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Micah Loewinger: Hey, it's Micah. If you've been enjoying the Divided Dial series as much as we have, come join us in New York on June 11th for a very cool, very low key live show that I'll be doing with Katie Thornton. We'll hear about the crazy lengths Katie went to to bring these stories to life and we'll talk about what our role is in keeping the public airwaves public. The event is on June 11th in New York. You can find more information at wnyc.org/events and in the show notes for today's podcast. Come and nerd out with us on all things radio. It's going to be really fun. Hey, you're listening to the On the Media midweek podcast. I'm Micah Loewinger.

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Micah Loewinger: This past weekend I went to Seattle to sit down with an all-time favorite OTM guest, tech activist and writer Cory Doctorow. We recorded the following conversation in front of a live audience at the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival, the topic, Enshittification, Corey's theory of how everything on the internet got worse. You may remember we first discussed this idea on the show a couple years ago and this was an opportunity to talk about what enshittification looks like right now, the latest attempts by tech companies to take advantage of users and workers, and the surge of lawsuits attempting to hold these companies to account. Here's that interview in Seattle.

Corey, thanks for being here.

Cory Doctorow: Thank you very much. It's great to be here. Thanks everyone for coming.

Micah Loewinger: You coined the phrase "enshittification" to describe a creeping phenomenon you noticed everywhere once user friendly tech platforms were becoming worse, shittier. Let's use Amazon as an example. The irony is not lost on me that we're speaking on stage at the Amazon Meeting Center. What was Amazon like in the early days when, in your view, it worked better for the people who used it?

Cory Doctorow: Well, the thing to understand is that enshittification is a modification of this idea that if you're not paying for the product, you're the product. The thesis of enshittification is whether or not you're paying for the product, you're the product, that two-sided platforms go after not just the end users or customers, but also the business users, so in Amazon's case, that would be the sellers.

When Amazon kicked off we'll remember that they were selling goods at a loss. They had a huge surplus because the capital markets were willing to trust Jeff Bezos with a lot of their money and they were able to sell things often below cost. Certainly when you factored in all kinds of goodies like free returns and discounted shipping and so on, it was a great deal for end users, and so we piled into the platform and we found ways to get locked into the platform.

Some of us bought Prime. Statistically, most of us bought Prime. If you're an affluent household in America, the chances are you've got it. An absolute majority of Americans households have. It means you're pre-buying a year's worth of shipping, which means that for most cases, it would be pretty silly to go shop somewhere else because you've already paid for shipping for the year.

We also bought things like digital media, so books and movies and songs and audio books, and these were permanently locked to Amazon's platform using what's called digital rights management, a kind of encryption. It's against the law to remove it, and so once you bought it, you can't leave the platform without leaving behind your purchases. Over time, what we saw was that the deal for both business customers and the end users decayed.

Micah Loewinger: You break down enshittification into three steps. Step 1 you just described, which is make a good thing for users. Here's this amazing marketplace where you can get what feels like anything in the world and it will be sent to you really fast, and there's no shipping if you have Prime. That's great. Stage 1 is, offer a good thing, but then try to lock people in. Stage 2 is you squeeze the users to make things better for the business customers. That would be the sellers, the advertisers, the publishers. Describe that in the case of Amazon.

Cory Doctorow: Well, in the case of Amazon, we saw some of those generous discounts get rolled back. We saw, in particular, a sell-off of the ad placement on the search results page. Amazon has this business, they call it an advertising business, but it doesn't work like other advertising businesses. They make $38 billion a year selling search results. The first result when you search on Amazon is not the best match for your query, it's the one whose backer paid the most money to be there.

Now, if you're a certain kind of merchant, being able to buy the Prime spot rather than having to be the best makes a lot of sense, but for everyone else, it's a raw deal. That first box on an Amazon search page on average is 29% more expensive than the best match for your query. The top row is 25% more expensive than the best match for your query. On average, you have to go down about 17 places, although it's not exactly 17 places. You can't just count 17 and click it, but that's about where you're going to find the best match. This is a way of making things much better for business customers at the expense of end users and ultimately, at the expense of the best businesses who are selling on the platform.

Micah Loewinger: Which brings us to stage 3 of enshittification. The platform then squeezes the businesses so that all of the value goes to the platform and its investors.

Cory Doctorow: Yes. We see this with Amazon. Ken Racine, when he was AG of Washington D.C., launched a case against Amazon on the basis that they were both formally and informally binding their sellers over to something called a most favored nation deal, where you had to sell on Amazon at your best price, but at the same time, Amazon was adding junk fees, so fulfillment fees and listings fees and so on to the point where 45 to 51 cents out of every dollar that was being brought in on the platform by third-party sellers was going straight to Amazon. That was the Amazon tax.

Now, very few firms have a 51% margin that they can afford to give to a distributor, and so in order to make that up, they had to raise their prices, but because of this most favored nation deal, when they raised their prices on Amazon, they had to raise their prices at Target, at Walmart, at mom and pop shops, and even at their own website or warehouse store. The price went up across the economy because of this.

This is not only turning the platform into a pile of shit, this is enshittifying everything. This is really what antitrust law was built around, was this idea that if you don't publicly regulate markets, then you will have private regulations of markets. You'll have individual billionaires who are going to decide what's for sale, how much it costs, where you can buy it, and whether you'll ever find out about it.

Micah Loewinger: You've pointed to this great example of Diapers.com, which was at one point a competitor to Amazon, doing what it sounds like, delivering to you diapers on a subscription.

Cory Doctorow: We think about Amazon and indeed other big tech companies as being like Willy Wonka's idea factory, just fizzing with cool products, but when you actually take a hard look at how they came to dominate their sectors, what you see is that they bought other people's good ideas. This is the case with Google, which had one very successful product 25 years ago and almost everything they'd made in-house crashed, and almost everything they made a success of, they bought from someone else.

This is the case of Amazon as well. Amazon didn't go from dominating books to dominating every retail sector by being the best retailer for it. They did it by buying the best retailers in those sectors, and then they came to a company called Diapers.com and no prizes for figuring out what they sold. Diapers.com said, "No, we've got a tidy business here. We don't want to sell to you." Amazon lit a couple hundred million dollars on fire selling diapers and other goods from Diapers.com below cost until Diapers.com lost the war and they sold to Amazon.

Now, actually, when they sold to Amazon at a bankruptcy, they had another offer from Walmart that was better than the offer than they had from Amazon, but they were afraid at that point that if they sold to Walmart instead of Amazon, that Amazon would find another way to get revenge on them. They sold to Amazon for pennies on the dollar, and Amazon shut them down. They don't exist anymore.

That's pretty typical across the economy of large firms and how they grow. It's not by being better. It's by having more access to the capital markets who are very anxious to explore the returns that are available to a monopolist. That's why they were willing to give Amazon a couple hundred million dollars to set on fire, because they understood that if they did this once and they proved that anyone who didn't sell to Amazon was going down hard, then that would be a valuable investment for the next acquisition and the next and the next, that no one would say no ever again, and that's pretty much what happened.

Micah Loewinger: I think if we maybe had an Amazon spokesperson on stage and they were responding to you, they might bristle at you saying that people are trapped on Amazon. It's not so hard to cancel Prime. There are also other online marketplaces where you can buy stuff. It's not like Amazon has run everyone out of business. More than that, millions of people use it, generating billions of dollars of revenue. This sounds like a very successful business that people like to use.

Cory Doctorow: Well, look, there's nothing wrong with intermediaries per se. Look, I'm mostly a writer. I write books. There are writers who manage to write their books, edit their books, sell their books. There was a guy when I was growing up in Toronto, like all the best Americans, I'm a Canadian, who-- he called himself Crad [unintelligible 00:09:33] and he used to sell his books on a street corner with a sign around his neck that said, "Very famous Canadian author, buy my books," or when he was feeling cheeky, he had a sign that just said, "Margaret Atwood."

Crad was a force of nature. He would secretly record the drunks that picked on him and then sell "Best of" cassettes of his conversations with drunks. There are a lot of writers I want to hear from who aren't capable of doing that, and there's nothing wrong with publishers, booksellers, distributors, marketers, all the people who bring books between writers to readers or bring goods and services between providers and consumers without it.

The problem is that when a firm that is there to intermediate, to be a help meet to facilitate, usurps the relationship between the producer and the user of a product or a service, then they're able to choke it off. There are aspects of Amazon's business that are very admirable. They've managed some really incredible logistical challenges. They've done some amazing feats of IT. My background is in IT. I look at much of what they've done, I find it very admirable. I think it's hard to question that Amazon has wrapped itself around the economy.

For example, Prime shipping costs Amazon nothing. They make so much money cornering their sellers into selling through Prime that the entire cost of shipping is offset. When Amazon sells you a "Made by Amazon" good and they ship it to you, they bill that shipping to one of their rivals who sells on their platform effectively, not literally, but they're making so much money from the high margins they get by corralling people into it. If you ship with someone else, even if you have a shipper that is comparable to Prime that delivers as reliably and in the same time frame, Amazon won't put you in the top of those listings and so you'll effectively be invisible.

Amazon has this way of corralling people in, just like with most favored nation pricing. These are not the actions of a firm that thinks that it has the best product that people would just use and price on voluntarily. These are the actions of a firm that understands that it has market power and isn't afraid to use it.

In the case of Prime, there was an FTC action last year where Chair Lina Khan and her colleagues showed that Amazon's internal memos documented that they were making people sign up for Prime accidentally, that people thought that they were just signing up to get free shipping and they were accidentally signing up for Prime and couldn't find out or figure out how to cancel it, that Amazon's own internal memos had found versions of that signup form that didn't cause that confusion, and they opted not to use them because they made more money when they tricked people into doing things.

This is not a firm that is making the most money because it's the best. It's making the most money because it has the most power.

Micah Loewinger: Let's talk about another example, Google. A federal court has deemed Google to be a monopoly.

Cory Doctorow: Three federal courts.

Micah Loewinger: Okay. That's settled. A lot of people say that Google search has gotten worse. Maybe you can relate to this. Sometimes you have to Google something multiple times to try to find something that you know is out there. The Department of Justice has actually found evidence to back up this paranoid feeling that some of us have.

Cory Doctorow: In one of the two DOJ cases, there was also a private case against Google, they published some internal correspondence from Google, memos written by Google executives, documenting an internal firestorm at the firm in 2019. In 2019, they'd reached this point where their search revenue growth had stalled. There's a reason it had stalled. They had 90% market share. Where are you going to get growth from? We were already using Google search for everything we could search for. Literally any phrase that passed however transiently, through your head, you rushed to a Google search box and typed it in.

Where is the growth going to come from? They could raise a billion more people to maturity and make them into Google customers, which is like the Google classroom plan, but that's a much slower project. It takes 18 years. Meanwhile, they needed to find growth somewhere else.

There's this guy, Prabhakar Raghavan, who was the revenue czar, and he had come to the company from McKinsey by way of Yahoo, where he'd overseen Yahoo search decline from 90% market share to 0% market share. Google hired him and put him in charge of revenue, and he had a brilliant idea.

He said, "Well, we do all these things to make search more accurate. We, sometimes, will search for synonyms of words you've typed or alternate spellings of words you've typed to helpfully suggest things in the background. You won't even see it. We're just doing it because we know that when people search for trousers, they might be looking for pants and so on. What if we just turned all that off? Then you might have to search twice or three times to find out what you were looking for, and we get to show you more ads every time you run a query."

His rival was this guy, Gomes, who was an engineer, and he had been with Google since the earliest days. He built out their server infrastructure. He was like, "No, I think that's a terrible idea. I think we're here to provide good search tools." You see in the memos this fight between these two factions, and in the end, money talks.

Micah Loewinger: They purposefully made it bad to make more money, and they did. It worked.

Cory Doctorow: They did. They continued their growth story, Wall Street continued to reward them with a very high price-to-earnings ratio, and that means that they can do things like buy other companies with their stock, which is not a thing that companies that don't have high price-to-earnings ratios get to do.

Today you go to Google and there's six ads that look exactly like search results, and they're labeled with the word "ad" in eight point type, that's 90% gray on white. Then there's two paragraphs of AI hallucinations, and then beneath that, there's 10 SEO links written by scumbags that Google can't be bothered to fight anymore because they laid off 12,000 people right after doing an $80 billion stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years. Yes, Google is bad these days.

Micah Loewinger: We have limited time, so I'm going to let you choose which example we go into. Do you want to talk about Uber, or do you want to talk about the nursing industry?

Cory Doctorow: Oh, let's talk about the nursing industry.

Micah Loewinger: Okay, go for it.

Cory Doctorow: Sure. Well, maybe we can get a twofer here. Uber has this labor pricing thing called algorithmic wage discrimination, comes from this legal theorist, Veena Dubal, where if you're a picky Uber driver, you get a higher rate per mile and per minute, but as soon as you start taking those offers, the rate goes down. Algorithmic wage discrimination has metastasized out of Uber and into everything that describes itself as Uber for whatever.

One of the Uber-for-whatevers is nursing. Three giant apps now have replaced what used to be dozens and dozens of staffing agencies that brought in contract nurses for hospitals. At least one of them, when a nurse clocks on for a shift, gets that nurse's credit history. If that nurse is sitting on a large amount of credit card debt, especially delinquent debt, that nurse is offered a lower wage because people who are facing looming debt will work for less money. This is algorithmic wage discrimination 2.0, and it's coming to any instance in which you are paid through these spot markets where it's very opaque and hard to see, and where you're misclassified as a contractor and so on.

Micah Loewinger: I'm not an economist, but I would assume that these companies that are getting worse would eventually encounter a competitor who would offer a comparable product that's better, and Amazon, Google, these nursing apps, Uber would have to make a better case to their consumers. Why hasn't there been more competition?

Cory Doctorow: Well, that's the crux, really, of the enshittification hypothesis, that it's not that these are worse people. In many cases, the people running these companies are the same people who ran them when we really, I think, faithfully recall them doing good things. We weren't hallucinating. Google was good. Facebook was a nice place to talk to your friends. Amazon gave you a good deal. All the rest of it at one point.

The same who people are running it, they didn't get a brain parasite and become evil. That's the head of our health program. What happened was they used to face constraints. It used to be that they had competitors, but you have things like Mark Zuckerberg, who confronts the possibility that Instagram is going to take away his users. People were leaving Facebook for Instagram despite the lock-in.

Social media's got this great lock-in which economists call the collective action problem, but you know as the six people in your group chat can't agree on what board game you're going to play. If you can't agree on what board game you're going to play, you definitely can't agree on when it's time to leave Facebook, and you love each other more than you hate Mark Zuckerberg, so you're stuck there.

In the 2010s, Instagram comes along and people start to bolt for the exit, and they go to Instagram. Mark Zuckerberg tries to buy Instagram for $1 billion at a time when they have 12 employees, and his CFO is like, "Mark, are you nuts?"

Mark Zuckerberg, a man fully committed to putting down his worst plans in writing where they can be discovered by government lawyers, sends an email to his CFO going, "Well, Bob, as you know, this murder is fully premeditated." He says, "The reason we're buying them is because people like Instagram more than they like Facebook, and so if we buy Instagram, then they'll stop being Facebook users, but they'll still be customers of Facebook, the platform, they'll still be locked to us, and so they'll have nowhere to go."

You look across the board, you see versions of this. Competition has dwindled, and where it hasn't done this through acquisition, it's done this through exclusive dealings. Google buys every search box, including on Apple, so that no matter where you search, you're searching on Google. It doesn't matter which browser you use, what carrier, what mobile operating system, you're always searching on Google. Who's going to make a new search engine if the chances of you finding a new search box are zero?

You see these barriers to entry being built. They're being built often in contravention of the black letter of our antitrust and competition laws. Until fairly recently, we didn't see much enforcement of those laws, and so competition went away, companies just stopped worrying about their competitors.

Micah Loewinger: You've talked a little bit about antitrust Woodstock. This is the fact that Google and Facebook have been facing investigations from the government in the same-

Cory Doctorow: Trials.

Micah Loewinger: Trials, excuse me.

Cory Doctorow: At the same time as Apple-

Micah Loewinger: At the same time in the same courtroom.

Cory Doctorow: In the same courthouse. This is a really remarkable thing. All over the world there has been an enormous upsurge of interest in antitrust and competition law. This thing that dates from the late 19th century, the Sherman Act of 1890 was passed by Senator John Sherman, brother of Tecumseh Sherman. That's how vintage this stuff is. It's largely been in a coma for about 40 years. Ronald Reagan embraced this weird philosophy from this guy, Robert Bork, that said that the purpose of antitrust law should be to protect monopolies on the grounds that they're efficient. There's a very weird QAnon reading of these statutes.

Micah Loewinger: Well, didn't he say the well-being of the consumer?

Cory Doctorow: Consumer welfare. That's it, so that the purpose should be to ensure that firms lower prices while improving quality and not that they don't amass power. Of course, if you allow firms to amass a lot of power and then they raise prices, they will insist, "Well, we didn't raise prices because we have power. We raised prices because energy went up or labor went up, or the moon is in Venus." It's then up to you to try and prove it. Of course, if you let them amass power, they have more power than the government and then it becomes very hard to break them up. It's the kind of thing you want to do early on.

We have seen this incredible revival of antitrust, and it's happened in the US. In Canada, we have a competition bureau that in its entire history has challenged three mergers, but successfully challenged zero mergers. Last year, we got this massive new set of powers for our competition regulator. In the UK, in the EU, in South Korea and Japan, and in China, there have been these massive surges of antitrust enforcement, lawmaking, new policy making, new investigations. What's wild is that none of this is being driven by billionaire dark money.

This is the first time in my memory that we've had a thing that people wanted and billionaires didn't, and governments all over the world are acting on it. Trump has just done some real violence to the agencies that were doing this, but Trump is making the mistake that the Grinch made when he stole Christmas. The Grinch thought that the Whos in Whoville saw the tinsel in the balls, and then Christmas entered their hearts. What he didn't understand was that the reason they hung up the tinsel in the balls was that Christmas was in their souls.

Trump thinks that the reason that we all got interested in breaking up corporate power is because Lina Khan did something about it. The reason Lina Khan was able to do something about it is because we cared, and that doesn't go away when he fires Lina Khan or illegally fires Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Slaughter from the FTC and so on. That energy is still there.

[applause]

Cory Doctorow: Thank you.

Micah Loewinger: I don't know where you get these metaphors from. It's pretty incredible.

Cory Doctorow: Hazards of being a science fiction writer.

Micah Loewinger: Antitrust is one way we might challenge enshittification. You are on this other train that's pretty counterintuitive. We're going to unpack it. Tariffs. You think potentially tariffs could chip away at enshittification?

Cory Doctorow: Here's the thing. When life gives you sars, you make sarsaparilla. All over the world, for about 20 years, countries have been pressurized by the US Trade Representative to adopt a law that mirrors a law that we got here in 1998, called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, DMCA. Section 1201 of the DMCA, I'm sorry for the alphabet soup here, makes it a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine to tamper with a digital lock. If there's a digital lock that stops you from moving your Kindle book to a Kobo, even if you are legally allowed to move the Kindle book to the Kobo, removing the lock to do so becomes a crime.

It's legal to take your car to any mechanic, but if the mechanic needs to break a digital lock to read the diagnostic information and find out why the check engine light is lit, then that mechanic fixing your car becomes a felony. It's legal to unlock all the features that come with your Tesla when you buy it, but if there's a digital lock that stops you from unlocking the subscription content and the software upgrades, then getting those on your own becomes a crime.

It's legal to put third-party ink in your printer, but there's four giant printer companies, have all bought each other, they have raised the price of ink to $10,000 a gallon. I'm not kidding. It is the most expensive substance you can buy as a civilian without getting a special permit. You are printing your grocery list with colored water that cost more than the semen of a Kentucky Derby winning stallion. If they use a digital lock to detect a third-party cartridge, then removing that third-party lock so you can put your own goddamn ink in your own goddamn printer becomes a crime.

Now, if you're America, that sucks, because most Americans are not shareholders in the companies that do this, but at least all those companies are listed on the American stock exchanges. If you're an American investor, it's like it's good for your GDP. If you're anyone else in the world, all this means is that you are allowing American companies to pick your own people's pockets to steal their privacy, because you can't install a privacy blocker if you have to remove a digital lock to do it.

More than 50% of all web users have installed an ad blocker, which also protects your privacy. It's the largest consumer boycott in human history. No one's ever installed an ad blocker for an app because you have to remove a digital lock to change how the app works so that you can protect your privacy while you use it, and that's a felony. An app, it's just like a website wrapped in the right kind of IP to make it a crime to protect your privacy while you use it. That's why companies are so horny to get you to use their apps and not use their websites.

You're selling your public's money, you're selling your public's privacy. Why would you do it? Well, the US Trade Representative let it be known to every trading partner of America that if you don't pass a law like this you can't expect tariff-free access to US market, so happy Liberation Day. Countries around the world that pass these laws- in Canada, it's Bill C11, passed in 2012, in Europe, it's Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, Mexico did it in 2020 as part of USMCA and so on, all these countries that have adopted these laws have no reason to keep them on the books.

Right now, the response that we're coming up with sucks. It's like, "Well, we're going to tariff your stuff because you're tariffing our stuff." If you're Canada, we're a branch plant for the US, we ship raw materials to you guys, you make them into products, we bring them back and we buy them. 25% tariffs on US-manufactured goods is a 25% tax on the Canadian public. It's a very weird way to punish America. It's like punching yourself in the face really hard and hoping the downstairs neighbor says, "Ouch."

Meanwhile, it's pretty indiscriminate. Tariffing soybeans just hurts some poor farmer in a state that begins and ends with a vowel who never hurt anyone in Canada, but if you legalize breaking digital locks, then you can launch a new Canadian tech sector into a stable orbit by consuming the monopoly rents that have been extracted by American tech companies during this quarter century where they've been ripping off the world.

You can export those tools to everyone in the world, including Americans, who are obviously also victimized by this stuff. You can become to the world for these jailbreaking tools, what Finland was for mobile phones for 15 years when Nokia was at the top of the world. You strike at the highest margin lines of business of the most profitable firms on the S&P 500. The CEOs who paid $1 million out of their own pockets to sit behind Donald Trump on the dais, those CEOs' companies are the ones who bear the brunt of this assault.

This is a great policy. It's how you win a trade war. Don't get angry at Elon Musk's Nazi salute. He loves the attention. Kick him in the dongle. Move fast and break kings. This, I think, is an incredible opportunity. I think the first government that does it is going to start a stampede because there's going to be a lot of people all over the world who will benefit from the jailbreaking tools, but only a few countries that will dominate selling those tools to everyone else.

You're going to be able to go into your dry cleaner and get an alternative app store on your Xbox or your phone from some guy with a folding table at the back of it, everywhere, but only one country is going to have the company that makes and supports that suite of tools. That's the opportunity that is up for grabs right now.

Micah Loewinger: Okay, let's unpack a little bit of what you just said. Basically, if I have this right, the United States used the threat of tariffs to coerce countries into passing copyright laws that would force them to protect American tech dominance abroad. Now that that leverage is way gone-

Cory Doctorow: Totally.

Micah Loewinger: -there's no reason for these companies to prioritize American tech at the expense of their own consumers.

Cory Doctorow: Exactly.

Micah Loewinger: You think that what we could see is basically an explosion of competition in Canada, Europe, Mexico, wherever, that would threaten Amazon, Google, Facebook, whatever-

Cory Doctorow: Apple, Microsoft.

Micah Loewinger: -Apple to our benefit?

Cory Doctorow: Yes, well, because we're going to import it. Look, we don't have to confine ourselves to importing reasonably priced pharmaceuticals from Canada. We can also bring in the tools of technological self determination. Anyone who can process a payment and get an internet connection can buy software from anywhere. We don't have a great firewall of America yet, and if we do, I've got a VPN to sell you. I think that we will be beneficiaries of these tools. Absolutely.

Micah Loewinger: Let's use an example so that everyone can sink their teeth into it. You've pointed to this app called the OG app. It was created by a couple teenagers. It was a jailbreak of Instagram. Tell us more about it and explain how that could be a blueprint for what you're imagining.

Cory Doctorow: These two teenagers, they got sick of how Instagram worked. They remembered the old good Instagram, they wanted a new good Instagram. They made an Instagram client that would throw up a little web browser where you'd log into Instagram with your login and password. It would grab the little authentication token, the cookie, put it into their app, and then it would go to Instagram and grab everything waiting for you on Instagram and it would throw away all of the ads, it would throw away all of the suggestions.

It would throw away everything that was out of sequence like three-day-old posts or three-month-old posts that were engagement bait and would just show you the things that the people you followed had posted with the most recent ones at the top. Unlike the Instagram app, which is sending just unimaginable torrents of telemetry back to Mark Zuckerberg whenever you use it, every time you touch it, every time you look at it, every time you scroll up or down, all of that stuff is being recorded, none of your interactions with the service were transmitted to Facebook unless you liked or commented on something, and then it would send the like or the comment to it. Everything else was a black hole.

It was in the top 10 of both app stores within a day. That day, Meta sent a complaint to Apple and Google, and because there is honor among thieves, they both took it down. Now, if you could just circumvent, if you could just jailbreak, if you could just go around the digital locks, we could just have that app on all of our devices right now. It could actually just work with the official Instagram app. It could just watch what the Instagram app was doing and pull stuff out of it.

They could be much more aggressive about how they did it, but because we have this law that says, "Well, once you put a digital lock on something, it's against the rules to change it," we've created a felony contempt of business model where doing things that displease shareholders, but have never been prohibited by any legislature, become a crime. This is the opportunity that we have here is to move from a regime in which what you can do is limited by things that please the shareholders of large firms to what you can do being all of those things that legislatures permit, that your elected representatives have said you should be allowed to do. It's a much better regime, I think. Thank you.

[applause]

Micah Loewinger: Clearly, the fact that the app was so popular in just a day speaks to this hunger for a different way of thinking about social media that's not about generating value and time on the app or exposing you to as many advertisements as possible, but just the thing that you signed up for, the platonic ideal of social media. As you said, there's a law on the books that would make this kind of jailbreaking very onerous. This future opportunity that you're envisioning, why wouldn't this be happening all the time? The OG app that Canadians enjoy, how could we have access to that under this current legal landscape?

Cory Doctorow: Well, the way that we'd end up getting access to it is you get a tool from Canada or somewhere else that would let you install a third-party app store on your iPhone, and because that tool would come from a country where they have meaningful privacy and consumer and labor protections, you could be pretty sure that it wasn't spying on you or doing other nasty things to you because you'd have a throat to choke, there'd be someone to sue if the tool was no good. Then that tool would allow you to install third-party app stores, and you'd choose an app store and that app store would include the OG app and you'd be off to the races.

Micah Loewinger: Got it. You've been talking about enshittification for a couple of years now. It was dubbed the word of the year by a few organizations, including the American Dialect Society. I think it's fair to say it's, forevermore, a part of the tech journalism Silicon Valley lexicon. Do you think that putting a name to this phenomenon has led to some kind of demonstrable change?

Cory Doctorow: It has certainly taken what was, heretofore, a very abstract technical discussion, and it's really turned this very nuanced critique into something that a lot more people have their heads around. I'm not going to say that it's fixed anything yet.

Micah Loewinger: The companies that you write and talk about, they're paying attention, right?

Cory Doctorow: Sure. David Risher, the CEO of Lyft, he used the phrase in his report to his shareholders this year. We've seen other CEOs take up the mantle. At its root, enshittification is a thesis about constraint. It's not about individual bad guys. Although there are some really bad guys involved, and I'm here to make fun of them all day long. I don't think it matters which person is sitting in Mark Zuckerberg's seat if the law is set up to allow Mark Zuckerberg to create a felony contempt of business model out of that world.

Lily Tomlin used to do this bit on Laugh-In and Saturday Night Live where she would pretend to be a Bell System operator. She would end all of these fake ads for AT&T by turning to the camera and saying, "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company." When Lina Khan was chair of the FTC, she said, "These companies, it's not that they're too big to fail, it's not just that they're too big to jail, it's that they're too big to care."

In the new book about Facebook by Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People, she starts off by talking about how Facebook executives were careless in the sense that they didn't care if what they did ended up hurting someone. They took no care with their actions. By the end of the book, they were careless in the sense that they didn't care how angry they made us, that they went from a point where they understood that if their employees staged a mass walkout or if their users staged a mass revolt, that they could face consequences. By the end of the book, they are convinced that they face no consequences.

That is ultimately what enshittification is about. The fact that giving people a minor license to be just a little profane has roped a bunch of normies into what used to be a pretty obscure domain of policy, albeit one that I've devoted most of my life to, I've worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation now for 23 years, that has really given me a lot of heart. I think that it's a mistake to be an optimist or a pessimist, which is to think that the world will get worse or better no matter what we do. I think the world gets better when we act.

If you can spy a way to act to improve the lie of the land, you may not be able to see how you get from there to the end, but at least you can see how you'll get to the next step, and from there you might see new terrain that you couldn't see from where you were when you started.

[applause]

Cory Doctorow: Thank you.

Micah Loewinger: That's a great place to end. Thank you, Cory.

Cory Doctorow: Thank you, Micah.

Micah Loewinger: Cory Doctorow is an author and activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. His latest novel, he writes books, is titled Picks and Shovels, and his new CBC podcast series is called Understood: Who Broke the Internet? Thank you all. Thanks so much, everybody here.

[applause]

[music]

Micah Loewinger: Thank you also to the stellar team at PBS who made the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival happen, Sarah Menzies, Adam Brown, Eric [unintelligible 00:37:43], Michael McClinton, Jake Newman, and Anne O'Dowd. Don't forget to tune into the big show this weekend to hear how a journalist in Hungary advises Americans to cover and think about rising threats to democracy. In the meantime, you should follow us on Bluesky and Instagram. Just search @onthemedia. I'm on there too. Thanks for listening. I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

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