book is called Inshittification. Book is getting rave reviews. It's on bookshelves now, and people are really saying that this is the first time that someone has really put a name to this feeling that I think that we have all identified in our lives.

2:20And Corey joins us now. So Corey, welcome. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. It's my pleasure. Corey, before we get into it, define the concept, because obviously in shitification, which is a great word, explain it in your own terms. Define it in your own terms. Sure. Well, I should preface it by saying that for about a quarter of a century now, I've worked for a digital rights group called the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And that job is consisted of trying to get people to think about these complex, technical, abstract ideas before they become very concrete because it's kind of too late to do anything about them.

2:53And that's a business of coming up with metaphors and similes and analogies and parables and funny words. And so this is the latest. This is the funny word that seems to have caught on this time around. And it describes both a characteristic pattern by which platforms go bad and then advances a theory of why that's happening now and what we can do about it. And so that characteristic pattern is that first, platforms are good to their end users. They find a way to lock those users in so that second, they can make things worse for those end users without fearing their departure because of the lock-in in order to make things better for business customers.

3:29And then third, it locks the business customers in and drains away all the value from them as well. So you end up with a kind of husk where the minimum value, kind of a mingy, like homeopathic residue of value is left behind to keep the users locked to the platform. And then the users keep the customers, the business customers locked to the platform. And all the value is delivered to shareholders and executives. And that, I think, is a pattern that when you hear it and when you've heard it described, you can sort of see how it would apply to everything from Uber to Amazon to Google to Twitter.

4:00But what's more important, I think, is that incentivification advances a theory about why, why it's happening now. I don't want to speak for too long. Maybe we can talk about it in a minute. But the high level answer is because they can, because we stopped disciplining firms that did bad things. And so now they do them. So you mentioned these three phases. And to me, the things that immediately come to mind, like in my own life, the examples that come to mind, something like an Uber, right? Uber comes on the market whenever it was 10, 15, I guess, years ago now. And as a consumer, you're like, oh, my God, this is unbelievable, right?

4:33I can get a cab. Not only can I get a cab on my phone, I can see when it's coming. I can see who the driver is. And it's cheap. It's cheaper than an actual cab. So I'm going to start using Uber now, right? I live in New York City. New York City is one of those places where it's actually always been pretty easy to get a cab. But now you start using Uber because it's even easier. And now you go, you try and get a cab on Uber, and it's three, four, five, maybe ten times as expensive as it was back then. The cars are worse. The entire experience is worse, right? What are some other examples? I mean, Facebook obviously would be sort of another one, right?

5:09I mean, I'm sure you remember back when Facebook came on the market 20 years ago. It was incredible. Yeah, I mean, Facebook is like, I think, the prototypical case here. So Facebook starts off as a public service, one that's available beyond college kids, with a pretty good offer. They say, look, I know everyone that you want to talk to has a social media account on MySpace, but I don't know if you knew this, MySpace is owned by an evil billionaire named Rupert Murdoch, and who would want to get their social media from an evil billionaire? Plus, Rupert Murdoch's really spying on you with his platform, and Facebook is the platform that won't spy on you.

5:42We just show you the things that you want to see. And so people pile onto Facebook and they get locked in. We were also naive. Well, look, I actually disagree that this is about Niva Tay. I think that platforms get worse when they can, but if they can't, they don't. I think that's a really important point. So, you know, Facebook locks us in through the simple expedient that we love each other more than we hate Mark Zuckerberg. But, you know, your friends are a pain in the ass and they can't agree when it's time to leave Facebook. So you all end up stuck on Facebook. You're holding each other hostage.

6:14And so that triggers phase two. Facebook makes things worse for end users and courts some business customers. So they start spying on you and they start showing you things that you never asked to see. And that means that they can target ads to you. And it means that publishers can put excerpts from their website on Facebook and have those excerpts sort of crammed non-consensually into your eyeballs. They get a free traffic funnel. That's very good for them. And once they get locked in, because it's quite easy for a powerful buyer to lock in its sellers, its suppliers, much easier than for a powerful seller to lock in its buyers.

6:53Monopoly is very hard. Monopsony is quite easy. Few businesses can afford, you know, the overnight loss of even 20 % of their gross receipts. So once you have one customer who accounts for 20 % of your gross receipts, they really get to call the tune. So the advertisers and the publishers get locked in too. And Facebook turns the screws on them in phase three, makes things worse. Ad targeting fidelity goes to hell. Ad prices go through the roof. Ad fraud explodes. when Procter & Gamble zeroed out their$200 million a year surveillance advertising spend in 2017, they didn't see any drop in business because it was all fraud.

7:28And publishers have to put longer excerpts just to get shown to their own subscribers, much less getting recommended. Eventually, it's just fully substitutive text from their own website. The only way they can monetize it is using Facebook's crooked advertising system. And that's the final stage. Facebook is a pile of shit. And, you know, I think when you hear it that way, you really remember that that's what happened. Corey, you mentioned Procter & Gamble and how they, in 2018, I think it was, they spent 200, or they pulled their$200 million programmatic advertising budget and nothing happened to their sales.

8:00That's fascinating to me. And I mean, doesn't that sort of suggest that the inshittification process, it's not just for the consumer. I mean, even for advertisers or for businesses that are, you know, that rely on these platforms. I mean, they don't even, they don't even know how these Facebook, how Facebook's algorithms work, right? The whole thing is a total black box. So you can't even tell if your advertising budget is actually doing anything. Yeah, I think that's totally right. Actually, one of the differences between in shitification as a theory about what's going on and some of the other criticism of tech in recent years is I don't have any patience at all for the idea that if you're not paying for the product, you're the product.

8:38If they can make you the product, you're the product, right? If you buy a John Deere tractor and you fix it yourself, as farmers have been doing with their farm implements since the dawn of agriculture, the repair won't start working until John Deere sends a technician out to type an unlock code into the console on the tractor, charges you a couple hundred bucks. It's not like the tractor was an ad-supported freebie, right? If you have an iPhone, you know, the distraction rectangle in your pocket was not free. It was a thousand bucks. And while Apple did turn off Facebook surveillance, when they turned off Facebook spying through their app store, they turned on Apple spying.

9:16Apple now gathers the same data that Facebook used to gather. There's no opt-out. When Gizmodo found out they were doing it, they lied about it at first. And they use it to target ads to you. It's exactly the same thing Facebook was doing. I don't think dignity and fairness are a customer loyalty program. I think that they're what firms do when they fear that a failure to deliver dignity and fairness will hurt them more than cheating will benefit them. I think it's funny you bring up Apple because I was going to, you know, as devil's advocate, sort of make the point that if there's any company, if there's any of these big tech companies that have perhaps avoided incentivification, one might argue that it's Apple.

9:56I mean, you know, I got the new iPhone, whatever the heck it's called, and the new iOS. And it's still a generally pretty good – I mean, put the privacy stuff aside for a second. As his user experience goes, it's sort of like the interfacing with the device. It's still pretty good, right? I mean, I think that – has Apple figured out sort of a way to thread this needle? I don't think so. I mean, look, I'm not going to argue about whether the UI is good or not. I'm not an iPhone user, so I'm not really qualified to say that. But Apple's taking 30 cents out of every dollar you spend. And that means that all the products you're buying are more expensive, right?

10:33So Apple is colluding with the app market to rip you off. This has been the subject of antitrust investigations in the U.S. and in Europe and gigantic fines. And Apple continues to do it. In fact, the European Union recently ordered them to stop and to allow you to choose another app store if you wanted. it. And Apple's response was, well, it was three stages. Their first response was, OK, we'll allow other app stores. But if we think your phone has been outside of Europe for more than 20 days, we'll delete all your apps and all your data. And we are going to charge a junk fee for every dollar you spend in that app store of 30 percent.

11:07So, yeah, so we won't be processing the payment. We're just going to charge 30 percent because we can. Because the next response was to. Yeah. And the next response was to threaten to leave the European Union, which no one took very seriously. And now they just filed 18 spurious legal objections is probably going to tie this up for a decade. So, you know, you deciding where you get your software is really a matter between you and your device. And, you know, Apple may make good decisions sometimes. But like, if you want to run IceBlock, the app that Apple just took out that warns you if there's someone in your neighborhood who might kidnap you and send you to a camp, you can't because Apple has removed that from the App Store and you can't choose another App Store.

11:48Right. So I want to go back to something that you said that, you know, the old adage about if you're not paying for the product, you are the product. And I mean, I completely agree with you that like the John Deere thing is a great example. You know, there's other examples I mentioned before the, you know, some car companies now that charge you a recurring fee to do to use certain features like the remote start. I think BMW, there's a big backlash against BMW a few years ago because they tried to charge for the heated seats, which are something. But they brought it back. It's now for their automatic headlight dimming.

12:18And Mercedes charges for renting your accelerator pedal. You have to pay monthly rent on your accelerator pedal. Otherwise, you only get half the acceleration. It's unbelievable. So I guess the question I have is, putting that aside, that's different because you are paying for the car, right? I think everybody would agree that you pay$50 ,000 for a new Mercedes or whatever, probably much more than that. you should get the features that come with the car. The social platforms are different though, right? Because these are free. I mean, you don't have, like, you really are the product in the case of Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, are you not?

12:57Well, sure, but so are the advertisers and so are the publishers, right? Everyone is being turned into the product. My point is that, like, there is no state of nature that says how much they're going to spy on you or how much junk they're going to cram into your feed or how misleading they'll be or how little money they'll spend on anti-fraud or what have you, that's not like a thing that comes down off a mountain on two stone tablets. It's what an economist would call an equilibrium. They are sitting there and saying, well, how much can we extract? How little can we spend on product quality?

13:26And how much profit will we get? And one of the things they're asking is like, will users leave? Will regulators fine us? Will publishers leave the platform or advertisers if we rip them off? And if you can rig the game, you know, here's an example. When Facebook kicked off and they were luring people out of MySpace, the pitch didn't end with, we're like MySpace, but we won't spy on you. It's not like anyone was going to say, okay, well, I'm going to sit here smugly on Facebook all alone and wait for my stupid friends to notice that this is better while I just reread the privacy policy. right they had to give people some way to bridge that and what they gave them was a bot and you gave that bot your login and password and it would go to myspace several times a day pretending to be you it would grab all the messages waiting for you in myspace and put them in your facebook feed and you could reply to them and push them back out to myspace right so you could just kind of solve that equilibrium right like you could say oh yeah and it's much cheaper for me to leave so if you do that to facebook today they will nuke you until you glow right they'll say oh you You violated Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by reverse engineering.

14:34And you violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. You committed a criminal cybersecurity breach by violating our terms of service. And also, you violated contract law. You're a tortfeasor who's engaged in tortious interference with contract with our users. And you're violating our patents, our copyrights, our trademarks, our trade secrets. It's just all of the stuff that they can just bury you in that Rupert Murdoch didn't have in his arsenal. Otherwise, we never would have gotten Facebook. And I think that had Mark Zuckerberg had the legitimate fear that he would lose more money by cheating than he would gain by cheating, he might not have cheated.

15:11And if he had the hubris, which I wouldn't put past him, to continue to cheat, then he might have been supplanted by someone who did unto him as he did unto Rupert Murdoch. And this gets back to what you this concept of like the collection action problem or the collective action problem. Right. Because you could the argument you can make is like, look, you don't like Facebook, leave Facebook. Right. You don't like, you know, you don't like MySpace. You went to Facebook. You don't like Facebook. Go somewhere else or go nowhere. Just don't use them. But but again, the network effects are the things that are keeping you there.

15:43Right. Like you're not. There's plenty of people, I think, who use Facebook probably against their, you know, their own best heart, you know, thoughts. But they're doing it because that's where their grandma is and that's where the kids, you know, the pictures of their friends' kids are, right? Well, let me plug a nonprofit that I don't work for, a group called The Light Collective that was founded by this woman, Andrea Downing. And Andrea is a breast cancer previvor. That means she has the gene for breast cancer. And she was part of a group of breast cancer previvors who were courted by Facebook and transitioned to Facebook in the early 2010s.

16:17And these communities are really important. So if you're a breast cancer previvor, you're wrestling with pretty significant medical questions like, should I preemptively have my uterus or my breasts or my ovaries removed? Plus, you know, the women in your life are sick and dying, right? Your mothers, your sisters, your aunts, your grandmothers, your daughters, right? This is a big deal. And so this community is super important. And one day Andrea was just poking around on Facebook. She's not like a security researcher by training. She's not a computer person by training, but she's, you know, interested in the subject.

16:47She's very smart. and she noticed that you could enumerate the full membership of any Facebook group, even if you weren't a member. So you could find out who all the women were in this breast cancer previvor group if you just had a Facebook account. And she reported this to Facebook and Facebook said, oh no, we're not going to fix that. That's part of the ad tech stack. It's a feature and not a bug. So they sued. And then when Obama's FTC settled with Facebook, it was one of the cases that was non-consensually folded in and settled. So they never got any justice out of this. And they're all still on Facebook.

17:17Right. They're all still on Facebook because they love each other more than they hate Mark Zuckerberg. The cost of being spied on and is hard to calculate. And when put up against the immediate harms of losing that community makes people want to stay. You know, if you've seen that documentary, Fiddler on the Roof, you may have asked yourself, how come those people stay in that goddamn village when every 15 minutes the Cossacks ride through and kick six kinds of shit out of them? Well, you find out in the last scene because eventually the czar kicks the Jews out of the pale settlement. And they're like, well, I guess we're never going to see each other again.

17:57Right. And the only thing they had literally was each other. I want to go back to this, the antitrust stuff. So you wrote on your blog, pluralistic, excuse me, today about Google and what you call the economic mistake that allowed this company to become so big. We talked about how Google is sort of like the proto example of incentivification. The search, the Google search now compared to what it was even five years ago, I mean, 10 years ago, it's really unbelievable, right? I mean, you used to be able to search to go on Google. You could even click the I'm getting lucky button and chances are you'd get at least something probably what you like.

18:34Now you can't even you have to scroll down half the page before you even get something that's not an ad. If that's even going to send you to where you want to go, you don't know. What is the economic mistake that allowed Google to get as big as it did? Well, let's look at the structure of Google. Google likes to bill itself as like, you know, Willy Wonka's idea factories. Look at all of our amazing products. Right. They call themselves Alphabet, and they have a product for every letter from A to Z. When you actually look at what Google has done as a company, they've had one really successful consumer product launch.

19:04It happened a millennium ago in the previous century when they made a really good search engine. They have not had a successful consumer product, almost without exception, since all the products they launched internally flopped. The products that they succeeded with are acquisitions. And that's their ad tech stack. YouTube being a prime example, right. Yeah, video, ad tech, not just YouTube, Android, maps, docs, collaboration, satellite photos, even their internal stuff like server management. These are all acquisitions. So they're not Willy Wonka. They're rich uncle penny bags, right? They're buying all the other kids' toys and playing with them, but claiming that they're their own, that they thought this stuff up.

19:44And this is not something that competition law is a stranger to. The history of competition law in this country is that we had these monopolies and they became, well, John Sherman, the senator who briefed for the first antitrust law, the Sherman Act in 1890, was Tecumseh Sherman's brother. He said they became autocrats of trade. He said we wouldn't allow a king of America. Why are we allowing these autocrats of trade? So they became autocrats of trade. And we understood that they got there by engaging in two kinds of mergers. They engaged in horizontal mergers where firms bought their immediate competitors.

20:20And they engaged in vertical mergers where they bought elements of their supply chain. So imagine a rail company that buys all the other rail companies and then buys a couple of coal mines. And so if you have a coal mine, you only have one place to ship your coal and they compete with you. And so you can never succeed because they control this important factor of your production. There's no other logistical way to bring your coal to market. And so they end up not only owning the rail system, but they own the coal system, too. And this is how these trusts, which is why we call it antitrust, this is how they expanded.

20:51And starting in the 1970s, this group of neoliberal economists, the Chicago school, started to advance these radical theories of antitrust. The most noted proponent of this is a guy called Robert Bork. Even if you don't know his name, you might have heard of things being Borked as being in a very bad situation. Borked, yeah, Supreme Court. That's named after him because he really blew his Senate confirmation hearing when they tried to put him on the Supreme Court in the Reagan years. And Bork had this conspiracy theory. He said that, first of all, monopolies are quite good. And the only time you will ever see a monopoly in the wild is if they are doing a really good job and we're all voluntarily shopping with them.

21:28And if they weren't doing a good job, someone else would come in and just offer a rival product. We'd all shop somewhere else. And so you can always tell that a monopoly is good if it exists. Right. And Bork also had this theory that John Sherman and the authors of the Clayton Act and the authors of the Robertson-Patman Act and so on, that all of these authors of antitrust laws in Congress and the Senate, that they thought monopolies were great, too. And they never intended these laws to be used to fight monopolies. Now, this is like just genuinely a very dumb thing to say. It bears no relationship to reality as we understand it.

22:07We are talking about congressmen and senators who got up on their hind legs in the chamber and said in great detail what they were doing and why. So, nevertheless, Borg is pushing on an open door, and billionaires quite like the idea that if there was an antitrust law, they could corner markets and not have to compete and cease to practice capitalism and instead go to kind of feudalism, where they make money from owning things instead of from doing things. And they push this agenda. Carter backs it a little, but Reagan really lets go with it. And then his successors, Republican and Democrat, right up to Biden, with a little bit of Trump won.

22:44They buy this. They like these monopolies. They say that they're efficient and good and they're doing good by the American people and the American economy. And every part of our economy is captured this way, including search. So Google has a 90 % search market share, and they were convicted of violating the antitrust laws last year in a federal court. And one of the things that the judge found was that Google had bought its way to dominance. So they bribed Apple. Via double click. 20 billion. Yeah. Well, no, no, no. That's the ad case. This is the search case. Right. So there's two. They lost three, but there's two that are relevant here.

23:19So one was the search case where they bought their way to dominance. They bought every place where you might encounter a search. box. So they paid Apple$20 billion a year not to enter the search market and to make Google their search. They paid for all the browsers, all the manufacturers, all the operating systems, all the carriers. They all put Google in as the default. And so that meant that no one wanted to capitalize a rival search engine because where would you ever encounter that search engine? They also did the same in ads. So they bought a company called DoubleClick and then a whole string of other acquisitions that were part of what's called the ad tech stack.