It’s Not Just You: The Internet Is Actually Getting Worse

0:02This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Sometimes a term is so apt, its meaning so clear and so relevant to our circumstances, that it becomes more than just a useful buzzword and grows to define an entire moment. I'm quoting the New Yorker's technology columnist, Kyle Chayka. The term he's describing, well, it's so evocative that, unfortunately, we can't say it on the air. I immediately grabbed onto it. I knew what it meant. I could apply it in my own experience because everything just seems to be getting worse all around us on our phones and on websites.

0:48The term is initiatification, and it was coined by Cory Doctorow. I've been following Cory Doctorow's work for years and years on the internet. He's someone who I always look to to understand what's going on online and how the latest tech policy is changing and how things work. And when I saw him starting to use this word in shittification, where everything getting worse, I just immediately understood what he was talking about, I think as we all do. In shittification was a word of the year in 2023. and now it's the title of Cory Doctorow's new book. Doctorow is a prolific and respected tech blogger, and he writes science fiction too.

1:28He also played a big role in the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates for civil liberties online. Here's Cory Doctorow speaking with The New Yorker's Kyle Chayka. Well, I think that when you describe something that is all around, but that is sort of so diffuse that you can't really put your finger on it. When you describe it, you kind of attach a handle to it. And you give people a way to carry it around and maybe try and carry it to each other and say, are you noticing this? I'm noticing this. I thought I was crazy. I thought it was just me. Maybe we can start with an example that a lot of our listeners will have experienced already.

2:10Can you talk about what happened with Google search? You know, the Google DOJ antitrust trial last year surfaced all these memos about a fight about making Google search worse. So in 2019, Google had reached maximum search growth. They had a 90 % market share in search. So they weren't going to get any more users except maybe by like breeding a billion humans to maturity and then making them Google users. They haven't tried that yet. Well, no, that's Google Classroom. It just takes a while, right? And so, you know, as a great Ed Zitron reported in his newsletter in Where's Your At At, you see in the memos, this strategy emerged.

2:46This guy Prabhagar Raghavan, who's an ex-McKinsey guy who'd been at Yahoo, overseeing Yahoo search, who's in charge of Google search revenue. He says, why don't we make search worse, right? Why don't we get rid of things like spell check or something called query stemming, where if you search for trousers, it also searches for pants. Or context clues, like everybody is searching for pants because someone got pantsed on national TV. And so when it searches for pants, you look at trending queries and you put that at the top. All of that stuff that made it so that you could one-shot your search. You search and the top result would be the one you were looking for.

3:25What if we make it a three-shot? Right. What if we make it so that you got to search two or three times and then every time we get to show you ads and there's this guy at Google, Ben Gomes, who's a Googler from the OG days. He was building their first servers when it was like one computer under a desk. He oversaw the build out to all of the data centers all over the world. And he's in charge of search technology. And he's like, what are you talking about? This is a terrible idea. and you know historically i think that guy would have won the argument not because the google founders had a sense of holy mission maybe they did and maybe they didn't but because google understood that as they used to say competition is just a click away but at that point google had spent many years bribing apple to the tune of 20 billion dollars a year not to make a competing search engine they had bribed all the browsers and all of the mobile carriers and all the people who made operating systems to make Google the default search.

4:20Even Microsoft's browser was just a rebadged version of Chrome. And so everywhere you looked, there was Google search, and they could make it worse, and it wouldn't matter. Because people had nowhere else to go, and they could turn the screws tighter and tighter and extract more of our attention until we eventually flee elsewhere, which may be happening now with open AI and generative search. Like that, in some ways, is delivering a more convenient product, even though it itself is… Not necessarily a better one. Yeah. Not right, but faster. One of the things about OpenAI that that story tells you, because that search is not good, is that people are willing to use perplexity in OpenAI instead of search, because search is so degraded, right?

5:01It's only good in comparison. And here's the kicker. I use a search engine. I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but I use a search engine called Kagi, K-A-G-I dot com. and I was just amazed by how good they were the first time I used them. I was staying with my fiction editor and I was in his living room on my computer and so was he. And he was like, have you ever tried Kagi? And I'm like, Kagi, no, tell me more. And he's like, it's like Google used to be when Google started. And I was like, that's amazing. It's 10 bucks a month. I tried it for like 10 seconds and I'm like, okay, I'm buying it.

5:30And then I read this article by Jason Kevler in 404 Media about Kagi. He's using it too. And he's like, by the way, they're using Google's index and they're syndicating and reorganizing its results. Now, Kaggy, they seem like very smart people, but I don't know how many people work there, 10, 20? Maybe, like, I don't know, it's certainly not 100. But you can't tell me that Google cannot do a better job with its own search index than, what, eight guys in a garage? Well, it just goes to show that the product doesn't have to be so bad. No, it's a choice. Like, the core good product is in there somewhere, we're just not allowed to access it because of all these layers of tweaking and mediation.

6:09You define this like very specific process or like the stages of things getting worse, as we can say euphemistically. And I was hoping you could go through those for us. Sure. So, in-shittification describes a three-stage process by which platforms go bad. In stage one, the platform is good to its end users, but it finds a way to lock those end users in. It's different ways based on different platforms. You know, Uber chased all the other cab companies out of the market. So that's one way to get locked in. It's very complicated. Facebook had a much easier one, which is like once you're in a place with a bunch of friends, it's really hard to organize them all to go.

6:46Economists just call that the collective action problem. You know, you love your friends, but they're a pain in the ass. You can't agree on what board game to play this weekend, much less like, you know, when it's time to leave Facebook, especially if some of you are there because that's where you hang out with the people that have the same rare disease as you or your customers or the people you left behind when you moved or the people organizing the Little League carpool. So it's really hard to go. And so you have people locked in. Once they're locked in, the platform is worse to those end users in order to be good to business customers.

7:15And it brings in advertisers, publishers, taxi drivers, platform sellers, performers, sex workers, whoever it is that they are brokering the introduction between. And this is where I think a lot of other critiques stop. You know, they'll say, oh, if you're not paying for the product, you're the product. that there's a kind of conspiracy between, say, advertisers and Facebook to screw end users. But what actually happens after the business customers are locked in is they get screwed too, right? And so the platforms start to squeeze their business customers, and they try to reach a kind of equilibrium where all the value except for whatever kind of homeopathic residue is needed to keep people locked in and to keep business customers locked into those people, all that value has been extracted, given to shareholders, given to executives.

8:03And that is like the final stage of identification. And that's where I think we find ourselves now with a lot of platforms. They're not the minimum viable product. They're like the maximally identified product. I think you described that third stage in the book as something like a giant pile of garbage. Like everyone is getting abused. I've used a word that wasn't garbage, but yes, indeed. Yes. No one is winning except for the platform. In this model, the users have been attracted in. We like the features, we like the product, that's cool. Then the businesses come in and they're making money too and everyone is happy for a little while, maybe a year in this utopian situation of the platform.

8:44Then the screws start to turn and everyone is suffering except for the platform and its executives. So in those stages, the people who are benefiting at the end are Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk of X now. What does that end stage look like that we're living in right now? Well, it's not new, right? Like they didn't invent greed in like 2019, nor did they invent the ways that tech platforms can change the rules from moment to moment that allows this incentivization. You know, people have been remotely downgrading platforms and technologies for as long as they've been around. What changed is that the platforms don't lose to competitors when that happens.

9:29So, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, when he launched Facebook, the thing he offered to the general public in 2006, where you didn't have to have a.edu address to join it, his pitch was, sure, you're all using MySpace, but did you know that it's owned by an evil, crapulent, senescent Australian billionaire named Rupert Murdoch, who's spying on you with every hour that God sends? Come to Facebook, we'll never spy on you and we'll only show you the things you asked to see. We're not going to boost stuff into your field of vision that you didn't ask for. And, you know, it wasn't enough to bring people over from MySpace.

10:01MySpace users had a collective action problem too. The difference was that back then, IP laws hadn't been monotonically expanded in the way that they have in the last 20 years. And so Mark Zuckerberg was able to give MySpace users a scraper. And you gave that scraper your username and password, this bot, and it would pretend to be you at MySpace several times a day, grab everything in your feed that was waiting to be shown to you, and it would put that in your Facebook feed. You could reply to it there. And then it would push it back out to MySpace. So you didn't have a collective action problem.

10:34You could just move from one to the other. Now, 20 years later, if you try to do that to Facebook, they'll say you violated section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and patents and trademarks and copyrights and trade secrets, we've kind of rigged the game so that history ended with the current round of winners that no one can do unto them as they did unto their predecessors. Cory Doctorow speaking with New Yorker columnist Kyle Chayka. More in a moment.

11:08in the book you are not a total pessimist and like you're far from pessimistic about this actually it's not just that everything is getting more and more and shitified and worse and worse and there's nothing to do about it there are strategies and there are ways to like make that lever of and shitification harder to use uh i mean maybe you can talk about how there are these political ideas to fix this, but perhaps under Trump right now, we're not seeing so much action. Well, yeah, you know, I mean, there is something quite miraculous about antitrust in the last six or seven years, even under Trump.

11:42You know, the case that Google just lost started under Trump. And what's miraculous about it is that it's happened all over the world. It's easy to think of this as being like just a thing Joe Biden did. I don't think Joe Biden actually did it. I think that Joe Biden was cornered into it by elements of his party who were sick to the back teeth of concentrated power and wealth and who, you know, in order to keep that coalition together, he had to do something. But it wasn't just Joe Biden who was cornered into that. You know, like all the best Americans, I'm Canadian. And in Canada, we have this very, very weak competition regime.

12:17Our competition bureau had challenged three mergers in its whole history, but it succeeded zero times, right? And yet Justin Trudeau, again, hardly an enemy of concentrated corporate power, whipped his party to pass big muscular antitrust law that created new powers for a competition bureau. We've seen very big antitrust action in the EU and in EU member states like Germany and France and Spain, but also in Australia, South Korea, Japan, and even China. So this is happening everywhere. And Trump, he's trying to stop it. But the reason Trump did it in 2019 when he brought the case against Google was not merely that he was petulant about big tech.

12:58It was that there was this giant political tailwind for doing something about concentrated power, about monopoly. And that came from you and me. That came from people who are living out what the finance sector calls Stein's law, that anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. And that power is still abroad in the world. And we're seeing so much more activity and action in the EU, in the UK, as far as passing these packages of regulations. But they are impacting how American users experience technology, too. There's this kind of trickle-down effect or trickle-across. Can you talk about that a little bit?

13:38Yeah, well, some of that is already happening, as you say. So the European Union, for example, said, Apple, we don't care how much money you make selling lightning chargers. From now on, everything sold in the European Union, unless there's a damn good reason, is going to have a USB-C charger. And we're not going to keep filling our e-waste dumps with immortal garbage that has proprietary dongles on it. And Apple quetched and they complained, but they did it. And they kind of, I guess, decided that it was like logistically, transcendently hard to do this in a way where they would split the manufacturing run and they would send the USB-C ones to Europe and they'd send the lightning port ones to America and everyone else.

14:20So everybody else got it. Now, the Digital Markets Act, which came into effect in 2024, goes a lot further and it imposes these interoperability requirements on companies. So they can't lock rivals out of the platform, right? They can't say, oh, well, we think you might invade our users' privacy or consumer rights, so we're not going to let you in. In Europe, what they say is, well, we have a privacy law here. Unlike in America. America hasn't had a new privacy law since Ronald Reagan banned video store clerks from disclosing your VHS rentals in 1988. But other countries have mature muscular privacy laws.

14:55And they say, we'll decide that. If a company plugs into an Apple device and invades someone's privacy, we'll take care of that. You can stand down, Tim Cook. And Apple is so upset about this that they threatened to leave the EU over it, which is not going to happen. And in fact, after that was reported, they were like, oh, no, no, no, that's not what we were threatening at all. We're just sad. This is more in sorrow than in anger. We hope you'll see the error of your ways. But, you know, Apple's not going to walk away from 500 million affluent consumers. And that's where this stuff is going to get.

15:29It's easier to make this singular experience. It's easier to make one product for everyone. And that product has to tow some line if the laws are strict enough in order to reach enough consumers. But I was thinking also about AI. And I'm curious what stage of inshittification you think generative AI is in right now. So whatever AI can or can't do, the reason it has attracted hundreds of billions of dollars in investment capital is because the market is betting that you can fire workers and replace them with chatbots. And I don't think you can. I don't think that – not only do I not think you can now, I don't think you will be in the future.

16:06I think that there are lots of ways in which when workers are in charge of how they use AI, they might make their job better. They might be better at their job. They might be happier. but I don't think that bosses firing workers and replacing with AI is going to work. And I don't think that shoveling more words into the word guessing program will make that happen. I think that's like saying, you know, we keep breeding these horses to run faster and faster. It's only a matter of time till one of the mayors gives birth to a locomotive. You know, a person is not like a word guessing program with more words.

16:35Right. And so I think because in certification is about a service that works getting worse and AI is kind of a service that was just a bunch of flashy demos, that it's in really a different space. Although it is interesting to note that all of the promising avenues for improvement, according to AI bosses, involve doing a lot more AI queries and having that happen automatically through these things called routers that take what would have been a query that cost you one sum and turn it into 20 queries that each cost you a sum, but that you have no insight into. You don't get to choose how that query is broken up and subbed out to these different kinds of models at different prices, which even if they're not ripping you off now, which I'm 100 % sure they are, they will rip you off in the future with, right?

17:30They just have a black box where it's just like you give them a credit card and then after you ask a question, they tell you how much they've charged your credit card. Why wouldn't they abuse that power. Yeah, they're already extracting more value from the user as much as they can. I mean, right now we're seeing open AI rollout advertising friendly products, like advertising in your book seems to be like the harbinger of the worst kinds of gentrification, and it's kind of the model that underlies much of the internet right now. So actually, I want to quibble with that a little. I was the co-editor for many years, and I'm still the co-owner of a website called Boing Boing, which is one of the first big advertising supported blogs.

18:12And our advertisers only made us invade our users' privacy to the extent that our users' privacy was invadable. And so when pop-up blockers became normal, advertisers stopped asking for pop-ups. When ad blockers became normal, advertisers became less interested in invading people's privacy. And I think that if we banned surveillance advertising and just went back to contextual advertising, that advertisers would say, oh, well, we're not going to advertise anymore. But when the time comes, of course, they're going to advertise. There's no way companies are not going to pay advertising firms to tell other people about their products.

18:49It's a completely ridiculous thing to claim. And so, you know, back to the thesis of the book, the policy environment creates inshittification, right? The inshittificatory environment creates the regime in which bad impulses, bad people, bad ideas thrive. And so we have to make a hostile environment for inshittification. We are long past the day where we should be updating our privacy law. At the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we had this campaign called Privacy First, where it's like, if you're angry because Grampy's a QAnon, you think Facebook brainwashed him, or you think the reason your teenager is anorexic is because Insta brainwashed her, or you think the reason the millennials in your life are quoting Osama bin Laden is because TikTok brainwashed them, or if you're angry about cops using reverse warrants to round up protesters at anti-ice demonstrations or the January 6th riots, or if you're angry about kids being followed into abortion clinics by their phones, or if you're angry about someone making deep fake porn of you, if you're angry about people being racially discriminated against when they get a loan or get a job or get a mortgage, what you're really angry about is privacy, right?

19:56This is all surveillance. And the coalition for this is so big, and it crosses so many political lines, that if we could just make it illegal to spy on people, we could solve so many problems. Like that would break the whole model that's going on right now. Yeah. Well, Corey, thank you so much for coming on. It was a pleasure to talk to you. The pleasure is very mutual. Thank you for having me on.

20:24Cory Doctorow is a writer and former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation he spoke with staff writer Kyle Janka Kyle's column Infinite Scroll publishes weekly at newyorker.com and you can subscribe to the New Yorker there as well newyorker.com I'm David Remnick, hope you enjoy the show next week, Jon Stewart joins us in a conversation from the New Yorker Festival don't miss it The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Sommer, with guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Guan, and Alejandra Deckett.

21:20The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherena Endowment Fund.