Mastodawn

mesanford Feb 28, 2023

This week on my #podcast, I read #Twiddler, a recent Medium column in which I delve more deeply into #enshittification, and how it is a pathology of digital platforms, distinct from the rent-seeking of the analog world that preceded it:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

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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/2023/02/27/knob-jockeys/#bros-be-twiddlin

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Twiddler - Cory Doctorow - Medium

Tracking Exposed is a scrappy European nonprofit that attempts to understand how online recommendation algorithms work. They comine data from volunteers who install a plugin with data acquired…

Medium

Cory Doctorow Feb 27, 2023

Enshittification, you'll recall, is the lifecycle of the online platform: first, the platform allocates #surpluses to end-users; then, once users are locked in, those surpluses are taken away and given to business-customers. Once the advertisers, publishers, sellers, creators and performers are locked in, the surplus is clawed away from them and taken by the publishers.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

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Pluralistic: Tiktok’s enshittification (21 Jan 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow Feb 27, 2023

#Facebook is the poster-child for enshittification. When FB welcomed the general public in 2006, it sold itself as the privacy-respecting alternative to #Myspace, promising users it would never harvest their data. The FB feed consisted of the posts that the people you'd followed - the people you cared about - published.

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Cory Doctorow Feb 27, 2023

FB experienced explosive growth, thanks to two factors: #NetworkEffects (every new user was a draw for other users who wanted to converse with them), and #SwitchingCosts (it was practically impossible to convince all the people you wanted to hear from to leave FB, much less agree on what platform to go to next). In other words, every new user who joined FB both attracted more users, and made it harder for those users to leave.

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Cory Doctorow Feb 27, 2023

FB attained end-user lockin and was now able to transfer users' surpluses to business customers. First, it started aggressively spying on users and offered precision targeting at rock-bottom prices to advertisers. Second, it offered media companies "algorithmic" boosting into the feeds of users who hadn't asked to see their posts.

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Cory Doctorow Feb 27, 2023

Media companies who posted excerpts to FB, along with links to their sites on the real internet were rewarded with *floods* of traffic, as their posts were jammed into the eyeballs of millions of users who never asked to see them. Media companies and advertisers went all-in, integrating FB surveillance beacons in their presence on the real internet, hiring social media specialists who'd do #PlatformKremlinology in order to advise them on the best way to please #TheAlgorithm.

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Cory Doctorow Feb 27, 2023

Once those business customers - creators, media companies, advertisers - were locked into FB, the company harvested their surplus, too. On the ad side, FB raised rates and decreased expensive anti-fraud measures, meaning that advertisers had to pay more, even as an increasing proportion of their ads were either never served, or never seen.

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Cory Doctorow Feb 27, 2023

With media companies and creators, FB not only stopped jamming their content in front of people who never asked to see it, they actively suppressed the spread of business users' posts *even to their own subscribers*. FB required media companies to transition from excerpts to fulltext feeds, and downranked or simply blocked posts that linked back to a business user's own site, be it a newspaper's web presence or a creator's crowdfunding service.

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Cory Doctorow Feb 27, 2023

Business users who wanted to reach people who explicitly directed FB to incorporate their media in users' feeds had to pay for "boosts."

This is the (nearly) complete enshittification cycle: having harvested surpluses from users and business customers, FB is now (badly) attempting to surf the line where nearly *all* value in the service lands in its shareholders' pockets, with *just enough* surplus left over to keep end-users and business-users locked in (see also: #Twitter).

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Cory Doctorow Feb 27, 2023

There have been lots of other abusive "platform" businesses in the past - famously, 19th century railroads and their #RobberBaron owners were so obnoxiously abusive that they spawned the #trustbusting movement, the #ShermanAct, and modern competition law. Did the rail barons do enshittification, too?

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Cory Doctorow Feb 27, 2023

Well, yes - and no. I have no doubt that robber barons *would* have engaged in zuckerbergian shenanigans if they could've - but they were constrained by the stubborn inertness of atoms and the slippery liveliness of bits. Changing rail schedules to make direct connections with cities to destroy a rival ferry business (or hell, *laying track* to those cities) is a slow proposition. Changing content recommendations at Facebook is something you do with a few mouse-clicks.

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Cory Doctorow Feb 27, 2023

Which brings me to the thesis of "Twiddler": enshittification doesn't arise from the special genius or the unique wickedness of tech barons - rather, it's the product of the ability to *twiddle*. Our discourse has focused (rightly) on the extent to which platforms are "instrumented" - that is, the degree to which they spy on and analyze their users' conduct.

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Cory Doctorow Feb 27, 2023

But discussion of what the platforms *do* with that data - the ways they "react" to it - has echoed the platforms' own boasts of transcendental #BehaviorModification prowess (c.f. "#SurveillanceCapitalism) while giving short shrift to the extremely mundane, straightforward ways that the ability to change the business-logic of a platform lets it allocate and withdraw surpluses from different kinds of users to get them on the hook, reel them in, and then skin and devour them.

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Cory Doctorow Feb 27, 2023

The Twiddler thesis, in other words, is a counter to the narrative of @mariafarrell's #ProdigalTechBros, who claim that they were once evil sorcerers, but, having seen the error of their ways, vow to be *good* sorcerers from now on, forswearing "hacking our #DopamineLoops" like vampires swearing off blood:

https://conversationalist.org/2020/03/05/the-prodigal-techbro/

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The Prodigal Techbro

Prodigal tech bro stories skip straight from the past, when they were part of something that—surprise!—turned out to be bad, to the present, where they are now a moral authority on how to do good…

The Conversationalist

Cory Doctorow Feb 27, 2023

People who repeat the claims of Prodigal Tech Bros are engaging in #CritiHype, @leevinsel's term for criticism that repeats tech's own mystical narratives of their own superhuman prowess, rather than grappling with the mundanity of doing old conjurer's tricks *very quickly*, with computers:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

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You’re Doing It Wrong: Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype

Maybe more people are writing about the real and potential problems of technology today than ever before. That is mostly a good thing. The list of books and articles from the last few years that have…

Medium

Cory Doctorow Feb 27, 2023

That's what twiddling is - doing the things that grocers and rail monopolists and music monopolists have always done, but very quickly, with computers. Whether it's #Amazon rooking sellers/authors, or #Apple and #Google's #AppStores rooking app makers, or #Tiktok and #Youtube rooking performers, or #Uber rooking drivers, it's the same underlying pattern of surplus-harvesting, and so's the method. It's the same things their predecessors did, but very quickly, with computers.

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Cory Doctorow Feb 27, 2023

A grocer who wants to price-gouge on eggs needs an army of low-waged workers with pricing guns. #AmazonFresh does it in an eyeblink, by typing a new number into a web-form and clicking submit. As is so often the case when a magic trick is laid bare, the mechanic is very, very boring: the way to make a nickel vanish is to spend hundreds of hours practicing with a mirror while you shift so it is clenched between your fingers, and protrudes from behind your hand (spoiler alert).

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Cory Doctorow Feb 27, 2023

The trick can be baffling and marvellous when you see it, but once you know how it's done, it's pretty obvious - the difference is that most sleight-of-hand artists don't think they're sorcerers, while plenty of #TechBros believe their own press.

There's a profound irony in twiddling's role in enshittification: early internet scholarship rightly hailed the power of twiddling for internet *users*.

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Cory Doctorow Feb 27, 2023

Theorists like @aramsinn described this as #configurability - the ability of end-users (aided by tinkerers, SMEs and co-ops) to modify the services they used to suit their own needs:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vk8c2

Arguably the most successful configurability story is #AdBlocking, which @dsearls calls "the biggest boycott in human history." Billions of end-users of the web have twiddled their browsers so that they aren't tracked by #AdTech and don't see ads:

https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2015/09/28/beyond-ad-blocking-the-biggest-boycott-in-human-history/

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Cory Doctorow Feb 27, 2023

Configurability was at the heart of early hopes for mass #disintermediation, because audiences and performers (or sellers and producers) could go direct to one another, assembling a customized, un-capturable conduit composed of an a-la-carte selection of payment processors, webstores, mail and web hosts, etc.

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Cory Doctorow Feb 27, 2023

Whenever one of these utilities tried to capture relationships to harvest more surplus, both ends of the transaction could foil them by blocking, reverse-engineering, modding, or mashing them up, wriggling off the hook before it could set its barbs.

But - as we can all see - a funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century. The platforms seized the internet, turning it into "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four":

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

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Tom Eastman (@tveastman) on X

I'm old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.

X (formerly Twitter)

Chuck Munson Feb 27, 2023

@pluralistic Not only are many of those ads never served or never seen, but advertisers who should know better never demanded third party auditing of Facebook's advertising claims. No ABC, no Nielsen, and no Arbitron equivalents. Of course, advertisers and companies were OK with this, because they wanted to be in on the con. Especially advertising agencies who sold Facebook's advertising magic that it could engage every possible customer out there with its magical algorithms.

Chuck Munson Feb 27, 2023

@pluralistic I've argued for years that Facebook built stickiness of the platform with users by "stealing" content from media companies. Facebook wasn't showing entire articles, but via the social graph was taking the title and lead from stories and allowing users to post them to news feeds. As we know, this is pretty much all that most people read before making comments and getting into arguments. Maybe the media were being hooked on a new form of exposure bucks,.

Brian Dear Feb 27, 2023

@pluralistic My pet theory is that #enshittification happens to VC-funded companies because of pressure to not only grow grow grow users but grow grow grow revenue. I saw it at one of my own VC-funded companies. The board wanted revenue, didn't care what principles (or users) were trampled upon to get it. We got it. We also enshittified galore. But hey, there was an exit, as they call it, and then the acquiring megacorp went wild w/ enshittification. Wallets filled, the website is now long gone.

sebboh Feb 27, 2023

Hello, @pluralistic! If you search your content on the "knob-jockeys" post for the phrase "inconvenient gut-flora" you will find that the match is immediately followed by a youtube link which contains the five-letter string "&". Please change that to the one-letter string "&" and then your link will work. Have a good day and keep up the good work!

Cory Doctorow Feb 27, 2023

@sebboh Thanks!