Let's give Mr. Cory Doctorow a giant round of applause.
Thank you very much. Hello. Hi. Thank you. Hi. Hi.
Hi. I have a confession to make. I am now old.
I turned 52 last month. I am now the full deck of cards.
I have two artificial hips. I have cataracts in both my eyes.
I am old as dirt. And you may know that the AARP has these
junk mail like doxxing ninjas who track you down on your 50th birthday to try and sell you a membership.
What's less well known is that if you buy the membership on that day,
you get issued a card that lets you complain that things used to be better when you were younger.
I got that card and I know that the complaint is trite to say that things used to be better in the old days,
but I really think it's true when it comes to the Internet.
I
really do think the Internet used to be better back before it turned out into what the Kiwi hacker Tom Eastman calls
five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of text from the other four.
And I miss the good old Internet.
But this isn't a talk about bringing the old good Internet back.
It's a talk about what a new good Internet could be and why we don't have it yet and how we can get it.
So this is a talk about ensuring that the Internet is good.
And I'm not going to go into too much detail on that.
But I just want to make a point about a term I coined in 2016, which is the endemic form of the internet.
And platforms are a term I coined to describe how platforms die.
And platforms, they're the endemic form of the Internet.
A platform is a firm that mediates between end users and business customers.
Uber's got drivers and riders.
Amazon and eBay have sellers and buyers.
Google and Facebook have publishers and advertisers and users on the other side.
The platform sits between those two different groups and mediates between them.
Remember when we said that the end users, we're talking about the end users and business customers?
the internet was going to disintermediate everything.
It did disintermediate everything,
and then it promptly re-intermediated everything.
Platforms are just intermediaries.
Now, here's how a platform dies.
First, it's good to its users.
Then, it abuses those users to make things better
for business customers.
Finally, it abuses the business customers
to claw back all the value that had once been allocated
to those end users and then to those business customers,
allocates it to themselves,
and then there's no value left,
it turns into a pile of shit, and it dies.
And we are living through mass end-stage platform decay.
We are in the great en-shittening.
And I'm going to explain how those three stages
of the process of platform en-shittification,
and then I'm going to explain the policy choices
that let them get away with it,
and then I'm going to tell you what policy changes
would let us seize the means of computation
and build
a new good internet that is the worthy successor
to the old good internet.
It's a talk about how we make the en-shitternet
that we have now an intermediate stage
between that old good internet and a new good internet.
So I'm going to start with a case study, Facebook.
Now, Facebook is a company that was founded
to non-consensually rank the fuckability
of Harvard undergraduates,
and it only got worse after that.
Now, when Facebook started, it was only open
to people who had .edu addresses and K-12 US addresses,
American students.
But in 2006, Facebook opened to the general public.
It told users, yeah, I know you all use Myspace,
but have you ever thought about how Myspace is owned
by an evil, senescent, crapulent, Australian billionaire
who spies on you with every hour that God sends?
Come use Facebook.
We are the privacy-forward alternative to Myspace,
and we will never spy on you.
Just come and tell us who in this world matters to you.
Put their names into Facebook,
and we will compose a personal feed for you
consisting solely of what those people publish
for consumption by the people who follow them.
Now, that was stage one.
Facebook had this surplus.
It had investor cash from people like Peter Thiel,
and it allocated that surplus to us,
the end users.
And then we, the end users, we locked ourselves into Facebook.
Now, Facebook, like most tech businesses,
has network effects on its side.
A product or a service has network effects
if it gets better when more people use it.
So you joined Facebook because there was someone there
you wanted to talk to, and then once you were there,
you were a reason for someone else to join
to come and talk to you.
But Facebook doesn't just have high network effects.
It also enjoyed high switching costs.
Switching costs.
They're everything that you have to give up
when you leave a product or a service.
Now, in Facebook's case, switching away from Facebook,
the cost was access to all the people
that you hung out with on Facebook,
the people who followed you and the people that you followed.
Now, in theory, you could have all gotten together
and agreed on where to go next
and left the platform together,
but in practice, you were hamstrung
by an insurmountable collective action problem.
It's hard to get a lot of people
to do the same thing at the same time.
You and your six hacker buddies are going to struggle
to figure out where you're going to go to dinner tonight.
How the fuck are you and your 200 Facebook friends
going to agree on when it's time to leave Facebook
and where you should go next?
So Facebook's end users engaged in mutual hostage taking
and kept themselves glued to the platform.
And Facebook, it saw the hostage situation and exploited it,
withdrawing the surplus from those end users
and allocating it to two important groups
of business customers, publishers
and advertisers.
To the advertisers, Facebook said,
hey, remember when we told those rubes
that we weren't going to spy on them?
We lied.
We will spy on them from asshole to appetite.
We will sell you access to that surveillance data
in the form of fine-grained ad targeting,
and we will devote substantial engineering resources
to combating ad fraud.
The ads will be dirt cheap to serve,
and we will spare no expense to make sure
that when you buy an ad, a person sees it.
Now to the publishers, Facebook said,
hey, remember when we told those rubes
we were going to only show them the things
that they asked us to show them?
We lied.
Upload short excerpts from your website,
put a link at the bottom, and we'll non-consensually
cram it into the eyeballs of people
who never asked to see it.
We are offering you a free traffic funnel
that will drive millions of users to your website
that you can monetize as you please.
And if those users subscribe to your feed,
they'll be stuck to you forever.
And so advertisers and publishers,
they got stuck to the platform too,
dependent on those users.
So the users were holding each other hostage,
and the hostages took the publishers
and the advertisers hostage too,
and everyone was locked in,
which meant it was time for the third phase
of unshittification, withdrawing surplus from everyone
and handing it to Facebook shareholders.
For the users, that meant that the feed that you got,
the quantum of stuff that you'd asked to see
was dialed down to a whole bunch of people.
It was a homeopathic dose,
so that there could be a resulting void
that could be filled with ads
and pay-to-boost content from publishers.
For advertisers, that meant the prices went up
and the ad fraud policing went down.
So advertisers paid much more for ads,
and many or most of those ads
never got shown to a human being.
For publishers, Facebook reached in
and algorithmically suppressed the reach of content
unless larger and larger excerpts were put in the posts
that were posted to Facebook.
Until anything less than a full-text feed
would likely not reach even your own subscribers,
let alone be boosted to other people
through algorithmic recommendation.
And then Facebook put the knife in.
They started punishing publishers
who put links to their own content,
to their own website, in those posts.
So they were corralled into posting full-text feeds
with no links back to their website,
becoming commodity suppliers to Facebook
entirely dependent on Facebook,
both for reach and for money.
And so Facebook was able to get rid of all of that.
through their monetization,
which was only available
through that crooked advertising system.
When any of those groups squawked,
Facebook just repeated that lesson
that they'd learned on day one of the Darth Vader MBA.
I have altered the deal.
Pray I don't alter it any further.
Now, Facebook has entered the final
and most dangerous phase of enshitification.
It wants to withdraw all available surplus
and leave just enough residual value in the service
and business customers stuck to those end users
without leaving anything extra on the table
so that every extractable penny is drawn out
and returned to its shareholders.
But that is a very brittle equilibrium
because the difference between,
ugh, I hate this service,
but I can't bring myself to quit it,
and Jesus Christ, why did I wait so long
to quit this shit hole?
Get me the fuck out of here, is razor thin.
All it takes is one Cambridge Analytica scandal,
one whistleblower, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven,
one live-streamed mass shooting,
and users bolt for the exits.
And Facebook discovers that network effects
are a double-edged sword.
If users can't leave because everyone is staying,
then once everyone leaves, there's no reason to stay.
That is the terminal phase of enshitification,
the phase when the platform becomes a pile of shit.
And that phase is usually accomplished by panic,
which in tech circles we call pivoting,
which is how...
Thank you.
All right.
Which is how we get pivots like,
in the future, all internet users
will voluntarily transform themselves into legless,
sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon characters
in a virtual world we ripped off
from a 25-year-old satirical science fiction novel.
Now, enshitification is not inevitable.
Plenty of tech platforms in history died without enshitifying,
but when three criteria are satisfying,
enshitification always ensues.
The first is a general lack of competition.
40 years ago,
the Carter administration started pulling Jenga blocks
out of American antitrust enforcement.
Then Reagan started pulling them out by the fistful.
And every administration since,
but not including the Biden administration,
has continued to nerf antitrust,
making it progressively weaker,
until every industry, not just tech,
is dominated by the anti- Benson.
by a tiny handful of companies, whether we're talking about pharma, health insurance, appliances,
athletic shoes, books, booze, drugstores, office supplies, eyeglasses, vitamin C, bottle
caps, airlines, railroads, rental cars, mattresses, champagne, candy, and professional wrestling.
These companies grew by doing things that were illegal until the 1980s, which is not
coincidentally the time that we got the first PCs.
PCs, the internet, and antitrust drawdown, all those phenomena occurred at the same time.
Tech is the first industry in a century to be born even as antitrust was getting weaker.
Now, what laws were those companies allowed to violate?
Well, first, they were able to sell goods below cost, and that meant that if you had
deep pockets, you could bankrupt your competitors and prevent new companies from entering the
market.
So, some of you may remember that.
You'll remember when Amazon tried to buy a company called Diapers.com, and Diapers.com
said, we don't want to sell.
We like being our own business.
So Amazon lit $100 million on fire in the next few months, selling diapers below cost
until Diapers.com went bust.
So this is not about the best company succeeding, it's the company whose shareholders are willing
to lose the most money that gets to survive.
But more than anything, these companies were able to merge with their major competitors
and buy out small ones.
So think about Google.
Google made one good product 25 years ago, a really amazingly great search engine.
And that amazingly great search engine opened a conduit to the capital markets, and that
gave Google an effectively blank check to buy competitors.
So it didn't matter that virtually everything Google developed in-house was a failure.
Videos, social media, Wi-Fi balloons, smart cities, they couldn't even keep an RSS reader
running.
It didn't matter because they could buy other people's companies.
And that's how they got a mobile operating system, an ad tech stack, video, maps, documents,
satellites, server management.
Google is not Willy Wonka's idea factory, they're just rich uncle pennybags spending
other people's money to buy the products that they themselves are too ossified and
lumbering to create.
And that's not just Google.
Apple buys 90% of Google's products.
90 companies per year.
Tim Cook brings home a new company more often than you bring home a bag of groceries.
Eliminating competition is the first step in enshitification because it's a lot easier
to treat your customers and suppliers like shit when you're the only game in town.
But all industries have consolidated, and not just tech.
Enshitification is what happens when you stir two more tech-centric factors into the mix.
So I want to take a quick interlude from economics here and do some hacker shit.
Remember when I told you about how network effects drive explosive growth?
Well, tech does have amazing network effects, but it has another property, an irreducible
feature that operates as the anti-network effect, which is low switching costs, which
are driven by universality.
Because we only know how to make one computer, right, the Turing-complete universal von Neumann
machine.
It's a machine that can run all the software we know how to write.
We don't know how to make a computer that runs all the programs except for the one that
makes your shareholders sad.
We just know how to make that one.
If that wasn't the case, we wouldn't see people showing up every year at cons like
this going like, hey, guess what, I figured out how to write malware in PostScript, right?
So that means that every software-driven product or service is liable to adversarial interoperability.
That's when a hacker uses reverse engineering, scraping, and bots to plug something into
something that the OEM doesn't want plugged in.
Remember that Facebook case study?
When Facebook was telling MySpace users that they needed to escape Rupert Murdoch's evil
crapulent Australian social media panopticon, it didn't just say to those MySpacers, hey,
fuck your friends, come to Facebook and just hang out looking at our cool new UI until
they show up.
Instead, it gave them a bot.
You fed the bot your login credentials, and it would go to MySpace and pretend to be you,
and it would scrape the things waiting in your inbox.
It would copy them into your Facebook inbox, and then you could reply to it and paste it
back into your MySpace outbox.
The explosive growth that platforms get from network effects draws competitors, and those
competitors hack interoperability layers into their products that attack those incumbents
on their highest margin offerings, draining out users, draining off revenues, so that
every company starts with explosive network effects growth, and then it ends with implosive,
low-switching cost-driven growth.
Every successful tech company started with adversarial interop.
Google presented itself to the world's web servers and said, hey, I'm a user, just give
me your web pages, please.
Apple reversed Microsoft Office and made iWork Suite, Pages, Numbers, Keynote that could
perfectly read and write the files from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
Look hard at any tech company, and you'll find them ripping, mixing, and burning the
biggest products and services of the day.
Why do tech companies go after the biggest products and services?
The same reason.
The same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks.
That's where the users are.
But when these companies exploited the dying of our antitrust rules to grow to unimaginable
scale, they joined forces and declared the end of history.
Adversarial interoperability was great when they did it.
It was necessary to humanity's progress.
But anyone tries to do that to them, well, that's a crime.
Because, you know, every pirate wants to be an admiral.
An industry with 1,000 small and medium sized companies.
companies has the same collective action problem you and your friends will have
when you're looking for a place to have dinner tonight. They won't be able to
agree on anything. Not only can they not agree on what the law should be for
their industry, they can't even agree on how to cater the annual meeting where
they would discuss the question. Do you remember the Napster Wars? Tech was much
bigger than the entertainment sector back during the Napster Wars, but big
content kicked tech's ass because there were five labels and seven studios, which
meant that they could easily agree on a single unified response to P2P, and
today there's three labels and four studios. Those companies are so
incestuous, they've got the corporate equivalent of a Habsburg jaw, and they've
decided that they're going to replace every creative worker with a chat bot,
which is why the actors and writers in my hometown of Burbank have spent the
summer roasting on treeless sidewalks in front of the studios.
you
Because when a sector has five companies or four or three or two, it
can agree on one policy direction and it can screw its customers and suppliers so
hard that it amasses a fortune that lets it get that policy. Today's tech is even
more concentrated than the entertainment sector was back during the Napster Wars,
and they've agreed that history has come to an end. When Apple reversed office and
built iWork, Microsoft had to just suck it up, but in the ensuing decades
Apple and Microsoft and Google and Facebook and the other tech giants have
secured changes to law, regulation, and policy that make it illegal to do unto
them as they did unto others. If you were to reverse the file formats used by iOS
and make a runtime for its apps and a player for the DRM-restricted media that
you get through it, Apple would reduce you to rubble. They'd come after you
with Section 1201, Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Torsious Inclusion & Regression Act, and the D.S.L.M. Copyright Bill.
interference with contract copyright patent trademark and trade secrecy the
stuff that we call IP in other words now I know free software hackers hate it
when you use the word IP they say it doesn't mean anything but no IP means
something very specific when we're talking about a business context IP is
any rule or law that lets me reach outside of the four corners of my
business and exert control over the conduct of my competitors my customers
and my critics or as Jay Freeman from the side a project puts it this is
felony contempt of business model and here's what that looks like today one in
four web users is installed an ad blocker Doc Searles calls it the largest
consumer boycott in history and he's not wrong ad blockers are only possible
because browsers are open platforms you don't have to bypass any IP to mod a
browser and change the way the page renders in the users browser but if you
want to add ad blocking to apps you can do that by adding a blocker to the
apps you would commit half a dozen federal crimes bypass the DRM well that's
a DMCA 1201 violation it's punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a
$500,000 fine for a first offense an app is just a name for a web page that's
been skinned with enough IP that it will allow Apple or Google to send you to
prison for felony contempt of business model if you mod it so let's get back to
in shitification hacker interlude over
is what happens when companies do not face competition and when they're able
to use that incredible flexibility of our universal computers to twiddle the
knobs on the back end to do Darth Vader shit altering the deal further
unconstrained by privacy law labor law fair trading law turning every platform
into a rigged Skinner box casino where the payout schedule is altered from
moment to moment making it impossible for end-users or business customers to
to figure out whether they're getting a fair deal.
Tech companies can twiddle the knobs whenever they want,
without explanation, without transparency.
And we can't get a law passed
to make them stop compulsively touching their knobs.
Because in a world of five giant websites,
each filled with screenshots of texts from the other four,
they can easily agree that those rules will be bad,
and they can mobilize the monopoly winnings
from that rig casino they've built
to make sure that those laws never pass.
So let's take stock.
Step one, consolidated industries eliminate competition
through predatory pricing and acquisition.
Step two, tech companies play this high-speed shell game
on the back end and use their consolidation
to Bigfoot any attempt to constrain their twiddling,
like labor, privacy, or fair trading laws.
Now we come to step three,
where tech companies embrace tech laws,
but just the laws
that make it illegal for us to twiddle back at them.
The IP laws that make felony contempt
of business model a reality.
Criminalizing adversarial interoperability,
this process that once acted as garbage collection
for the unshittified, bloated, top-heavy companies,
letting nimble, innovative players drain off their users,
eat their lunch, and dance on their graves.
Put these three factors together,
consolidation, unrestricted twiddling for them,
and a total ban on twiddling for us,
and unshittification does become inevitable.
That's how unshittification works.
Now let's talk about how we're gonna end it.
Throw it into reverse and build a new good internet
that's a worthy successor to that old good internet.
Step one, we gotta halt consolidation
and break up big tech companies.
This one is actually going great.
After 40 years, we have the first U.S. administration
in two generations to take this seriously,
joined by colleagues who are doing really muscular shit
in the U.S. and the EU, and even in China.
They are blocking mergers, demanding breakups,
and they're fighting alongside lawmakers
who are joining hands across the political spectrum.
There's a bill in Congress right now
called the America Act that'll break up Facebook and Google,
and its two lead co-sponsors are
Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren.
The Federal Trade Commission and the DOJ
have published new merger guidelines
which ban anti-competitive mergers
that have been the norm for 40 years.
Now, if you're only cursorily paying attention to this,
you might've gotten the impression
that the amazing chair of the FTC, Lena Kahn,
is thrashing indiscriminately and losing big tech mergers
like the Activision-Microsoft merger that she tried to block.
But the reality is, Kahn is trying to make new law.
After four decades of complacency
and a bias in favor of monopolies,
she is taking swings no one has taken
since the Carter administration.
She is a goddamn American hero,
and her colleagues like Rohit Chopra at the CPFB
and Jonathan Cantor at the DOJ are doing the Lord's work.
Thank you.
But it takes a long-ass time to do these breakups.
It took 69 years to break up AT&T.
I don't wanna wait that long for a new good internet.
And we don't have to because tech is different.
It's universal, it's interoperable.
And that means we have options that we've never had before
when we were fighting rail barons and oil barons
and the Whiskey Trust.
Those options are interoperability driven,
and they will devolve control over technology
from giant companies to small companies or co-ops
or nonprofits or communities of users themselves.
Interop is how we seize the means of computation.
So how do we do that?
Well, first things first, we gotta limit twiddling.
We gotta pass comprehensive federal privacy laws with a,
private right of action,
meaning that you can sue if your privacy is violated,
even if your local public prosecutor
doesn't think you deserve it.
We need to end worker misclassification
through the so-called gig economy,
meaning that every worker will be entitled to minimum wages,
a safe workplace, fair scheduling,
and apply normal consumer protection standards
to e-commerce platforms and search engines
that ban deceptive advertising, fake reviews,
and misleading search results that put fake businesses
and products ahead of the best matches.
Thank you.
Then we need to open up those walled gardens.
There's laws like the Digital Markets Act
and the European Union that are gonna force tech platforms
to stand up APIs that allow new platforms to connect to them.
This interop will make switching costs low again.
So you can leave Facebook or Twitter
and go to Mastodon, Diaspora, or Blue Sky
or some other new platform and still exchange messages
with the people you left behind
and participate in the communities
that matter to you and connect to the customers
that you rely on.
These new platforms, they need to be fiddle-constrained
the way the big ones should be,
subject to the same privacy, fair trading, and labor rules.
But mandatory APIs, there's a fatal flaw
in administering them because they are so easy to cheat on.
Because if we order Facebook to open an API
to allow interoperators to siphon off their users,
it doesn't mean that we don't want them
to pull the emergency brake
if they think someone's exploiting it to steal millions,
millions of dollars.
Or billions or billions of users' data.
And that means that Facebook can cheat
because they can claim that they pulled the plug
because they thought there was a breach
when really they just wanted
to destabilize those new platforms,
teach their founders, their users, their investors.
You don't bet against Facebook if you wanna win.
And even if you drag Facebook in front of a regulator
to get them punished for this,
it's gonna take years to get justice
because to a first approximation,
everyone who understands Facebook's infra well enough
to determine whether the shutdown was pretextual,
is a Facebook employee.
So we're gonna have disputed shutdowns
that turn into years long fact intensive inquests
that will make nobody happy.
To make mandatory APIs work,
we need to make robust interoperability preferable
to that behind the scenes fuckery.
We need to align tech giants incentives
so that they encourage competition
rather than sabotaging it.
And this is where you all come in.
This is the part that we need hackers for.
Because in addition to mandatory interop
that's already coming down the pike,
we need to restore the right to mod, tinker,
reverse and hack these services.
I'm gonna tell you why and how
and how we're gonna make it safe for users.
First, why do we need to do this?
Well, companies do hate competition,
but the one thing they hate more than competition
is surprises.
If we have the right to mod existing services
to restore busted API functionality,
then any company that is tempted to nerf
its APIs has to consider the possibility
that you're gonna come along and scrape its site
or reverse its app and make that API work again.
And that means that the choice for tech giants
isn't keep the API and lose my discontented users
or nerf the API and screw my competitors.
It becomes this, keep the API
and lose my discontented users
or nerf the API and get embroiled
in an unquantifiable guerrilla warfare
against engineers who have the attacker's advantage,
meaning I have to be perfect
and they only need to find one mistake I've made
and exploit it.
Tech giants hate surprises
because investors hate surprises.
When you get a quarterly earnings call
and announce worse news than predicted,
your company's share price tanks.
Remember the start of 2022
when Facebook told its investors
that it attracted slightly fewer American users
than it thought it would in the previous quarter?
And they engaged in a mass sell-off
that lost a quarter of a trillion dollars
off the company's share price
in one day,
the single largest tanking of any corporate valuation
in the history of the human race?
Now, the people who make the call to break an API,
they're executives at those companies.
Those executives, more than anyone else in the world,
have portfolios that are top heavy
with shares in the companies they work for,
meaning that if they do something that creates a surprise,
that creates a mass sell-off
that tanks the company's share price,
they themselves are the ones who are gonna get hurt.
So you put the decision makers
on the front lines of their own bad decisions.
And you know what?
No one ever lost money betting on the hubris of tech leaders,
so maybe they'll go ahead and do it anyway.
And if they do, we'll have adversarial interoperability.
We can hack, scrape, and reverse our way back to the API
that they've shut down.
So how do we get adversarial interoperability?
Well, we should roll back every law or a regulation
that constitutes felony contempt of business model.
Anti-circumvention, criminalizing terms of service,
virus violations, overbroad patents and copyrights, all of it.
But that's a project of years,
and we need adversarial interop now.
And here's how we can do that.
First, we can just wait for these companies to cheat
because they're gonna cheat, right?
When we pass the Digital Markets Act
or any other law that constrains their twiddling,
they're gonna cheat
because they're incapable of not cheating.
They've proven that over and over again.
And when they cheat, we'll penalize them.
We can stick them with a special master.
This is a kind of court-appointed adult supervisor,
who has to approve their legal threats
against interoperators and verify that those threats
are about protecting the company's users
and not its shareholders.
Now, while we're waiting for them to cheat,
we can put the government to work for us,
specifically government procurement.
Governments should require that every tech company
that sells them a product or a service
has to promise not to interfere with interoperability.
I mean, that's just good prudent administration.
The Lincoln administration only bought rifles
from companies that agreed on standard tooling.
I mean, of course they did.
Wars canceled, boys.
The bullet factory shut down this week, right?
That has been the bedrock of good public procurement
for centuries.
We just forgot it.
Every digital system procured by every level of government
should come with a binding covenant
not to impede interoperability.
From the cars in your government motor pool
to the Google Classroom
and our public schools to iPhones and our public agencies.
Now, those companies, they're gonna squawk,
but no one forces a tech giant
to sell to the American government.
If you're too emotionally fragile
to sell to the American public on fair terms,
go find another line of work
better suited to your delicate sensibilities.
Your shareholders' priorities are your problem.
Public agencies are charged with doing the people's business.
Thank you.
Okay, so we're gonna use adversarial interrupt
to keep big companies from sabotaging mandatory interrupt.
And we're gonna use procurements, conduct remedies,
and new law to get adversarial interrupt.
But how do we keep the interoperators honest?
After all, if you squint just right,
Cambridge Analytica is just an interoperator.
Now, remember, I talked about putting limits
on twiddling, privacy law, labor law, fair trading laws.
That's how we do it.
I mean, frankly, it's surreal that the primary mechanism
by which we keep Facebook's users, Facebook's users,
from abusing Facebook's, or Facebook's partners
from abusing Facebook's users,
is by asking Facebook to decide what is
and isn't good for its users.
Remember, Cambridge Analytica was a Facebook partner.
So whether you're using an API
or whether you're fielding an interoperable app
that relies on scraping and reversing,
we want you bound by those same laws.
But these should be laws that are passed
by democratically accountable lawmakers
and public proceedings,
not by shareholder accountable executives
in closed-door boardrooms.
And shitification didn't happen
because today's companies are run by evil geniuses.
They are no more wicked than the everyday mediocrities
who founded DEC and Sun and AOL.
All of those companies would have happily abolished
their competitors, captured their regulators,
and abused their users and business customers
if they could have gotten away with it.
We didn't let them get away with it.
But we let the current crop get away with murder.
They're just able to buy their way to dominance,
merge with their competitors until they have the money,
and unity of purpose to capture our laws,
to give them the freedom to abuse us without limit
and criminalize anything we do in our own self-defense.
To stop them, we need to block new mergers
and unwind existing ones.
We need to limit their ability to twiddle the back end,
keep their users and business customers
in a constant state of confusion.
And we need to restore our ability to twiddle back,
to give ourselves an internet operated by
and for the people who use it.
That new good internet would be a worthy success,
successor to our old good internet.
Now for millennia, the indigenous people of California
used controlled burns to wipe out old and sick trees,
opening the canopy for new growth.
But when the settlers banned good fire,
California started to accumulate fire debt.
And that means that every year, California burns.
Because the alternative to good fire isn't no fire,
it's wildfire.
When tech companies had to contend
with the implosive contraction of low switching costs,
they were dynamic,
springing up and disappearing all the time.
When we stopped enforcing antitrust law,
we ended good fire and we got wildfire.
Our tech companies have terminal gigantism
and they're on fire all the time.
It's time to stop making the tech giants better
and time to start evacuating them and letting them burn.
In your heart, you know we could have a better internet
than this one and a better tech sector.
Do you remember?
When tech workers dreamed of working for a big company
for a few years before striking out on their own
to start their own business that put that big company out
of business?
Then that dream shrank to working
for a tech giant for a few years,
quitting and doing a fake startup
to get acquihired back by your own boss
in the world's most inefficient way to get a raise.
And then it shrank even further to working for a tech giant
for your whole life, but there'd be free kombucha
in the cafeteria and you'd get massages on Wednesdays.
And now that dream is over and all that's left is
work for a tech giant until they fire your ass,
like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired six months
after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries
for the next 27 years.
We deserve better than this and we can get it.
I want to take a lesson here from my arch nemesis,
a guy called Milton Friedman,
the court sorcerer of Ronald Reagan,
architect of the neoliberal revolution,
author of Our Misery.
And he was a monster, but he knew a thing or two.
And when people would ask him,
Milton, how will you ever put your cookie fringe ideas
into operation?
He would say, someday there will come a crisis.
And when crisis comes, ideas that are lying around
can move from the fringe to the center in an instant.
I love quoting Freeman.
I imagine that when he hears his words in my mouth,
he looks up from that spit he's roasting on
and gargles a curse at me around that red hot iron bar
sticking out of his jaws while the demons around him
laugh and laugh.
And that's what I'm talking about.
We're going from crisis to crisis.
And thus far, we do the same thing with every crisis.
We do the same thing we did last time, but harder
and hope for a different outcome.
We need to start spreading good ideas lying around
so that that next crisis doesn't go to waste.
Now, I'm not a hacker.
I haven't written commercial software since the last century.
These days, I run my mouth, I write books.
My next book is called The Internet Con,
How to Seize the Means of Computation.
It comes out in three weeks and it explains this stuff in detail.
But it's not my only thing.
It's my book, because I write when I'm anxious.
So I came out of lockdown with eight books.
There's two of them in the dealer's room at the No-Starch Press booth.
The first one's a hacker novel about the old good internet
and the people who built it called Red Team Blues
that's dedicated to Dan Kaminski.
I finished it the week he died.
And then there's a book called...
Thank you.
Yeah.
One for Dan.
And then there's a book called Showpoint Capitalism
I wrote with my friend Rebecca Giblin
about creative...
Creative labor markets and how they were captured by big tech and big content,
how to win them back.
I'm gonna be at the No-Starch booth from 2.30 to 3.30 if you wanna come by
and I can make your books non-returnable with a Sharpie
and you can ask me questions.
But you don't have to buy a book or line up for that.
You can email me.
I'm Corey at EFF.org.
I've been with EFF since 2002.
It's 21 years now.
And so...
I remember that old good internet.
And with my colleagues there, we're fighting for a new good internet.
And so the last thing I'll say to you, I don't know if we've got time for questions, but
the last thing I'll say to you is I hope that those of you who do support EFF will continue
to do so and I thank you for it.
And I hope that if you haven't looked too hard at EFF yet, that you figure out why
so many people are wearing our swag at this con and find out a little more and see if
you can find it in your heart to support us too.
So that's what I had to say to you today.
That's the plan.
Thank you very much for coming and listening.
So we got 10 minutes, a long rambling statement followed by, what do you think of that is
technically a question, but it's not a good one.
If anyone has questions, I'm happy to take them.
Sir, shout and I'll repeat it back.
Okay.
So the question is, if you're bootstrapping a company and you don't wanna get sucked up
by big companies, you're avoiding VCs, what can you do?
Well, there's a whole class of stuff that economists call Ulysses Pact.
So Ulysses, you may know the story, right?
Ulysses was a hacker.
He knew that if you sailed through the sea of the sirens and you heard their song, you
would jump into the sea and that the sailors had a standard protocol for not being lured
to their death.
They fill their ears with wax.
They fill their ears with wax.
But Ulysses being a hacker, he wanted to hear the song.
So he improvised the solution.
He said, tie me to the mast and whatever I do, don't untie me.
I wanna hear the siren song and he did.
A Ulysses Pact is when you anticipate a time in the future when you can reasonably assume
that you will be weak and you take a step now to prevent yourself now while you're strong
from giving into that weakness.
So you ever go on a diet and throw away all the Oreos?
That's a Ulysses Pact.
And we have Ulysses Pacts in tech, right?
The reason GPL and Creative Commons licenses and other free and open licenses are irrevocable
is so when the day comes that your VC says, all right, hippie, we went along with this
bullshit open source stuff at the start, but now you gotta make a choice, right?
We can pull the plug on you and you can put those 150 people who quit their jobs to follow
you into this startup out on the breadline and cost them their kid's college fund.
Or you can put this source back in the proprietary box.
You can say, you know, I would do it if I could, but I can't.
I tied myself to the mast and no one's gonna untie me.
I have an irrevocable license on my code.
So the answer to this is like not being strong, right?
The answer to this is anticipating your weakness and taking steps now while you are strong,
while you are not stressed, while you're not in those circumstances to ensure that you
won't be tempted, right?
The lesson of inshittification is not that we have uniquely evil techs.
We have tech leaders.
The lesson of inshittification is that we have uniquely weak constraints on ordinary
people that leads them into this absolutely wicked course of action.
Other questions?
I think we've got time for one more.
Yes, ma'am.
Speaker 4
Right.
So the question is like the kind of Fediverse-y, Valid-y kind of world of cool, open, federatable,
hard to capture services, will they be able to find enduring success?
And I would say that I'm way more interested in their success than their enduring success
because the whole point about federated open services is that they fail really gracefully.
I remember trying to get X to work on my Linux box.
The fact that it doesn't exist anymore is fine because we weren't locked in.
If you have an old toilet seat iBook that you put X on, it's not like you can't put
Wayland on now.
You can migrate.
So I actually think I am way more interested in those services attaining however brief
a success because they have a nice grease skid into the next open platform and the next
and the next.
And this often happens that we forget a lesson.
We put our rat poison for years.
We don't have any rats.
We take the rat poison away because who needs it?
We haven't had rats for years.
And then there's rats everywhere.
We're like, where did these fucking rats come from?
We used to know that we needed open platforms in the early days of the web.
We all remember the hard lessons of CompuServe and Genie and AOL.
And then we forgot.
And now we're learning those lessons again.
And so we need to keep those lessons open.
The question of whether they can attain liftoff, it's this hard equilibrium where if the existing
services are so terrible that people are willing to endure the high switching cost of leaving
their friends and everything that matters to them, I mean, yeah, those services are
going to get a lot of users.
But it will be because we just let this point of no return arrive, which is actually not
great.
I would much rather make it easy to evacuate those services by getting the European Union
to mandate interop for them through the Digital Markets Act than wait for them to become so
unbearable that even people for whom they are very important can no longer stay and
end up in the Fediverse.
I'm a committed Fediverse user, but that's not how I want people on the platform.
I want to minimize the amount of harm that people have to go through.
On the other hand, let's not...
Don't let the crisis go to waste.
If it does get that bad, let's make sure we welcome them.
Yeah.
Last question.
Yeah.
Intransigent.
Yeah.
So the question is, the Biden administration is the first administration in two generations
to take antitrust seriously.
How do we hurt the politicians who are standing in their way?
Yeah.
You know, there's an old joke from Ireland, not an Irish joke, a joke from Ireland whose
punchline is, if you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here.
And it's corollary is like the best time to have done something about corporate corruption
in our politics was 40 years ago, and the second best time is now.
It's gonna be a slow process, right?
Like Chuck Schumer blocked the floor vote for the Access Act last quarter, or last session.
It's gonna be really hard to say, well, you know, everybody should vote.
Vote for Mitch McConnell to show Chuck Schumer what he deserves.
I mean, not least because it's not a plausible path, right?
I mean, even if you are not partisan in any way, the number of Chuck Schumer voters who
are gonna become Mitch McConnell voters off the back of this is gonna be very small.
And so, I think a lot of this happens at the primary level, it happens at the state level.
It happens...
You know, Larry Lessig says that we have four forces, norms, laws, code, and markets.
It happens at the normative level.
All of us are the people that are the tech support army for all the normies in our lives.
And like, we've had this attitude that, well, it's more important that it be easy so that
you can use it than it be right.
And we all get that that's not a completely indefensible position, but that it also has
limits, right?
Like your password just can't be password123 on all your services, no matter how hard you
find it to use a password manager.
And maybe we need to move this question about big tech.
Tech independence, interop, and so on, out of the realm of things that are so much of
a pain in the ass that you shouldn't bother.
This is just for like us ninjas and not for you normies.
And maybe we need to do what we did with passwords and start talking about how we make it for
everybody.
They deserve it.
All right.
So, 2.30, I'm gonna be down in the dealer's room at No Starch.
Come by coreyatff.org.
Thank you all for coming.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
.