Autoenshittification, YouTube, and Disenshittify or Die
Cory Doctorow (July 2023, Hacker News):
Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket.
[…]
The car manufacturers got so desperate for chips that they started buying up washing machines for the microchips in them, extracting the chips and discarding the washing machines like some absurdo-dystopian cyberpunk walnut-shelling machine[…]
[…]
These digital systems are a huge problem for the car companies. They are the underlying cause of a precipitous decline in car quality. From touch-based digital door-locks to networked sensors and cameras, every digital system in your car is a source of endless repair nightmares, costly recalls and cybersecurity vulnerabilities[…]
Cory Doctorow (September 2023):
It doesn’t have to be this way. Enshittification occurs when companies gobble each other up in an orgy of mergers and acquisitions, reducing the internet to “five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four” (credit to Tom Eastman!), which lets them endlessly tweak their back-ends to continue to shift value from users and business-customers to themselves. The government gets in on the act by banning tweaking by users - reverse-engineering, scraping, bots and other user-side self-help measures - leaving users helpless before the march of enshittification. We don’t have to accept this! Disenshittifying the internet will require antitrust, limits on corporate tweaking - through privacy laws and other protections - and aggressive self-help measures from alternative app stores to ad blockers and beyond!
Cory Doctorow (November 2023, Hacker News):
For example, when Google contemplates raising the price of a Youtube subscription, the dissent might say, “Well, this will reduce viewership and might shift viewers to rivals like Tiktok” (competition). But the price-hiking side can counter, “No, because we have a giant archive, we control 90% of searches, we are embedded in the workflow of vloggers and other creators who automatically stream and archive to Youtube, and Youtube comes pre-installed on every Android device.” Even if the company leaks a few viewers to Tiktok, it will still make more money in aggregate. Prices go up.
When Google contemplates increasing the number of ads shown to nonsubscribers, the dissent might say, “This will incentivize more users to install ad-blockers, and then we’ll see no ad-revenue from them.” The pro-ad side can counter, “No, because most Youtube viewing is in-app, and reverse-engineering the Youtube app to add an ad-blocker is a felony under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. As to non-app viewers: we control the majority of browser installations and have Chrome progressively less hospitable to ad-blocking.”
When Google contemplates adding anti-adblock to its web viewers, the dissent might say, “Processing users’ data in order to ad-block them will violate Europe’s GDPR.” The anti-adblock side can counter, “But we maintain the fiction that our EU corporate headquarters is in the corporate crime-haven of Ireland, where the privacy regulator systematically underenforces the GDPR. We can expect a very long tenure of anti-adblock before we are investigated, and we might win the investigation. Even if we are punished, the expected fine is less than the additional ad-revenue we stand to make.”
When Google contemplates stealing performers’ wages through opaque reshufflings of its revenue-sharing system, the dissent might say, “Our best performers have options, they can go to Twitch or Tiktok.” To which the pro-wage-theft side can counter, “But they have no way of taking their viewers with them. There’s no way for them to offer their viewers on Youtube a tool that alerts them whenever they post a new video to a rival platform. Their archives are on Youtube, and if they move them to another platform, there’s no way to redirect users searching for those videos to their new homes. What’s more, any attempt to unilaterally extract their users’ contact info, or redirect searchers or create a multiplatform client, violates some mix of our terms of service, our rights under DMCA 1201, etc.”
Cory Doctorow (August 2024, transcript):
The enshittification of the internet wasn’t inevitable. The old, good internet gave way to the enshitternet because we let our bosses enshittify it. We took away the constraints of competition, regulation, interop and tech worker power, and so when our bosses yanked on the big enshittification lever in the c-suite, it started to budge further and further, toward total enshittification. A new, good internet is possible - and necessary - and it needs you.
Previously:
- Musi for YouTube Removed From the App Store
- Juno for YouTube Removed From the App Store
- Automattic vs. WP Engine
- Chrome’s Manifest V3 and uBlock Origin
- GM Stops Sharing Driver Data With Brokers
- Mozilla Report on Auto Privacy
- Avoiding Enshittification
- The Enshittification of All Things
- Global Chip Shortage
Update (2024-10-22): Cory Doctorow (via Hacker News):
In 2020, 75% of Massachusetts voters voted in favor of an automotive right-to-repair ballot initiative, which would force auto manufacturers to share access to diagnostic information with car owners and independent mechanics, so any mechanic could fix your car. You wouldn’t be locked into taking it to the manufacturer.
The people of Massachusetts were pretty adamant: They wanted to choose their own mechanics. They had voted even more forcefully for a very similar right-to-repair initiative in 2012.
The problem is that right to repair only came into effect in August. The carmakers had so much ready cash (much of it accumulated by gouging drivers on maintenance) that they were able to pay an army of lawyers to challenge the law in court. In the decade since Massachusetts voters affirmed their overwhelming support for automotive right to repair, the actual state of it in Massachusetts went into freefall, with an ever-growing proportion of the cars on the road becoming inaccessible to independent mechanics. And it’s still on shaky ground, not fully enforced, and carmakers are deactivating some of the features in cars so they don’t have to share the specifics of how to repair them.
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Governments can — and should — have rules about interoperability in their procurement policies. They should require companies hoping to receive public money to supply the schematics, error codes, keys and other technical matter needed to maintain and improve the things they sell and provide to our public institutions.
Update (2024-11-19): See also: Hacker News.
7 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
"A new, good internet is possible - and necessary - and it needs you."
Kinda feeling the same about a good computing platform. GnuStep?
I don't think a "new good internet" can happen until a large number of people are all willing to leave behind all of the perceived benefits of the current internet. That means no YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, Netflix, Disney+, Amazon, Google, and so on. It also means not using the various services that most of the internet runs on, like AWS, Azure, Google's backend, and so on.
It doesn't need to be everyone. Remember that the good old internet for the longest time was just tech enthusiasts and nerds, and didn't become popular in the mainstream (i.e. an internet-wide eternal September) until iPhone and Android came out and gave to the world an actual usable pocket-sized computer. But those who do choose to work on it and make it good will have to give up what's there now.
I'm already halfway there, because the current internet is so shitty now that I don't want anything to do with it. My quality of life improves the more I disengage from it. Hopefully more and more people will do the same and something new and better can spring up in its place. And hopefully that happens before we delve even more into a cyberpunk dystopia and the "new good internet" becomes illegal.
@Old Unix Geek
Totally agree. There's no good modern OS any longer, not since Apple ruined OS X. I really hope something good can emerge at some point, but I don't see anything on the horizon other than linux, and in spite of its improvements in the last decade, I'm still skeptical that it could someday hit the level of usability and consistency that OS X had circa 2010.
A while ago — likely a decade or longer — Arnold Kling said something along the lines of "What we pro-decentralization technolibertarians didn't foresee were the returns to scale for running large numbers of computers". This explains the AWS/Google/Meta/Azure/etc.
So when I see stuff from Doctorow like
The old, good internet gave way to the enshitternet because we let our bosses enshittify it. We took away the constraints of competition, regulation, interop and tech worker power, and so when our bosses yanked on the big enshittification lever in the c-suite, it started to budge further and further, toward total enshittification.
I can only conclude he's largely misdiagnosing the problem (and therefore likely to suggest all sorts of solutions that won't fix the problem and/or make other problems worse).
@Bri I'm down with that. Especially as my cat's experiencing a notable decline in health and I'm realising how much of "the Internet" is just dark noise. Yes, we can do so much better.
And it's a fucked up state of affairs when sending out email is a choice between funnelling it through Amazon SES or running a VPS on one of the trusted (i.e. big and well-known) providers so I can proxy SMTP traffic through it. There's no reason for such stupid policies ever, but the centralised Inshitternet makes this sort of thing all but inevitable and a future where you could host your mail server anywhere with an Internet connection, be it your home or a co-hosted facility with a VPS offering, is something we should absolutely be able to count on in this better world. Accepting the edicts of the great and the good has always been a choice, and much as I enjoy using Cloudflare and AWS, I'd prefer not to have to.
People always say that about running your own email server… I run mine and have no delivery problems. I think you just need to not use an IP from a shit provider.
@bob Good for you! That was an option for me about 3 years ago when I was with an ISP that kept their IP space off the PBL, but it's not any more. I am well aware that it works out fine for some, but I insist that it isn't bad admins making poor choices; sometimes you're SOL and the absolute best you can do is run a cronjob that tests the DNSBLs every hour so you can quickly delist yourself when the year's up for your whitelist entry. It's outrageous and wrong.
