It's not your job to fix the internet

25:03it. Um, it's why we have all these VNMOs, right. You know, these, these, uh, Ryan Reynolds phone company and whatever, right. It's because you can now really easily switch them on carriers. And so, uh, if we said as a policy matter, uh, the legacy platforms, Facebook, Twitter, maybe Tik TOK have to, um, provide you with a file that lets you, um, follow all the people that you were following on Twitter when you moved to Mastodon or blue sky or anywhere else, right because it's a standard protocol anyone could support it uh and show the messages that you post to them if they're still following you if we made that not only would that go a long way to resolving that issue make it really easy to go from one place to another but it would also be really easy to enforce and so unlike say a hate speech rule which is one of the things we've tried to do to make places like twitter more viable we have it in canada australia europe they've got various harmful content rules the uk has just got this new online harms act and so on And leaving aside all the other questions, right, about like whether it's a good idea or bad idea, if you like the idea of a hate speech rule, you still have to agree on what hate speech is.

26:10You have to evaluate every accusation of hate speech to see if it satisfies your definition. You have to do a technical investigation to see whether the platform has taken reasonable steps to avert that hate speech incident. And this is like a seven-year, fact-intensive, deep investigation that you have to do for something that happens 100 times a minute on these platforms. Meanwhile, if you just say, like, you can leave. You can leave. It's really easy. If you go, you still follow all the people that you were following. They all follow you. It's like the work of a few seconds. You know, you resolve a seeming paradox, right?

26:45The paradox I alluded to at the start here, this reveal preference paradox, which is like, why would a member of a disfavored minority who faces endless harassment and hate speech on Twitter stay on Twitter? Well, it's because the only thing worse than being a member of that disfavored minority and being showered in abuse is being a member of a disfavored minority showered in abuse and being isolated from your community. Right. So let them go. Let people go somewhere else. Let's not rely on Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk being better at being the unelected absolute dictator of people's social media lives.

27:17Let's just abolish that job. Yeah. I mean, I think the only thing that comes to mind for me there is that that way you're thinking about it sort of assumes there is good stuff on the other end, if only it were easy for us to get there. Sure. And this is where I come back to, like, why isn't anybody building the better products? Oh, because people can't leave. right i i do wonder that is like back to chicken and egg problems right it's like i think that the hardest part of uh like i i am you know we could spend forever talking about how terrific i think the fetterverse is and i'm gonna try very hard not to do that while we're sitting here but uh i think that the thing that is so frustrating to me about the fetterverse is that is that there no one has yet quite built the thing and and everything i hear from people is like well nobody's gonna build the thing because there's no business in building the thing because how on earth are you going to?

28:04Yeah. You just can't do it. There's no business in competing with these because it is a mix of illegal and impossible. Yeah. And if we so and I guess your argument would be that's why we have to start with the policies and that you're but that requires confidence on your side that if we even if we just sort of removed the gate that suddenly there is this like huge latent supply of great stuff that would immediately come to exist and solve the problem. So, I mean, look, I don't know that the platforms management always knows what's best for their own firms, but they sure act like if you made it possible to go, you would leave.

28:40Right. Think of agree. You know, this is an argument that comes up a lot with right to repair. You know, there's the there's the kind of no true Scotsman version of the Apple fanboy, which is just like no one who owns an iPhone wants to use a third party app store or take their phone anywhere but an Apple store to get it fixed. It's like, wow, if that were true, it would seem like Apple wouldn't need to spend tens of millions of dollars making sure. You've done a lot of work you didn't need to do in that case. Yeah. And so like maybe they're I mean, sure, they might be making some foolish choices there and misallocating their capital.

29:10But I don't think it's the case. I think that we should take them at their word. I think that they do understand that people would want to go. You know, the Berlin Wall was said by the commissars of the German Democratic Republic, was said to be there to keep people out of the Soviet socialist utopia and not to keep people in. And yet they sure act like the reason the wall was there is to keep people in. I also think that there's like a growing geopolitical case outside of the US to get off American platforms. Uh, and you know, you have this effort now in Europe called Eurostack, tons of capital going into cloning, uh, American services because Donald Trump has made it really clear that America doesn't have trading partners.

29:55It doesn't have allies. It has rivals and those rivals, uh, will be, uh, neutralized with American tech companies. So when the international criminal courts, chief prosecutor swore to Warren against Bibi Netanyahu for genocide, Trump denounced it. And then Microsoft terminated his Outlook account. And the chief prosecutor of the ICC lost all of his email archives, his address book, his calendar, and access to all the working files of the International Criminal Court. And I think a lot of policymakers in Europe were like, oh, wait, we need to do something about this. And then I think it was the German regulators asked Microsoft, hey, just to be clear, if an American spy agency asks you for access to a European data repository on a server stored in Europe, you're not going to give it to them, right?

30:41And they were like, oh, no, we'll probably give it to them. And we won't tell you. And we may not ask for a warrant. And so there's just like a very strong case for getting the hell off of these platforms. platforms and uh i think as they build these um duplicate platforms they're going to run up against a wall which is that there's no way for people to get their data out right like no one's going to copy and paste a million documents out of a ministry into uh you know from outlook or gdocs into like a euro stack equivalent you need to be able to like run virtual phones in a cloud and autopilot an app and you need to be able to like jailbreak things and do on-device bridging and and scrape and like all this other stuff.

31:20That's the only way we're going to get data out of it. It's a very honorable tradition. People have been doing this with online services, like since the IBM 360. It's, it's a totally reasonable thing to say that people who have their data on one platform should be able to take it to another platform without the first platform's permission or cooperation. It's nice if they do that, but they don't, you shouldn't have to rely on it. And, and I, I liken it to like the EU, uh, observing a housing crisis in East Germany and then building a lot of great housing in West Germany. And then being like, well, why is no one moving into this great housing, right?

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36:50All right, we're back. Let's just dive right back in with Corey Doctro. Here goes. I've become sort of fascinated by the local first software movement and apps like this app Obsidian where it's like the thesis behind these things is what I have is a folder full of text files. And what you provide is a way to manipulate that folder full of text files, but there's still a bunch of text files on my computer. And that is such a complete 180 degree inversion of how we think about most software now. That is like, what actually happens is I am logging into something that is at a data center very far away.

37:23And I think like we're talking, you know, not that long after this huge AWS failure. And one of the things that fascinates me about those is everybody then has this moment of like, oh my God, none of my stuff is mine. All of my stuff is somewhere else. And you have this visceral moment of like, I get on my computer and I don't have anything that I think is like those moments are very eye-opening to people. But is there a way we can start to solve this stuff in product by just being like – like Tim Berners-Lee, I know, talks about this with the solid protocol stuff. And I think that is like an interesting idea that I haven't seen anyone other than Tim Berners-Lee talk about.

37:56But this idea that like we have to start from a new premise of whose data is whose and where. and if we can build different software on top of it, maybe that starts to solve some of this problem too. I just think you end up with this problem of how you get the data out, right? And how you manage the awkward transition. Because if we're going to go back to friction, that's the source of friction. There's a little bit of friction in learning to use a different app, right? Being like, oh, you know, Adobe, one of the stories I tell in the book is like Adobe decided it didn't want to keep paying the license fee for Pantone and decided to shove it off onto Adobe customers.

38:31So you're going to have to suddenly pay 21 bucks a month for the rest of your life to see the Pantone colors in your own files. Including all of your old files. Your old files, they would go black. What was it, black pixels? Yeah, they would go black if you didn't pay 21 bucks a month. And, you know, you go like, OK, I'm going to download all my files and I'm going to learn to use the GIMP, right? But like that's a little bit of friction, right? Learning some new key combinations and stuff. The real friction is like getting all the data out, reworking all your workflows, collaborating with other people.

39:02You know, like you think about like GDocs, the value of GDocs isn't editing in a browser. It's editing with other people on a browser. Yes. You know, so how do you how do you move all that stuff over? How do you maintain the permissions? You know, all of that stuff is the source of friction. We need to we need to address that part. I'm all for like holding things locally. Actually, you're reminding me, we gave a presentation 20 years ago at the O 'Reilly OS 10 con about now that the Mac is a Unix machine, here's a really easy way to build an IMAP server on your own computer. Oh, interesting. And you can pop your mail into like an inbox file and then you can use any mail client you want with IMAP pointed at your hard drive.

39:49and so you can like use mail.app for reading and composing you use thunderbird for searching you can use pine for something else right like it's the apps are really small and the repos there and depending on how you like configured it you wouldn't necessarily have to make multiple copies of your mail and you know it's it's very cool and you could even imagine having like two imaps right one on the one in the cloud one on your computer those two are kept in sync and then you've got five pop clients on your computer if you want to use them use them for different reasons right? Like all of that's like fine.

40:20You know, maybe that, maybe there are people listening to this are going, well, that's insane. But, uh, if you're like me and you live in email and I absolutely live in email, um, then, uh, you have a lot of archives, you have a lot of workflow recorded and like, you know, as you say, like a folder full of text files in your hard drive is a very powerful repo that lots of different programs can act on. And one of the nice things about a folder full of text files on your hard drive is that we have some very standard utilities like our sync that will keep them connected to something else that you can do encrypted syncs with.

40:52And that allows you to have like a hybrid world where you can access your files remotely and or even do things like, you know, leave your laptop at home, take a burner when you go across a border and configure the IMAP server. So this is a thing that Google used to do when Googlers probably still do. When Googlers had to go to China, they would give you a burner and it would only access like the last three days of your IMAP and not like the whole spool. And you just like your IT department wouldn't let you look at that file. So if Chinese authorities made you unlock your laptop at the border, you just handed it to them.

41:26I have a friend who used to go to China for Google quite a lot. And he says that when he got back, the Chromebook would just go in a shredder because they would just assume that it had been compromised in his hotel room or whatever. Wow. That's, that's wild. Well, we're going to have to talk more about that some other time. But I think as you talk about that, it just makes me think, again, we're in this place of how much is the onus on me to sort of think differently about what I'm doing versus should all of this stuff just work better? And I think you're of the mind of all of this stuff should work better.

41:58I think it's easier for you to think differently if everything works better. Yeah, sure. It's very hard to imagine the thing that doesn't exist and that isn't in the world. I've been going back and back and back to Larry Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, which is just still such an important work, talks about these four forces that regulate our world. There's code, law, norms, and markets, right? So code, things that are technologically possible can happen, right? It sounds very tautological, but you can pass a law requiring the repeal of gravity, but if no one's built an anti-gravity engine, it doesn't matter what the law says.

42:36So you can't really ban or mandate the use of a technology that doesn't exist. Or you can ban it, but it doesn't matter. Banning time machines doesn't matter. And when things are profitable, it's easier to get them legalized. And once they're legalized, if they are profitable, it's harder to ban them. Uh, and once things are normative, right. Once things are like considered reasonable, it's harder to ban them and it's easier to legalize them and it's easier to sell them. So you, you have these things kind of going around and around and cyclically reinforcing themselves. Yeah. By all means, like let's have a norm that says asking someone to use Facebook to book the kids a little league for, for, you know, the carpools is like asking someone to like sit in the smoking area to plan, you know, the little league thing.

43:23Sure. Normative. Yes. Fine. Right. Clip that, put it on social media. Yes. That is how everyone should treat Facebook groups about anything. Yeah. But at the same time, like, look, there's a wonderful person called Andrea Downing, who runs a nonprofit called The Light Collective. And Andrea is a breast cancer previvor. So this means that she has the gene for breast cancer. And she's part of a group on Facebook for this. And they were lured to Facebook. They were courted by Facebook in the early 2010s when Facebook actively went around to different medical communities online and said, come on Facebook.

43:54We have all these features for you that'll make things better for you. And being a breast cancer provider, previvor is a very medically consequential and socially important thing, right? So you're making a bunch of choices like, should I have my uterus, my ovaries and my breasts removed? You're also dealing with the sickness and death of your daughters, your sisters, your aunts, your grandmothers, your mothers, right? So this is, this is like a really important group to these people. And Andrea, not a security researcher by training, but she was poking around on Facebook one day and noticed that you could enumerate the full membership of every Facebook group, even if you weren't a member of it, including her group, which obviously this is a bad thing.

44:33So she tells Facebook about it. She files a bug report and they won't fix it. They said, oh, no, no, that's part of the ad tech stack. It's a feature, not a bug. So they sued Facebook. And when the FTC under Obama settled all claims outstanding against Facebook with a big fine, they settled this case. And they're still on Facebook, right and they're still on facebook because as much as they hate mark zuckerberg and the way that he runs that platform they love each other and are important to each other in a way that outstrips it and yet they are still hamstrung by this collective action problem right so you know like yeah yeah let's say like we should all get off the platform but once we make it easy to leave right like if you could go to blue sky or mastodon and see the messages in that facebook group and reply to them, people would trickle out.

45:18And if we make it easier for people to go, the people for whom things are intolerable will leave. And then maybe the company that's running the firm will, or the service rather, will get the message and make things more tolerable for the people they haven't lost. Or maybe what'll happen to them is what happened to Rupert Murdoch in MySpace, which is that we'll like double tap it and stuff it in the shallow grave it deserves to be in. Which is a pretty solid outcome in a lot of cases. It's a great outcome. Who cares? Right. It's not the Mona Lisa. We don't need to preserve it forever. It's fine.

45:50So long as the people can leave. Right. Like the demise of LiveJournal is fine. The destruction of the communities on LiveJournal is a tragedy. If we could have gotten rid of LiveJournal, which was like, and you know, it's still around as part of VContact, but which is like, which was like under management that manifestly was not suited to continue running LiveJournal. if we could have got rid of that and gotten rid of that and kept the communities that would have been the best of all outcomes yes and i think to the extent that you have if like if you wanted to pick one single solution that solves that it's let us move the communities i i totally agree with you on that and i think i mean the the step beyond that even then is like this is where you get real fed-a-versy where it's like actually it shouldn't the the community should just be the size of the internet and we should not like, I shouldn't even have to know what platform you're on.

46:40Yeah. But that I think is like, that's yet another sort of product bridge that we're going to have to figure out. I don't care which email client you use, right? Like we, I don't care what browser you use. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I don't care what phone carrier you use. Exactly. We have solved this problem before. Yeah. Okay. So I'm curious, I want to talk a little bit on the sort of flip side, which is like from the product makers side. And I think you bring up a couple examples in the book of companies doing things that are somewhere between delightful and disliked by major platforms and illegal, but they're doing it anyway.

47:15Tell me about this company, Para, that's doing really fascinating stuff on top of DoorDash that I think is a pretty good example of a lot of the possibilities of what you're talking about. Yeah. So Para, it started off as an app to help DoorDash drivers not get cheated by the platform. So the way the DoorDash platform would dispatch a job to a driver is they would expose the base pay, but not the tip. And the tip was like the majority of compensation. Like oftentimes the base pay would be like a buck 50 and the tip would be 10 bucks. And you wouldn't find out what the tip was until you clocked on the job.

47:50So it was like a blind box, right? It was like a slot machine. And if you saw the total pay for the job and then you changed your mind and you canceled the job and you did that too often, you'd get taken off the app because you were booking jobs and then canceling them. So it turns out DoorDash wasn't very good at this. And the JSON object that they transmitted to your phone just had the tip and the clear text. So they were just like hiding it with CSS on the page, basically? Yeah, exactly. Cool. So yeah. So, so para was just an app that extracted that value and showed you an overlay that was like, this is an$11 job.

48:27This is a$1 job. And, you know, from, from DoorDash's perspective, you can think about it this way. Like if you as a customer can lowball the tip and still get a delivery, then you will be more likely to be a DoorDash customer. Right. Right. And if no drivers clock on because the tip is too small and DoorDash doesn't want to lose you as a customer, they have to take some of the junk fees they've taken off of the customer and give it to a driver. So if they can just blind that transaction until after it's been locked in, then they can just take more value from drivers for themselves. Which is like pure stage three in shitification.

49:05Absolutely. That is exactly what that is. Yeah, 100%. Okay. So they rolled this out. DoorDash accused them of stealing drivers' social security numbers, which is amazing because if your DoorDash app is storing your social security number, that's bad. Yeah. If I can get it from DoorDash, we have a real big problem. Yeah. And empirically, it wasn't happening. And because we could see what the app was doing. And then they threw 40 full-time engineers at it. And they eventually, like, basically crushed it. But partly the reason they crushed it, I think, is that Para couldn't raise the capital to hire 80 engineers because there were all these legal threats hanging over it, too, where it was quite a capital risk.

49:50So DoorDash these days, what they want to do is pry open multiple offers from all the gig platforms on your phone and then let you figure out which one you're willing to take based on the one with the highest compensation. And one of the things, if you've never done work on a gig platform that people don't always appreciate is that you get an offer and you only have a few seconds to decide whether to take it. And you know how like if you go to the grocery store, they put unit pricing on the shelf. So, you know, the raisins are like four bucks, but they're three cents a gram or whatever, three cents an ounce.

50:26You don't get that breakdown. So you don't see what your mileage and your minutes are being paid. You just see a total. You have to try and do that math in your head. And you can imagine like if you're a dasher and an Uber driver and a Lyft driver, and you're also doing like three other kinds of delivery work on your phone, it might be really hard to do the sums in your head. And so one of the things that para can do is just normalize those values and show you like a true unit cost for this. Right. Which like, again, like it's very weird that we would try and make it illegal for a worker to know the unit costs of their labor offer.

51:05Right. This whole argument for piecework, which allows the firms bidding out the piecework to avoid insurance and overtime and whatever, is that the seller of the labor can make their own choice, that it's paternalistic to make the choice for them. Okay, but I don't think it's paternalistic to say doing a whole bunch of algebra in your head in real time while driving a car is a thing that most of us can't do. And maybe we should have a computer do that for you. You know? Computers are pretty good at that. So the reason I bring this up is because my sense throughout the book is this is the sort of thing you'd like to see a million of across every possible platform.

51:47Like you talk a lot about jailbreaking and the concept of adversarial interoperability. And it's like until we get these big policy swings, like what we need is to just poke and prod at every available piece. Well, and to get the policy swings. Well, right. I guess we need the one to make that legal again. And then, but then the way to pry this open is not to like build another Amazon. It's to just tear Amazon into a thousand pieces with a thousand different kinds of apps. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, why wouldn't you know what Jeff Bezos said when he started the business? Your margin is my opportunity.

52:24Right. Right. So just raid their margins. And I think this is like back to geopolitics. Right. So Canada's response to the tariffs, like a lot of countries, has been retaliatory tariffs, which is another way of saying things in Canada now cost more because we import a lot of finished goods from America. Also, we have to drink shitty rye instead of delicious bourbon. It is a lot of cell phones in the name of geopolitics. Yeah, it's a very weird way to punish America. This is like punching yourself in the face really hard and hoping the downstairs neighbor says ouch. Meanwhile, we could consume the accumulated monopoly rents of these tech platforms that have been extracted from Canadians and other people in the world.

53:03And not only realize a consumer surplus for these goods are cheaper, but we could create export markets for disensitifying software, right? And that's stuff that everyone in the world would want. And if Canada doesn't do it, someone else will. So there's this kind of interesting equilibrium where if anyone defects, that defector, the first defector, reaps a huge benefit. and all the subsequent defectors reap a much smaller benefit, right? Like, so consuming the accumulated monopoly rents of American tech platforms as fuel for a single-use rocket to boost Canada's tech sector, which used to be very big.

53:38We used to have a company that made all the world's smartphones called Research in Motion, right? To boost that into a stable orbit on a better cash basis, right? Because selling app stores for iPhones that loot the$100 billion per year transaction fee business that Apple takes out of the iPhone without incurring the hardware costs that Apple is bearing. That is a very good opportunity. That margin could be our opportunity. And if we don't take it, someone else will. And if that's not enough, if you remember when those Russian soldiers looted those Ukrainian tractors and they were all low jacked by John Deere and they showed up in Chechnya and then the John Deere dealership in Kiev bricked the tractors And everyone was like, ha ha, dumb looters, you get your comeuppance from John Deere.

54:25Well, it does mean that Donald Trump could order any country's tractors immobilized. Right. So there's like a geopolitics case for this. This is what we were told that Huawei was going to do to our critical infrastructure. And it's what American tech companies have done to the world's critical infrastructure. And I say that first because it's scary and bad in an era of Trumpism. But second, because like as Putin showed us after invading Ukraine and accelerating the European transition to solar by 15 years in five, when the devil's at the door, a lot of the things that used to seem like burdens you could never hurdle or barriers you could never hurdle are suddenly things that you can just jump over with ease.

55:11They're just not that big a deal. You know, the U.S. trade representative says, well, unless you have these IP laws, we're going to hit you with tariffs and then they hit you with tariffs. Right. Well, like someone threatens to burn your house down unless you do as they say, and then you do it and then they burn your house down. You're kind of a sucker if you keep doing what they say. Right. So I'm quite excited by this moment, like not about Trump broadly, but about this specific thing that this thing I've worked on for a quarter of a century and more than half my adult life is actually closer to being realized.

55:39I think like having has better a more fertile soil to grow than at any time. And as Americans, we're going to be able to import those tools because, you know, if you've got a payment method and an Internet connection, you can download jailbreaking tools. you know it's easier than getting cheap insulin from canada getting good software from canada you know yeah that was one of the things you said in the book that i thought was really interesting is that that actually this is a we're going to have a global solution to an american problem because there is no incentive to play nice in in geopolitics right now yeah um last thing real quick and then i know you have to go yeah i'm i couldn't tell throughout the whole book whether you think that under sort of the current conditions in shitification is essentially inevitable that if I build a thing that is successful enough that it is inevitably going to go this way because, you know, money and power corrupt the same way that they always do.

56:30So I'm, I'm curious, like what you would tell startup founders and people who are like new at this and are saying, I don't, I don't want to, I want to do a good job and not build a horrible and shitified platform. Is there, is there a way out other than you just like holding their heads in both hands and being like, don't be an asshole. No, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta hack your future self. So the Ulysses pact is named after one of the most important hackers, Ulysses, who, uh, you know, was, was in this situation where he was going to sail onto the sea of the sirens. And if you heard the siren song, you would jump it in the water and drown.

57:07And so the accepted protocol was to fill your ears with wax, but he wanted to hear what the sound sounded like. Cause it was probably amazing. So he anticipated his future weakness and he had his sailors tie him to the mast so that he could hear the song but not jump in. So a Ulysses pact is anytime you take a course of action off the table and a moment of strength because you anticipate your future moment of weakness. So being strong is not being infallible. It's in fact recognizing your own fallibility. And so if you think about the forces that led to inshittification, right, monopolization, regulatory capture, a weak workforce, the ability to modify products after their sale and make them worse.

57:46What you need to do is create the circumstances where neither the devil on your left shoulder whispering things in your ear, nor the VC threatening to pull the plug on you can force you to do something that today seems like a bad idea. So unionize your workforce so that they can tell you to fuck off if you tell them to incentivize things and make it stick. Make all your software irrevocably open source. create APIs and make sure that at least, you know, 51 % of your users are API users off platforms. So if you shut the API down in the future, you go out of business instantaneously, right? Like all this stuff may sound like a big lift.

58:21It is a big lift, right? But you, you do this stuff and not even you can pressure yourself into incentivizing your product without immediately going out of business. And so that's how you do it. Ulysses taught us how to do it. now we know. I like it. All right, Corey. All right. Thank you so much for doing this. This is really fun. Thanks, David. All right. Thank you again to Corey for being here with us. That was super fun. I learned a ton from that conversation and I kind of have come to think differently about how I exist on the internet. I've been noodling on that interview for a couple of weeks now and I think the way that I approach these services is already starting to change.

58:56If you want to talk about in-shittification, if you have thoughts, if you have feelings, get at me. I want to hear all about it. First cast of the first.com call the hotline and speaking of, We're going to take a break and we're going to do a hotline question. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Rippling. Is your business paying for 20 tools to do the job of one? That doesn't exactly sound like it's software as a service. It actually sounds like it's sad. Software as a disservice. It's time to replace your stitched together tech stack with one platform for all of your departments with Rippling.

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1:03:11All right. We're back. VergeCast hotline time. The number, as always, 866-VERGE11. one. The email, vergecastattheverge.com. I'm davidpierce.11 on Signal. Get at us. I want to hear all of your questions, all of your thoughts, all the other feelings-y tech books that you think I should read. I want to hear about it. And we got a question about an episode we recorded a couple of weeks ago that I think is like perfectly on brand for this conversation that we're having right now. So let me just play it right here. Hey, this is Matt from Springfield, Missouri. I was listening to the episode where we're discussing how Amazon has been a lawsuit with perplexity.

1:03:45And I actually sell old manuals for machinery on my own personal website, Amazon and eBay. And actually, if I'm seeing an increase in sales from referral links from these AI agents on my personal website, actually, I would prefer these AI agents, people to shop that way, because then I wouldn't have to spend more time and resources to be diversified on different markets, and I could just keep it on my website. I also sell my products cheaper on my website because I don't have to pay for the Amazon and eBay fees. Anyway, that's my two cents. Thanks for the show. I was really struck by this question because I think that we have come to see Amazon in particular as like the platform on which you sell stuff, right?

1:04:31And there is this sense that if you can't compete on Amazon, you can't win. Amazon in so many ways has set it up to be that way, right? There's an antitrust case against Amazon because of the practices that it used to monitor prices around the internet and actually penalize sellers for having lower prices elsewhere than they had on Amazon. This is the kind of thing that Amazon has done to preserve itself as the only place that people can reasonably go to shop. The other thing is that it's really hard to make a good shopping experience somewhere else, right? I think Shopify has done a really interesting job of just sort of taking pieces of the puzzle and making it simpler.

1:05:08So now like I can have a website, but Shopify handles all of the actual logistics of selling. That's really interesting, right? Like I think if we can sort of pull the catalog apart, but make all of the logistics centralized, there's something really interesting there. But this is a total inversion of that. That is like, okay, what if instead of having a central platform where all this stuff was, we had a central shopper that could go all of the places. And instead, as a seller, I can have my website and trust that there will be agents and there will be these autonomous bots that come around and find things on my website to buy.

1:05:47Maybe that's a better outcome here. It's at least a very different outcome than this incredible centralization that we've had. And this is something that I hear from the AI people who are web defenders. And to be totally honest, I'm very skeptical of those people. I think it's very hard to think the open web is a good idea and that everything should be intermediated by AI. But there is something to this idea that actually what we need is a new way of finding stuff on the web that is not just about finding stuff, right? Because it's one thing to say, okay, we're going to show you the coolest coat you've ever seen, but you have to set up an account.

1:06:24You have to enter your credit card details. You have to enter into a relationship with a new company that's going to send you emails all the time. You have to wait weeks because they're not as sophisticated a shipping operation as Amazon or Walmart. So there are a lot of reasons that just purely logistically and in a convenience sense, it makes sense for everything to have been totally centralized. But if you match this idea of now I have an AI agent that is capable of finding these sort of product needles in haystacks for me with now there are these tools like Shopify that are starting to centralize some of the boring grunt work logistics of it all.

1:07:02in such a way that it is easy for me to track my packages. It is easy for me to know my credit card is secure. It is easy for me to get things quickly, but I don't have to just do it through the one player. All that is super interesting, right? And this is like classic bundling and unbundling. Amazon was a complete bundling phase of the internet where it said, we're going to take every single piece of the puzzle and we're going to do it all in one place. And what happens when you get a big bundle is people start to just pull parts of that out, right? There's no way that one company can do every single thing the best.

1:07:32And so you take a company like Shopify, not to keep bringing up Shopify, that is like, well, we're going to take a part of this and do it better or differently or more accessibly to more people. Or you get companies like Walmart who are like, we're going to compete on having this sort of premium bundle that gets you lots of other stuff. There are just a lot of things about Amazon that we're starting to see people pull apart and make better products individually out of. The question then is, what is the thing that knits all of those things together if it's not just another huge Amazon-style platform.

1:08:06Maybe it could be AI. I'm skeptical of AI agents in every single way, including their ability to find good, interesting products and not just the same products that they would find on Amazon or the products that they have made corporate deals with. But in a world in which there is a truly neutral, truly useful agent that knows what I like, knows the full catalog of the internet, and can handle the logistics because there are ways to handle the logistics, that becomes a really fascinating shopping system. And so I think the idea that there are people out there who are saying, I have been selling things and I'm starting to see an uptick on my website, not just on the other platforms that I am forced to play with because of AI agents, that's a huge win.

1:08:50There are lots of complicated downstream effects, but that thing by itself, I take as a victory. And that's really interesting. And I think in the sort of in-shittification universe, the thing after in-shittification is unbundling, right? And I think in a certain tiny, small way, this is what that looks like. Anyway, Matt, thank you for calling in. This one sort of broke my brain open in a really fun way, and I appreciate you calling in. Anyway, that's it for the Vergecast. I gotta go finish moving. I gotta stop talking because this cold is just gonna destroy me. So we're gonna get out of here.

1:09:23As always, if you have thoughts, feelings, questions, other books I should read, feelings about AI agents, tell us everything. 866-VERGE-11 is the hotline. vergecastsattheverge.com is the email. We want to hear everything from you. Absolutely, all of the time. The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will be back on Friday with, I don't even know what, a bunch of fun stuff. We're also shooting version history all of this week. I'm going to be in New York, so I'll be in the studio with Neel Eye for Friday's show.

1:09:53we have a ton of fun stuff coming up for you. This like holiday season of podcasts from The Urge is going to be great. I'm looking forward to it. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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