Episode 255 – Enshittification: A Monopoly Story with Cory Doctorow

Macro N Cheese – Episode 255
Enshittification: A Monopoly Story with Cory Doctorow
December 16, 2023

 

[00:00:00] Cory Doctorow [Intro/Music]: The way that we’re going to win these important justice struggles is with a powerful, free, fair, and open communications infrastructure for organizing on. And if that doesn’t take us to victory, then not having it will certainly take us to failure.

Intermediaries themselves aren’t necessarily bad, but when an intermediary is freed from any disciplining force, the temptation as an intermediary, to abuse both the business users and the end users and to make everything worse for everyone, that temptation appears to be irresistible.

[00:01:35] Geoff Ginter [Intro/Music]: Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse all together. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:43] Steven Grumbine: Alright. This is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today’s guest been a guest several times before and each time better than the last. This time we’re going to talk about his new fiction book and some of his new nonfiction work, including some synthesis about monopolies and the power of major corporations over society as a whole.

I would like to introduce my guest, Cory Doctorow, who is an activist and a prolific author. He has written tons of phenomenal novels, novellas, blog posts.

Without further ado, I’ll bring on my guest, Cory Doctorow. Welcome to the show, sir.

[00:02:25] Cory Doctorow: Thank you very much. It’s a treat to be back on.

[00:02:27] Grumbine: Thank you. You are a busy man. It’s unbelievable, when you do a search in your name, it is just amazing how much information, how many media appearances, how many books. You are a very busy person, so thank you for this time.

[00:02:44] Doctorow: Well it’s my pleasure. I write to avoid anxiety and to avoid thinking about my anxiety, so I came out of lockdown with nine books. So, I’m spending a lot of time on the road, a lot of time on media talking about it, but it’s going good. Both the books we’re going to talk about today are national bestsellers, they’re on the USA Today list.

[00:03:05] Grumbine: And I have both of them too, so I’m super excited. The subject of our conversation is not going to specifically be focused on the fiction work, but it’s really great.

Cory Doctorow, a novel of truth and reconciliation in our polarized future, The Lost Cause. And it’s got some great critical acclaim, Bill McKibben, Kim Stanley Robinson, The Financial Times, Steve Silberman, Washington Post. You’ve got a ton of great feedback. Tell us about this book.

[00:03:41] Doctorow: And just recently after the book went to press, I had some really nice things said about it by Naomi Wolf and Rebecca Solnit. Definitely it’s become a fast favorite among people who I think very highly of. And it’s a novel set in the near future, 30-40 years out. And it’s set about a generation into a transition, a just green transition, that arises out of a series of extremely, historically contingent moments.

And I think that when you look back on anything big and transformative and profound that happened, there’s always someone who’s in the right place at the right time. It’s never foreordained, there’s always a lot of lucky needle threading, and that’s no different here. And so, they have now spent a whole generation with young people growing up, to put on a blue helmet and go abroad to work, or to stay at home even, and work on climate remediation.

To move whole coastal cities inland. To do the hard work of weatherizing and solarizing. To deal with huge numbers of traumatized internal refugees. To manage the public health emergencies that come up through habitat loss and the spread of zoonotic plagues, as animals move into the urban wildlife interface. And the climate emergency that we’re all worried and frightened about, and the consequences of it, are as frightening as we worry about.

But unlike today, it’s a world in which we’re actually treating it with the gravitas and urgency that it merits. And as a result, it doesn’t have that nightmare feeling of being trapped in a bus that’s headed for a cliff edge, and the driver won’t turn or hit the brakes. And all the people sitting up in first class keep saying, ‘no, there’s no cliff, there’s no cliff’ and ‘oh, if there’s a cliff, we’ll just be going fast enough that we’ll go over it.’ Or ‘maybe we’ll build some wings on the bus before it hits the rocks below.’ And ‘whatever happens, we’re definitely not going to stop the bus or swerve the bus, someone could break an ankle if we did that.’ And we finally actually stopped the bus.

And yeah, it’s scary being trapped out here in the desert with the broken down bus, but at least we’re not headed over the cliff anymore. At least we’re not denying reality. But of course, every revolution has a counter reformation. The people who lose a just struggle, they don’t dig a hole and climb inside and pull the dirt down on top of themselves.

Instead, their resentments at having lost, they fester. And in particular, if we never figure out how to reconcile with them, they continue to rise up. Wherever you look in the world, you see old grievances coming to the fore, and this is no different. There’s been a change in American politics, there’s a new president, and there’s a vicious counter reformation underway.

And the two major groups that are leading it, one is a group of sea going billionaire wreckers who took to the ocean after we finally started taxing the ultra rich, and are now circumambulating the Pacific in a fleet of old aircraft carriers and super yachts and cruise ships, trying to convince the economies in the global South to switch to Bitcoin.

And they’ve got a group of useful idiots in America. Turkeys who they’ve convinced to vote for Christmas, old white militia MAGA clubs who are rising up and seeking to roll back the clock on everything that’s happened. And the protagonist of this story is a young man who’s just about to graduate high school, and go off and be part of this global remediation movement.

And he’s watching it disappear around him. And it’s about how a struggle over something as local as, how you allocate jobs/guarantee jobs- because of course, there’s no Green New Deal without MMT, and this is an MMT novel- turns into a real shooting war. And it makes, for some, I think, pretty exciting reading.

A lot of people are really excited about it anyway.

[00:07:34] Grumbine: I am. And as I’m hearing you say this, now I have not read the book yet, it reminds me of the antithesis of Don’t Look Up. They’re sitting at the table at the end, holding hands, basically accepting the end. And because they were able to actually do something, sounds weirdly like hope.

[00:07:53] Doctorow: Yeah, and hope is so much better than optimism. Optimism is just this idea that if you hang around, things are just gonna get better, you don’t have to do anything. It’s really just pessimism in brighter clothes. Hope is the idea that humans have agency, that what we do matters, that there’s a reason to get out of bed, that our choices can make a difference.

And that even if we can’t see our way from A to Z, from here to where we want to be, if we can find any step we can take that allows us to materially improve our circumstances, to ascend the gradient towards the world we want to live in, then as we attain that new vantage point, we might discover something else that we can do. Some other path, some terrain that was obscured from that lower spot that we were standing at.

And we can ascend even further and further. That the inability to see how we get all the way to the end, doesn’t mean that there’s no path there. It just means that parts of the path are going to be obscured until we get closer to it, and there’s no reason to stop climbing. And so, this is very much a hopeful book.

There’s a little sub genre in science fiction called Hope Punk, and this book has been closely identified with that genre.

[00:09:01] Grumbine: That’s very cool. I was thinking, as you were saying that… I was going through some terrible financial problems, still am, but I stopped trying to solve the whole thing. It was too big. Impossible to deal with.

[00:09:17] Doctorow: I’m sorry to hear about the financial straits, but as you know, the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.

[00:09:24] Grumbine: That’s the key. And the other thing you just said that struck me- and I think for people that are becoming somewhat nihilistic or checking out- just because the pathway that somebody else told you to follow isn’t the way that it works, doesn’t mean that there’s not a pathway to a way that works.

And I think that’s what I’m hearing here. And I think that’s going to be an important point for people, as they watch the world materially change in ways that, probably, are going to be terrifying.

[00:10:02] Doctorow: Yeah. It’s already terrifying. This is a frightening moment. And if I don’t watch out, I’m going to end up writing another book.

[00:10:12] Grumbine: Well, I think we’ll all be waiting for that. Let’s move on. You also wrote another book. And this book is going to be the thrust of what I think we’ll be talking about today. It may not be as sexy as the end of the world or post-apocalyptic revival, but it’s very important to, I think, here and now. And it may be important enough to consider, as we try to prevent the total collapse of society.

With unmitigated power of corporations and the abuse they give, not only to the customers, but also within industry. As they use nefarious predatory practices of crushing competition, and then buying up and liquidating it, amongst other things.

And I want to talk about the word that really got me to the table. I’d heard it many times before, because I follow your work, but the idea of ‘enshittificaton.’ There’s a Wiki page with you on it. It says enshittificaton: Cory Doctorow. You coined the term

[00:11:16] Doctorow: I did.

[00:11:18] Grumbine: Amazing. Tell us what enshittificaton is.

[00:11:21] Doctorow: Well, enshittificaton is a term I coined to describe a certain pathology of platform decay. And the reason that matters is, because strangely enough, platforms have emerged as the dominant life form on the commercial internet. There was this period where all of us, including entrepreneurs, were excited about disintermediation in the internet.

That the internet was going to make it possible for people to directly transact with one another. That was what drove a lot of the enthusiasm, even the investment enthusiasm, in the early years. And while we did get rid of a lot of middlemen with our disintermediation, we just created a bunch of new ones.

The platform is nothing but a middleman. The platform is a two-sided market that allows for transaction or connection between business users and end users. Think of Uber and its drivers and its riders. Or Amazon and its marketplace sellers and its customers. Or Facebook, which has end users, and then advertisers and publishers.

And the fact that the intermediary is the dominant form of the internet, is a little weird. And what’s more, there’s nothing wrong with intermediaries, per se. There are lots of things that I don’t want to do, that I’m happy to have someone else do for me.

When I was growing up in Toronto, there was a guy, a street author named Crad Kilodney. He would write his own books. He published them himself. And he would stand on a street corner with a sign that said, ‘very famous Canadian author, buy my books.’ Sometimes he’d have a sign that said Margaret Atwood, which is quite funny. And he was a great guy and super weird and interesting, and I miss him.

He’s dead. But there are lots of people with stuff to say, who don’t have the Crad Kilodney willingness to stand on a street corner with a sign around their neck. And I want to hear what they have to say. So, intermediaries themselves aren’t necessarily bad. But when an intermediary is freed from any disciplining force, the temptation, as an intermediary to abuse both the business users and the end users, and to make everything worse for everyone… that temptation appears to be irresistible.

And in the digital world, the temptation has fully consumed the people who run these services. And what’s more, some of the unique characteristics of digital technology, allow them to abuse us in ways that are really quite extraordinary and different, from the kinds of abuse that we would have to suffer in an earlier age, with less digital, less nimble, less fluid commercial logics.

So, I’ll take you through a case study of how enshittificaton works, by talking about Facebook. They’re a bit of a poster child for enshittification. So, in stage one of enshittification, you have a company that has some surplus and allocates it to their end users, in order to bring those end users in.

So, here’s how Facebook started off. They had all of this investor capital… well, actually Facebook originally, originally started off as a service that allowed Mark Zuckerberg and his creepy pals to non-consensually rate the fuckability of their fellow Harvard undergrads. But then it got worse and they brought in a bunch of Harvard kids and then other university kids, and then they said, ‘okay, we’re going to open up to the wide world.’ And they got a bunch of investor capital from people like Peter Thiel, to go off and do that.

And they said to their potential end users, ‘hey, I know that you’re all enjoying hanging out with your friends over there on MySpace, but have you considered that MySpace is owned by an evil, crappulent, senescent Australian billionaire named Rupert Murdoch, who spies on you with every hour that God sends?… If you come to Facebook, we are never going to spy on you… we are the privacy forward alternative to existing social media. Come to Facebook, tell us who matters to you, articulate your social graph and we will fill a feed with nothing but the posts made by the people you follow, the things that they want their followers to see.’

That was their value proposition. Now, at the end of stage one, and the thing that heralds the beginning of stage two, the platform has to figure out some way to lock you in. And depending on the platform, that can be a long game, or it can be very technical.

So, Uber, their lock-in is, ‘well, we’re just going to burn $32 billion worth of Saudi Royals’ investment capital, losing 41 cents on every dollar of every ride, in order to push other market participants out. Put all the taxi companies out of business. Keep new market entrants from showing up. Convince city fathers that there’s no reason to have public transit anymore, because Uber is too cheap to meter. And then when we start raising the prices’- they have now, where they’ve doubled the price and halved the compensation to drivers- ‘there’s just nowhere else to go.’

And so they’re the only game in town. That’s one way to do lock in. With Amazon, they do lock-in by selling you Kindle and Audible books, ebooks, and audiobooks that are locked to their platform with encryption, something called digital rights management. And law in Canada and the US makes it illegal to remove that digital rights management.

And so, once you buy a book, nobody, not even the author, can give you permission to take it off of Amazon’s platform, break up with Amazon, delete all their apps, and start getting your books somewhere else. You’re going to have to throw away all your books if you break up with Amazon.

So that’s another form of lock-in. With Facebook, they don’t have to do any of that stuff. It’s actually really straightforward, because with social media, we lock ourselves in through something that economists call ‘collective action problems.’ That’s where you and all your friends are on Facebook and you all agree that it’s kind of getting ugly out there and you don’t want to stay. But you can’t agree on whether it’s time to go right now, and if so, where you should all go.

And so, that collective action problem of figuring that out, keeps you all stuck to the platform, even if none of you are having a very nice time there. Not because you like Facebook, but because you love each other more than you hate Facebook. You’ve taken each other hostage by caring about one another. It’s a very evil dynamic.

So, once people are locked into Facebook, we can start moving on to phase two. And that’s where Facebook withdraws the surplus from those end users and starts to allocate it to business customers, in order to bring them to the platform and get them locked in. They turn to the advertisers and they say, ‘Hey, do you remember when you told these rubes that we were never going to spy on them?’… well, that was obviously a lie… we’re spying on them from asshole to appetite, and for small dollars, we will let you target them in exquisite detail, and we’re going to spare no expense to have our engineers police ad fraud, so that if you give us a dollar to have an ad reach a very specific kind of person, you can be sure that that ad reaches that kind of person and that the money isn’t wasted.’

And then to the publishers, they’d say, ‘Hey, you remember when we told these rubes that we weren’t going to show them anything except the stuff they asked to see?… that was obviously also a lie… if you put excerpts from the things you’re posting to your website on Facebook, and include a link back to your own website, we’ll just non-consensually cram it into the eyeballs of people who never asked to see it, and some of them are going to click that link, and they’re just going to be like a free traffic funnel that you can monetize however you do that on your own website… off you go.’

And so, the advertisers and the publishers pile in, and here’s where the digital starts to make a difference, because digital is really flexible. Facebook can alter the payment scale and the degree to which those advertisements are reaching people, and to what extent they’re just defrauding the advertisers. They can do that from moment to moment. So, you might go to Facebook and say, ‘Hey, I want to reach 600,000 – 18 to 34 year old man-children who own an Xbox and have been recently looking up information about gonorrhea symptoms, and I want to do it within these two zip codes.

And Facebook will take your money, but then they don’t have enough of those people. And so they come up with these weird scams like, ‘oh, we found a lookalike audience that we’re gonna show these ads to, that don’t meet your criteria… we’re still gonna bill you for them.’

Or they just stop policing ad fraud. You’re getting charged for ads that just never render, or that render off screen, or that are in apps that never actually display them to the end user. This gets so bad, that in, I believe it was 2018, Proctor and Gamble killed its programmatic ad spend, its digital ad spend, where they were actually targeting people. They zeroed out that they $100 million a year spend that they were making, and they saw a $0 a year drop in sales. Because by their first approximation, probably no one was seeing those ads. So, whenever someone starts to balk at that, if an advertiser starts to pull back from the platform, Facebook can use automated tools to notice that, and they can start to give them a better deal.

They can offer them lower prices, they can police their ad display more carefully, and generally do better by them. And this is like playing a fish on a reel. You give more value to this business customer when they’re starting to pull back and then when they tire out, you take it back again. They do the same thing to the publishers.

So, publishers start to notice that, not only are they not getting recommended anymore, they’re not getting shown to the people who actually subscribe to them unless they start to put more and more of their articles on the website. Not just a greater quantity, but a greater proportion. So, rather than an excerpt, you’ve got to put the whole story up.

And the idea here, is that you’re becoming a commodity back end supplier to Facebook. Someone who’s no longer monetizing users on your own website, and is wholly dependent on Facebook for your income. And that gives Facebook all kinds of leeway to do bad things to you. And they do the same thing to the publishers, as they did to the advertisers.

If a publisher starts to balk at being asked to put such a generous tranche of their material on Facebook, Facebook just gives them 25 million views. And they’re like, ‘oh my god, I am the Louis Pasteur of social media, we’re going to do more of this.’ And eventually, all those publishers pile in and they end up locked to the platform as well.

And so, once you get the business customers locked in, then it’s time to start squeezing them as well, to withdraw the surplus from them. And that’s stage three. And so, you see just, increasing costs. You see lower quality, less monetization, lower compensation, and so on. And this is true whether you’re a TikTok or a YouTube performer, or a driver for Uber, or a seller on Amazon, or a Facebook publisher or advertiser.

Things are just getting monotonically worse. And what Facebook wants to find, is the minimum quantum of residual value that they can leave in the platform, such that everybody remains locked in, but such that there isn’t even one microcent of value left behind, that could be reappropriated to those shareholders who subsidized the initial lock in play.

And that’s just a very brittle equilibrium. The difference between, ‘Jesus, I hate this place, but I can’t seem to leave it’, and ‘oh my god, what am I still doing here?… I’m out.’ It’s razor thin. All it takes is a big privacy scandal, or a giant atrocity, like a live stream mass shooting, or Cambridge Analytica style thing, or a whistleblower. And people bolt for the exits.

And when that happens, the platform owners start to panic. And the technical term in Silicon Valley for panicking is ‘pivoting.’ And so, the latest panic from Facebook is like, ‘Hey, I know we spent a couple of decades trying to convince you that you should commodify all your relationships in this largely text based medium, but actually, we’ve had a vision, and our founder has determined that the true future lies in you submitting to being converted to a legless, sexless, low polygon, heavily surreal cartoon character in a virtual world called the Metaverse, that we stole from a 25 year old cyberpunk novel.’

And at that point, that’s when everything turns into a pile of shit. That is the final stage of enshittification. It is the inevitable outcome of an environment, in which we don’t police anti-competitive conduct. So, we let companies buy their competitors or merge with their major competitors. Think of Google, a company that made one really good product a quarter of a century ago, an amazing search engine, and ever since, almost with that exception, has failed to launch a single successful product in house.

Virtually everything that they’ve done in house, whether that’s their RSS readers, or their WiFi balloons, or their smart cities, or their many social media networks, or their different messaging tools… all of them have failed. Whereas the things that they built that are successful, like their ad-tech stack, and their video platform, and their server management tools, and the collaboration tools, maps, satellites… all of that stuff is just stuff they bought from someone else.

They’re not really Willy Wonka’s idea factory, they’re just rich Uncle Pennybags. They’re using other people’s money to buy every good idea in Silicon Valley, and operationalize it. Which, at least, makes them better than Yahoo, which used Wall Street’s money to buy everyone else’s ideas and then destroy them.

But they’re still not coming up with their own ideas. They’re not doing any innovating. They’re just janitors, which is cool. Janitors are important, all solidarity to janitors. But they’re not innovating. They’re just operationalizing and maintaining. Good for them, but it’s not what we think of, when we think of Silicon Valley and progress.

So, you’ve got Google and other companies, that are unconstrained by competition. And when they’re not constrained by competition, they also end up not constrained by regulation. Because if you and your competitors comprise a half dozen companies, it’s really easy for you all to decide what it is you want from your regulators, and to make it stick.

For one thing, you’re not competing with each other, so you’ve got amazing profits that you can use to roll into your lobbying efforts. But also, you’re solving that collective action problem. Think back to the Napster era, when there were a couple hundred medium sized tech companies, and seven giant entertainment companies. And yeah, those tech companies were much larger in aggregate. They were an order of magnitude wealthier than the entertainment companies.

But they got their asses kicked, because the entertainment companies spoke with one voice. They told the same thing to every judge, every lawmaker, every regulator, and every reporter… whereas the tech companies had no message discipline. They couldn’t even agree on how to cater a meeting, where they would discuss their message discipline. And so, they got their asses handed to them.

And so today, you know, those companies, they’ve become so concentrated and inbred, they’ve basically got a Habsburg Jaw. And they’ve captured their regulators. And that means that they can act as though privacy, and fair trading, and labour laws just don’t exist.

And again, the amazing thing about digital, is that if you’re not constrained by regulation, you have so much flexibility, that you can really rook people. So like Uber drivers, they bucket themselves into either ants who take every drive, or pickers who are really picky about which rides they take.

And the Uber wage pricing algorithm takes picky drivers and offers them a higher wage. And once they become less picky, the wage starts to drop. And if they become more picky, the wage goes back up again. So, this is something that even the most black-hearted coal boss in a Tennessee Ernie Ford song couldn’t have done.

Not because he didn’t want to, but because he just didn’t have enough green eyeshade clerks to make it happen. And that is a very powerful way to abuse people. You get this with garden variety fraud. You get it with labor. You get it with privacy… all kinds of violations. So, they’re able to capture their regulators, which means that they don’t have to fear competition, they don’t have to fear regulation.

And their labor force, although until recently pretty powerful, have also been on the back foot. Tech workers don’t have the market power they used to have, back when tech was a very important force, and tech workers were in really hot demand.

And so, as a result, it’s no longer the case that a tech worker can say, ‘Boss, I know you want me to enshittify this project, but it matters to me. And it would be a moral injury to me, to take this thing that I worked on so hard, and I missed my kids little league games for, and that I put so much of myself into, and whose users I really care about, and then enshittify it. So, I’m just not gonna do it. And you can’t even find someone else to do it, because I’m in such a tight labor market.

And now, the boss says, ‘don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.’ And so they’re not disciplined by labor either. And so, that’s very dangerous. And then finally, the other source of discipline that tech companies used to face, was the discipline of users themselves, taking self-help measures, because that flexibility of digital cuts both ways.

Half of all web users have now installed an ad-blocker. Doc Searls calls it the most successful consumer boycott in human history, and he’s right. And that flexibility of digital, let you say to the tech companies that wanted to spy on you and bombard you with ads, ‘I’m going to take the part of the offer where I get some content that I like, or a service that I like, but I’m going to hand you back the part of the service where you spy on me…and we’re going to take this pre feast menu and we’re going to make it an a la carte. ‘

And that’s not something you can do anymore either, because those regulators, who’ve been captured, have been induced to pass laws that make that kind of reverse engineering and modification, illegal. Under a whole suite of IP laws that basically sum up to what Jay Freeman calls ‘felony contempt of business model.

And so, now you have companies that are freed from the discipline of competition, of regulation, of workers, and of their customers, taking action to constrain their conduct. And freed of all that constraint, they have enshittified in the most grotesque ways. And we are living through the great enshittening, where everything that used to be wonderful, is now terrible. And yet, we can’t seem to stop using it.

[00:29:33] Intermission: You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a non profit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT, or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube, and follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Twitch, Rokfin, and Instagram.

[00:30:25] Grumbine: Well, your book, your recent book, the one that I’m pulling all this together from, is The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

Love the title, by the way…

[00:30:35] Doctorow: Oh, well thank you.

[00:30:37] Grumbine: and it plays right into everything you’ve just said.

But I want to read the first two sentences of the introduction, so you understand the gravitas that’s going on. I’m just going to read it for everyone. It says, ‘this is a book for people who want to destroy big tech, it’s not a book for people who want to tame big tech… there is no fixing big tech.’

I love that.

[00:31:02] Doctorow: Yeah.

[00:31:03] Grumbine: You’re not even hiding it. It’s your lead. Tell us about this book, because it’s fantastic.

[00:31:10] Doctorow: For the first couple of decades of this century, when we’ve run up against problems with tech, our feeling was that we needed to make the tech better. The problem with Mark Zuckerberg, wasn’t that he was the unelected Social Media Czar of four billion people’s lives. It was that he wasn’t using that authority well. And so, we needed to fix it… and if we couldn’t fix it, well, maybe we’d replace Zuck. There comes a point where you have to say, ‘actually, that job just shouldn’t exist, we need to abolish Zuck, not improve or replace Zuck… we need to get rid of that job.

I’m speaking to you from Southern California, where I live, and we have some pretty bad wildfires here. I know that’s something that everybody gets, but we’ve been getting them for longer than most. And the reason we have wildfires is partially because of the climate emergency, but it’s also because of another kind of debt, and that’s the fire debt in our forests. Because the settler colonialists ended the indigenous practice of controlled burning- which was used to clear the fuel out of the forest, open the canopy, and allow for green new shoots- and instead, the settlers declared war on fire.

And at the urban wildlife interface, where the fire is most dangerous to humans because that’s where the humans and the fire mix, we go to these heroic measures to make that safe. And as a result, more people end up in those urban wildlife interfaces. And it becomes harder to say that we need good fire, and yet those people are all in harm’s way.

And with big tech, we’ve done much the same thing. The universality and flexibility of tech has always meant that new market entrants, new companies, could eat the lunch of old companies by finding ways to interoperate with. That is to say, connect to their existing products.

When Facebook kicked off and opened up to the general public, their pitch wasn’t just that they had a better privacy policy than MySpace. There aren’t a lot of people who are going to say, ‘Well, I do love my friends, but until they wise up, I’ll just sit here all alone on Facebook and admire that superior privacy policy.’

What Facebook did was, they offered every MySpace user a bot. And if you gave that bot your login and your password, it would go to MySpace several times a day, and it would grab your waiting messages. And it would stick them in your Facebook inbox, and you could reply to them there.

And that meant that you didn’t have to choose between the people that mattered to you, and a service that you preferred. Now, in the intervening years, as tech has captured its regulators, it’s managed to make this kind of interoperability, this guerrilla warfare. This, at the Electronic Frontier Foundation- which is the nonprofit I work for and have been at for now nearly a quarter of a century, working on these issues- what we call ‘adversarial interoperability’, which is when you add something to a system that the people that made it, don’t want there.

That’s a lot to say, ‘adversarial interoperability.’ We also use the term ‘competitive compatibility’ or ComCom, which is a lot easier to say. So, adversarial interoperability is in the DNA of every one of these big tech companies. They all relied on it.

The way Apple became a success and survived the years of Windows dominance, was to counter Bill Gates dirty trick, which was not giving Mac users a decent version of Microsoft Office. Which meant that when you tried to collaborate with Windows users, who were 95 percent of the operating system market, the files they sent you, just wouldn’t open, or if you managed to open them and send them back, they wouldn’t be able to open them.

This was really cursed software. I was managing small and medium sized enterprise networks back then, and you could just wave the installation disk around the office, and files would spontaneously become corrupted. And what Steve Jobs did to resolve that was not beg Bill Gates to fix it. Instead, he got his own technologist to reverse engineer the Microsoft file formats and make their own compatible versions.

And so, now we have the iWork suite. We have Pages, Numbers, and Keynotes, that just perfectly read and write those Windows, Office, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. And that let people do what Facebook users were able to do, which is not have to choose between the operating system they preferred and the collaboration they need to do.

It let them have an a la carte offering, where they could get some of the stuff that was valuable, access to those Word files and those PowerPoint files and those Excel files without the part they didn’t want, which was the Windows operating system.

Now today, all of that is effectively impossible. The tech companies have ganged up all kinds of IP to make that reverse engineering, the violation of the terms of service, and so on, into a contract law matter. A criminal and civil, cyber security matter. A copyright matter. A patent matter. A trademark matter… and so on. To the point where now anyone who tries to do this, is immediately crushed. And that has allowed these companies to end the cycle of good fire. So instead of becoming senescent and keeling over, and making way for something new, as the space in the canopy is opened up.

They just get bigger and bigger, and the fire debt gets more and more deadly. And more and more people move into that urban wildlife interface, and become more and more embedded in these social media networks, and these proprietary file formats and so on.

Such that, there are even more reasons for our law and policy makers, to try and make Mark Zuckerberg or Tim Cook or any of the other tech executives, better at their jobs. Rather than abolishing their jobs, because they don’t want to let those people down.

And that’s a good impulse. We don’t want to hurt people when these tech platforms collapse, but the fact is that they are going to collapse. And so, what we need to do is, rather than preserving the urban wildlife interface, we need to evacuate it. We need to make it easy for people to get the hell off of these wild gardens, and off of these platforms and into platforms where they can control the technology.

Where it is responsive to them, where it’s disciplined by their needs, and therefore concerned with their well being. And the way that we do that, is with interoperability. With things that let you take the stuff that matters to you about an existing platform, like the friends you have on Facebook or Twitter, and bring them with you to a better platform.

So we could, for example, order Facebook to interoperate with Mastodon. So if you go to Mastodon, or Blue Sky, or any of these other platforms that have just kicked off, you can still exchange messages with the people who stayed behind on Facebook or on Twitter. But you yourself are not subject to the rules, oversight, and privacy violations of those platforms.

And if we can do that, then we can hasten the moment at which we can do so much more. Because we’re cutting off Facebook’s supply lines. We’re cutting off the means by which it makes all of its money, by keeping those users locked in. And we’re making Facebook poorer, and therefore, we’re making it weaker.

[00:38:08] Grumbine: You’re opening the canopy this way.

[00:38:10] Doctorow: That’s right.

[00:38:11] Grumbine: I like it. Let me just raise a concern I have, and I don’t know how this plays into this. As fellow MMTers, we understand that the public purpose is there for the taking. We have the ability to do great things. And some of the hand in glove behavior between government and industry- and this is a little off the beaten path- but we can look at Haiti, Puerto Rico, Detroit, and these areas, had major problems.

Rather than the government stepping in and facilitating it on behalf of the public purpose, it threw its hands in the air and allowed it to go to venture capitalists and equity funds… that tore the value right out of Puerto Rico and Detroit.

Water poisoned with lead.

Yes, but this is, in my mind, a very similar thing. We think that there is no alternative, and yet, there clearly is one. But there’s something there. There’s a delta between our agency and the institutions that we look to, to serve our purposes. And there appears- and I think there’s miles of evidence to suggest this is true- that our institutions are no longer representing ‘we the people.’ They’re representing those elite interests.

It’s quite clear the government either has pretended to be feckless, in the name of allowing these largesse behaviors, or they really are impotent to solve them. And I would proffer up that I don’t believe they’re incapable of doing that. I would say that they choose not to do that. What are your thoughts?

[00:39:55] Doctorow: Yeah, well, I think that every institution- including firms, but also including governments- are the locus of struggle, between people who want to do the right thing and people who want to do the wrong thing. And some of those people, they might even be acting in goodwill.

So, often when you have an executive at a startup, who agrees or bows to their investor’s pressure to make the product worse for their customers, they tell themselves a story that ‘I’m doing this because I convinced 150 of my friends to quit their jobs, put their kids college funds and their mortgage on the line and come work for me… and if I don’t take this hit, if I don’t do this thing that kills me to do- this is my baby, I worked on this and it matters so much to me- but if I don’t make it worse, then I am going to put all of those people out into the street… and so, I’m going to make a sacrifice to do the noble thing, in order to keep the lights on.’

So, you have these loci of struggle within governments. You have people who want to line their pockets, and you have people who want to do the right thing. And you have people who want to do the right thing, but are talking themselves into making compromises that aren’t good compromises.

Think of the horse trading in DC, where you sometimes have people forming blocs, to back a bad project in order to get a good one through. I think maybe Joe Biden agreeing to doing inhumane things on the southern border of the United States, that meet and exceed what Trump was doing, but doing so in order to get a deal on something else, on the budget or whatever.

That all of this means that when there is no discipline, when the cost of doing the wrong thing is less than the cost of doing the right thing, then the people who want to do the wrong thing are able to win those arguments.

When someone in government says, ‘if we do this bad thing, we won’t get reelected’, or ‘the free and fair press will condemn us and the people who trust that institution will view us in bad odor, and it will harm our party’s chances over a long time period’ or ‘deprive us of the political will we need to survive close calls, when we’re trying to make stuff that matters to us happen in legislation or in regulation.’

When they can say that, and they also say, ‘and we know, guys, that it’s the right thing to do… none of us really want to look at ourselves in the mirror after we make this compromise’, they can win the argument. But if all they can say is, ‘none of us want to look at ourselves in the mirror after we make this compromise’, they’re going to, over the long term, lose that argument more and more.

And that’s true at Google, and it’s true in the White House, and it’s true in all kinds of places. When we say power corrupts, that’s what we mean. Deprived of external disciplining forces, you can talk yourself into anything, and we can all do it. We are masters of rationalization.

And so, once you have the circumstance in Congress where you have these very slim majorities, you have the ability of Congress people to talk themselves into a learned helplessness, where they don’t do anything. Where you have the promulgation of the story that taking muscular action, if it fails, will rob you of credibility and therefore better to do nothing, in case there’s something you want to do later, that you can’t do right now. And you’re gonna want that credibility for later. And don’t bother trying to take a big swing now, because if you do, you might lose. And if you lose, then when you finally decide to make a big swing, which might be never, then no one’s gonna back your play.

That’s the kind of stuff that you get in an environment where there is none of that discipline of external force. And we can see in this moment, at the best parts of the Biden administration, what it looks like when people reject that.

So, thinking of Lina Khan here, Jonathan Kanter, Rohit Chopra, or Jennifer Abruzzo, the General Counsel of the Department of Labor, who are really making some gutsy, ballsy, big moves. And it shows you that there’s so much more power than these people have been led to believe they have.

And I often contrast Lina Kahn with Pete Buttigieg because they’re both young, they’re both billed as skilled technocrats, and most importantly, they both have very similar legislative authority. So, the enabling legislation of the Department of Transport actually imports, nearly verbatim, Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act. And Section 5 says that the Commission can act to curb any unfair or deceptive business practice.

So, this is extremely broad latitude to act. You can do almost anything if you say that it’s an unfair or deceptive business practice. But no one’s used Section 5 in generations. It’s just sat there unused. It’s not, like, hard to find. It’s right there between Section 4 and Section 6.

So in comes Lina, and she says, ‘Hey, you know what we’re going to do?, we’re going to use Section 5 powers and we’re going to ban non competes nationwide. We’re going to use Section 5 powers and start to look at whether privacy and violating your privacy is an unfair, deceptive business practice… and break the deadlock that we’ve had in Congress for 25 years.’

The last time Congress passed a broadly applicable privacy law, it was a law that bans video store clerks disclosing your rental history to newspapers. That’s how long it’s been since we had a new, big, ambitious federal privacy law in this country. So Kahn is like, ‘well, we don’t have to wait for Congress, I’ve got that power already.’

So, we contrast her with Buttigieg, who showed up in office, seemingly without any hundred day plan, without a greatest hits list of ways in which industry was screwing over people. Not doing anything about the increasing danger and overstressed nature of the rail system and the way that its employees were being harmed.

Nothing about the fact that airlines, like Southwest, had been routinely not just overbooking flights, but actually scheduling flights that they didn’t have planes for. And then the morning the flight was supposed to go, they would just look at which flights had the most empty seats and cancel them. That is a pretty unfair and deceptive practice.

Selling you tickets on a plane that doesn’t exist,

[00:46:30] Grumbine: Wow.

[00:46:30] Doctorow: Is an unfair and deceptive practice. And Buttigieg just didn’t take aim at any of it. And when his critics came out and said, ‘He should be doing more.’ A lot of people who are, kind of, Buttigieg stans, came out of the woodwork to say, ‘Well, he doesn’t have the authority.’

He’s not the I.T. Boss of Southwest. He doesn’t get to tell railroad companies who to hire or how many people need to be in each car. And the fact is, that he does.

[00:46:58] Grumbine: Yeah.

[00:46:58] Doctorow: He has to line up his ducks. He has to do the stuff, but he does. I am prepared to give Buttigieg the benefit of the doubt,

[00:47:05] Grumbine: I’m not.

[00:47:06] Doctorow: And think that he is merely incompetent, rather than malicious.

[00:47:09] Grumbine: Right.

[00:47:09] Doctorow: He believes the story that he, one of the most powerful regulators in the world, has no power. And therefore, all he can do is jawbone. When Southwest cancels a million traveler’s tickets over Christmas last year, all that he has in his toolbox is just to chide them in public. And it’s amazing when civil servants actually take this stuff in hand when you see fully operational battle stations.

Most of what we’ve gotten through the neoliberal era especially is the opposite. The sense that if Detroit’s on the back foot, all that we can do to save it is turn it over to vulture capitalists. Because we ourselves, not only can we not pay for it, but we don’t even have the authority or the competence to run it.

[00:47:58] Grumbine: I’m far less generous with the establishment Democrats that inhabit the White House and these institutions today. But it’s very interesting to see that character presentation between Buttigieg, and other peers within the government, and how different they approach their work.

[00:48:18] Doctorow: Yeah.

[00:48:18] Grumbine: Particularly East Palestine [OH], where Norfolk Southern completely destroyed a community…

[00:48:24] Doctorow: Yeah.

[00:48:25] Grumbine: with toxic waste, and they sat on the sidelines going, ‘Oh, well, there’s really nothing we can do.’

[00:48:31] Doctorow: Well, they said, ‘that’s terrible, there’s nothing we can do’, when Greta Thunberg came to Canada, and Justin Trudeau marched with her in a demonstration against Justin Trudeau’s climate policies. And a lot of us Canadians were like, ‘Justin, if only you knew someone who could have the ear of the prime minister and tell him to change these policies you hate so much.’

[00:48:52] Grumbine: It is amazing. For me, things are getting really bad. This lack of agency, whether it’s real or perceived, and perception is reality to most people. When you feel you have no agency, and your government is saying we can’t do it. It sounds like maybe it is the Rothschilds controlling everything.

I absolutely loved the movie ‘Oppenheimer.’ I watched unelected technocrats and bureaucrats destroy a man, and do it without any irony whatsoever. Being able to destroy people within here, shows unelected bureaucrats, unelected agents of the state, having this tremendous, unbridled power. Your thoughts?

[00:49:46] Doctorow: Well, I think that the liberal, not even neoliberal, but just the liberal mindset of locating the answer to all of life’s crises, in individual action.

[00:50:00] Grumbine: Yes.

[00:50:01] Doctorow: And shopping harder is part of what’s going on here. And because shopping harder has some real limits, especially under conditions of monopoly. If you’re going to vote with your wallet, the people who have the thickest wallets, get more votes than you.

And that means that the monopoly party is going to win every one of those rigged elections. It leaves us in this circumstance, where nothing we do as individuals, seems to move the needle. And we don’t believe that our lawmakers can do anything, institutionally, to move the needle.

And that puts us into the ‘there is no alternative’ mindset. One of the reasons I think science fiction is such a potentially subversive literature- although there’s plenty of reactionaries who’ve written science fiction- but one of the reasons it’s so potentially subversive, is because when someone says there is no alternative, science fiction says, ‘says who?’

[00:50:50] Grumbine: Yeah.

[00:50:51] Doctorow: My job is thinking of 15 alternatives before breakfast every morning. Of course there’s alternatives. I got alternatives all day long. I got more alternatives than you’ve had hot breakfast. And so, there’s this incredible opening of the imagination that comes from science fiction. Not just from reading a science fiction novel as a roadmap for making change, but reading a science fiction novel as a reassurance that change is possible.

[00:51:18] Grumbine: Some of the guys from Money on the Left and the humanities division, would often talk about the role of culture and literature and movies, in shaping society. And one of the things I used to say, from more of a foot soldier perspective, I watched the rebirth of Roseanne, the very first episode of the return.

[00:51:37] Doctorow: Right.

[00:51:38] Grumbine: In that very first episode, Roseanne and her sister were fighting about her sister voting for Jill Stein.

And she said in front of 15 million viewers, ‘the only problem with socialism is, you eventually run out of someone else’s money.

[00:51:54] Doctorow: Yep.

[00:51:55] Grumbine: 15 million people. You’ve been pumped full of this, there is no alternative mindset.

[00:52:02] Doctorow: Yep.

[00:52:03] Grumbine: Zero sum thinking.

[00:52:05] Doctorow: Yeah, I think that’s 100 percent true.

[00:52:08] Grumbine: And so, when I see the work you’re doing, my attraction to Cory Doctorow, aside from the fact that I love a guy that is driven to think about alternatives constantly- which, if you read your work, that’s all we’re reading, is alternatives- as somebody who lives for the alternatives, Cory, take us out with explaining how someone might consider thinking about alternatives.

[00:52:34] Doctorow: Well, the second half of this book is all about policy prescriptions, and specifically about shovel ready policy prescriptions: ‘What should we do in order to make big tech smaller, in order to make it less powerful, in order to facilitate people’s departure from big tech?’ ‘What specific policies can we make?’ ‘How should we enforce them?’ ‘How will we know when they’re being violated and so on?’

And I’m a really big believer in this kind of exercise. Because I think that for all the things that Milton Friedman got wrong- and he got nearly everything wrong- he is my arch nemesis. And one of the reasons I enjoy quoting him is because I like to imagine that he looks up from hell, that Satan took him to in 2006, and sees me using his words again. And then he gargles a curse around that red hot iron bar that’s protruding from his jaws, while the demons turn the spit faster.

But you know, one of the things that he got absolutely right, is when people would say ‘Milton, how are you going to get people to go along with your cockamamie scheme?’

People do not want to abandon the benefits of the New Deal. They don’t want to go back to being forelock-tugging plebs. He would say, in times of crisis, ideas can move from the periphery to the center in an eye blink. Our job is to keep ideas lying around until that crisis arrives and the impossible becomes the inevitable.

And I am a real believer in putting together shovel ready programs because if there’s one thing that we know Big Tech has given us a lot of and that they’re going to keep on giving us, it’s crises. They have created an environment of perpetual crisis. And because we don’t have any good ideas lying around, every time one of these crises strikes, we just do the same thing we did last time, but harder, and hope for a better outcome.

And so, at the end of this book, I talk about what specific authorities, different regulatory agencies have that they can use to immediately create systems that will require interoperability, that will be hard to cheat on, easy to catch cheating on, and that will materially improve the lives of end users by making it easier for them to go to better places without having to give up the stuff that matters to them.

And when people say, well, what can I do individually about that? Well, individually, there’s not much we can do. You can become part of a polity. I have worked with this charitable nonprofit called the Electronic Frontier Foundation now for a quarter of a century. And we have a network of community groups and cities all across America called the Electronic Frontier Alliance.

And you can look that up and see if there’s a community group in your area. You can also support us financially. I am a major donor to EFF, even though it’s where I get a lot of my salary. I give a lot of it back to them because I see how important and how effective they are. But the other thing that you can do is you can socialize these ideas, have these good ideas lying around, so that when the crisis comes and a politician or regulator says, This time, let’s do something different and hope for a different outcome.

There’s a whole bunch of people who immediately recognize what they’re talking about and who don’t say, I’ve never heard anything like that, it sounds cockamamie, forget it, let’s just do the same thing we did last time, I’m very familiar with that, I’m sure it’ll work this time.

[00:55:59] Grumbine: I think about that internally at our own small nonprofit. We had this thing called the good ideas list. And it was just ideas that maybe we didn’t have the resources for at the time, or maybe we didn’t have the will of the team to go forward, but these were really neat ideas that maybe would have a place later.

I think sometimes you just get away from thinking about it because we’re into this immediacy thing. If you can’t see an immediate result of your actions, then you lose interest. So within that space, these good ideas, these shovel ready projects, how does one get that shot of immediacy that society has been so wired to?

How do we get people to see that setting aside these ideas to make sure that they’re there in times of crisis? How do you get them to see that there’s value there?

[00:56:56] Doctorow: Well, right now, we’re actually getting some pretty amazing action. So, there is more opportunity for immediacy then there has been in a long time on tech. This is not a U. S. phenomenon, the suspicion of tech and the interest in breaking it up and weakening its power. You have major action in the E. U. and the U. K. and major changes being undertaken in Canada and even in China. The cyberspace regulation is quite muscular in terms of curbing the power of big tech. You often hear from ghouls like Nick Clegg that China uses tech to project its power out of the country. And that’s why we can’t touch Facebook, because they’re defending American and European cyberspace from China.

But China itself clearly does not view those tech companies as elements of soft power. They view them as competitors for power. It’s why Xi Jinping keeps rounding up tech barons from China and sticking them in gulags. He thinks that they’re competitors of his, not his foot soldiers. So I think that given all that action, there’s always something cool going on in your country.

Lina Kahn and the FTC just refiled their antitrust case to block the Microsoft Activision merger. The Wall Street Journal has published something like 80 editorials about why she’s an idiot for trying to block mergers. This is a moment where we could be getting behind her, putting wind in her sails.

There’s an act working its way through the Senate on this, the America Act, which would break up Google and Facebook, and its two main co sponsors are Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz. Talk about bipartisan legislation. So there is an opportunity for you to speak to your racist Facebook uncle at Christmas this year, and say, hey, have you heard what your best friend Ted Cruz is supporting?

I support it too. Why don’t you call him up and call up your other senator and tell him how important this is? We’re in a moment right now.

[00:58:55] Grumbine: There’s some really horrible things going on in the world today. Gaza in particular, not feeling any real agency there, but this is once again, the, distract, bring massive amounts of unthinkable pain to people and then strip them of their will to fight back. So any kind of perk, like what you just said, I think gives people an opportunity to have some power, to have some direction to the pathlessness or the wayward feeling that they have based on the coming and going of society today.

So. I want to thank you, Corey, so much.

[00:59:36] Doctorow: Well, thank you. When I say as we close out then, I don’t for a second think that the future of the internet and how we regulate it is more important than what’s going on in Palestine and Gaza right now. But as someone who spent a good fraction of his adolescence cycling around the streets of Toronto with a bucket of wheat paste and a stack of photocopied flyers trying to turn people out for a demonstration, I’m here to tell you that the way that we’re going to win these important justice struggles is with a powerful, free, fair, and open communications infrastructure for organizing on.

And if that doesn’t take us to victory, then not having it will certainly take us to failure. If our adversaries get to use the internet to mobilize, and we’re stuck with a bucket of wheat paste, we’re gonna lose. And so, I think that this is very important. I think that it’s not more important than Israel, Palestine, but I think it’s more foundational than just about any struggle we have, because it is the terrain on which all these other important fights are going to be won and lost.

[01:00:39] Grumbine: We’re a complete agreement on that. Absolutely. It’s funny. Sometimes you see the very urgent thing right in front of you, and you don’t realize that it’s a symptom of a larger struggle and foundational is the ability to communicate and organize, and we’ve lost that largely due to big tech. And so with that, you have said, Hey, here’s a really important fight. Let’s take it on. And I appreciate you doing that.

[01:01:04] Doctorow: Well, thank you.

[01:01:06] Grumbine: Cory’s got two books. We talked about them today. The first book is The Lost Cause. I will be reading this. I can’t wait. It’s MMT. It is hope. And I hope that you will read it. And the other book, which we just really dove into is The Internet Con, how to seize the means of computation by author Cory Doctorow, my guest, my friend, thank you so much for joining us again today.

[01:01:33] Doctorow: Oh, thank you. I appreciate that.

[01:01:36] Grumbine: Tell everybody where we can find more of your work.

[01:01:38] Doctorow: Yeah, well, in a bookstore, for starters, I’ve got another novel coming out in February called The Bezel, so I did write nine books during lockdown. We’re going to the studio on Monday to start recording the audiobook with Will Wheaton. It’s going to be great. It’s the sequel to my novel Red Team Blues. You can follow my more daily quotidian work at Pluralistic.net. And I write an essay about six days a week. And that’s syndicated as a Twitter thread, a Mastodon thread, a Tumblr post, a Medium post, RSS, and email. And you can find links to get all of those across the top of the page at Pluralistic.net. And all of that is licensed Creative Commons attribution. So you can distribute it and even charge money for it.

Without having to kick anything back to me, all you need to do is correctly attribute it.

[01:02:29] Grumbine: Awesome. Cory, thank you for making time with me today. I really appreciate it. Folks. I hope you appreciate this. A great conversation. I loved it. Thank you so much, sir.

[01:02:39] Doctorow: Well, thank you. It was my pleasure.

[01:02:41] Grumbine: Absolutely. All right. This is Steve Grumbine with Macro N Cheese. My guest, Cory Doctorow. We are out of here.

[01:02:55] End credits: Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts, and promotional artwork by Andy Kennedy. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.