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“Disenshittify or die” a rant about the history of tech, how it is bad and how it might get better
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- Title
- Pluralistic: "Disenshittify or Die" (17 Aug 2024)
- Authors
- Cory Doctorow
- Published
- Aug 17 2024
- Word count
- 9588 words
The paragraph we can feel.
Meaningless. They subsidized Uber drivers with investor cash, it wasn't a real business.
In fact, arguably none of them were real businesses. If they're not making money, and they don't have a business plan (that's not enshittification) that will make them money, then they're not a real business.
Uber absolutely had the opportunity to be a real, non-harmful business - they just decided that the bait and switch would make them more money.
Taxis used to be absolutely terrible in a huge amount of places. Adding live tracking, up front pricing, and in-app payment was an enormous change for the better, and Uber could’ve made solid, consistent money as just a better “real” taxi company.
Even the ability for drivers to drop in and out of working on demand is arguably a positive - but an inherently dangerous one, given the incentives it creates. Again, they had the opportunity to use that model with the drivers classified as actual part time employees (and they do exactly that now, since the government forced them to where I am), but Uber fought that every step of the way because they felt that fucking over the “independent contractors” would make them more money.
I could give the same spiel about AirBnB, Deliveroo, even TikTok. Every one of them had the bones of a genuine improvement over the status quo - they could have been real businesses that competed on merit - but they wouldn’t have been billion dollar companies so they chose the other path.
That is also one of the more insidious things about these companies. That they just refuse to do even the bare minimum of decency unless forced. Even then, some of them rather throw a hissy fit rather than try and change their ways. Deliveroo being a prime example of that, where they pulled out of the country here because it was ruled that their delivery drivers could not be classified as independent contractors.
I hope I don't sound like an asshole here, that's not my intention, but from your wording it feels like you're seeing companies as people with human motivation, and as long as you do, you're going to be disappointed. They're not insidious, they're led by people whose job is to increase profits without breaking the law and who likely do not even think that way. Deliveroo did not throw a hissy fit, they calculated that pulling out is economically more sensible than staying. The article basically says this, the people in charge always wanted to increase profits and reduce costs doing what was possible within the law and the market and always will.
This may seem like useless pedantry, but imo fully realizing this and throwing away the misleading vocabulary is a necessary step to finding solutions, because you can't just force companies to be good and moral by law.
Nope, you do not sound like an asshole.
Oh I am fully aware companies themselves are not humans. There are humans that lead those companies though, they do have a say in how a company acts and the way they lead a company very much has an influence on how it "acts" towards the outside world.
While I largely see your point, I feel like you are over correcting by trying to put everything in a framework of pure rational acting and thoughts driven by pure greed. Which to some degree is true but if that is all there is to it we would be in an even worse corporate hellscape than we find ourselves currently in.
That is one way of looking at it. However, looking at the larger context of it all, there are other companies active in this country like Deliveroo. They are very much profitable and are so while following the law.
Which, as far as I am concerned, means that Deliveroo didn't even wanted to try playing by the rules. Meaning it isn't that much of a calculus on economy as it is the company, specifically the people behind the company, throwing a hissy fit.
That's where I disagree, there is a reason that in the EU the state of things is much less dire as it is in the US in regards to companies going down the path of enshittification.
The same applies when people blame corporate greed for inflation. Corporations are always maximally greedy. They don’t all coordinate to raise prices across industries at once.
Not entirely true, and part of the reason it's mostly true is because we created laws to prevent that collusion from happening.
Most people who own most stocks are majority shareholders in many companies across multiple industries.
I think this is really not paying attention, at all, to how uber operated. It was a red flag parade of violations and shitty business practices from day 1, much akin to Zuckerbergs "these dumb fucks trust me with their data" quote.
The point being, there was no decision, this was always the plan, and it could not have been more obvious. And yet people still flocked to support them. I think uber is one of the easy examples of showing just how willingly ignorant consumers will be when it benefits them. I know way too many people who talk a big game about trying to avoid unethical companies who couldn't stop signing uber's praises despite their borderline (or arguably actually) illegal tactics.
What you’re saying is pretty much exactly what I meant. May well be that I could’ve put it more clearly, but at the very least I can assure you I’ve been paying attention!
The opportunity was there because taxis sucked and nobody had fixed that problem. The Uber founders knew this, and were demonstrably able to fix it. And they decided, right from the beginning, to “disrupt” by going head to head with labour laws instead. Taking that route from the start was the decision, and it was all but inevitable when their goal was to build a billion dollar business.
Facebook and Google as well. They all start out as useful services, but eventually Infinite Growth Disorder (cancer for corporations) destroys all of the original value to extract profits.
Considering Apple has the largest market cap of all, it's interesting to see how much value they still deliver. The products are still good in many ways, though you can see services revenue slowly eating away at software quality from within. Curious how hardware seems resilient against cancer -- I guess because so many aspects of the product are physically locked when you buy it?
Anecdotally, it’s harder to get things swapped/replaced/tinkered with even with AppleCare+.
I’ve even said “I don’t care at this point, charge me and swap it out”, which has received pushback.
I mean, do you really want me to go outside and chuck my MacBook across the parking lot for a new battery?
Yeah, I think a core part of enshittification depends on being able to slowly worsen the service over time, and like you say that’s a lot harder to do with durable physical goods.
I think it’s interesting that the consumer pushback has been so much stronger when companies like BMW tried it with hardware, too. Software to lock off hardware features isn’t inherently worse than software to lock off software features, but the former provoked a much louder outcry - I guess perhaps because it makes the whole issue more tangible.
I’d say that Apple choosing to sell high end, high price laptops with 8GB RAM in 2024 is a move cut from the same cloth - bumping it to 16GB would make no appreciable difference to the margins, so the only reason to have a model with 8GB is price anchoring and/or planned obsolescence - but even then it lacks the dishonesty of true enshittification. The deal is clear up front, it’s just a bad deal, and the informed consumer can choose one of the other ones.
Crazy concept, but maybe these business plans are predatory and damaging to humanity and should be illegal?
It's 5am and my mind is short circuiting, sorry for the noise.
That's exactly it. If they 'disrupted the taxi industry,' but then up being as (or more expensive than) taxis once they're subject to roughly the same rules, and need to be profitable instead of burning VC cash...it's not a good disruption.
CostPlusDrugs is an example of a good disruption. By bringing transparency to the pharma process while being profitable, they're undermining the existing rot.
Yet at the same time, damn near everything requires a PA these days.
“Have you tried dying first?”
They are. It's literally called (because I feel the term is a bit overused these days) "predatory pricing".
But the TL;DR is that it's hard to prove and usually self regulates; someone undercuts for too long and they need to raise prices or die.
But predatory pricing + market capture creates a dangerous force, and tech has already hit the bottom of the barrel with "free" services. We definitely need an overhaul of this.
Yeah, I was about to comment something similar. In that row of examples, Uber does not belong as it was never a good product with a solid foundation to begin with.
To somebody who doesn't follow the inner workings it was though. If you just assumed at face value that they were an actual business model from the beginning, providing a superior product for lowet price in a sustainable way.
Instead it turns out the entire first decade of Ubers existence was an ad to crush taxi companies and take their stead.
Well yeah, sure. But, if you are putting it into an argument for an article like this, it is great if you fact-check your presumptions a bit. Also, by this point I feel that most people who pay a little bit of attention to the tech space should be aware of the fact? That might just my bias showing though.
Well they made a trillion dollar empire from the monopoly money bearers. In a world of insanity...
And enshittification isn't a new phenomenon, just the newest name for rent-seeking. America's been doing that for at least 50 years now, and no one seems interested in stopping it.
You know, enshittification is the new buzzword making the rounds online... but you're absolutely right that it's just a fancy name for rent seeking... or as I like to think of it: why give something away for free when you can absolutely make money from it? And when no one stops you there... keep charging for an inferior product, especially when any possible competition is already in on the game, or has been otherwise eliminated. American certainly isn't exactly trying to eliminate monopolies. Capitalism, baby!
In fact, i think of this old scene from Spongebob: Squidward was doing his usual terrible clarinet playing during a talent show (I think that was the case), and some of the random characters started grabbing tomatoes from a stand that happened to be there. And with how Mr. Krabs's personality is... once he saw that they were all grabbing the tomatoes, he stopped letting them be taken for free and charged everyone a buck per tomato. Sure, in this context it's meant to be comedic... but it's also what lies at the root of it all: instead of giving something away for free, charge for it because you can and it's popular, so people will pay.
They are all vehicles of extracting wealth that cosplayed as a niche services serving a purpose. Welcome to late stage capitalism.
Perhaps some companies and products should die or lose market share for their enshittification. Kagi is a much better search engine than Google and its business model better insulates the company from making anti-user decisions. Facebook is something of a hydra due to their acquisition of Instagram and push for Threads, but there are also plenty of increasingly-popular alternatives. It's easy to paint with too broad a brush because many of the enshittifying companies are stagnating from lack of competition and the loss of free venture capital.
The big issue is that Kagi is using Google's backend for indexing. It just substitutes the targeted ads/bad search results with a subscription price. And we saw how much of the net went down with Facebook that one time it went down.
We've long been a boiling frog, and now we may not even have working legs to get out of the pot.
Yep, I'm familiar. Of course that's why they're also building their own index and use Bing's too.
The subscription model is much more protective than ads. Screw up badly enough and everyone will cancel their subscription. I'm only worried about subscription services when they double dip like Spotify and Amazon. I still think Bezos made the wrong choice for Amazon.com by approving sponsored results and ads.
How do Spotify and Amazon double dip? Do they both do a subscription and ads?
Spotify doesn't exactly have ads, but they have home page recommendations for popular artists that pay for advertising. Amazon has sponsored results when searching for stuff on Amazon.com along with pages of discounts and ads. The Prime Video tier included with Prime also has ads unless you pay a bit extra every month, but I'm more okay with ad-sponsored cheap/free plans
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Relevant post that summarizes my feelings, although from a different context:
https://kagifeedback.org/d/2808-reconsider-your-partnership-with-brave/73
I love the guy. Always brings some optimism.
I'm glad you wrote this because the first half was not optimistic or happy making, and I probably would have noped out of it if not for your comment.
For everyone else: read to the end for the hopeful stuff!
He is an author after all. I highly reccomend checking out Walkaway and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.
Utopian sci-fi thrillers.
Currently reading Pirate Cinema. All of his characters talk in the same voice, but his stories are fun enough and layered enough to keep me interested. He's kind of a pulpier Neal Stephenson IMO.
Walkaway is crazy good. Unauthorized Bread as well.
I have yet to read Down and Out.
Pretty sure I read DAO years ago, as well as the one about the gold farmers (little brother?) I want to like them, but I think he's a better futurist than a writer. Certainly a fan of Boing Boing and the weird mutant stuff.
[Please feel free to mark as off-topic/noise, this “mini-rant” turned out way longer than I had anticipated]
While I have some surface-level familiarity with his work, I did have to wonder about the proofreading or rather, lack thereof in this piece. The typos/grammar issues/colloquial style are one thing, even in their frequency (seriously can I please editorialize at least the obvious language errors in this text, let me do it for free, I am able and willing to), but the “throwing around” of interesting-sounding, probably-correct but almost conspiracy-like theories almost did end up annoying me more.
What are these tactics Apple or Uber or Deere etc. use specifically? Is it actually, verifiably proven or just based on (strong) assumptions (especially with regard to the various claims on Apple’s)? Can you please point to some further reading for these cases/examples? What’s the source for Amazon’s $38bn and seller price policies and 29%? I want to share this article with a lot of people, many of whom’d be put off by the look and consequently ignoring the content all because of its presentation…
It just left me with a rather rushed impression for the most part, which is unfortunate given the topic itself is a) an important one b) principally something I’m very much interested in and c) in its core ideas probably wasn’t even rushed by him, just this transcript-ish version is! I get that he probably wanted to get it out quickly, but huge portions of that look like they haven’t been read over after writing once.
Maybe there’ll be edits published to this piece over time, bit by bit increasing cohesiveness (and readability). After all, it’s not even the content that’s the issue, it’s merely the spelling and a slight lack of detail in some places.
To (hopefully) end on a positive note, at least I agree with the message. He really does have good things to say.
This especially resonated with me. It really probably is “only” a matter of enforcement against these quasi- or actual monopolies, for the most part.
The article is basically Doctorow's crib notes for his DefCon speech. If you've followed his Pluralistic blog, he's written multiple pieces (and articles elsewhere) addressing each of the points for which you've mentioned wanting more details. There are extensive links to evidence in the original articles.
Examples:
Apple vs the "free market"
Lies, damn lies, and Uber
John Deere's repair fake-out
Amazon is a rip-off
I'll admit that since Cory Doctorow coined the term "enshittification", it's been a framework for much of his writing. The pastiche in this particular article doesn't do justice to his long-running work.
I was aware the term was his idea, and to be honest I don’t mind expanding upon something extensively if it’s an important/far-reaching concept.
This is what I figured based also on the handful of his articles which I have read, but thanks for confirming it. And thanks for digging up the relevant links!
Rory Van Loo & Nikita Aggarwal, Amazon's Pricing Paradox , in Harvard Journal of Law & Technology (2023).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/3645
Thanks @patience_limited for the link.
As for Apple, take it's love of independent repair straight from the horse's mouth. Or an angry man who used to repair people's phones in a public park.
This answers a long standing question in my mind, of why Reddit pushes their app so hard, and every restaurant wants you to download their app to even see their menu. Because capture and it's illegal to write workarounds.
For folks who want to read this but are balking at how much sadness we can withstand, search for this phrase and start there: " this is the place in the speech where I’d list out all the amazing things that have happened over the past four years. "
It's certainly one of the reasons, and an important one. There are also various other reasons, most, just like the one you cite, boil down to having more control over the user and their experience. People tend to stick around less on websites as it is easier for them to move between "platforms" (sites) so retention tends to be better for apps. Which is important for content focussed platforms like Reddit.
I should say btw, that it is not entirely true that nobody ever installed a tracker-blocker for an app. There are ad blockers for at least Android presenting themselves as a VPN. These often also include lists that will block a variety of tracking related requests from apps. The issue is that this also often breaks certain apps (more than websites) and it will of course not block any requests related to trackers that aren't known. Most apps use third party services for tracking.
If anyone is curious about tracker blockers on Android, I've been using Tracker Control for about a year and it's pretty good. If you use it, be prepared to do a little tinkering with the app from time to time after installing a new app as it will block some connections thinking they're trackers, but an app actually depends on the site for data. I've had issues with some app logins that requires me to toggle some connections in the Tracker Control app looking for the culprit. But 9 times out of 10 I don't even remember the Tracker Control is running. As an added bonus it blocks a decent number of ads in apps.
Mullvad VPN has an option to block ads, trackers and other evil creatures. Also, I think Blokada can block both app trackers and app ads.
That was an amazing talk / article. I would love it if my fellow tech workers saw themselves as workers. I'm in a union myself and so many of my fellow union members who work in tech don't appreciate it much.
Slightly off topic, but I would like to point to quizizz.com as an example of massive and rapid enshittification.
Just logged in today, and they set a limit of 20 active quizzes per free user. I had hundreds. My old ones are somehow grandfathered in, but new ones will "take up space", and I will have to "free up space" once I hit the 20 quiz limit with new quizzes.
I just love the idea that primarily text + small or low rez images for quizzes takes up so much space that 20 is the limit. Definitely just a scheme to get people to pay 12 bucks a month (or drum up business subscriptions) for something they can pull off on plenty of other platforms.
Which is a shame because I came to Quizizz after Kahoot kept cutting free features. 🙃 Can't we just have some nice free tools for education?
Servers cost money to run and maintain, so there always has to be some sort of funding model.
Servers cost peanuts compared to a single person wage, doing the programming of the site, actually.
Well that is why I included maintainence. Engineers certainly aren't cheap.
Yes and no. Especially these days, a small handful of servers has the power to serve thousands or millions of users.
At the end of the day, you're right, and is probably why we should have a modern version of the post office that is dedicated to providing computing resources for free at point of use, funded by taxation on internet access.
Don't get me wrong. I completely understand that and don't mean to downplay that. It's just a shame that the free versions of products that used to be mostly fully featured with licenses that allowed it to be used for smaller use cases (vs whole school systems) continue to get degraded. I understand they've gotta pay the developers, pay for hosting, and pay for advertising. But for people who greatly benefit from the product as students or teachers, but can't afford an additional subscription or get support from the school to add it as a supply, it's disappointing to keep losing access to these tools. I suspect it's hard to enforce that people are using the free licenses fairly and not for large commercial use, so I hope I don't come across as pointing the finger and saying they're wrong. They've got bills to pay. I'm more just lamenting the situation isn't different such that there'd be more access to these tools.
Only thing I thought should be mentioned is that Uber performed market capture by using investment money to offset the loss— it was planned from the beginning.