Mastodawn

No matter how benevolent a dictatorship is, it's still a dictatorship, and subject to the dictator's whims. We must demand that the owners and leaders of tech platforms be fair and good - but we must also be prepared for them to fail at this, sometimes catastrophically.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/#free-as-in-puppies

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Pluralistic: What the fediverse (does/n’t) solve (23 Dec 2022) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow Dec 23, 2022

That is, even if you trust #TimCook to decide what apps you are and aren't allowed to install - including whether you are allowed to install apps that block #Apple's own extensive, nonconsensual, continuous commercial surveillance of its customers - you should also be prepared for Cook to get hit by a bus and replaced by some alt-right dingleberry.

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Cory Doctorow Dec 23, 2022

What happens next is a matter of technology and law. It's a matter of whether you have to give up your media and your apps and your data to escape the no-longer-benevolent dictatorship. It depends on whether the technology is designed to let you move those things, and whether the law protects you from tech companies, or whether it protects tech companies from *you*, by criminalizing #jailbreaking, #ReverseEngineering, #scraping, etc.

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Cory Doctorow Dec 23, 2022

As thorny as this is, it's even harder when we're talking about #SocialMedia, because it's *social*. Sociability adds a new and pernicious #SwitchingCost, when we hold each other hostage because we can't agree on when/whether to go, and if we do, where to go next. When the management of your community goes septic, it can be hard to leave, because you have to leave behind the people who matter to you if you do.

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Cory Doctorow Dec 23, 2022

We've all been there: do you quit your writers' circle because one guy is being a jerk? Do you stop going to a con because the concom tolerates a predator? Do you stop going to family Thanksgiving because your racist Facebook uncle keeps trying to pick a fight with you? Do you accompany your friends to dinner at a restaurant whose owners are major donors to politicians who want to deport you?

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Cory Doctorow Dec 23, 2022

This #CollectiveActionProblem makes calamity of so long life. At the outer extreme, you have the families who stay put even as their governments slide into tyranny, risking imprisonment or even death, because they can't bear to be parted from one another, and they all have different views of how bad the situation really is:

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/12/the-oppermanns-book-holocaust-nazi-fascism/672505/

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What It Feels Like When Fascism Starts

A 1933 novel tracks the Nazis’ rise to power in real time.

The Atlantic

Cory Doctorow Dec 23, 2022

The corporate person is a selfish narcissist, a paperclip-maximizing artificial lifeform forever questing after its own advantage. It is an abuser. Like all abusers, it is keenly attuned to any social dynamic that it can use to manipulate its victims, and so social media is highly prized by these immortal colony-organisms.

You can visit all manner of abuses upon a social network and it will remain intact, glued together by the interpersonal bonds of its constituent members.

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Cory Doctorow Dec 23, 2022

Like a kidnapper who takes your family hostage, abusers weaponize our love of one another and use it to make us do things that are contrary to our own interests.

In "Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media," @catvalente is characteristically brilliant about this subject. It is one of the best essays you'll read this month:

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

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Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media

I bet you're wondering how we got here...

Welcome to Garbagetown

Cory Doctorow Dec 23, 2022

Valente is on the leading edge of creators who were born digital - whose social life was always online, and whose writing career grew out of that social life. In 2009, she posted her debut novel, "The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making" to the web for free. Two years, and many awards, later, Macmillan brought it out in hardcover:

https://memex.craphound.com/2011/05/10/valentes-girl-who-circumnavigated-fairyland-sweet-fairytale-shot-through-with-salty-tears-magic/

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Valente’s Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland…: sweet fairytale, shot through with salty tears — magic! – Cory Doctorow's MEMEX

Cory Doctorow Dec 23, 2022

"Stop Talking to Each Other" is a memoir wrapped around a trenchant, take-no-prisoners critique of all the robber-barons who've made us prisoners to one another and fashioned whips out of our own affection for one another and the small pleasures we give each other.

It begins with Valente's girlhood in the early 1990s, where #Prodigy formed a lifeline for her lonely, isolated existence.

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Cory Doctorow Dec 23, 2022

Valente - a precocious writer - made penpals with other Prodigy users, including older adults who assumed they were talking to a young adult. These relationships expanded her world, uplifting and enriching her.

Then, one day, she spotted a story about Prodigy in her dad's newspaper: "PRODIGY SAYS: STOP TALKING TO EACH OTHER AND START BUYING THINGS."

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Cory Doctorow Dec 23, 2022

The headline floored her. Even if Valente wanted to buy the weird grab-bag of crap for sale at Prodigy in 1991, she was a 12 year old and had no way to send internet money to Prodigy. Also, she had no money of any sort.

For her, the revelation that the owners of Prodigy would take away "this one solitary place where I felt like I mattered" if she "didn’t figure out how to buy things from the screen" was shocking and frightening.

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Cory Doctorow Dec 23, 2022

It was also true. Prodigy went away, and took with it all those human connections a young Cat Valente relied on.

This set the pattern for every online community that followed: "Stop talking to each other and start buying things. Stop providing content for free and start paying us for the privilege. Stop shining sunlight on horrors and start advocating for more of them. Stop making communities and start weaponizing misinformation to benefit your betters."

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Cory Doctorow Dec 23, 2022

Or, more trenchantly: "Stop benefitting from the internet, it’s not for you to enjoy, it’s for us to use to extract money from you. Stop finding beauty and connection in the world, loneliness is more profitable and easier to control. Stop being human. A mindless bot who makes regular purchases is all that’s really needed."

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Cory Doctorow Dec 23, 2022

Valente traces this pathology through multiple successive generations of online community, lingering on #Livejournal, whose large community of Russian dissidents attracted Russian state-affiliated investors who scooped up the community and then began turning the screws on it, transforming it into a surveillance and control system for terrorizing the mutual hostages of the Russian opposition.

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Cory Doctorow Dec 23, 2022

Valente and her friends on the service were collateral damage in the deliberate enshittification of LJ, band the Russian dissidents had it worse than they did, but it was still a painful experience. LJ was home to innumerable creators who "grew audiences through connections and meta-connections you already trusted."

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Cory Doctorow Dec 23, 2022

Most importantly, the poisoning of LJ formed a template, for how to "[take] apart a minor but culturally influential community and develop techniques to do it again, more efficiently, more quickly, with less attention."

It's a template that has been perfected by the alt-right, by the #SadPuppies and the #Gamergaters and their successor movements. These trolls aren't motivated by the same profit-seeking sociopathy of the corporate person, but they are symbiotic with it.

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Cory Doctorow Dec 23, 2022

Valente lays out the corporate community's lifecycle:

I. Be excited about the internet, make a website!

II. Discover that users are uninterested in your storefront, add social features.

III. Add loss-leaders to "let users make their own reasons to use the site" (chat, blogs, messaging, etc), and moderate them "to make non-monster humans feel safe expressing themselves and feel nice about site."

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Cory Doctorow Dec 23, 2022

IV. The site works, and people "[use] free tools to connect with each other and learn and not be lonely and maybe even make a name for themselves sometimes."

V. The owners demand that users "stop talking and start buying things."

VI. Users grow disillusioned with a site whose sociability is an afterthought to the revenue-generation that is supposed to extract all surplus value from the community they themselves created.

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Cory Doctorow Dec 23, 2022

VII. The owners get angry, insult users, blanket the site with ads, fire moderators, stoke controversy that creates "engagement" for the ads. They sell user data. They purge marginalized community that advertisers don't like. They raise capital, put the community features behind a paywall, and focus so hard on extraction that they miss the oncoming trends.

VIII. "Everyone is mad."

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Cory Doctorow Dec 23, 2022

IX. "Sell the people you brought together on purpose to large corporation, trash billionaire, or despotic government entity who hates that the site’s community used those connective tools to do a revolution."

X. The people who "invested their time, heart, labor, love, businesses and relationships" are scattered to the winds. Corporate shareholders don't care.

XI. Years later, the true story of how the site disintegrated under commercial pressures comes out. No one cares.

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SSFC KDT (MOVED)Dec 23, 2022

@pluralistic christ man don't you own a blog or something 😂

cartoons_and_poetry Dec 24, 2022

Yes. There are things we're forced to participate under capitalism, but these are not the ones

Phillip Hallam-Baker Dec 23, 2022

@pluralistic Three questions to ask those in power:

1) How did you get it?

2) On whose behalf do you use it?

3) How do we get rid of you?

It is the last one that I don't think is getting the attention needed from folk designing social media.

I have changed my Mastodon account once. It is not clear to me that I can do it easily unless I have the cooperation of the service instance I am leaving. I certainly can't stop them transferring my account without permission either.

This might sound like I am being really picky but that is exactly what security requires and I do security.

Éric Freyssinet Dec 23, 2022

@pluralistic @[email protected] better here ? :)

John Panzer Dec 23, 2022

@pluralistic 👆 This is the piece on the Fediverse that you should read today if you read just one. So many good points made here (and pushbacks on FUD).

John Panzer Dec 23, 2022

@pluralistic When winter comes, that’s when you find out if your structures are built resiliently. After the controller of a platform goes to the dark side, “What happens next is a matter of technology and law. It's a matter of whether you have to give up your media and your apps and your data to escape the no-longer-benevolent dictatorship…

John Panzer Dec 23, 2022

@pluralistic …It depends on whether the technology is designed to let you move those things, and whether the law protects you from tech companies, or whether it protects tech companies from you, by criminalizing jailbreaking, reverse engineering, scraping, etc.”

Both law AND tech play important roles here! Law can’t mandate things technology can’t deliver. Technology can be stymied by poor laws - or nonexistent ones. But acting together they’re very effective.

John Panzer Dec 23, 2022

@pluralistic This is a banger: “The corporate person is a selfish narcissist, a paperclip-maximizing artificial lifeform forever questing after its own advantage. It is an abuser. Like all abusers, it is keenly attuned to any social dynamic that it can use to manipulate its victims, and so social media is highly prized by these immortal colony-organisms.”

(And thus its power must have external checks and balances or individuals are toast.)

John Panzer Dec 23, 2022

@pluralistic And now I need to go read Valente’s piece!

‘Valente describes Musk's non-commercial imperatives: "the yawning, salivating need to control and hurt. To express power not by what you can give, but by what you can take away…[the] viral solipsism that cannot bear the presence of anything other than its own undifferentiated self, propagating not by convincing or seduction or debate, but by the eradication of any other option."’ 🔥

Stephanie Helms 🏳️‍⚧️Dec 23, 2022

@pluralistic wish i could boost this 100 times. just great. thanks.

Cory Doctorow Dec 23, 2022

@sidhra Thank you!

Mark Davis Dec 23, 2022

@pluralistic I don't honestly believe we are entitled to "demand" anything. You can ask nicely, you can even expect it – but to demand it reeks of the same arrogance many of them exhibit.

jnfr 🇺🇦 🦋Dec 24, 2022

@pluralistic Thanks so much for the links to Valente's essay, as well as your own additions to it. It was a welcome oasis today.

And thanks for putting up the long-form on your blog. That's easier reading for me.

Cory Doctorow Dec 24, 2022

@jnfr Thank YOU!

Ceri Dec 24, 2022

@jnfr @pluralistic same. The quotes and summaries of Valente's article were good, nevertheless I am so glad I took the time to read the entirety of her piece. The rage and passion of it really hit home. Also, I used Livejournal - though never heavily - and was one of those who drifted away in the Russian by-out. I never knew that was about a crack down on dissidents. Sad to hear, good to know.

Rob Landley Dec 24, 2022

@pluralistic I'm told Fiddler on the Roof is an old movie about migrating off Twitter.

DrYak Dec 24, 2022

@pluralistic #enshittification ; #openstandards and #interoperability ; move to #mastodon and #fediverse
A great thread (as usual) by Cory Doctorow

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/109564921147797946

Cory Doctorow's linkblog (@[email protected])

Attached: 1 image No matter how benevolent a dictatorship is, it's still a dictatorship, and subject to the dictator's whims. We must demand that the owners and leaders of tech platforms be fair and good - but we must also be prepared for them to fail at this, sometimes catastrophically. If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/#free-as-in-puppies 1/

La Quadrature du Net - Mastodon - Media Fédéré

Anil Dec 24, 2022

@pluralistic I loved Cat’s piece, though I struggled with some parts where I know the folklore diverges from the reality. It captures a particular feeling beautifully well, though.

Lira Dec 24, 2022

@pluralistic It was a pleasure to read and reflect on this whole thread. This is a crucial time to think about these topics. The future, fortunately, is not written. And it is with this critical vision - and all this knowledge - that we can try to do better. Thank you very much!!

Cory Doctorow Dec 24, 2022

@lira Thank you, Lira.

Matt Jan 12, 2023

@pluralistic this is fantastic! As someone who left Twitter for Mastodon and Post, this gives a clear view of the evolution of social media and the internet generally. Pretty compelling case for Mastodon