"Cory Doctorow Explains Why Big Tech Is Making the Internet Terrible"

From the Jacobins at Jacobin Magazine, May 7:

The internet is increasingly a miserable place to be. As Cory Doctorow explains, Silicon Valley CEOs and grifters are working hard to keep it that way.

In his new book Red Team Blues, Cory Doctorow explores the world, and grift, of cryptocurrency by way of a techno-thriller. He recently spoke to Jacobin’s David Moscrop about his latest book, the state and future of artificial intelligence, and why Twitter and Google suck so much

David Moscrop
I want to start with your new book, Red Team Blues. First of all, fantastic title. The catalog copy describes it as “a grabby next-Tuesday thriller about cryptocurrency shenanigans that will awaken you to how the world really works.” You’ve written fiction about proprietary technology, 3D printing, uploading consciousness, surveillance, and lots more. Why cryptocurrency this time?

Cory Doctorow
Well, I think that there’s a mode of what you might call service journalism that can carry over into fiction — and science fiction is really good at it — which takes ideas that are complicated and extremely salient, and that are treated as a black box by readers, and unpacks them, sometimes around a narrative. I think of Margot Robbie doing this in The Big Short when she’s in a bathtub full of bubble bath, explaining how credit default swaps work and collateralized debt obligations.

There’s this kind of performative complexity in a lot of the wickedness in our world — things are made complex so they’ll be hard to understand. The pretense is they’re hard to understand because they’re intrinsically complex. And there’s a term in the finance sector for this, which is “MEGO:” My Eyes Glaze Over. It’s a trick.

You give someone a prospectus so thick that they assume it must be important and good in the same way that when you give someone a pile of shit that’s big enough, they assume there must be a pony under it. And so I wanted to take that complex technical stuff going on with crypto, an arena in which I think there is mostly no “there” there, and do exactly that: show how there’s no “there” there in a story about someone who’s trying to figure out whether there’s a “there” there.

This is not in the catalog copy, but it is super important to me: one of the plot elements in this book, and it’s not a spoiler, it’s in the first chapter, is about how secure enclaves and remote attestation work. And this is super nerdy stuff that I’ve been obsessed with for twenty years. It’s basically a way of designing computers so that I can send you a computational job that your computer then performs and then you send the output back to me and I can know for sure that the job was performed on your computer to my specifications and not tampered with by you.

And there are lots of really interesting applications for this, but it’s also incredibly dystopian, right? Because it means that I can send you a keystroke monitor because I’m your boss and know that you’re not interfering with it. It’s basically a way for the computer to treat its owner or user as an adversary and allow a third party to control them with it. That’s the explicit architectural design. And there are some cryptocurrencies that are based on that. They’re kind of peripheral, but cryptocurrency is the first application for these that isn’t entirely sinister.

It may sound esoteric, but the way your iPhone stops you from installing third-party software is the same model. It’s this kind of remote attestation digital signing, secure enclave business. And as you can tell from just hearing me describe it to you, this is incredibly eye-watering, technical, deep, weird, complicated stuff. I happen to think it’s unbelievably important for the future of technological self-determination. And one of my major projects since 2002 — when the first Microsoft white paper about this came out — has been to try and get people to go like, “Oh wait, this is a big deal.” This is in some ways my latest bite at that apple.

Sleight of Hand and “Enshitification”

David Moscrop
I want to talk a little bit more about the “there” there when it comes to crypto, because I could never figure out what it was. The primary hurdle seems to be getting enough people to believe in it. What’s the play? Is it a “Trust me, we know what we’re doing and this will solve all your problems” play? Is that the play with making it a MEGO?

Cory Doctorow
You know what it is? In many cons, you take something that the mark understands and, from there, you encourage them to infer something logically based on their understanding of the setup. But you do a little sleight of hand in between. The mark assumes that if I’m holding a coin in my hand and then I turn my hand over, that I’m not slipping the coin between my fingers so that it’s in my palm when the back of my hand is showing and vice versa. And because the mark knows something about how coins and hands perform, he or she just operates on the assumption of how the world works. And the sleight of hand here is similar to a scam that, when I was writing for Wired in the ’90s, my editor Bob Parks uncovered.

There was a company that made GPS tracking bracelets to help you find your kids when they’re kidnapped. And their pitch was, “Here is a bracelet that gets your kids’ location using the GPS satellites and then it sends it back to you using the GPS satellites.” And if you know anything about GPS satellites, you went, “Hey wait a minute, how does that work?” Because with GPS satellites, you can receive from them with a small, low-powered device, but to send data to a GPS satellite, even if they were configured to receive it, which they’re not, would require a twenty-five-foot dish. And this was before mobile data networks. This was in the early ’90s.

What these guys were doing was taking people’s cursory, rule of thumb–based understanding of how GPS worked and how satellites worked — that’s kind of like, “Well I guess it works like a walkie-talkie, right? Where you can send and receive” — and they were just scamming people.

A lot of the crypto stuff starts with what a sleight-of-hand artist would do. “Alright, we know that cryptography works and can keep secrets and we know that money is just an agreement among people to treat something as valuable. What if we could use that secrecy when processing payments and in so doing prevent governments from interrupting payments?”

After this setup, the con artist can get the mark to pick his or her poison: “It will stop big government from interfering with the free market” or “It will stop US hegemony from interdicting individuals who are hostile to American interests in other countries and allow them to make transactions” or “It will let you send money to dissident whistleblowers who are being blocked by Visa and American Express.” These are all applications that, depending on the mark’s political views, will affirm the rightness of the endeavor. The mark will think, that is a totally legitimate application.

It starts with a sleight of hand because all the premises that the mark is agreeing with are actually only sort of right. It’s a first approximation of right and there are a lot of devils in the details. And understanding those details requires a pretty sophisticated technical understanding.

David Moscrop
Well, speaking of grifts, let’s talk about Twitter. The site was never a utopian online space, but it was previously at least better than it is now. What’s driving its collapse beyond Elon Musk purchasing it? Is there something better out there or something better to come?

Cory Doctorow
I think we should thank Elon Musk for what he’s doing because I think a lot of the decay of platforms and the abuses that enable that decay is undertaken slowly and with the finest of lines, so that it’s very hard to point at it and say that it’s happening. And Musk, a bit like Donald Trump, instead of moving slowly and with a very fine-tip pencil, he kind of grabs a crayon in his fist and he just scrawls. This can help to bring attention to issues on which it would otherwise be difficult to reach a consensus.

With Musk and with Trump, it’s much easier to identify the pathology at play and do something about it — and actually get people to understand what the struggle’s contours are and to join the struggle. I think in a very weird way, we should be thankful to Musk and Trump for this.

The pathology that I think that Musk is enacting in high speed is something I call “enshitification.” Enshitification is a specific form of monopoly decay that is endemic to digital platforms. And the platform is the canonical form of the digital firm. It’s like a pure rentier intermediary business where the firm has a set of users or buyers and it has a set of business customers or sellers, and it intermediates between them. And it does so in a low competition environment where antitrust law or competition laws are not vigorously enforced.

To the extent that it has access to things like capital, it can leverage its resources to buy potential competitors or use predatory pricing to remove potential competitors from the market. Think about Uber losing forty cents on the dollar for thirteen years to just eliminate yellow cabs and starve public transit investment by making it seem like there’s a viable alternative in rideshare vehicles. And we see predatory pricing and predatory acquisition in many, many, many domains.

Just look at grocery stores in Canada. Loblaws is buying its competitors, engaged in predatory pricing, and abusing both its suppliers and customers to extract monopoly rents and leave everyone worse off. But there’s a thing that happens in the digital world that’s different. Digital platforms have a high-speed flexibility that is not really present in analog businesses.

John D. Rockefeller was doing all this stuff one hundred twenty years ago, but if Rockefeller was like, “I secretly own this train line and I use the fact that it’s the only way to get oil to market to exclude my rivals, and I’m worried that there’s a ferry line coming that will offer an alternate route that will be more efficient,” he can’t just click a mouse and build another train line that offers the service more cheaply until the ferry line goes out of business and then abandon the train line. The non-digital example is capital intensive, and it demands incredibly slow processes. With digital, you can do a thing that I call “twiddling,” which is just changing the business logic really quickly.

Jeff Bezos is a grocer twice over. He runs a company called Amazon Fresh that’s an all-digital grocer and he runs a company called Whole Foods that’s an analog grocer. And if Amazon Fresh wants to gouge on the price of eggs, he just clicks a mouse and the price of eggs changes on the platform; he can even change the price for different customers or at different times of the day. If Whole Foods wants to change the price of eggs, they need teenagers on roller skates with pricing guns. And so, the ability to play the shell game really quickly is curtailed in the analog world.

The digital world does the same things that mediocre sociopath monopolists did in the Gilded Age, but they do it faster and with computers. And in some ways, this contributes to the kind of mythology surrounding the digital world’s Gilded Age equivalents. They can compose themselves as super geniuses because they’re just doing something fast and with computers that makes it look like an amazing magic trick, even though it’s just the same thing, but fast. And the way that this cycle unfolds is you use this twiddling to allocate surpluses — that is, to give goodies to end users so they come into the platform. This is things like loss-leaders and subsidized shipping.

In the case of Facebook or Twitter, it’s “you tell us who you want to hear from and we’ll tell you when they say something new.” That’s a valuable proposition; that’s a cool and interesting technology. And then you want to bring business customers onto the platform. And so, you’ve got to withdraw some surplus from the end users. So, you start spying on end users and using that to make algorithmic recommendations....

....MUCH MORE

Previously on the Enshitification channel:

• A Very Deep, Very Interesting Dive Into Platform Economics
• The Tech Platforms In Your Life: Kafka Was An Optimist
• Engineering Addiction Into Your Product: Lessons From the Professionals

There are dozens more on the blog, if interested use the search box, upper left.