Ensh****fication 

 

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone with the third and final part of our discussion with the great Cory Doctorow, journalist and novelist and special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, about the process whereby big platforms go bad, a phenomenon he calls "ensh****fication." In part one, we went through the three steps taken by big digital platforms like Facebook, Amazon, TikTok, and Twitter to get richer and get worse.

One, lose money to win customers. Two, benefit big suppliers and squeeze the small ones. Three, squeeze everyone but the shareholders, making everyone miserable but not too miserable to leave. In part two, we discussed how and why this happens and whether big digital is maybe just different from other earlier monopolies. This is the solution section, both uplifting and deeply problematic. The problem, for instance, of passing common-sense regulation, which is hobbled by confusion over how the internet works, abetted by platform designers, and also by the fact that those designers are rich and thus effective lobbyists.

Cory Doctorow: It's not that they're rich. It's that they're rich and united.

Brooke Gladstone: A crucial distinction, one only has to look back on the early days of this century.

Cory Doctorow: Tech at the time was like 150 squabbling small and medium-sized companies that all hated each other's guts and were fighting like crazy, and so lawmakers heard contradictory messages from tech. The consolidation of tech into what Tom Eastman calls five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four, that produced a common playbook, right? Now, we get a lot of tech laws that are very bad that tech has pushed for because tech is able to sing with one voice.

Brooke Gladstone: Congress offers bad solutions because they don't get the internet.

Senator Ted Stevens: The internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. If they're filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line--

Cory Doctorow: You don't have to get the technology in-depth to be able to make good policy. The last time I checked, there weren't any microbiologists in Congress, and yet we're not all dead from drinking our tap water. What you need to be able to do is hold a hearing in which the truth emerges from a truth-seeking exercise where adversarial entities counter one another's claims and an expert regulator who isn't captured by industry is able to evaluate those claims. That's how you get good rules.

Brooke Gladstone: Instead, we end up with regulations that are simply unworkable?

Cory Doctorow: Since the 1990s, every couple of years like a bad penny, someone proposes that we should make cryptography that works when criminals and foreign spies and stalkers are trying to break into it but doesn't work when police officers are trying to break into it or our own spies. Bill Clinton had something called the "Clipper chip." Right now in the UK, there is a proposal about this for instant messaging. It happens all over the world.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm not an expert. It sounds to me like if you're going to try and create an encryption system that will protect you from crooks but not from each other, you're not going to get an encryption system.

Cory Doctorow: Nailed it right there on the head in one. We have a name for what lawmakers do when we point this out. They say, "Nerd harder. We have so much confidence in your incredible genius as a sector. Surely, all you need to do is apply yourself." Sometimes they're right. Sometimes there's a dazzling act that goes on from tech where they say, "This is impossible," and what they mean is we'd rather not do it. That would be things like, "Can you have a search engine that doesn't spy on you?" They're like, "That's like having water that's not wet."

Brooke Gladstone: Which brings us to the first of Doctorow's three prime solutions to ensh****fication, fixing the problem of user privacy. Platform designers say their services can't run without using our data. They rarely say how or why. Why not begin the fix by returning to a form of advertising we had two decades ago, ads based on context rather than behavior?

Cory Doctorow: Let's start with how a behavioral ad works. You land on a webpage and there is a process where the webpage, the publisher takes all the information they have about you that they've gathered through this ad tech surveillance system.

Brooke Gladstone: Which includes what?

Cory Doctorow: Everything you've bought, everywhere you've gone, everything you've looked at, all the people you know, your age, your demographics, your address, everything. They say, "I have here one Brooke Gladstone, NPR host and proud New Yorker who last week was thinking about buying an air conditioner for her apartment." They say, "What am I bid for this Brooke Gladstone?"

That goes off to one of these ad tech platforms. The ad tech platform asks the advertisers, the buy-side platform. They say, "Who among you will pay me for Brooke Gladstone?" There is a little auction that takes place. If you've ever noticed that the page lags when you're loading it, that's the surveillance lag, right? That's the auctions. Dozens of them taking place at once.

Brooke Gladstone: What? How do I not know this?

Cory Doctorow: Yes, it's terrible, right? Bandwidth gets faster, pages get slower, and it's the surveillance lag that's doing it. All this busy marketplace stuff happening in the background.

Brooke Gladstone: Even if an ad company fails to win your behavioral ad auction, the process still gives them a lot of insight into your behavior. Whereas with context ads, they mostly have access to what's relevant and obvious.

Cory Doctorow: You are reading an article about the great outdoors. They look at your IP address and they go, "This is someone in New York." They say that you're using an iPhone, so it's someone who has $1,000 to buy a phone. They say to the marketplace, "Who wants to advertise to someone in New York who's reading about the great outdoors?" The same thing happens and you get an ad, but the ad is not about you. It's about what you're reading.

Brooke Gladstone: The advertiser will know what the publisher of the article knows, not your Google searches or your health concerns or what's in your email address book.

Cory Doctorow: If Congress says, "We are going to pass a comprehensive privacy law," the industry would have to respond with context ads.

Brooke Gladstone: That's one potential privacy fix, but we need more than that. The legislative focus seems to be on children's privacy. Do we have a model in the Child Online Protection Act?

Cory Doctorow: We could if we ever bothered to enforce it. COPA says that you can't gather data on people who are under 13. If you recall when poor Shou Chew, the CEO of TikTok, was being grilled by Congress, there was a congressman from Georgia who was just weirdly horny for whether or not pupils were being measured.

Congressman Buddy Carter: Can you say with 100% certainty that TikTok does not use the phone's camera to determine whether the content that elicits a pupil dilation should be amplified by the algorithm? Can you tell me that?

Shou Chew: We do not collect body, face, or voice data to identify our users. The only face data that you'll get that we collect is when you use the filters to have, say, sunglasses on your face, we need to know where your eyes are.

Congressman Buddy Carter: Why do you need to know where the eyes are if you're not seeing if they're dilated?

Shou Chew: That data is stored on your local device and deleted after use if you use it for facial. Again, we do not collect body, face, or voice data to identify our users.

Congressman Buddy Carter: I find that hard to believe. It's our understanding that they're looking at the eyes. How do you determine what age they are then?

Shou Chew: We rely on age-gating as our key age assurance.

Congressman Buddy Carter: Age?

Shou Chew: Gating, which is when you ask the user what age they are. We have also developed some tools where we look at the public profile to go through the videos that they post to see whether--

Congressman Buddy Carter: Well, that's creepy. Tell me more about that.

Shou Chew: It's public--

Cory Doctorow: He's just baffled as he should be. Rather than the congressman from Georgia saying, "Wait, this is what everybody does? That's terrible," he says, "We're not here to talk about your American competitors. We are here to talk about what you're doing for Xi Jinping." You know what? They're all doing that.

Brooke Gladstone: Congress has settled on another unsatisfying measure. The Child Protection Act doesn't really do anything?

Cory Doctorow: Does it? Can anyone with a straight face look at Congress's legislative intent in passing a rule? On the one hand, they pretty definitely don't mean measure people's pupils and do some kind of digital phrenology to figure out if they're over 13. On the other hand, they didn't mean give everyone a box that says, "I'm over 13." There is another way of thinking about this, which is to say, "Don't spy on anyone in case they might be under 13."

Brooke Gladstone: Congress is reaching back for some old-school, antitrust-style legislation.

Cory Doctorow: Mike Lee has got a bill right now that both Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz have sponsored. It says that, at a minimum, the ad tech business should be broken up so that you can be a company that provides a marketplace where people buy and sell ads, or you can be a company that represents publishers in that marketplace, or you can be a company that represents advertisers in that marketplace.

You cannot, in the mode of Google and Meta, be a company that is the marketplace that represents the buyers and represents the sellers, and somehow, even though you claim that this is a very clean arrangement, somehow the share of money going to publishers keeps going down, the cost to advertisers keeps going up, and your margins keep increasing. We could say that you can have a platform or you can use the platform. If you own a platform, you can't own one of the teams.

Brooke Gladstone: Facebook vowed not to spy on us when it started on its road of broken promises. Now, the big platforms claim that reigning in privacy would break the internet. They say the same thing about taking step two in Doctorow's program to pull big media from the dung heap. Step two is interoperability. Consider this.

Cory Doctorow: When you buy a pair of shoes, you can wear anyone's socks with them. When you buy a car, you can plug any charger into the cigarette lighter. In theory, when you buy an iPhone, you could run anyone's software on it. In fact, it is much easier to do that with an iPhone than with a car cigarette lighter. There is this latent computer science bedrock idea that is very important but esoteric, I apologize in advance, called "Turing completeness," named for Alan Turing, the great hero of computer science.

Turing completeness, it says that the only computer we know how to make is the one that can run all the programs we know how to write. You could hypothetically write a program that would allow you to install a different operating system on your iPhone or a different app store on your iPhone. It's not the technical challenge alone that stops it. The real thing that prevents it is that if you tried it, Apple would destroy you with lawsuits. They'll drum up a thousand excuses that, today, we call IP, which colloquially just means anything that allows me to control the conduct of my competitors, my critics, or my customers.

Brooke Gladstone: Of course, in fairness to big digital, they're not alone here. If you buy a John Deere tractor, only John Deere can fix it literally.

Cory Doctorow: Yes, it's a thing they do call "VIN-locking." VIN is vehicle identification number. Computers are now so cheap that they can put a little microchip in every part. After you install the part, the microchip asks the central computer in the engine, "Do you know who I am?" [chuckles] If the central computer in the engine says, "No, I've never seen you before. You're a new part," it says, "Well, I'm just not going to work until the manufacturer sends an unlocked code."

What that means is that if you're a farmer with your $500,000 piece of heavy farm equipment that you paid for with your money that you need to bring in the crops before the hailstorm comes and destroys them and you swap in the new part as farmers have done since tractors began and since plows began, your tractor says, "No, you've got to pay a John Deere technician a couple of hundred bucks to show up and just type an unlock code."

Brooke Gladstone: They got rid of that, right?

Cory Doctorow: They keep making feints towards it. What they've never said and what I don't think you'll ever hear them say is that if you want to just bypass the thing that makes sure that a John Deere technician has overseen the repair, that's your right. They're never going to say that. They are going to continue to claim that even though it's your property that the manufacturer's cold, dead hand rests upon it and that your use of your property is forever subject to their whim. If they decide to be generous with you, that's fine. As Darth Vader says in his MBA course, "I've altered the deal. Pray that I do not alter it further."

Brooke Gladstone: John Deere is doing what big digital does, interposing itself between the customers and their purchased products creating uncertainty by turning knobs by-

Cory Doctorow: -what I call "twiddling." Twiddling is the ability to change the business rules very quickly. There are no real policy constraints on twiddling.

Brooke Gladstone: Cory says three factors gave rise to the new world of big digital and made ensh****fication inevitable.

Cory Doctorow: The first is no competition. For 40 years, we let these companies buy their competitors. We let them do predatory pricing. We let them violate the antitrust law that was on the books because Ronald Reagan said that we shouldn't enforce it the way it was written. All of his successors until Biden said, "That sounds like a good idea to me too." On the one hand, there's just nowhere else to go. Then you have digital is different. The platforms can play this high-speed shell game because there's no rules on how they can change the rules.

There's no rules on how they can alter your experience or harvest your data or do other things that are bad for you. Then, finally, we can't use the intrinsic property of computers. This universality, this touring completeness to step in where Congress has failed and put limits on their twiddling ourselves by changing the technology so it's twiddle-resistant so that when they try to spy on us, our computer says, "I'm sorry. No, I belong to Brooke, not Mark Zuckerberg, and even though you've requested that private data, I am not going to furnish you with it."

Brooke Gladstone: No competition and unbridled twiddling are the first two factors kettling users. The third taps into feelings many of you have had. You can't stay, but you can't go. Because if you do, you leave your community behind, your history. You can't take it with you.

Cory Doctorow: Re-establish the connection with them. There's no right to exit.

Brooke Gladstone: Though some companies have tried to make it possible.

Cory Doctorow: A company called Power Ventures. If you just hold your Facebook login and your logins for all the other services you used, it would put them all into one inbox that you could manage centrally. You could send LinkedIn messages and Twitter messages and Facebook. You wouldn't do it in a way that would allow them to surveil you. They could see the message, but they couldn't see all the things you did leading up to the message and leaving it and so on. It was a great tool.

Facebook argued that it violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Facebook gives you this kind of Sophie's choice, where either you go and you do what's best for Brooke, the individual, or you do what's best for Brooke, the member of a community. Because if you leave, you leave the community behind. Now, we could just make this a rule. We could say as we do with most out-of-protection regimes like the California Privacy Act, like the European General Data Protection Regulation, and so on, we could say, "If you have some user's data and the user asks for the data, you got to give them the data.

Then we could say to a company like Twitter that is just cruisin' for a bruisin' from consumer protection agencies and is probably going to be operating under a new consent decree, "Hey, your consent decree, now that you've abused your users, is you've got to support this standard so that users can leave but continue to send messages to Twitter. They can take their followers with them if they leave and they can take their followees with them when they leave."

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Brooke Gladstone: To recap, to reverse the degradation of our online experience, we rest some control of our privacy by insisting on ads that collect only context rather than every known morsel of information about our earthly lives, then sue for interoperability, the right to use what we own from books to tractors and slap away the seller's cold, dead hand. Finally, we lay claim to our right to exit. The simple idea that signing out of social programs should be as easy as signing up.

All these would take lots of public pressure, but all are possible. In fact, they were normal parts of our online experience, all of them before being thrown on the dung heap with mission statements vowing to give people the power to build community, protect the user's voice, and not be evil. Big digital's current mission statement should be, "It gets worse before it gets worse." I wonder, has anyone ever stopped the process in its tracks? Have users ever rebelled before a platform or a service went south?

Cory Doctorow: Well, I've got some good news for you, Brooke, which is that podcasting has thus far been very ensh****fication-resistant.

Brooke Gladstone: Really?

Cory Doctorow: Yes, it's pretty cool. Podcasting is built on RSS.

Brooke Gladstone: I know that. It stands for Really Simple Syndication that lets pretty much anyone upload content to the internet that can be downloaded by anyone else. The creators of RSS were very aware of how platforms could lock in users and build their tech to combat that. In turn, podcasts are extremely hard to centralize.

Cory Doctorow: Which isn't to say that people aren't trying.

Brooke Gladstone: Like Apple?

Cory Doctorow: Oh, my goodness. Do they ever? YouTube. Spotify gave Joe Rogan $100 million to lock his podcast inside their app. The thing about that is that once you control the app that the podcast is in, you can do all kinds of things to the user like you can spy on them. You can stop them from skipping ads.

The BBC for a couple of decades has been caught in this existential fight over whether it's going to remain publicly funded through the license fee or whether it's going to have to become privatized. It does have this private arm that Americans are very familiar with BBC Worldwide and BBC America, which basically figure out how to extract cash from Americans to help subsidize the business of providing education, information, and entertainment to the British public.

Brooke Gladstone: The BBC created a podcast app called BBC Sounds?

Cory Doctorow: That's right. One of my favorite BBC shows of all time is The News Quiz.

Game Show Host: Welcome to The News Quiz. It's been a week in which the culture secretary suggested that BBC needs to look at new sources of funding, so all of this week's panelists will be for sale on eBay after the show.

[laughter]

Cory Doctorow: You can listen to it as a podcast on a four-week delay. [chuckles] You can hear comedians making jokes about the news of the week a month ago or you can get it on BBC Sounds. From what I'm told by my contacts at the B, people aren't rushing to listen to BBC Sounds. Instead, they're going, "There is so much podcast material available more than I could ever listen to. I'll just find something else," and that's what happened with Spotify too.

Brooke Gladstone: Spotify paid big bucks like hundreds of millions of dollars to buy out production houses and big creators like Alex Cooper and Joe Rogan in an attempt to build digital walls around their conquest's popular shows just to see their hard-one audiences say, "I'll pass."

Cory Doctorow: Now, Spotify is making all those pronouncements, "We are going to, on a select basis, move some podcasts outside for this reason and that." Basically, what's happening is they're just trying to save face as they gradually just put all the podcasts back where they belong on the internet instead of inside their walled garden.

Brooke Gladstone: Maybe it's because of the abundance of content or because like the news business, people are used to getting it for free. Podcasting seems resistant even though no medium is safe from what Doctorow is describing. Ensh****fication sits at the intersection of some of our country's most powerful players, entrenched capitalist values, and the consumer's true wants and needs. How do you see our future?

Cory Doctorow: I have hope, which is much better than optimism. Hope is the belief that if we materially alter our circumstance even in some small way that we might ascend to a new vantage point from which we can see some new course of action that was not visible to us before we took that last step. I'm a novelist and an activist and I can tell the difference between plotting a novel and running an activist campaign. In a novel, there's a very neat path from A to Z. In the real world, it's messy.

In the real world, you can have this rule of thumb that says, "Wherever you find yourself, see if you can make things better, and then see if, from there, we can stage another climb up the slope towards the world that we want." I got a lot of hope pinned on the Digital Markets Act. I got a lot of hope pinned on Lina Khan and the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust actions, the Department of Justice antitrust actions, the Digital Markets Act in the European Union, the Chinese Cyberspace Act, the Competition and Markets Authority in the UK stopping Microsoft from doing its rotten acquisition of Activision.

[music]

Cory Doctorow: I got a lot of hope for people who are fed up to the back teeth with people like Elon Musk and all these other self-described geniuses and telling them all to just go to hell. I got a lot of hope.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you for taking me on this journey with you. I am inspired. [laughs]

Cory Doctorow: Thank you for coming on it.

Brooke Gladstone: Journalist, activist, novelist Cory Doctorow. His most recent novel is called Red Team Blues.

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Brooke Gladstone: On the Media is produced by Micah Loewinger, Eloise Blondiau, Molly Schwartz, Rebecca Clark-Callender, Candice Wang, and Suzanne Gaber. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer this week was Andrew Nerviano. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

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