The last time Congress managed to pass a federal consumer privacy law was in 1988: The Video Privacy Protection Act. That’s a law that bans video-store clerks from telling newspapers what VHS cassettes you take home. In other words, it regulates three things that have effectively ceased to exist.
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The threat of having your video rental history out there in the public eye was *not* the last or most urgent threat the American public faced, and yet, Congress is deadlocked on passing a privacy law.
Tech companies’ regulatory capture involves a risible and transparent gambit, that is so stupid, it’s an insult to all the good hardworking risible transparent ruses out there.
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Namely, they claim that when they violate your consumer, privacy or labor rights, It’s not a crime, because they do it with an app.
Algorithmic wage discrimination isn’t illegal wage theft: we do it with an app.
Spying on you from asshole to appetite isn’t a privacy violation: we do it with an app.
And Amazon’s scam search tool that tricks you into paying 29% more than the best match for your query? Not a ripoff. We do it with an app.
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Once we killed competition - stopped putting down rat poison - we got cartels - the rats ate our faces. And the cartels captured their regulators - the rats bought out the poison factory and shut it down.
So companies aren’t constrained by competition or regulation.
But you know what? This is tech, and tech is different.IIt’s different because it’s flexible. Because our computers are Turing-complete universal von Neumann machines.
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That means that any enshittificatory alteration to a program can be disenshittified with another program.
Every time HP jacks up the price of ink , they invite a competitor to market a refill kit or a compatible cartridge.
When Tesla installs code that says you have to pay an extra monthly fee to use your whole battery, they invite a modder to start selling a kit to jailbreak that battery and charge it all the way up.
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Lemme take you through a little example of how that works: Imagine this is a product design meeting for our company’s website, and the guy leading the meeting says “Dudes, you know how our KPI is topline ad-revenue? Well, I’ve calculated that if we make the ads just 20% more invasive and obnoxious, we’ll boost ad rev by 2%”
This is a good pitch. Hit that KPI and everyone gets a fat bonus. We can all take our families on a luxury ski vacation in Switzerland.
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But here’s the thing: someone’s gonna stick their arm up - someone who doesn’t give a shit about user well-being, and that person is gonna say, “I love how you think, Elon. But has it occurred to you that if we make the ads 20% more obnoxious, then 40% of our users will go to a search engine and type 'How do I block ads?'"
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I mean, what a nightmare! Because once a user does that, the revenue from that user doesn’t rise to 102%. It doesn’t stay at 100% It falls to *zero*, forever.
[Any guesses why?]
Because *no user ever went back to the search engine and typed, 'How do I start seeing ads again?'*
Once the user jailbreaks their phone or discovers third party ink, or develops a relationship with an independent Tesla mechanic who’ll unlock all the DLC in their car, that user is *gone*, *forever*.
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Interoperability – that latent property bequeathed to us courtesy of Herrs Turing and Von Neumann and their infinitely flexible, universal machines - that is a serious check on enshittification.
The fact that Congress hasn’t passed a privacy law since 1988 Is countered, at least in part, by the fact that the *majority* of web users are now running ad-blockers, which are also tracker-blockers.
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But no one’s ever installed a tracker-blocker for an *app*. Because reverse engineering an app puts in you jeopardy of criminal and civil prosecution under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with penalties of a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine for a first offense.
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And violating its terms of service puts you in jeopardy under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, which is the law that Ronald Reagan signed in a panic after watching Wargames (seriously!).
Helping other users violate the terms of service can get you hit with a lawsuit for tortious interference with contract. And then there’s trademark, copyright and patent.
All that nonsense we call “IP,” but which Jay Freeman of Cydia calls “Felony Contempt of Business Model."
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So if we’re still at that product planning meeting and now it’s time to talk about our app, the guy leading the meeting says, “OK, so we’ll make the ads in the *app* 20% more obnoxious to pull a 2% increase in topline ad rev?”
And that person who objected to making the website 20% worse? Their hand goes back up. Only this time they say “Why don’t we make the ads 100% more invasive and get a 10% increase in ad rev?"
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Because it *doesn't matter* if a user goes to a search engine and types, “How do I block ads in an app." The answer is: *you can't.* So YOLO, enshittify away.
“IP” is just a euphemism for “any law that lets me reach outside my company’s walls to exert coercive control over my critics, competitors and customers,” and “app” is just a euphemism for “A web page skinned with the right IP so that protecting your privacy while you use it is a felony.”
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Interop used to keep companies from enshittifying. If a company made its client suck, someone would roll out an alternative client, if they ripped a feature out and wanted to sell it back to you as a monthly subscription, someone would make a compatible plugin that restored it for a one-time fee, or for free.
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To help people flee Myspace, FB gave them bots that you’d load with your login credentials. It would scrape your waiting Myspace messages and put ‘em in your FB inbox, and login to Myspace and paste your replies into your Myspace outbox. So you didn’t have to choose between the people you loved on Myspace, and Facebook, which launched with a promise *never* to spy on you. Remember that?!
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Thanks to the metastasis of IP, all that is off the table today. Apple owes its very existence to iWork Suite, whose Pages, Numbers and Keynote are file-compatible with Microsoft’s Word, Excel and Powerpoint. But make an IOS runtime that’ll play back the files you bought from Apple’s stores on other platforms, and they’ll nuke you til you glow.
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FB wouldn’t have had a hope of breaking Myspace’s grip on social media without that scrape, but scrape FB today in support of an alternative client and their lawyers will bomb you til the rubble bounces.
Google scraped every website in the world to create its search index. Try and scrape Google and they’ll have your head on a pike.
When they did it, it was progress. When you do it to them, that’s piracy. Every pirate wants to be an admiral.
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Because this handful of companies has so thoroughly captured their regulators, they can wield the power of the state against *you* when you try to break their grip on power, even as their own flagrant violations of our rights go unpunished. Because they do them with an app.
Tech lost its fear of competitin it neutralized the threat from regulators, and then put them in harness to attack new startups that might do unto them as they did unto the companies that came before them.
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But even so, there was a force that kept our bosses in check That force was *us*. Tech workers.
Tech workers have historically been in short supply, which gave us power, and our bosses knew it.
To get us to work crazy hours, they came up with a trick. They appealed to our love of technology, and told us that we were heroes of a digital revolution, who would “organize the world’s information and make it useful,” who would “bring the world closer together.”
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They brought in expert set-dressers to turn our workplaces into whimsical campuses with free laundry, gourmet cafeterias, massages, and kombucha, and a surgeon on hand to freeze our eggs so that we could work through our fertile years.
They convinced us that we were being pampered, rather than being worked like government mules.
This trick has a name. Fobazi Ettarh, the librarian-theorist, calls it “vocational awe, and Elon Musk calls it being “extremely hardcore.”
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This worked very well. Boy did we put in some long-ass hours!
But for our bosses, this trick failed badly. Because if you miss your mother’s funeral and to hit a deadline, and then your boss orders you to enshittify that product, you are gonna experience a profound moral injury, which you are *absolutely* gonna make your boss share.
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Because what are they gonna do? Fire you? They can’t hire someone else to do your job, and you can get a job that’s even better at the shop across the street.
So workers held the line when competition, regulation and interop failed
But eventually, supply caught up with demand. Tech laid off 260,000 of us last year, and another 100,000 in the first half of this year.
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You can’t tell your bosses to go fuck themselves, because they’ll fire your ass and give your job to someone who’ll be only too happy to enshittify that product you built.
That’s why this is all happening right now. Our bosses aren’t different. They didn’t catch a mind-virus that turned them into greedy assholes who don’t care about our users’ wellbeing or the quality of our products.
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As far as our bosses have *always* been concerned, the point of the business was to charge the most, and deliver the least, while sharing as little as possible with suppliers, workers, users and customers. They’re not running charities.
Since day one, our bosses have shown up for work and yanked as hard as they can on the big ENSHITTIFICATION lever behind their desks, only that lever didn’t move much. It was all gummed up by competition, regulation, interop and workers.
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As those sources of friction melted away, the enshittification lever started moving very freely.
Which sucks, I know. But think about this for a sec: our bosses, despite being wildly imperfect vessels capable of rationalizing endless greed and cheating, nevertheless oversaw a series of actually *great* products and services.
Not because they used to be better people, but because they used to be subjected to *discipline*.
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So it follows that if we want to end the enshittocene, dismantle the enshitternet, and build a new, good internet that our bosses can’t wreck, we need to make sure that these constraints are durably installed on that internet, wound around its very roots and nerves. And we have to stand guard over it so that it can’t be dismantled again.
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A new, good internet is one that has the positive aspects of the old, good internet: an ethic of technological self-determination, where users of technology (and hackers, tinkerers, startups and others serving as their proxies) can reconfigure and mod the technology they use, so that it does what they need it to do, and so that it can’t be used *against* them.
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But the new, good internet will *fix* the defects of the old, good internet, the part that made it hard to use for anyone who wasn’t *us*. And hell yeah we can do that. Tech bosses swear that it’s impossible, that you can’t have a conversation friend without sharing it with Zuck; or search the web without letting Google scrape you down to the viscera; or have a phone that works reliably without giving Apple a veto over the software you install.
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They claim that it’s a nonsense to even *ponder* this kind of thing. It’s like making water that’s not wet. But that’s bullshit. We can have nice things. We can build for the people we love, and give them a place that’s worth of their time and attention.
To do that, we have to install constraints.
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The first constraint, remember, is competition. We’re living through a epochal shift in competition policy. After 40 years with antitrust enforcement in an induced coma, a wave of antitrust vigor has swept through governments all over the world. Regulators are stepping in to ban monopolistic practices, open up walled gardens, block anticompetitive mergers, and even unwind corrupt mergers that were undertaken on false pretenses.
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Normally this is the place in the speech where I’d list out all the amazing things that have happened over the past four years. The enforcement actions that blocked companies from becoming too big to care, and that scared companies away from even trying.
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Like Wiz, which just noped out of the *largest acquisition offer in history*, turning down Google’s $23b cashout, and deciding to, you know, just be a fucking business that makes money by producing a product that people want and selling it at a competitive price.
Normally, I’d be listing out FTC rulemakings that banned noncompetes nationwid.
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Or the new merger guidelines the FTC and DOJ cooked up, which – among other things – establish that the agencies should be considering whether a merger will negatively impact privacy.
I had a whole section of this stuff in my notes, a real victory lap, but I deleted it all this week.
[Can anyone guess why?]
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That’s right! This week, Judge Amit Mehta, ruling for the DC Circuit of these United States of America, In the docket 20-3010 a case known as *United States v. Google LLC*, found that “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly," and ordered Google and the DOJ to propose a schedule for a remedy, like breaking the company up.
So yeah, that was pretty fucking *epic*.
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Now, this antitrust stuff is pretty esoteric, and I won’t gatekeep you or shame you if you wanna keep a little distance on this subject. Nearly everyone is an antitrust normie, and *that's OK*. But if you’re a normie, you’re probably only catching little bits and pieces of the narrative, and let me tell you, the monopolists know it and they are *flooding the zone*.
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The *Wall Street Journal* has published over 100 editorials condemning FTC Chair Lina Khan, saying she’s an ineffectual do-nothing, wasting public funds chasing doomed, quixotic adventures against poor, innocent businesses accomplishing nothing
[Does anyone out there know who owns the *WSJ*?]
That’s right, it’s Rupert Murdoch. Do you really think Rupert Murdoch pays his editorial board to write *one hundred editorials* about someone who’s not getting anything done?
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The reality is that in the USA, in the UK, in the EU, in Australia, in Canada, in Japan, in South Korea, even in *China*, we are seeing more antitrust action over the past four years than over the preceding *forty* years.
Remember, competition *law* is actually pretty robust. The problem isn’t the law, It’s the enforcement priorities.
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Reagan put antitrust in mothballs 40 years ago, but that elegant weapon from a more civilized age is now back in the hands of people who know how to use it, and they’re swinging for the fences.
Next up: regulation.
As the seemingly inescapable power of the tech giants is revealed for the sham it always was, governments and regulators are finally gonna kill the “one weird trick” of violating the law, and saying “It doesn’t count, we did it with an app.”
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Like in the EU, they’re rolling out the Digital Markets Act this year. That’s a law requiring dominant platforms to stand up APIs so that third parties can offer interoperable services.
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So a co-op, a nonprofit, a hobbyist, a startup, or a local government agency wil eventuallyl be able to offer, say, a social media server that can interconnect with one of the dominant social media silos, and users who switch to that new platform will be able to continue to exchange messages with the users they follow and groups they belong to, so the switching costs will fall to damned near zero.
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That’s a very cool rule, but what’s even cooler is how it’s gonna be enforced. Previous EU tech rules were “regulations” as in the GDPR - the General Data Privacy Regulation. EU regs need to be “transposed” into laws in each of the 27 EU member states, so they become national laws that get enforced by national courts.
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For Big Tech, that means all previous tech regulations are enforced in *Ireland*, because Ireland is a tax haven, and all the tech companies fly Irish flags of convenience.
Here’s the thing: every tax haven is also a crime haven. After all, if Google can pretend it’s Irish this week, it can pretend to be Cypriot, or Maltese, or Luxembougeious next week. So Ireland has to keep these footloose criminal enterprises happy, or they’ll up sticks and go somewhere else.
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This is why the GDPR is such a goddamned joke in practice. Big tech wipes its ass with the GDPR, and the only way to punish them starts with Ireland’s privacy commissioner, who barely bothers to get out of bed. This is an agency that spends most of its time watching cartoons on TV in its pajamas and eating breakfast cereal. So all of the big GDPR cases go to Ireland and they die there
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This is hardly a secret. The European Commission knows it’s going on. So with the DMA, the Commission has changed things up: The DMA is an “Act,” not a “Regulation.” Meaning it gets enforced in the EU’s federal courts, bypassing the national courts in crime-havens like Ireland
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In other words, the “we violate privacy law, but we do it with an app” gambit that worked on Ireland’s toothless privacy watchdog is now a dead letter, because EU federal judges have no reason to swallow that obvious bullshit.
Here in the US, the dam is breaking on federal consumer privacy law – at last!
Remember, our last privacy law was passed in 1988 to protect the sanctity of VHS rental history. It's been a minute.
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And the thing is, there's a *lot* of people who are angry about stuff that has some nexus with America's piss-poor privacy landscape. Worried that Facebook turned grampy into a Qanon? That Insta made your teen anorexic? That TikTok is brainwashing millennials into quoting Osama Bin Laden? Or that cops are rolling up the identities of everyone at a Black Lives Matter protest or the Jan 6 riots by getting location data from Google?
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Or that Red State Attorneys General are tracking teen girls to out-of-state abortion clinics? Or that Black people are being discriminated against by online lending or hiring platforms? Or that someone is making AI deepfake porn of you?
A federal privacy law with a private right of action - which means that individuals can sue companies that violate their privacy - would go a long way to rectifying all of these problems
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There's a pretty big coalition for that kind of privacy law! Which is why we have seen a procession of imperfect (but steadily improving) privacy laws working their way through Congress.
If you sign up for EFF’s mailing list at eff.org we’ll send you an email when these come up, so you can call your Congressjerk or Senator and talk to them about it.
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Or better yet, make an appointment to drop by their offices when they’re in their districts, and explain to them that you’re not just a registered voter from their district, you’re the kind of elite tech person who goes to Defcon, and *then* explain the bill to them. That stuff makes a difference
What about self-help?How are we doing on making interoperability legal again, so hackers can just *fix shit* without waiting for Congress or a federal agency to act?
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All the action here these day is in the state Right to Repair fight. We’re getting state R2R bills, like the one that passed this year in Oregon that *ban* parts-pairing, where DRM is used to keep a device from using a new part until it gets an authorized technician’s unlock code.
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These bills are pushed by a fantastic group of organizations called the Repair Coalition, at Repair.org, and they’ll email you when one of these laws is going through your statehouse, so you can meet with your state reps and explain to the JV squad the same thing you told your federal reps.
Repair.org’s prime mover is Ifixit, who are genuine heroes of the repair revolution, and Ifixit’s founder, Kyle Wiens, is here at the con.
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When you see him, you can shake his hand and tell him thanks, and that’ll be even better if you tell him that you’ve signed up to get alerts at repair.org!
Now, on to the final way that we reverse enhittification and build that new, good internet: *you*, the tech labor force.
For years, your bosses tricked you into thinking you were founders in waiting, temporarily embarrassed entrepreneurs who were only momentarily drawing a salary.
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You certainly weren’t *workers*. Your power came from your intrinsic virtue, not like those lazy slobs in unions who have to get their power through that kumbaya solidarity nonsense.
It was a trick. You were scammed. The power you had came from scarcity, and so when the scarcity ended, when the industry started ringing up six-figure annual layoffs, your power went away with it.
The only durable source of power for tech workers is as *workers*, in a union.
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Think about Amazon. Warehouse workers have to piss in bottles and have the highest rate of on-the-job maimings of any competing business. Whereas Amazon coders get to show up for work with facial piercings, green mohawks, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don’t understand. They can piss whenever they want!
That’s not because Jeff Bezos or Andy Jassy loves you guys. It’s because they’re scared you’ll quit and they don’t know how to replace you.
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Time for the second obligatory William Gibson quote: “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” You know who’s living in the future?. Those Amazon blue-collar workers. They are the bleeding edge.
Drivers whose eyeballs are monitored by AI cameras that do digital phrenology on their faces to figure out whether to dock their pay, warehouse workers whose bodies are ruined in just months.
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As tech bosses beef up that reserve army of unemployed, skilled tech worker, then those tech workers - *you all* - will arrive at the same future as them.
Look, I know that you’ve spent your careers explaining in words so small your boss could understand them, that you refuse to enshittify the company’s products, and I thank you for your service.
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But if you want to go on fighting for the user, you need power that’s more durable than scarcity. You need a union. Wanna learn how? Check out the Tech Workers Coalition and Tech Solidarity, and get organized.
Enshittification didn’t arise because our bosses changed. They were always that guy.
They were always yankin’ on that enshittification lever in the C-suite.
What changed was the environment, everything that kept that switch from moving.
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And that’s good news, in a bankshot way, because it means we can make good services out of imperfect people. As a wildly imperfect person myself, I find this heartening.
The new good internet is in our grasp: an internet that has the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the greased-skids simplicity of Web 2.0 that let all our normie friends get in on the fun.
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Tech bosses want you to think that good UX and enshittification can’t ever be separated. That’s such a self-serving proposition you can spot it from orbit. *We* know it, 'cause we built the old good internet., and we’ve been fighting a rear-guard action to preserve it for the past two decades.
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It’s time to stop playing defense. It's time to go on the offensive. To restore competition, regulation, interop and tech worker power so that we can create the new, good internet we’ll need to fight fascism, the climate emergency, and genocide.
To build a digital nervous system for a 21st century in which our children can thrive and prosper.
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I'm coming to BURNING MAN! On TUESDAY (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!" at PALENQUE NORTE (7&E). On WEDNESDAY (Aug 28) at NOON, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at LIMINAL LABS (830&C).
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Community voting for SXSW is live! If you wanna hear Rida Qadri and me talk about how gig workers can disenshittify their jobs with interoperability, vote for this one!
https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/150498
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AI design is increasingly stripping agency from humans, treating users as mere passive recipients of a tool. How do we instead design a new universe of possible technologies valuing human agency and creativity? In this fireside chat, we reflect on the long history of user hacks and innovation to learn how user ingenuity has always improved technology from the ground up. We consider truly innovative, humanistic uses of AI that can fulfill the promise of this technology. Participants leave inspired to consider the ideal design of AI and how we can control our own digital worlds.
Cory Doctorow