Social Quitting

Forthcoming in the January, 2023 issue of Locus Magazine.

Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow

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7 min read

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Nov 15, 2022

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The Phillip Medhurst Picture Torah 397. The Israelites collect manna. Exodus cap 16 v 14. Luyken and son.jpg

As I type these words, there is a mass exodus underway from Twitter and Facebook. After decades of eye-popping growth, these social media sites are contracting at an alarming rate.

In some ways, this shouldn’t surprise us. All the social networks that preceded the current generation experienced this pattern: Sixdegrees, Friendster, MySpace and Bebo all exploded onto the scene. One day, they were sparsely populated fringe services, the next day, everyone you knew was using them and you had to sign up to stay in touch with them. Then, just as quickly, they imploded, turning into ghost towns, then punchlines, then forgotten ruins.

This didn’t happen to Facebook and Twitter. Both attained a scale and durability that exceeded the networks that preceded them. For many people, it seemed like the operators of these services had cracked the nut of making eternal social media. Maybe it was their access to the capital markets, which let them hire better engineering teams? Maybe it was the singular genius of their founders and leaders? Maybe it was luck?

Today, it’s getting harder to believe that these networks will last forever. In the blink of an eye, they’ve gone from unassailable eternal mountains to shifting sands that might blow away at at time. Users are scrambling to download their data and tell their friends where they can be found if (when?) the service disappears.

How did these systems go from permanent to ephemeral? How did it happen so quickly?

Here’s my theory.

When economists and sociologists theorize about social media, they emphasize “network effects.” A system has “network effects” if it gets more valuable as more people use it. You joined Facebook because you valued the company of the people who were already using it; once you joined, other people joined to hang out with you.

Network effects are powerful drivers of rapid growth. They’re a positive feedback loop, a flywheel that gets faster and faster.

But network effects cut both ways. If a system gets more valuable as it attracts more users, it also gets less valuable as it sheds users. The less valuable a system is to you, the easier it is to leave.

When you leave a system, you have to endure “switching costs” — everything you give up when you change products, services or habits. Quitting smoking means enduring not just the high switching cost of nicotine withdrawal, but also contending with the painful switching costs of giving up the social camaraderie of the smoking area, the friends you’ve made there and the friends you might make there in the future.

For social media, the biggest switching cost isn’t learning the ins and outs of a new app or generating a new password: it’s the communities, family members, friends and customers you lose when you switch away. Leaving aside the complexity of adding friends back in on a new service, there’s the even harder business of getting all those people to leave at the same time as you and go to the same place.

Each commercial social media service has two imperatives: first, to make it as easy as possible to switch to their service, and second, to make it as hard as possible to leave. When Facebook opened up to the general public — and not just university students — it needed a plan to deal with MySpace.

At the time, MySpace was the largest social network the world had ever seen. It was overly complex, filled with spam, and often joyless, but for MySpace users, it had a major advantage over Facebook: all their friends were already on MySpace.

It didn’t matter that Facebook had a better user interface and more features. It didn’t matter that Facebook promised not to spy on its users on behalf of advertisers (yes, this was Facebook’s pitch in 2006 when it dropped the requirement that you sign up with a .edu address).

Facebook addressed this problem by giving MySpace users who switched to Facebook a bridge between the two services. Simply give this tool your MySpace login and password, and it would use a bot to login to your MySpace account, scrape all the waiting messages in your queues and inbox, and push them into your Facebook feed. You could reply to these, and the bot would log back into MySpace and post those replies as you.

Facebook attacked MySpace’s high switching costs head on, lowering them for users and unleashing network effects and rapid growth.

But as Facebook and Twitter cemented their dominance, they steadily changed their services to capture more and more of the value that their users generated for them. At first, the companies shifted value from users to advertisers: engaging in more surveillance to enable finer-grained targeting and offering more intrusive forms of advertising that would fetch high prices from advertisers.

This enshittification was made possible by high switching costs. The vast communities who’d been brought in by network effects were so valuable that users couldn’t afford to quit, because that would mean giving up on important personal, professional, commercial and romantic ties. And just to make sure that users didn’t sneak away, Facebook aggressively litigated against upstarts that made it possible to stay in touch with your friends without using its services. Twitter consistently whittled away at its API support, neutering it in ways that made it harder and harder to leave Twitter without giving up the value it gave you.

I think this is what’s killing the social media giants.

Every social media service has costs (trolls, surveillance, ads, identity theft risks, etc) and benefits (community, commerce, family). So long as the benefits outweigh the costs, you’ll probably stick around.

When benefits outweigh costs, economists call it a “surplus.” The surplus is the difference between the value you get from using a service and the costs exacted by your ongoing use of that service.

Companies that don’t have to worry about their users leaving — because of high switching costs and/or few competitors — can scoop up that surplus. They can pay fewer moderators to fight harassment, or spy on you more, or put more ads into your feed.

Once they have taken the surplus from you, they can allocate it to the advertisers who use their platforms — they can charge less to advertise to you, make it harder for you to skip ads, and so on. This brings in revenue, which gooses their share prices, and attracts more advertisers.

But all things being equal, the company would prefer that all the surplus would end up on its own balance sheet. Once you are locked in, and once advertisers are locked in, the companies can grab the surplus away from those advertisers, too. For example, companies can create their own products that directly compete with the ones that their advertisers offer, or they can rig the ad-buying market (as Google and Facebook did when they illegally colluded on a secret project called “Jedi Blue”).

The higher the switching costs, the more the social media companies can appropriate of that surplus — that is, the worse they can make things for both advertisers and users.

That’s what happened to MySpace and Bebo and Friendster and the other corpses in the social media graveyard: they made things worse for users and advertisers, and that meant that leaving hurt less, which meant the switching costs were lower.

As people and businesses started to switch away from the social media giants, inverse network effects set in: the people you stayed on MySpace to hang out with were gone, and without them, all the abuses MySpace was heaping on you were no longer worth it, and you left, too. Once you were gone, that was a reason for someone else to leave. The same forces that drove rapid growth drove rapid collapse.

The social media companies that are circling the drain today had a very long run. They figured out how to use the law (copyright, patent, terms of service, contract) to make it much, much harder for upstarts to offer a way to gracefully exit the system. Because they had so many of the people that mattered to us trapped inside them, and because they made it so hard to leave, they could really treat us like garbage without risking our departure. They cut the surplus to the bone.

And then…Stuff happened. Mark Zuckerberg got worried about losing users and decided we were all going to live as legless low-polygon cartoons in a metaverse that no one wanted to use, not even the Facebook employees who built it. Twitter got bought out by a low-attention-span, overconfident billionaire who started pulling out Jenga blocks to see whether the system would fall over, and when it did, we all got crushed by the falling blocks.

These services had been shaved down to the point where most of us were only a hair’s breadth away from quitting, because all the surplus had been transferred from us and from business users to the companies.

Once things got just a little worse, advertisers and users started to quit, and the long-delayed MySpacing of Facebook and Beboizing of Twitter began.

R.I.P.

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, and blogger. He has a podcast, a newsletter, a Twitter feed, a Mastodon feed, and a Tumblr feed. He was born in Canada, became a British citizen and now lives in Burbank, California. His latest nonfiction book is Chokepoint Capitalism (with Rebecca Giblin), a book about artistic labor market and excessive buyer power. His latest novel for adults is Attack Surface. His latest short story collection is Radicalized. His latest picture book is Poesy the Monster Slayer. His latest YA novel is Pirate Cinema. His latest graphic novel is In Real Life. His forthcoming books include Red Team Blues, a noir thriller about cryptocurrency, corruption and money-laundering (Tor, 2023); and The Lost Cause, a utopian post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias (Tor, 2023).

Switching Costs

Consumer Surplus

Social Media

Responses (74)

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MOST RELEVANT

Pax Ahimsa Gethen

Pax Ahimsa Gethen

over 1 year ago

"Enshittification" - brilliant word to describe the evolution of today's social media hellscape.

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De Clarke

De Clarke

over 1 year ago

lovely anglicisation of 'emmerdement'

42

MDA

MDA

over 1 year ago

I was about to post that, brilliant neologism that made my day!

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Ariel Beery / אריאל בארי

Ariel Beery / אריאל בארי

over 1 year ago

This would be the perfect time for a public owned platform with democratic governance to arise, one designed for healthy interactions and personal enrichment as opposed to extraction and psychological pollution

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Del

Del

over 1 year ago

I guess this needs to be built on decentralized open-source platforms, though; oterwise i can't see any way out

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Juan Ignacio Gil

Juan Ignacio Gil

over 1 year ago

Honestly, I don't think it would matter. What makes Facebook and Twitter unhealthy is not the companies or the owners, but the people, the users. It will be the same everywhere.

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1 reply

Arthur van der Harg

Arthur van der Harg

2 months ago

It’s been well over a year now, but check out Mastodon if you haven’t already. It’s exactly what you describe.

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Uva Be Dolezal

Uva Be Dolezal

10 months ago

I have been thinking this too. We need an entire public internet communication system, run by a private yet government branch like the Post Office/meets the old yellow pages for all local business listings, and services the library to the police…...

Read More

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Nana Bookwyrm

Nana Bookwyrm

over 1 year ago

"When switching costs are high, services can be changed in ways that you dislike without losing your business. The higher the switching costs, the more a company can abuse you,"

I wish more of the people who worship free market capitalism understood this concept. I'm so tired of them blaming consumers for not just making the right choices of the most high-quality, ethical, and sensibly priced goods and services. How can you, when the companies producing those things conspire not to offer good options, and distributers are squeezing both producers and consumers for everything they are worth?

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1 reply

Carol Shetler

Carol Shetler

over 1 year ago

One of my best decisions this century was never to join Twitter or Facebook in the first place.

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1 reply

Bill B

Bill B

over 1 year ago

Are we missing a critical element central to all “social” media platforms that contributes to decline and user disillusionment? What they promise and purport to deliver are never realized.

Shallow, addictive, echo chambers posing as community. Get out and shake some hands instead.

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Larry Cornett, Ph.D.

Larry Cornett, Ph.D.

over 1 year ago

It's unfortunate that this cycle seems inevitable. Do corporations always have to abuse their positions of power once they have people locked in?

I fear that human nature (e.g., competitiveness, greed, fear) ensures they always will.

So… Mastodon?

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Austin Barry

Austin Barry

over 1 year ago

Once you subscribe to the opportunity cost model rather than the actual cost model then yes. Any time you hear the expression “leaving money on the table”, it means the opportunity cost model.

Facebook could have stayed user centric with just enough advertising to pay the bills and made a bit of profit But nooo

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ifiwrote

ifiwrote

over 1 year ago

On to mastodon and toots!

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1 reply

Kamil Wezka

Kamil Wezka

2 months ago

I don't think it is just corporations; nature drives us to form groups or connections through various means wrapped in some business model. And as life goes on, every product or entity has some expiration date or until resources are depleted (including our inner motivation to use it - related to costs vs benefits as per article).

Jarlaxle Baenre

Jarlaxle Baenre

2 months ago

No but it seems that the founders of these tools do inevitably encounter a moment where they are faced with the temptation similar to a fable or biblical story.. few would be able to resist and most likely they are there because they wanted the power to influence people in the first place.

Just some guy

Just some guy

over 1 year ago

When I ditched Facebook, this was a feature, not a bug. I dumped it a few days after the 2016 election, when the crazy people were in full gloat mode and even uglier than before - and these people were family and friends.

One thing about social media is that it somehow motivates people to expose their ugliest. I was done with that. And this “feature” of allowing ugly to show through is why social media must die.

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Kamil Wezka

Kamil Wezka

2 months ago

People in groups lose their ability to self-control, especially when they see their actions are approved by strangers. That's why they removed the dislike icon.

Pamela H. Thompson

Pamela H. Thompson

over 1 year ago

It's funny. Every time you wrote "rapid growth," my brain read "stupid growth." Like those roaster chickens that have been bred to grow so fast, their legs break under their own weight.

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Stephenie Magister ✨

Stephenie Magister ✨

over 1 year ago

Twitter was originally designed and founded by EV Williams before he went on to found and design Medium (until recently handing the CEO chair to Tony Stubblebine).

Covering both platforms provides such a fascinating case study. A lot changed at Twitter once EV left. He only recently left Medium.

I'm so curious to see how this platform will evolve in new hands (as well as what EV's next experiment will be).

EV said he made Medium as a long-form version of Twitter to get past the max character limits. How far apart will the ultimate fates of the two platforms turn out to be?

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Melissa Coffey

Melissa Coffey

over 1 year ago (edited)

One does wonder what next big "thing" has drawn Ev's attention and interest enough to abandon two of his major social media darlings in the space of 6 months.

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Harlan Brothers

Harlan Brothers

over 1 year ago

Haha! Good one.

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Kim Witten, PhD

Kim Witten, PhD

over 1 year ago

It was inevitable, but all of these social media companies have turned into classic examples of Sick Systems.

10

davidpaul777

davidpaul777

over 1 year ago

You missed the elephant in the room. Social media companies are failing because of obnoxious and nonsensical censorship.

64

6 replies

Rosemarie MacAllister

Rosemarie MacAllister

over 1 year ago

TikTok anyone? People move off a platform due to boredom. Facebook and Twitter are flooded with shallow narcissists and victims in an echo chamber. They’re only left to look at each other now. TikTok preys on users by feeding them quick, mindless, endless, rat-a-tat mirroring that keeps them laughing and entertained. It’s the cocaine hit of social media. As with all drugs, the addiction doesn’t end well. Not to mention everyone using it could care less about its global security implications. Another aspect of addictive drug use.

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Only Darren

Only Darren

over 1 year ago

I think it is interesting that given most of us have phones, and most of those phones have contact lists, and contact lists can be made into groups, and group texts can be sent, that there is no tendency for folks to do that.

I realised it was because social media isn't about communication with each other. This is a guess, but I think a lot of people want a public voice. They want a place where they can stand on their soapbox and yell to the world the thing they want to say.

For some this leads to celebrity. For some it satisfies their urge to change the World (generally without actually changing anything). For some it is a rant. For some it is a rant with the intent to get the offender cancelled.

If new social media, like Mastodon, do not give people the ability to cast a vote with their likes, if it does not give them an algorithm that may float them to a public awareness level, if it does not curate a feed of what is hot and happening, will the section of the public that's grown up with all this use the service?

Because as I said at the start, social media is not about communication, it is about soap boxing. People want to feel important. They want to feel like they are listened to.

Makes me wonder what the future of social media will be, given I've learned that a social bulletin board is useful.

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Pax Ahimsa Gethen

Pax Ahimsa Gethen

over 1 year ago

Re group texts, I personally hate them and normally ask anyone sending them to remove me from their list. Only exceptions are for urgent or time-sensitive communications. Otherwise I prefer e-mails.

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De Clarke

De Clarke

over 1 year ago

lucid and satisfyingly explanatory. good stuff as usual! just about every time I read one of your pieces I learn something -- acquire a useful new bit of mental furniture -- and that is a high compliment. keep 'em coming!

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Janice Harayda

Janice Harayda

over 1 year ago

Really interesting. I'd bet few people remember this.

15

Gary Martin

Gary Martin

over 1 year ago

I think the actual beginning of the end happened a few years ago, when they started losing young people. Most of these social media companies' recent bone-headed mistakes have been a result of their desperation because of that trend. In particular, I think that's what pushed Zuck into moving Facebook/Meta into the VR space, which so far is looking like a total disaster. When you lose the kids, you're no longer cool.

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Just some guy

Just some guy

over 1 year ago (edited)

R.I.P.?

No.

Die a slow, painful, agonizing (business) death, Zuck, Elon and the rest of you. Good freaking riddance.

59

Geomann1

Geomann1

over 1 year ago

Facebook will plod on because for most non-commercial users the switching cost is high (one is not paying anything and all one’s friends are on). People post some pictures and wish people a happy birthday and you can find out what is going on at your favorite business (brewery for me), so life is good and there is no reason to switch.

However, Facebook fatigue is real—the novelty has long worn off and people have more interesting things to do—like read Medium stories. I’ll now post something maybe once a month.

I see the value of FB and to a greater degree Twitter declining to businesses—the source of revenues. Hence—Zuckerberg big gamble on metaverse as hopeful next revenue source.

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Isaac Morrison

Isaac Morrison

over 1 year ago

See also: "the trust thermocline"

https://therightstuff.medium.com/the-trust-thermocline-explains-how-companies-suddenly-lose-customers-and-employees-2657c9535e6a

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Taye Diggsnista

Taye Diggsnista

over 1 year ago

Brilliant

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Autumn Parsons

Autumn Parsons

over 1 year ago

I’m still on Facebook because you’re still on Facebook

because I’m still on Facebook

because you’re still on Facebook.

It's kind of like a social circle.

3

Masaru Tanji

Masaru Tanji

over 1 year ago

This is my two year quittaversary from Facebook, two years with the benefit of not having to worry about all of my personal life sold on the open market. Life is so much better now. Once people realize this en masse only the social addicts will remain. Hopefully quitting support groups will pop up that reduce the quitting costs for them.

6

Octopus Paul

Octopus Paul

over 1 year ago

Please write more about the "low-attention-span, overconfident billionaire who started pulling out Jenga blocks". Can't wait to read. LOL

5

Tim Colby

Tim Colby

over 1 year ago

I'm giving substack a try for a year. Was never on FB-Meta or Twitter. The only concern I'd have is will substack adopt the same arc of operations that other modern communication networks have lived and died by.

It seems like a bit of a Frankenstein network play where so far it tries to look federated, but I wouldn't know, however it does have lots of potential features.

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Rachel Cee

Rachel Cee

over 1 year ago

I left Twitter in 2013 and never regretted it. I am still on facebook, but minimize my time there. As soon as a viable alternative is around I'll leave for good, I may leave anyway just for my own sanity. Social media and especially facebook has become toxic.

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Dave Land (D-CA)

Dave Land (D-CA)

over 1 year ago

Old enough to remember that the pitch for cable TV was that it would be ad-free because you were already paying for it. And we all know how THAT worked out.

Don't believe the pitch.

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Kylie Stedman Gomes

Kylie Stedman Gomes

over 1 year ago

Some years ago now, I was introduced to the concept of 'adversarial interoperability', which as I understand it, means something like requiring companies like FB and Twitter to provide full, dynamic, ongoing access to users to all of their personal data, including relationships, regardless of which front end (user interface) service they use. This sounds like a scaled-up and legally required version of what you described FB doing with MySpace. Perhaps we could push for this?

Ultimately, however, I think it's time we considered the possibility that there are some services, like social media, which simply do not belong in private hands (whether one set of billionaire hands, or many sets as in a public company). They need to be commons by law, at least at the network level, with each of us having full sovereignty over our own data.

I wrote a piece about this with respect to Twitter some months back. https://medium.com/@kylie_23759/is-twitter-a-public-square-maybe-theres-a-better-question-36dff2dd70ce

Jordan Hall also wrote an excellent piece on 'Sovereignty as a Service" on Substack. https://deepcode.substack.com/p/sovereignty-as-a-service

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T. J. Brearton

T. J. Brearton

over 1 year ago

Except for those of us who already quit years ago…

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Marco Monteiro

Marco Monteiro

over 1 year ago

"Mass exodus" is a bit of wishful thinking, in regards to Facebook's users. Q3 report mentions record MAU.

It's not clear that the problems you hint at are actually keeping users away. Shinier things (Tiktok) provide a better explanation for some pain.

It's much easier to grow before 1/4th of the world's population are active users.

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Michael Zick

Michael Zick

over 1 year ago

Thought-provoking piece. In addition to your theories, I’d add that profitability over transparency and privacy, rapid UI/UX changes that had little improvement over the previous layout, blatant theft of other social media offerings at the expense of what drove users to the platform in the first place, and omnipotent leaders who paint with broad, destructive strokes, are additional contributors to their decline.

Social media used to be about sticking it to the man. Now it’s a question of which Big Brother to stay with.

2

J. Andrew Shelley

J. Andrew Shelley

over 1 year ago

From your mouth to God's ear, some might say!

The odds are 3:2 in favor of another decent decade for Twitter and 5:2 in favor of another decent decade for Meta...because Meta is already far more than Facebook.

We shall see.

6

Trisha Faye

Trisha Faye

over 1 year ago

I'm still on FB because most of my book sales are generated through there - but since I joined Medium in August, I find all my time has been spent HERE LOL

I have to admit, I've never heard of some of the earlier platforms you mentioned, other than MySpace, which my teenage son had.

7

Dave Land (D-CA)

Dave Land (D-CA)

over 1 year ago

The pitch for cable TV was that it would be commercial free, because you already paid for it. Let’s try to remember how that worked out.

1

Lance Klass

Lance Klass

over 1 year ago

Can anyone suggest a decent replacement for either Twitter or Facebook, or both?

1

Lance Klass

Lance Klass

over 1 year ago

I miss Prodigy, but of course most of you never heard of that early bulletin board, a great way to share knowledge, gain knowledge, and make good friends.

1

Shirley Márquez Dúlcey

Shirley Márquez Dúlcey

over 1 year ago

The big problem right now: where to go? All the newer social media are focused on pictures and/or video. Those of us who want to read and write are left without an appealing option. There is Medium of course, which is a wonderful site but not a substitute for FB or Twitter, and the general civility of discussion here likely wouldn't survive a massive influx of social media refugees.

1

Michelle Teheux

Michelle Teheux

over 1 year ago

As I’ve written before, Medium is my methadone. I was on FB way too much. Now I share my thought here and actually am well-paid for doing so. I’m still on FB, but I hardly ever post anything except sometimes a link to a medium piece.

6

Johnnie Burger

Johnnie Burger

over 1 year ago

Although this does not work symmetrically

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Anna Cowper

Anna Cowper

about 2 months ago

Maybe another possibility is we have all collectively grown up a bit? Rather than wasting so much time on the pointless activities of endless posting and scrolling, people would rather simply talk to each other - and go out and live?

Jigs says TechBros Must Die! (tm)

Jigs says TechBros Must Die! (tm)

about 2 months ago

Cory, while I agree with your analogy of sheep going over cliffs on these platforms, I took a different path than one does on the traditional trajectory to create a presence on SS and then use it, just this past September, on my 70th. Subscribe to them all, at once! Post to them all, at once! It seems this is the path one must take to make a few pennies online, and if one or two techBro toys drop offline (as TikTok did in Nepal), so what, ya got a dozen others, so no lapse in your enshittifying of the world. I am working right now on a

Baby AI to make sure my shit is broadcast around the globe every 15 minutes or so... and I am sure others are doing the same.

I have explained this behavior can be explained here (feel free to share on other platforms):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5r7ssFo2z6I S01E02 Theatre from Herojig (Slings from Pretoria)

Rafael S.

Rafael S.

about 2 months ago (edited)

Cure to depression: not wasting time on those garbage sites.

Jarlaxle Baenre

Jarlaxle Baenre

2 months ago

I just have to say that I just love how you allowed us to infer the obvious persona to whom you refer here. 👌

Kamil Wezka

Kamil Wezka

2 months ago

Good read.

I liked Twitter/Facebook at some point; then, over time, I learned that the online world can be daunting, and many people can unload a lot of negative sentiment online on you. And if you don't sell on these platforms, I see little point in using them - at least in my case, as I like to chat with people in person, sadly less nowadays.

Perhaps initially, I was this naive pessimist who got excited about something new to try, forgetting it was just a honeymoon period. Then, the red flags appeared, and I deleted Facebook and Twitter - I threw away my TV more than 20 years ago in a similar way.

I have a massive stack of books as entertainment and my limited imagination. Medium has a few interesting reads as well, which, for me, is better value than paid Twitter. And I am okay with just that. I don't need more noise to top my tinnitus 😂.

Matt Drabek

Matt Drabek

2 months ago

I see where you're going with this, but the problems with Twitter seem far more dire than Facebook. Facebook is experiencing declines in the amount of time people spend using it, but almost everyone still has an account. With Twitter, it's just a full-on exodus.

Éric Vallée

Éric Vallée

2 months ago (edited)

I think Social Media platforms also get hammered by generational shifts.

Honestly, I don't think social platforms like Facebook are that stimulating for an aging user base. People will stick around to remain connected, but noteworthy events don't happen that often in people's lives (especially as they get older) and I think most people my age or older don't spend tons of time there (sometimes, I'll check daily, but usually, several days go by without my logging in). They are busy with their lives (work, family, etc) and the content other users post on these platforms (jokes and vacuous sayings copy-pasted from the internet, selfies, etc) is not that interesting.

Young people are a lot more engaged on those platforms, but as each generation enters this landscape, they get to pick their platform of choice with very few ties. Lets face it, young people are interested in the platforms their friends, colleagues and romantic interests are in, not their parents, ants/uncles and all the old folks.

Max Sebastian

Max Sebastian

7 months ago

And now, Medium is going that way as well, paying writers more for claps and comments than for articles being actually read. This will encourage more writing that succeeds in generating claps and comments, rather than good writing. Medium will start…...

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Vir Diya

Vir Diya

about 1 year ago

Competition is supposed to be a cornerstone of a free market, but more and more, anti-competitiveness is being championed by the biggest fish in the markets that we ironically worship for their power.

Pepe Una

Pepe Una

about 1 year ago

Now that the masks are coming off, will people start building truly social networks or fall in despair?

Dawn Nelson

Dawn Nelson

about 1 year ago

great analysis, thank you!

Xander Hoskinson

Xander Hoskinson

over 1 year ago

Interested to see how this unfolds. I think, in many ways, it may do more for digital dialogue and communication that any other platform is currently doing. Lots of potential, even if there is some short term pain from the CEO 'switching costs' :)

Xander Hoskinson

Xander Hoskinson

over 1 year ago

Definitely not to be understated haha. Always such a pain to convince friends and family that some platforms are better than others!

Mark Krauss

Mark Krauss

over 1 year ago

Very interesting , Cory!

And we’ll written!

Have a great week!!

Mark Krauss🙂🙂

Nirupendra Pande

Nirupendra Pande

over 1 year ago

Very interesting!

Bruce Dickson

Bruce Dickson

over 1 year ago

Cory, a useful follow-up post would be on how Twitter succeed by attracting and keeping Cultural Creatives.

Down page explain "Cultural Creatives" also includes MAGA people trying to expand and ligitimize their form of new culture.

CCs also include people like Paul Krugman trying to ligitimize the culture of Centrist, do-nothing, status quo political economy. Give readers handles to conjure with Twitter aueiences and how a new platform might address this.

Bruce Dickson

Bruce Dickson

over 1 year ago

You explain an invisible mechanism well. I invite you to add to this what was learned from music, game and video streaming: verify ALL users charge a low monthly entry fee, $1.00/month for my podcast service. This reduces bots and relieves some pressure to sell ads. In a year you can raise to $1.50/month.

What else is missing which Prof Galloway is already onto is clear public, Vision Mission Products statements. This informs trolls what they can be penalized for.

Finally, on Twitter I participate in the user advisory thing where we rate some controversial tweets. Some good thinking here, yet, even I could improve their system. Since Musk took over, more and more half-baked, unsourced tweets are flagged for moderation. To my ear, many of the original tweets are too faulty to correct or provide easy context for.

Baunti Rekha Basumatary

Baunti Rekha Basumatary

over 1 year ago (edited)

I have been quitting these platforms one after the other. I can list 100 plus reasons

that makes issue like switching cost an inconsequential trouble. Life is so much better without it!

Atleast I can sleep better now! *.*

Dave Land (D-CA)

Dave Land (D-CA)

over 1 year ago

Yet.

Geoffrey Lewis

Geoffrey Lewis

over 1 year ago

if Twitter goes down to 30 employees a la Craigslist and it's just a hangout for poets and sh*tposters, I'd be fine with that -- the fewer the better; the less "influential" the better; let politicians go do something else; but it will remain a good…...

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Melissa Coffey

Melissa Coffey

over 1 year ago

I stopped posting publicly on FB about 4 years ago. I now only interact in private groups (neighbourhood boards and writer's groups). It was amazing to notice mentally how much lighter I felt - gone were the intricate inernal dialogues around friending / commenting / worrying about post poularity etc.

I think FB has created a disturbing mentality of "bookmarking" people. We have lost many of the skills of genuine connection by spending so much time on "social" media.

Do all dreams of utopic social spaces eventually become dystopic? One could more realisticaly call FB "antisocial" media these days.

I'm surprised that you don't mention LinkedIn as a growing platform for networking, information exchange and "self-promotion". It is huge in Australia.

Interesting article - thank you.

Trhodes

Trhodes

over 1 year ago

I was never that much into either service, so it doesn't bother me one bit for them to go poof! Facebook I messed with for a while, then it got too weird so I just quit bothering. Haven't been on there in at least 4-5 years. Twitter I never got into so don't really miss it. At least with them imploding there's no danger of trump showing up and tweeting all over us again. I swear if I ever hear another news cast talk about someone's tweets again, I will scream.

Dr Victoria Powell

Dr Victoria Powell

over 1 year ago

Interesting Cory thanks for this. It definitely feels like game over for Insta and Facebook, the advertising and stupid sh*t that you get shown is too annoying. I can't work out how to use FB's interface anymore, I find it really frustrating. Best place I've found now for community is Substack.

quietbyday

quietbyday

over 1 year ago

I'm curious: on what data are you relying to say there is a "mass exodus underway from Twitter"?

Elon Musk has stated the that DAUs are hitting highs. Is he lying?

Banzoussilucien

Banzoussilucien

over 1 year ago

Le Social :. Nous recevons souvent des enfants abandonnés par les parents dû Au comportement de la jeunesse actuelle. Mais je vois pas seulement les jeunes mais de grande personne aussi le comportement vu la façon d'amenée leurs vie aussi change , Oui s'est resonnable nous sommes dès humain sauf que entant que humain que nous sommes nous avons les potentialités d'écouter, ET d'Agir en rectifiant notre façon de voir les choses, sauf actuellement ce que nous remarquons les parents chasse les enfants , je pense chassé n'est pas une solution, plutôt donner conseil au jourdhui, de notre tour.nous sollicitons les parents , ET en contact les autorités de la Mairie nous Enregistrons les enfants, ET les enfants peuvent Intêingré l'institution , nous savons tous que la poubelle des hommes n'existe pas, ET dans l'avenir nous allons monté une un projet pour la construction des École Universitaire ET lycée construire un Camp éducatif pour spécialement.

Mellissa Manzagol

Mellissa Manzagol

over 1 year ago

Platforms like Medium offer a common interest to those that participate in it which naturally works as a great filter to social-style conversations. Slowly but surely I am here more than on the social platforms. #goodriddance.

Sharon Winkler

Sharon Winkler

over 1 year ago (edited)

Now is the time for tech entrepreneurs to come up with the NEXTGEN social media services. Services who can verify that accounts are created for actual humans-- whose brains are mature enough to handle the emotional strain of the online environment (Imany neuroscientist recommend 16 years or older).

These new platforms must figure out how to make their services profitable without manipulating users into obsessive use of their services. These services might use a combination of subscription service and advertising as is being tested by so many online services right now.

They must invite social scientists onto their teams to figure out how to conduct their services while providing safe environments for their most vulnerable users.

A tall order, but so much study has been done in the past 10 years--the right team, that places user experience as the driving factor of its systems, will be highly successful.

Thanks, Cory, for an insightful article.

Cecily Maria

Cecily Maria

over 1 year ago (edited)

Interesting... so what do you think is next? where are all these users going? Or are they returning to simpler times of going to the pub, having dinner parties, campfires and other actual in person human interaction?

Michelle Murphy

Michelle Murphy

over 1 year ago

Watching these companies implode is a parallel to me of what happens with almost all influencers - gain a big following because they are authentic, need to find ways to continually monetize and become walking advertisements, lose / stagnancy of followers, move to new platform

Kent Anderson

Kent Anderson

over 1 year ago

I wrote about this also. Pretty soon, within five years, up to 12-15% of those profiles on Facebook will be dead people who were never deleted. https://medium.com/@kentanderson-17716/six-degrees-of-facebook-285adb9cdfd2

Shelley Lieber

Shelley Lieber

over 1 year ago

People are leaving social media because of the bad energy. It used to be fun. Now it's just a shit show (due to enshittification) of angst.

Julia E Hubbel

Julia E Hubbel

over 1 year ago

I reposted this with comments on Linked In. Well done, Cory.

Julia E Hubbel

Julia E Hubbel

over 1 year ago

Bingo.

Jean Campbell

Jean Campbell

over 1 year ago

Editor fairy.

Desiree Driesenaar

Desiree Driesenaar

over 1 year ago

Social media as ghost towns. Great imagination. Like it. Thanks

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Cory Doctorow 10 HOURS AGO 467 Print this page Keep up with the latest news on Asia's biggest economy.Explore the China Focus hub Last year, I coined the term “enshittification” to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers; it really hit the zeitgeist. The American Dialect Society made it its Word of the Year for 2023 (which, I suppose, means that now I’m definitely getting a poop emoji on my tombstone). So what’s enshittification and why did it catch fire? It’s my theory explaining how the internet was colonised by platforms, why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, why it matters and what we can do about it. We’re all living through a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralising. It’s even terrifying. I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the “great forces of history”, and into the material world of specific decisions made by real people; decisions we can reverse and people whose names and pitchfork sizes we can learn. Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It’s not just a way to say “things are getting worse”, though, of course, it’s fine with me if you want to use it that way. (It’s an English word. We don’t have ein Rat für englische Rechtschreibung. English is a free-for-all. Go nuts, meine Kerle.) But in case you want to be more precise, let’s examine how enshittification works. It’s a three-stage process: first, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, there is a fourth stage: they die. Let’s do a case study. What could be better than Facebook? Facebook arose from a website developed to rate the fuckability of Harvard undergrads, and it only got worse after that. When Facebook started off, it was only open to US college and high-school kids with .edu and K-12.us addresses. But in 2006, it opened up to the general public. It effectively told them: Yes, I know you’re all using MySpace. But MySpace is owned by a billionaire who spies on you with every hour that God sends. Sign up with Facebook and we will never spy on you. Come and tell us who matters to you in this world. That was stage one. Facebook had a surplus — its investors’ cash — and it allocated that surplus to its end users. Those end users proceeded to lock themselves into Facebook. Facebook, like most tech businesses, had network effects on its side. A product or service enjoys network effects when it improves as more people sign up to use it. You joined Facebook because your friends were there, and then others signed up because you were there. But Facebook didn’t just have high network effects, it had high switching costs. Switching costs are everything you have to give up when you leave a product or service. In Facebook’s case, it was all the friends there that you followed and who followed you. In theory, you could have all just left for somewhere else; in practice, you were hamstrung by the collective action problem. It’s hard to get lots of people to do the same thing at the same time. So Facebook’s end users engaged in a mutual hostage-taking that kept them glued to the platform. Then Facebook exploited that hostage situation, withdrawing the surplus from end users and allocating it to two groups of business customers: advertisers and publishers. To the advertisers, Facebook said: Remember when we told those rubes we wouldn’t spy on them? Well, we do. And we will sell you access to that data in the form of fine-grained ad-targeting. Your ads are dirt cheap to serve, and we’ll spare no expense to make sure that when you pay for an ad, a real human sees it. To the publishers, Facebook said: Remember when we told those rubes we would only show them the things they asked to see? Ha! Upload short excerpts from your website, append a link and we will cram it into the eyeballs of users who never asked to see it. We are offering you a free traffic funnel that will drive millions of users to your website to monetise as you please. And so advertisers and publishers became stuck to the platform, too. Users, advertisers, publishers — everyone was locked in. Which meant it was time for the third stage of enshittification: withdrawing surplus from everyone and handing it to Facebook’s shareholders. For the users, that meant dialling down the share of content from accounts you followed to a homeopathic dose, and filling the resulting void with ads and pay-to-boost content from publishers. For advertisers, that meant jacking up prices and drawing down anti-fraud enforcement, so advertisers paid much more for ads that were far less likely to be seen. For publishers, this meant algorithmically suppressing the reach of their posts unless they included an ever-larger share of their articles in the excerpt. And then Facebook started to punish publishers for including a link back to their own sites, so they were corralled into posting full text feeds with no links, meaning they became commodity suppliers to Facebook, entirely dependent on the company both for reach and for monetisation. When any of these groups squawked, Facebook just repeated the lesson that every tech executive learnt in the Darth Vader MBA: “I have altered the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.” Facebook now enters the most dangerous phase of enshittification. It wants to withdraw all available surplus and leave just enough residual value in the service to keep end users stuck to each other, and business customers stuck to end users, without leaving anything extra on the table, so that every extractable penny is drawn out and returned to its shareholders. (This continued last week, when the company announced a quarterly dividend of 50 cents per share and that it would increase share buybacks by $50bn. The stock jumped.) But that’s a very brittle equilibrium, because the difference between “I hate this service, but I can’t bring myself to quit,” and “Jesus Christ, why did I wait so long to quit?” is razor-thin. All it takes is one Cambridge Analytica scandal, one whistleblower, one livestreamed mass-shooting, and users bolt for the exits, and then Facebook discovers that network effects are a double-edged sword. If users can’t leave because everyone else is staying, when everyone starts to leave, there’s no reason not to go. That’s terminal enshittification. This phase is usually accompanied by panic, which tech euphemistically calls “pivoting”. Which is how we get pivots such as: In the future, all internet users will be transformed into legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon characters in a virtual world called the “metaverse”. That’s the procession of enshittification. But that doesn’t tell you why everything is enshittifying right now and, without those details, we can’t know what to do about it. What is it about this moment that led to the Great Enshittening? Was it the end of the zero-interest rate policy (ZIRP)? Was it a change in leadership at the tech giants? Is Mercury in retrograde? Nope. © Saratta Chuengsatiansup The period of free Fed money certainly led to tech companies having a lot of surplus to toss around. But Facebook started enshittifying long before ZIRP ended, so did Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Some of the tech giants got new leaders. But Google’s enshittification got worse when the founders came back to oversee the company’s AI panic — excuse me, AI pivot. And it can’t be Mercury in retrograde, because I’m a Cancer, and as everyone knows, Cancers don’t believe in astrology. When a whole bunch of independent entities all change in the same way at once, that’s a sign that the environment has changed, and that’s what happened to tech. Tech companies, like all companies, have conflicting imperatives. On the one hand, they want to make money. On the other hand, making money involves hiring and motivating competent staff, and making products that customers want to buy. The more value a company permits its employees and customers to carve off, the less value it can give to its shareholders. The equilibrium in which companies produce things we like in honourable ways at a fair price is one in which charging more, worsening quality and harming workers costs more than the company would make by playing dirty. There are four forces that discipline companies, serving as constraints on their enshittificatory impulses: Competition. Companies that fear you will take your business elsewhere are cautious about worsening quality or raising prices. Regulation. Companies that fear a regulator will fine them more than they expect to make from cheating, will cheat less. These two forces affect all industries, but the next two are far more tech-specific. Self-help. Computers are extremely flexible and so are the digital products and services we make from them. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing-Complete Von Neumann Machine, a computer that can run every valid program. That means that users can always avail themselves of programs that undo the anti-features that shift value from them to a company’s shareholders. Think of a boardroom table where someone says, “I’ve calculated that making our ads 20 per cent more invasive will net us 2 per cent more revenue per user.” In a digital world, someone else might well say, “Yes, but if we do that, 20 per cent of our users will install ad blockers, and our revenue from those users will drop to zero, for ever.” This means that digital companies are constrained by the fear that some enshittificatory manoeuvre will prompt their users to google, “How do I disenshittify this?” And, finally, workers. Tech workers have very low union density, but that doesn’t mean that tech workers don’t have labour power. The historical “talent shortage” of the tech sector meant that workers enjoyed a lot of leverage. Workers who disagreed with their bosses could quit and walk across the street and get another, better job. They knew it and their bosses knew it. Ironically, this made tech workers highly exploitable. Tech workers overwhelmingly saw themselves as founders in waiting, entrepreneurs who were temporarily drawing a salary, heroic figures to be. That’s why mottoes such as Google’s “Don’t be evil” and Facebook’s “Make the world more open and connected” mattered; they instilled a sense of mission in workers. It’s what the American academic Fobazi Ettarh calls “vocational awe” or Elon Musk calls being “extremely hardcore”. Tech workers had lots of bargaining power, but they didn’t flex it when their bosses demanded that they sacrifice their health, their families, their sleep to meet arbitrary deadlines. So long as their bosses transformed their workplaces into whimsical “campuses”, with gyms, gourmet cafeterias, laundry service, massages and egg-freezing, workers could tell themselves that they were being pampered, rather than being made to work like government mules. For bosses, there’s a downside to motivating your workers with appeals to a sense of mission. Namely, your workers will feel a sense of mission. So when you ask them to enshittify the products they ruined their health to ship, workers will experience a sense of profound moral injury, respond with outrage and threaten to quit. Thus tech workers themselves were the final bulwark against enshittification. The pre-enshittification era wasn’t a time of better leadership. The executives weren’t better. They were constrained. Their worst impulses were checked by competition, regulation, self-help and worker power. So what happened? One by one, each of these constraints was eroded, leaving the enshittificatory impulse unchecked, ushering in the enshittoscene. It started with competition. From the Gilded Age until the Reagan years, the purpose of competition law was to promote competition between companies. US antitrust law treated corporate power as dangerous and sought to blunt it. European antitrust laws were modelled on US ones, imported by the architects of the Marshall Plan. But starting in the 1980s, with the rise of neoliberalism, competition authorities all over the world adopted a doctrine called “consumer welfare”, which essentially held that monopolies were evidence of quality. If everyone was shopping at the same store and buying the same product, that meant that was the best store, selling the best product — not that anyone was cheating. Executives weren’t better before. They were constrained . . . by competition, regulation, self-help and worker power And so, all over the world, governments stopped enforcing their competition laws. They just ignored them as companies flouted them. Those companies merged with their major competitors, absorbed smaller companies before they could grow to be big threats. They held an orgy of consolidation that produced the most inbred industries imaginable, whole sectors grown so incestuous they developed Habsburg jaws, from eyeglasses to sea freight, glass bottles to payment processing, vitamin C to beer. Most of our global economy is dominated by five or fewer global companies. If smaller companies refuse to sell themselves to these cartels, the giants have free rein to flout competition law further, with “predatory pricing” that keeps an independent rival from gaining a foothold. When Diapers.com refused Amazon’s acquisition offer, Amazon lit $100mn on fire, selling diapers way below cost for months, until Diapers.com went bust, and Amazon bought them for pennies on the dollar. Lily Tomlin used to do a character on the TV show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, an AT&T telephone operator who’d do commercials for the Bell system. Each one would end with her saying: “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.” Today’s giants are not constrained by competition. They don’t care. They don’t have to. They’re Google. That’s the first constraint gone, and as it slipped away, the second constraint — regulation — was also doomed. When an industry consists of hundreds of small- and medium-sized enterprises, it is a mob, a rabble. Hundreds of companies can’t agree on what to tell Parliament or Congress or the Commission. They can’t even agree on how to cater a meeting where they’d discuss the matter. But when a sector dwindles to a bare handful of dominant firms, it ceases to be a rabble and it becomes a cartel. Five companies, or four, or three, or two or just one company can easily converge on a single message for their regulators, and without “wasteful competition” eroding their profits, they have plenty of cash to spread around. This is why competition matters: it’s not just because competition makes companies work harder and share value with customers and workers; it’s because competition keeps companies from becoming too big to fail, and too big to jail. Now, there are plenty of things we don’t want improved through competition, like privacy invasions. After the EU passed its landmark privacy law, the GDPR, there was a mass-extinction event for small EU ad-tech companies. These companies disappeared en masse and that’s a good thing. They were even more invasive and reckless than US-based Big Tech companies. We don’t want to produce increasing efficiency in violating our human rights. But: Google and Facebook have been unscathed by European privacy law. That’s not because they don’t violate the GDPR. It’s because they pretend they are headquartered in Ireland, one of the EU’s most notorious corporate crime havens. And Ireland competes with the EU’s other crime havens — Malta, Luxembourg, Cyprus and, sometimes, the Netherlands — to see which country can offer the most hospitable environment. The Irish Data Protection Commission rules on very few cases, and more than two-thirds of its rulings are overturned by the EU courts, even though Ireland is the nominal home to the most privacy-invasive companies on the continent. So Google and Facebook get to act as though they are immune to privacy law, because they violate the law with an app. © Saratta Chuengsatiansup This is where that third constraint, self-help, would surely come in handy. If you don’t want your privacy violated, you don’t need to wait for the Irish privacy regulator to act, you can just install an ad blocker. More than half of all web users are blocking ads. But the web is an open platform, developed in the age when tech was hundreds of companies at each other’s throats, unable to capture their regulators. Today, the web is being devoured by apps, and apps are ripe for enshittification. Regulatory capture isn’t just the ability to flout regulation, it’s also the ability to co-opt regulation, to wield regulation against your adversaries. Today’s tech giants got big by exploiting self-help measures. When Facebook was telling MySpace users they needed to escape Murdoch’s crapulent Australian social media panopticon, it didn’t just say to those Myspacers, “Screw your friends, come to Facebook and just hang out looking at the cool privacy policy until they get here.” It gave them a bot. You fed the bot your MySpace username and password, and it would login to MySpace and pretend to be you, scraping everything waiting in your inbox and copying it to your Facebook inbox. When Facebook, Apple and Google were doing this adversarial interoperability, it was progress. If you try to do it to them, it’s piracy When Microsoft was choking off Apple’s market oxygen by refusing to ship a functional version of Microsoft Office for the Mac in the 1990s — so that offices were throwing away their designers’ Macs and giving them PCs with upgraded graphics cards and Windows versions of Photoshop and Illustrator — Steve Jobs didn’t beg Bill Gates to update Mac Office. He got his technologists to reverse-engineer Microsoft Office and make a compatible suite, the iWork Suite, whose apps, Pages, Numbers and Keynote could read and write Microsoft’s Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. When Google entered the market, it sent its crawler to every web server on earth, where it presented itself as a web-user: “Hi! Hello! Do you have any web pages? Thanks! How about some more? How about more?” But every pirate wants to be an admiral. When Facebook, Apple and Google were doing this adversarial interoperability, that was progress. If you try to do it to them, that’s piracy. Try to make an alternative client for Facebook and they’ll say you violated US laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and EU laws like Article 6 of the EU Copyright Directive. Try to make an Android program that can run iPhone apps and play back the data from Apple’s media stores and they’d bomb you until the rubble bounced. Try to scrape all of Google and they’ll nuke you until you glow. Tech’s regulatory capture is mind-boggling. Take that law I mentioned earlier, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA. Bill Clinton signed it in 1998, and the EU imported it as Article 6 of the EUCD in 2001. It is a blanket prohibition on removing any kind of encryption that restricts access to a copyrighted work — things such as ripping DVDs or jailbreaking a phone — with penalties of a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offence. This law has been so broadened that it can be used to imprison creators for granting access to their own creations. Here’s how that works: In 2008, Amazon bought Audible, an audiobook platform. Today, Audible is a monopolist with more than 90 per cent of the audiobook market. Audible requires that all creators on its platform sell with Amazon’s “digital rights management”, which locks it to Amazon’s apps. So say I write a book, then I read it into a mic, then I pay a director and an engineer thousands of dollars to turn that into an audiobook, and sell it to you on the monopoly platform, Audible, that controls more than 90 per cent of the market. If I later decide to leave Amazon and want to let you come with me to a rival platform, I am out of luck. If I supply you with a tool to remove Amazon’s encryption from my audiobook, so you can play it in another app, I commit a felony, punishable by a five-year sentence and a half-million-dollar fine, for a first offence. That’s a stiffer penalty than you would face if you simply pirated the audiobook from a torrent site. But it’s also harsher than the punishment you’d get for shoplifting the audiobook on CD from a truck stop. It’s harsher than the sentence you’d get for hijacking the truck that delivered the CD. Think of our ad blockers again. Fifty per cent of web users are running ad blockers. Zero per cent of app users are running ad blockers, because adding a blocker to an app requires that you first remove its encryption, and that’s a felony. (Jay Freeman, the American businessman and engineer, calls this “felony contempt of business-model”.) So when someone in a boardroom says, “Let’s make our ads 20 per cent more obnoxious and get a 2 per cent revenue increase,” no one objects that this might prompt users to google, “How do I block ads?” After all, the answer is, you can’t. Indeed, it’s more likely that someone in that boardroom will say, “Let’s make our ads 100 per cent more obnoxious and get a 10 per cent revenue increase.” (This is why every company wants you to install an app instead of using its website.) There’s no reason that gig workers who are facing algorithmic wage discrimination couldn’t install a counter-app that co-ordinated among all the Uber drivers to reject all jobs unless they reach a certain pay threshold. No reason except felony contempt of business model, the threat that the toolsmiths who built that counter-app would go broke or land in prison, for violating DMCA 1201, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, trademark, copyright, patent, contract, trade secrecy, nondisclosure and noncompete or, in other words, “IP law”. IP isn’t just short for intellectual property. It’s a euphemism for “a law that lets me reach beyond the walls of my company and control the conduct of my critics, competitors and customers”. And “app” is just a euphemism for “a web page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to mod it, to protect the labour, consumer and privacy rights of its user”. We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company. What about that fourth constraint: workers? For decades, tech workers’ bargaining power and vocational awe put a ceiling on enshittification. Even after the tech sector shrank to a handful of giants. Even after they captured their regulators. Even after “felony contempt of business model” and extinguished self-help for tech users. Tech was still constrained by their workers’ sense of moral injury in the face of the imperative to enshittify. Remember when tech workers dreamt of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over? That dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake start-up, get “acqui-hired” by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion. Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays. And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire you, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired last year, eight months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years. Workers are no longer a check on their bosses’ worst impulses. Today, the response to “I refuse to make this product worse” is “turn in your badge and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out”. I get that this is all a little depressing. OK, really depressing. But hear me out! We’ve identified the disease. We’ve identified its underlying mechanism. Now we can get to work on a cure. There are four constraints that prevent enshittification: competition, regulation, self-help and labour. To reverse enshittification and guard against its re-emergence, we must restore and strengthen each of these. On competition, it’s actually looking pretty good. The EU, the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, Japan and China are all doing more on competition than they have in two generations. They’re blocking mergers, unwinding existing ones, taking action on predatory pricing and other sleazy tactics. Remember, in the US and Europe, we already have the laws to do this; we just stopped enforcing them. I’ve been fighting these fights with the Electronic Frontier Foundation for 22 years now, and I’ve never seen a more hopeful moment for sound, informed tech policy. My big hope here is that Stein’s Law will take hold: anything that can’t go on for ever will eventually stop Now, the enshittifiers aren’t taking this lying down. Take Lina Khan, the brilliant head of the US Federal Trade Commission, who has done more in three years on antitrust than the combined efforts of all her predecessors over the past 40 years. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has run more than 80 pieces trashing Khan, insisting that she’s an ineffectual ideologue who can’t get anything done. Sure, that’s why you ran 80 editorials about her. Because she can’t get anything done. Reagan and Thatcher put antitrust law in a coma in the 1980s. But it’s awake, it’s back and it’s pissed off. What about regulation? How will we get tech companies to stop doing that one weird trick of adding “with an app” to escape enforcement? Well, here in the EU, they’re starting to figure it out. Recently, the main body of the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act went into effect, and they let people who get screwed by tech companies go straight to the European courts, bypassing the toothless watchdogs in places like Ireland. In the US, they might finally get a digital privacy law. You probably have no idea how backwards US privacy law is. The last time the US Congress enacted a broadly applicable privacy law was in 1988. The Video Privacy Protection Act makes it a crime for video-store clerks to leak your video-rental history. It was passed after a rightwing judge who was up for the Supreme Court had his rentals published in a DC newspaper. The rentals weren’t even all that embarrassing. Sure, that judge, Robert Bork, wasn’t confirmed for the Supreme Court, but that was because he was a virulent loudmouth who served as Nixon’s solicitor-general. Still, Congress got the idea that their own video records might be next, freaked out and passed the VPPA. That was the last time Americans got a big, national privacy law. And the thing is, there are a lot of people who are angry about it. Worried that Facebook turned Grampy into a QAnon? That Insta made your teen anorexic? That TikTok is brainwashing Gen Z into quoting Osama bin Laden? Or that cops are rolling up the identities of everyone at a Black Lives Matter protest or the Jan 6 riots by getting location data from Google? Or that red state attorneys-general are tracking teen girls to out-of-state abortion clinics? Or that Black people are being discriminated against by online lending or hiring platforms? Or that someone is making AI deepfake porn of you? Having a federal privacy law with a private right of action — which means that individuals can sue companies that violate their privacy — would go a long way to rectifying all of these problems. There’s a big coalition for that kind of privacy law. What about self-help? That’s a lot farther away, alas. The EU’s DMA will force tech companies to open up their walled gardens for interoperation. You’ll be able to use WhatsApp to message people on iMessage, or quit Facebook and move to Mastodon, but still send messages to the people left behind. But if you want to reverse-engineer one of those Big Tech products and mod it to work for you, not them, the EU’s got nothing for you. This is an area ripe for improvement. My big hope here is that Stein’s Law will take hold: anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. Finally, there’s labour. Here in Europe, there’s much higher union density than in the US, which American tech barons are learning the hard way. There is nothing more satisfying in the daily news than the recent salvo by Nordic unions against that Tesla guy. But even in the US, there’s a massive surge in tech unions. Tech workers have realised they’re not founders-in-waiting. In Seattle, Amazon’s tech workers walked out in sympathy with Amazon’s warehouse workers, because they’re all workers. We’re seeing bold, muscular, global action on competition, regulation and labour, with self-help bringing up the rear. It’s not a moment too soon, because the bad news is enshittification is coming to every industry. If it’s got a networked computer in it, the people who made it can run the Darth Vader MBA playbook on it, changing the rules from moment to moment, violating your rights and then saying: “It’s OK, we did it with an app.” From Mercedes effectively renting you your accelerator pedal by the month to Internet of Things dishwashers that lock you into proprietary dish soap, enshittification is metastasising into every corner of our lives. Software doesn’t eat the world, it just enshittifies it. There’s a bright side to all this: if everyone is threatened by enshittification, then everyone has a stake in disenshittification. Just as with privacy law in the US, the potential anti-enshittification coalition is massive. It’s unstoppable. The cynics among you might be sceptical that this will make a difference. After all, isn’t “enshittification” the same as “capitalism”? Well, no. I’m not going to cape for capitalism. I’m hardly a true believer in markets as the most efficient allocators of resources and arbiters of policy. But the capitalism of 20 years ago made space for a wild and woolly internet, a space where people with disfavoured views could find each other, offer mutual aid and organise. The capitalism of today has produced a global, digital ghost mall, filled with botshit, crap gadgets from companies with consonant-heavy brand names and cryptocurrency scams. The internet isn’t more important than the climate emergency, gender justice, racial justice, genocide or inequality. But the internet is the terrain we’ll fight those fights on. Without a free, fair and open internet, the fight is lost before it’s joined. We can reverse the enshittification of the internet. We can halt the creeping enshittification of every digital device. We can build a better, enshittification-resistant digital nervous system, one that is fit to co-ordinate the mass movements we will need to fight fascism, end genocide, save our planet and our species. Martin Luther King said: “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.” And it may be true that the law can’t force corporations to conceive of you as a human being entitled to dignity and fair treatment, and not just an ambulatory wallet, a supply of gut bacteria for the immortal colony organism that is a limited liability corporation. But it can make them fear you enough to treat you fairly and afford you dignity — even if they don’t think you deserve it. Cory Doctorow is a special adviser to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a visiting professor of computer science at the Open University. His next book ‘The Bezzle’, published by Head of Zeus, is out this month. This piece is adapted from his Marshall McLuhan Lecture, delivered at the Embassy of Canada in Berlin last month

CORY DOCTOROW

IDEAS

The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok

Or how, exactly, platforms die.

TikTok logo on the facade of the TikTok headquarters building in Culver City California

PHOTOGRAPH: AARONP/GETTY IMAGES

HERE IS HOW platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification

, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

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This essay originally appeared in Pluralistic, Cory Doctorow's site. It is reproduced here under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.

When a platform starts, it needs users, so it makes itself valuable to users. Think of Amazon: For many years, it operated at a loss, using its access to the capital markets to subsidize everything you bought. It sold goods below cost and shipped them below cost. It operated a clean and useful search. If you searched for a product, Amazon tried its damndest to put it at the top of the search results.

This was a hell of a good deal for Amazon's customers. Lots of us piled in, and lots of brick-and-mortar retailers withered and died, making it hard to go elsewhere. Amazon sold us ebooks and audiobooks that were permanently locked to its platform with DRM, so that every dollar we spent on media was a dollar we'd have to give up if we deleted Amazon and its apps. And Amazon sold us Prime, getting us to pre-pay for a year's worth of shipping. Prime customers start their shopping on Amazon, and 90 percent of the time, they don't search anywhere else.

That tempted in lots of business customers—marketplace sellers who turned Amazon into the "everything store" it had promised from the beginning. As these sellers piled in, Amazon shifted to subsidizing suppliers. Kindle and Audible creators got generous packages. Marketplace sellers reached huge audiences and Amazon took low commissions from them.

This strategy meant that it became progressively harder for shoppers to find things anywhere except Amazon, which meant that they only searched on Amazon, which meant that sellers had to sell on Amazon. That's when Amazon started to harvest the surplus from its business customers and send it to Amazon's shareholders. Today, Marketplace sellers are handing more than 45 percent of the sale price to Amazon in junk fees. The company's $31 billion "advertising" program is really a payola scheme that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to bid on the chance to be at the top of your search.

Searching Amazon doesn't produce a list of the products that most closely match your search, it brings up a list of products whose sellers have paid the most to be at the top of that search. Those fees are built into the cost you pay for the product, and Amazon's "Most Favored Nation" requirement for sellers means that they can't sell more cheaply elsewhere, so Amazon has driven prices at every retailer.

Search Amazon for "cat beds" and the entire first screen is ads, including ads for products Amazon cloned from its own sellers, putting them out of business (third parties have to pay 45 percent in junk fees to Amazon, but Amazon doesn't charge itself these fees). All told, the first five screens of results for "cat bed" are 50 percent ads.

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This is enshittification: Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.

This is why—as Cat Valente wrote in her magisterial pre-Christmas essay—platforms like Prodigy transformed themselves overnight, from a place where you went for social connection to a place where you were expected to “stop talking to each other and start buying things.”

This shell-game with surpluses is what happened to Facebook. First, Facebook was good to you: It showed you the things the people you loved and cared about had to say. This created a kind of mutual hostage-taking: Once a critical mass of people you cared about were on Facebook, it became effectively impossible to leave, because you'd have to convince all of them to leave too, and agree on where to go. You may love your friends, but half the time you can't agree on what movie to see and where to go for dinner. Forget it.

Then, it started to cram your feed full of posts from accounts you didn't follow. At first, it was media companies, whom Facebook preferentially crammed down its users' throats so that they would click on articles and send traffic to newspapers, magazines, and blogs. Then, once those publications were dependent on Facebook for their traffic, it dialed down their traffic. First, it choked off traffic to publications that used Facebook to run excerpts with links to their own sites, as a way of driving publications into supplying full-text feeds inside Facebook's walled garden.

This made publications truly dependent on Facebook—their readers no longer visited the publications' websites, they just tuned into them on Facebook. The publications were hostage to those readers, who were hostage to each other. Facebook stopped showing readers the articles publications ran, tuning The Algorithm to suppress posts from publications unless they paid to "boost" their articles to the readers who had explicitly subscribed to them and asked Facebook to put them in their feeds.

Now, Facebook started to cram more ads into the feed, mixing payola from people you wanted to hear from with payola from strangers who wanted to commandeer your eyeballs. It gave those advertisers a great deal, charging a pittance to target their ads based on the dossiers of non-consensually harvested personal data they'd stolen from you.

Sellers became dependent on Facebook, too, unable to carry on business without access to those targeted pitches. That was Facebook's cue to jack up ad prices, stop worrying so much about ad fraud, and to collude with Google to rig the ad market through an illegal program called Jedi Blue.

Today, Facebook is terminally enshittified, a terrible place to be whether you're a user, a media company, or an advertiser. It's a company that deliberately demolished a huge fraction of the publishers it relied on, defrauding them into a "pivot to video" based on false claims of the popularity of video among Facebook users. Companies threw billions into the pivot, but the viewers never materialized, and media outlets folded in droves.

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But Facebook has a new pitch. It claims to be called Meta, and it has demanded that we live out the rest of our days as legless, sexless, heavily surveilled low-poly cartoon characters. It has promised companies that make apps for this metaverse that it won't rug them the way it did the publishers on the old Facebook. It remains to be seen whether they'll get any takers. As Mark Zuckerberg once candidly confessed to a peer, marveling at all of his fellow Harvard students who sent their personal information to his new website, "TheFacebook":

I don’t know why.

They “trust me”

Dumb fucks.

Once you understand the enshittification pattern, a lot of the platform mysteries solve themselves. Think of the SEO market, or the whole energetic world of online creators who spend endless hours engaged in useless platform Kremlinology, hoping to locate the algorithmic tripwires, which, if crossed, doom the creative works they pour their money, time, and energy into.

Working for the platform can be like working for a boss who takes money out of every paycheck for all the rules you broke, but who won't tell you what those rules are because if he told you that, then you'd figure out how to break those rules without him noticing and docking your pay. Content moderation is the only domain where security through obscurity is considered a best practice.

The situation is so dire that organizations like Tracking Exposed have enlisted an human army of volunteers and a robot army of headless browsers to try to unwind the logic behind the arbitrary machine judgments of The Algorithm, both to give users the option to tune the recommendations they receive, and to help creators avoid the wage theft that comes from being shadow banned.

But what if there is no underlying logic? Or, more to the point, what if the logic shifts based on the platform's priorities? If you go down to the midway at your county fair, you'll spot some poor sucker walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that they won by throwing three balls in a peach basket.

The peach-basket is a rigged game. The carny can use a hidden switch to force the balls to bounce out of the basket. No one wins a giant teddy bear unless the carny wants them to win it. Why did the carny let the sucker win the giant teddy bear? So that he'd carry it around all day, convincing other suckers to put down five bucks for their chance to win one.

The carny allocated a giant teddy bear to that poor sucker the way that platforms allocate surpluses to key performers—as a convincer in a "Big Store" con, a way to rope in other suckers who'll make content for the platform, anchoring themselves and their audiences to it.

Which brings me to TikTok. TikTok is many different things, including “a free Adobe Premiere for teenagers that live on their phones.” But what made it such a success early on was the power of its recommendation system. From the start, TikTok was really, really good at recommending things to its users. Eerily good.

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By making good-faith recommendations of things it thought its users would like, TikTok built a mass audience, larger than many thought possible, given the death grip of its competitors, like YouTube and Instagram. Now that TikTok has the audience, it is consolidating its gains and seeking to lure away the media companies and creators who are still stubbornly attached to YouTube and Insta.

Yesterday, Forbes's Emily Baker-White broke a fantastic story about how that actually works inside of ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, citing multiple internal sources, revealing the existence of a "heating tool" that TikTok employees use to push videos from select accounts into millions of viewers' feeds.

These videos go into TikTok users' For You feeds, which TikTok misleadingly describes as being populated by videos "ranked by an algorithm that predicts your interests based on your behavior in the app." In reality, For You is only sometimes composed of videos that TikTok thinks will add value to your experience—the rest of the time, it's full of videos that TikTok has inserted in order to make creators think that TikTok is a great place to reach an audience.

"Sources told Forbes that TikTok has often used heating to court influencers and brands, enticing them into partnerships by inflating their videos’ view count. This suggests that heating has potentially benefitted some influencers and brands—those with whom TikTok has sought business relationships—at the expense of others with whom it has not."

In other words, TikTok is handing out giant teddy bears.

But TikTok is not in the business of giving away giant teddy bears. TikTok, for all that its origins are in the quasi-capitalist Chinese economy, is just another paperclip-maximizing artificial colony organism that treats human beings as inconvenient gut flora. TikTok is only going to funnel free attention to the people it wants to entrap until they are entrapped, then it will withdraw that attention and begin to monetize it.

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"Monetize" is a terrible word that tacitly admits that there is no such thing as an "attention economy." You can't use attention as a medium of exchange. You can't use it as a store of value. You can't use it as a unit of account. Attention is like cryptocurrency: a worthless token that is only valuable to the extent that you can trick or coerce someone into parting with "fiat" currency in exchange for it. You have to "monetize" it—that is, you have to exchange the fake money for real money.

In the case of cryptos, the main monetization strategy was deception-based. Exchanges and "projects" handed out a bunch of giant teddy-bears, creating an army of true-believer Judas goats who convinced their peers to hand the carny their money and try to get some balls into the peach-basket themselves.

But deception only produces so much "liquidity provision." Eventually, you run out of suckers. To get lots of people to try the ball-toss, you need coercion, not persuasion. Think of how US companies ended the defined benefits pension that guaranteed you a dignified retirement, replacing it with market-based 401(k) pensions that forced you to gamble your savings in a rigged casino, making you the sucker at the table, ripe for the picking.

Early crypto liquidity came from ransomware. The existence of a pool of desperate, panicked companies and individuals whose data had been stolen by criminals created a baseline of crypto liquidity because they could only get their data back by trading real money for fake crypto money.

The next phase of crypto coercion was Web3: converting the web into a series of tollbooths that you could only pass through by trading real money for fake crypto money. The internet is a must-have, not a nice-to-have, a prerequisite for full participation in employment, education, family life, health, politics, civics, even romance. By holding all those things to ransom behind crypto tollbooths, the holders hoped to convert their tokens to real money.

For TikTok, handing out free teddy-bears by "heating" the videos posted by skeptical performers and media companies is a way to convert them to true believers, getting them to push all their chips into the middle of the table, abandoning their efforts to build audiences on other platforms (it helps that TikTok's format is distinctive, making it hard to repurpose videos for TikTok to circulate on rival platforms).

Once those performers and media companies are hooked, the next phase will begin: TikTok will withdraw the "heating" that sticks their videos in front of people who never heard of them and haven't asked to see their videos. TikTok is performing a delicate dance here: There's only so much enshittification they can visit upon their users' feeds, and TikTok has lots of other performers they want to give giant teddy-bears to.

Tiktok won't just starve performers of the "free" attention by depreferencing them in the algorithm, it will actively punish them by failing to deliver their videos to the users who subscribed to them. After all, every time TikTok shows you a video you asked to see, it loses a chance to show you a video it wants you to see, because your attention is a giant teddy-bear it can give away to a performer it is wooing.

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This is just what Twitter has done as part of its march to enshittification: thanks to its "monetization" changes, the majority of people who follow you will never see the things you post. I have ~500k followers on Twitter and my threads used to routinely get hundreds of thousands or even millions of reads. Today, it's hundreds, perhaps thousands.

I just handed Twitter $8 for Twitter Blue, because the company has strongly implied that it will only show the things I post to the people who asked to see them if I pay ransom money. This is the latest battle in one of the internet's longest-simmering wars: the fight over end-to-end.

In the beginning, there were Bellheads and Netheads. The Bellheads worked for big telcos, and they believed that all the value of the network rightly belonged to the carrier. If someone invented a new feature—say, Caller ID—it should only be rolled out in a way that allows the carrier to charge you every month for its use. This is Software-As-a-Service, Ma Bell style.

The Netheads, by contrast, believed that value should move to the edges of the network—spread out, pluralized. In theory, Compuserve could have "monetized" its own version of Caller ID by making you pay $2.99 extra to see the "From:" line on email before you opened the message— charging you to know who was speaking before you started listening—but they didn't.

The Netheads wanted to build diverse networks with lots of offers, lots of competition, and easy, low-cost switching between competitors (thanks to interoperability). Some wanted this because they believed that the net would someday be woven into the world, and they didn't want to live in a world of rent-seeking landlords. Others were true believers in market competition as a source of innovation. Some believed both things. Either way, they saw the risk of network capture, the drive to monetization through trickery and coercion, and they wanted to head it off.

They conceived of the end-to-end principle: the idea that networks should be designed so that willing speakers' messages would be delivered to willing listeners' end-points as quickly and reliably as they could be. That is, irrespective of whether a network operator could make money by sending you the data it wanted to receive, its duty would be to provide you with the data you wanted to see.

The end-to-end principle is dead at the service level today. Useful idiots on the right were tricked into thinking that the risk of Twitter mismanagement was "woke shadowbanning," whereby the things you said wouldn't reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter's deep state didn't like your opinions. The real risk, of course, is that the things you say won't reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter can make more money by enshittifying their feeds and charging you ransom for the privilege to be included in them.

As I said at the start of this essay, enshittification exerts a nearly irresistible gravity on platform capitalism. It's just too easy to turn the enshittification dial up to eleven. Twitter was able to fire the majority of its skilled staff and still crank the dial all the way over, even with a skeleton crew of desperate, demoralized H1B workers who are shackled to Twitter's sinking ship by the threat of deportation.

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The temptation to enshittify is magnified by the blocks on interoperability: When Twitter bans interoperable clients, nerfs its APIs, and periodically terrorizes its users by suspending them for including their Mastodon handles in their bios, it makes it harder to leave Twitter, and thus increases the amount of enshittification users can be force-fed without risking their departure.

Twitter is not going to be a "protocol." I'll bet you a testicle (not one of mine) that projects like Bluesky will find no meaningful purchase on the platform, because if Bluesky were implemented and Twitter users could order their feeds for minimal enshittification and leave the service without sacrificing their social networks, it would kill the majority of Twitter's "monetization" strategies.

An enshittification strategy only succeeds if it is pursued in measured amounts. Even the most locked-in user eventually reaches a breaking point and walks away, or gets pushed. The villagers of Anatevka in Fiddler on the Roof tolerated the cossacks' violent raids and pogroms for years, until they were finally forced to flee to Krakow, New York, and Chicago.

For enshittification-addled companies, that balance is hard to strike. Individual product managers, executives, and activist shareholders all give preference to quick returns at the cost of sustainability, and are in a race to see who can eat their seed-corn first. Enshittification has only lasted for as long as it has because the internet has devolved into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four.”

With the market sewn up by a group of cozy monopolists, better alternatives don't pop up and lure us away, and if they do, the monopolists just buy them out and integrate them into your enshittification strategies, like when Mark Zuckerberg noticed a mass exodus of Facebook users who were switching to Instagram, and so he bought Instagram. As Zuck says, "It is better to buy than to compete."

This is the hidden dynamic behind the rise and fall of Amazon Smile, the program whereby Amazon gave a small amount of money to charities of your choice when you shopped there, but only if you used Amazon's own search tool to locate the products you purchased. This provided an incentive for Amazon customers to use its own increasingly enshittified search, which it could cram full of products from sellers who coughed up payola, as well as its own lookalike products. The alternative was to use Google, whose search tool would send you directly to the product you were looking for, and then charge Amazon a commission for sending you to it.

The demise of Amazon Smile coincides with the increasing enshittification of Google Search, the only successful product the company managed to build in-house. All its other successes were bought from other companies: video, docs, cloud, ads, mobile, while its own products are either flops like Google Video, clones (Gmail is a Hotmail clone), or adapted from other companies' products, like Chrome.

Google Search was based on principles set out in founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin's landmark 1998 paper, "Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," in which they wrote, “Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”Even with that foundational understanding of enshittification, Google has been unable to resist its siren song. Today's Google results are an increasingly useless morass of self-preferencing links to its own products, ads for products that aren't good enough to float to the top of the list on its own, and parasitic SEO junk piggybacking on the former.

Enshittification kills. Google just laid off 12,000 employees, and the company is in a full-blown "panic" over the rise of "AI" chatbots, and is making a full-court press for an AI-driven search tool—that is, a tool that won't show you what you ask for, but rather, what it thinks you should see.

Now, it's possible to imagine that such a tool will produce good recommendations, like TikTok's pre-enshittified algorithm did. But it's hard to see how Google will be able to design a non-enshittified chatbot front-end to search, given the strong incentives for product managers, executives, and shareholders to enshittify results to the precise threshold at which users are nearly pissed off enough to leave, but not quite.

Even if it manages the trick, this-almost-but-not-quite-unusuable equilibrium is fragile. Any exogenous shock—a new competitor like TikTok that penetrates the anticompetitive "moats and walls" of Big Tech, a privacy scandal, a worker uprising—can send it into wild oscillations.

Enshittification truly is how platforms die. That's fine, actually. We don't need eternal rulers of the internet. It's okay for new ideas and new ways of working to emerge. The emphasis of lawmakers and policymakers shouldn't be preserving the crepuscular senescence of dying platforms. Rather, our policy focus should be on minimizing the cost to users when these firms reach their expiry date: Enshrining rights like end-to-end would mean that no matter how autocannibalistic a zombie platform became, willing speakers and willing listeners would still connect with each other.

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And policymakers should focus on freedom of exit—the right to leave a sinking platform while continuing to stay connected to the communities that you left behind, enjoying the media and apps you bought and preserving the data you created.

The Netheads were right: Technological self-determination is at odds with the natural imperatives of tech businesses. They make more money when they take away our freedom—our freedom to speak, to leave, to connect.

For many years, even TikTok's critics grudgingly admitted that no matter how surveillant and creepy it was, it was really good at guessing what you wanted to see. But TikTok couldn't resist the temptation to show you the things it wants you to see rather than what you want to see. The enshittification has begun, and now it is unlikely to stop.

It's too late to save TikTok. Now that it has been infected by enshittifcation, the only thing left is to kill it with fire.

Enshittification

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Black-and-white photograph of a man with short hair and black glasses, wearing a face microphone.Cory Doctorow, who coined the term enshittification in 2022

Enshittification is the pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms that function as two-sided markets. Examples of enshittification include services and products such as Amazon, Facebook, Google Search, Twitter, Bandcamp, Reddit, Uber and Unity.

The term enshittification was coined by the writer Cory Doctorow in November 2022; the American Dialect Society selected it as its 2023 Word of the Year. Doctorow has used the term platform decay to describe the same concept.

History and definition[edit]

DEF CON 31, 2023

The term enshittification was coined by Doctorow in a November 2022 blog post[1] that was republished in Locus in January 2023.[2] He expanded on the concept in another blog post,[3] which was republished in the January 2023 edition of Wired:[4]

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

In a 2024 article on ft.com, Doctorow extended the word with the term "enshittocene" to state that "'enshittification' is coming for absolutely everything".[5]

According to Doctorow, new platforms offer useful products and services at a loss, as a way to gain new users. Once users are locked in, the platform then offers access to the userbase to suppliers at a loss, and once suppliers are locked-in, the platform shifts surpluses to shareholders.[6] Once the platform is fundamentally focused on the shareholders, and the users and vendors are locked in, the platform no longer has any incentive to maintain quality. Enshittified platforms which act as intermediaries can functionally act as both a monopoly on services and a monopsony on customers, as high switching costs prevent either from leaving even when alternatives technically exist.[4] Doctorow has described the process of enshittification as happening through "twiddling"; the continual adjustment of the parameters of the system in search of marginal improvements of profits, without regard to any other goal.[7] Enshittification can be seen as a form of rent-seeking.[4]

To solve the problem, Doctorow has called for two general principles to be followed:

- The first is a respect of the end-to-end principle, a fundamental principle of the Internet in which the role of a network is to reliably deliver data from willing senders to willing receivers. When applied to platforms, this entails users being given what they asked for, not what the platform prefers to present. For example, users would see all content from users they subscribed to, allowing content creators to reach their audience without going through an opaque algorithm; and in search engines, exact matches for search queries would be shown before sponsored results, rather than afterwards.[8]

- The second is the right of exit, where users of a platform can easily go elsewhere if they are dissatisfied with it. For social media, this requires interoperability, countering the network effects that "lock in" users and prevent market competition between platforms. For digital media platforms, it means enabling users to switch platforms without losing the content they purchased that is locked by digital rights management.[8]

The American Dialect Society selected "enshittification" as its 2023 Word of the Year.[9][10]

Examples[edit]

The word gained traction in 2023, where it was widely adopted by journalists in reference to several major platforms discontinuing free features in order to further their monetization or taking other actions that were seen to degrade functionality in ways intended to thwart competition and increase profits.[11]

Amazon[edit]

See also: Criticism of Amazon

In Doctorow's original post, he discussed the practices of Amazon. First, Amazon started selling goods below cost to build up a user base. Amazon then introduced the Amazon Prime subscription which encouraged users to shop more exclusively at Amazon. The strong base of clients who had formed a habit of using Amazon exclusively incentivised more sellers to sell their products through Amazon, as Prime users were only searching Amazon for goods. Finally, Doctorow indicated that Amazon then began to focus on its shareholders by increasing profits and introducing fees. In 2023, 45%+ of the sale price of items went to Amazon in the form of various fees[citation needed]. He described advertisement within Amazon as a payola scheme, in which sellers are bidding against one another for search ranking preference, and identified that the first five pages of a search for "cat beds" were 50% advertisements.[4]

Doctorow has also criticised the near-monopoly of Amazon's Audible service, which controls over 90% of the audiobook market, and applies mandatory digital rights management (DRM) to all audio books. Doctorow pointed out that this meant that a user leaving the platform would lose access to their audio book library. Doctorow decided to independently distribute the audio version of his book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation since Amazon's system would not distribute it without DRM.[12][better source needed]

Bandcamp[edit]

This term was used retroactively to describe the 2022 sale of Bandcamp to Epic Games, and later when Epic Games sold Bandcamp to music licensing firm Songtradr in September 2023.[13] In October 2023, it was revealed that almost half of Bandcamp's staff were laid off, including many key members of the executive team who apparently "vanished", according to former employees. Following this acquisition, there was a large outpouring of grief and rage on social media from many former employees, users and artists who viewed Bandcamp as an essential service for niche and independent artists to release music while retaining profits from the sale of their work.[14] Bandcamp had also unionized in March of 2023, and Songtradr laid off most of the staff involved in the union, as well as the people involved in negotiation with the union.[15] As of October 2023, Songtradr still has not formally recognized the union.[15] According to music journalist Philip Sherburne, writing for Pitchfork, by specifically targeting both the customer-support department and the editorial department for layoffs, Songtradr was signaling either ignorance or apathy for the reason Bandcamp had been successful.[13]

Facebook[edit]

See also: Criticism of Facebook

According to Doctorow, Facebook offered a good service until it had reached a "critical mass" of users, and it became difficult for people to leave because they would need to convince their friends to go with them. Facebook then began to add posts from media companies into feeds until the media companies too were dependent on traffic from Facebook, and then adjusted the algorithm to prioritise paid "boosted" posts. Business Insider agreed with the view that Facebook was being enshittified, adding that it "constantly floods users' feeds with sponsored (or "recommended") content, and seems to bury the things people want to see under what Facebook decides is relevant".[16] Doctorow pointed at the Facebook metrics controversy, in which video statistics were inflated on the site, which led to media companies over-investing in Facebook and collapsing. He described Facebook as "terminally enshittified".[4]

Google Search[edit]

See also: Criticism of Google

Doctorow cites Google Search as one example, which became dominant through relevant search results and minimal ads, then later degraded through increased advertising, search engine optimization, and outright fraud, benefitting its advertising customers, which was followed by Google's collusion to rig the ad market through Jedi Blue to recapture value for itself. Doctorow also cites Google's firing of 12,000 employees in January 2023, which coincided with a stock buyback scheme which "would have paid all their salaries for the next 27 years", as well as Google's rush to research an AI search chatbot, "a tool that won't show you what you ask for, but rather, what it thinks you should see".[8][4][17][18][19]

Reddit[edit]

Reddit users protest the changes on r/place. "Spez" is the username of the Reddit CEO, Steve Huffman.

See also: 2023 Reddit API controversy

In 2023, shortly after its initial filings for an initial public offering, Reddit announced that it would begin charging fees for API access, a move that would effectively shut down many third-party apps by making them cost-prohibitive to operate.[20] The CEO, Steve Huffman, stated that it was in response to AI firms scraping data without paying Reddit for it, but coverage linked the move to the upcoming IPO; the move shut down large numbers of third party apps, forcing users to use official Reddit apps that provided more profit to the company.[20][21][22] Moderators on the site conducted a blackout protest against the company's new policy, although the changes ultimately went ahead. Many third party Reddit apps such as the Apollo app were shut down because of the new fees.[23][21][24]

Twitter / X[edit]

Main article: Twitter under Elon Musk

The term was applied to the changes to Twitter in the wake of its 2022 acquisition by Elon Musk.[25][17] This included the closure of the service's API to stop interoperable software from being used, suspending users for posting (rival service) Mastodon handles in their profiles, and placing restrictions on the ability to view the site without logging in. Other changes included temporary rate limits for the number of tweets that could be viewed per day, the introduction of paid subscriptions to the service in the form of Twitter Blue,[25] and the reduction of moderation.[26] Musk had the algorithm modified to promote his own posts above others, which caused users' feeds to be flooded with his content in February 2023.[27] The increase in hate speech on the platform, particularly antisemitism and Islamophobia during the Israel–Hamas war, led to some organisations pulling advertisements from the platform.[28] According to internal documents seen by The New York Times in late 2023, the losses from advertisers pulling out may amount to $75 million by the end of the year.[29] Musk delivered an interview on November 29, in which he told advertisers leaving the website to "go fuck yourself."[30][31]

Uber[edit]

See also: Controversies involving Uber

App-based ridesharing company Uber gained market share by ignoring local licensing systems such as taxi medallions while also keeping consumer costs artificially low by subsidizing rides via venture capital funding.[32] Once they achieved a duopoly with competitor Lyft, the company implemented surge pricing to increase the cost of travel to riders and dynamically adjust the payments made to drivers.[32]

Unity[edit]

See also: Unity (game engine) § Runtime fee

The Unity game engine's 2023 changes to its licensing model were described by Gameindustry.biz as an example of enshittification, as the proposed changes would have applied retroactively to projects which had already been in development for years while degrading quality for both developers and end users, while increasing fees.[33] While the Unity Engine itself is not a two-sided market, the move was related to Unity's position as a provider of mobile free-to-play services to developers, including in-app purchase systems.[34] In response to these changes, many game developers announced their intention to abandon Unity for an alternative engine, despite the significant switching cost of doing so, with game designer Sam Barlow specifically using the word enshittification when describing the new fee policy as the motive.[35]

Dating apps[edit]

The market for dating apps has been cited as an example of enshittification due to the conflict between the dating apps' ostensible goal of matchmaking, and their operators' desire to convert users to the paid version of the app and retaining them as paying users indefinitely by keeping them single, creating a perverse incentive that leads performance to decline over time as efforts at monetization begin to dominate.[36] Mathematical modeling has suggested that it is in the financial interests of app operators to offer their user base a sub-optimal experience.[37]

See also[edit]

- Look up enshittification in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Anti-competitive practices

- Bait and switch

- Data portability

- Market failure

- Platform capitalism

- Platform cooperative

- Predatory pricing

- Vendor lock-in

- Tendency of the rate of profit to fall

Platform cooperative

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A platform cooperative, or platform co-op, is a cooperatively owned, democratically governed business that establishes a two-sided market via a computing platform, website, mobile app or a protocol to facilitate the sale of goods and services. Platform cooperatives are an alternative to venture capital-funded platforms insofar as they are owned and governed by those who depend on them most—workers, users, and other relevant stakeholders.

Typology[edit]

While there is no commonly accepted typology of platform cooperatives, researchers often ontologize platform cooperatives by industry. Some potential categories include: transportation, on-demand labor, journalism, music, creative projects, timebank, film, home health care, photography, data cooperatives, marketplaces.[1] Other typologies differentiate platform cooperatives by their governance or ownership structures.

Platform cooperatives are a business model that differs from platform capitalism, prioritizing fairness and sharing over profit motive. On the other hand, platform capitalists, such as Airbnb and Uber, are more traditional multi-sided businesses focusing on profit and returns to investors. These can also be referred to as capitalist platforms, while cooperativist platforms prioritize cooperation and fairness in addition to a profit motive. In turn, projects like Wikipedia, which rely on unpaid labor of volunteers, can be classified as commons-based peer-production initiatives.[2]: 31, 36

Examples[edit]

Many platform co-operatives use business models similar to better-known apps or web services, but with a cooperative structure. For example, there are numerous driver-owned taxi apps that allow customers to submit trip requests and notify the nearest driver, similar to Uber.[3][4]

The Internet of Ownership website includes a directory of the platform co-op "ecosystem".[5]

Equal Care Co-op is the UK’s first platform-based social care and support co-operative. [6] The platform enables those looking for support to build and manage their own teams, which can include family members, friends and volunteers as well as paid, professional care and support workers. It allows care teams to work together directly, replacing the layers of management that would usually control that support. [7]

Eva is a ride-sharing application that offers a service similar to Uber, but in line with its cooperative members priorities: cheaper for rider members and better wages for driver members.[8]

Fairbnb.coop [9] is an online marketplace and hospitality service for people to lease or rent short-term lodging. Foremost, it is also a community of activists, coders, researchers and designers working to create the platform to enable hosts and guests to connect for travel and cultural exchange, while minimizing the cost to communities. It is an alternative to commercial platforms.[10]

Fairmondo is an online marketplace for ethical goods and services, that originated from Germany and has expanded to the UK. Joining as a stakeholder is open for all and the minimum share is limited to an affordable amount, with stakeholders exercising a democratic control through one-member-one-vote principle.[11] It is a cooperative alternative to Amazon and eBay.[12]

Green Taxi Cooperative is the largest taxi company in the Denver metro area.[13] Organized by the Communications Workers of America Local 7777, its members buy into the cooperative for a one-time membership fee of $2000 and then pay fees amounting to a "fraction" of what large companies charge drivers.[14] Despite having a mobile application through which riders can schedule pickups, and thus competing directly with ride-hailing applications like Uber and Lyft, as of November 2016 the Green Taxi Cooperative reportedly held 37% market share in Denver.[15]

Meet.coop is an open source meeting and conferencing tool.[16]

Midata is a cooperatively owned, Zurich-based, online platform that seeks to serve as an exchange for members' medical data. Using an open-source application, members are able to securely share their medical data with doctors, friends, and researchers, and are provided access to "data analysis, visualization and interpretation tools". Members can also consent to their data's use in medical research and clinical trials. In a pilot project, post-bariatric-surgery patients are able to upload data to the platform, including their weight and daily step count, and follow their own post-surgery progress.[17]

Savvy Cooperative is a multi-stakeholder patient-owned research insights cooperative that seeks to match patients with patient engagement leaders, digital health companies, and clinical innovation leads, enabling industry and start-up tech companies to easily conduct user research with patients to ensure the products that go-to-market are patient-centric and focused on patient needs. Using Savvy's platform, patients can find and apply for gigs that match their conditions, get reimbursed for their participation, and qualify for dividends based on their co-op participation. Savvy is majority patient-owned.[18]

Stocksy United is a platform cooperative headquartered in Victoria, British Columbia. It is a "highly curated collection of royalty-free stock photography and video footage that is 'beautiful, distinctive, and highly usable.'"[19] In 2015, Stocksy earned $7.9 million in sales—doubling its revenues from the year prior—and paid a dividend of $200,000 to its members.[19]

Up & Go is a digital marketplace for professional home services that allows users to schedule services such as house cleaning, dog walking, and handywork with worker-owned businesses that have fair work practices.[20][21]

Resonate[22] is music streaming coop[23] similar to Spotify.

Collective Tools is a cooperatively owned cloud service that offers storage, communication and canvas boards to organisations as well as storage and email to private persons.[24]

Platform co-operativism[edit]

Platform Cooperativism is an intellectual framework and movement which advocates for the global development of platform cooperatives. Its advocates object to the techno-solutionist claim that technology is, by default, the answer to all social problems.[25][26][27] Rather, proponents of the movement claim that ethical commitments such as the building of the global commons, support of inventive unions, and promotion of ecological and social sustainability as well as social justice, are necessary to shape an equitable and fair social economy.[28] Platform cooperativism advocates for the coexistence of cooperatively owned business models and traditional, extractive models with the goal of a more diversified digital labor landscape respecting fair working conditions.[29]

Platform cooperativism draws upon other attempts at digital disintermediation, including the peer-to-peer production movement, led by Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis and the P2P Foundation,[30] which advocates for "new kinds of democratic and economic participation"[31] that rest "upon the free participation of equal partners, engaged in the production of common resources", as well as the radically distributed, non-market mechanisms of networked peer-production promoted by Yochai Benkler.[32] Marjorie Kelly's book Owning Our Future contributed the distinction between democratic and extractive ownership design to this discussion.[33]

While platform cooperatives are structured as cooperatives, granting democratic control to workers, customers, users, or other key stakeholders, companies and initiatives that support the ecosystem of the cooperative platform economy are considered a part of the platform cooperativism movement insofar as they attempt to encourage, develop, and sustain its development. It has also been argued that, as the spread of platform cooperativism "will require a different kind of ecosystem—with appropriate forms of finance, law, policy, and culture—to support the development of democratic online enterprises", any person or business associated with the development of this ecosystem can be considered a proponent of platform cooperativism.[34]

History of the term[edit]

The term "platform cooperativism" was coined by New School professor Trebor Scholz in a 2014 article titled, "Platform Cooperativism vs. the Sharing Economy", in which he criticized popular sharing economy platforms and called for the creation of democratically controlled cooperative alternatives that "allow workers to exchange their labor without the manipulation of the middleman".[32] Shortly thereafter, journalist Nathan Schneider published an article, "Owning Is the New Sharing", which documented a variety of projects using cooperative models for digitally mediated commerce, as well as online, distributed funding-models which hoped to replace the venture capital model predominant in the technology sector.[35] Both Scholz and Schneider would later credit the work and provocations of other researchers and digital-labor advocates as their inspiration, including, among others, lawyer Janelle Orsi of the Sustainable Economies Law Center, who had "called on technology companies in the sharing economy to share ownership and profits with their users", and Amazon Mechanical Turk organizer Kristy Milland who had proposed a worker-owned alternative to the platform at the "Digital Labor: Sweatshops, Picket Lines, Barricades" conference in November 2014.[36][37]

There are several other precursors to platform cooperativism. In 2012, the Italian cooperative federation Legacoop promulgated a manifesto on the "Cooperative Commons", which called for bringing the lessons of the cooperative movement to control over online data.[38] The same year Mayo Fuster Morell published an article named "horizons of digital commons" in which she pointed to the evolution of commons-based peer production merging with cooperatives and the social economy.[39] The article reflects on an event named Building Digital commons, which took place in October 2011. It was the goal of the event to further connect the cooperative tradition and collaborative production. Other previous similar terms on new forms of cooperativism such as "open cooperativism"[40] and also studies of how the digital environment opens up new possibilities for the cooperative tradition[41] are of relevance to the new term platform cooperativism.

In 2015, Scholz published a primer on platform cooperativism, "Platform Cooperativism: Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy", which was published in five languages[42] and helped to internationalize the concept.[43] In 2016, he published Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy,[44] which further developed the concept. Together, Scholz and Schneider went on to convene an event on the subject, "Platform Cooperativism. The Internet. Ownership. Democracy", at The New School in November 2015,[45] and edit a book, Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet.[46]

Roots in criticism of the sharing economy[edit]

Proponents of platform cooperativism claim that, by ensuring the financial and social value of a platform circulate among these participants, platform cooperatives will bring about a more equitable and fair digitally mediated economy in contrast with the extractive models of corporate intermediaries.

The concept of platform cooperativism emerged from the discourse surrounding digital labor, popular in the late 2000s and early 2010s, which critiqued the use of digitally mediated labor markets to evade traditional labor protections.[47] Early studies of digital labor, using the theories of Italian Workerists, focused on the "free" or "immaterial" labor performed by users of Web 2.0 platforms (sometimes referred to as "playbor"), while later analyses served to critique the "crowd fleecing"[48][49] of digital laborers by microtask labor-brokerages such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and Crowdflower.[50]

In 2014, the digital labor discourse shifted to the so-called "sharing economy", resulting in an increase in both academic and media attention to the practices and policies of online markets for labor, services, and goods.[51] Researchers and labor advocates argued that platforms such as Uber and TaskRabbit were unfairly classifying full-time workers as independent contractors rather than employees, thus avoiding legally granted labor protections such as minimum-wage laws[52][53][54] and the right to join a union with which to engage in collective bargaining,[55] as well as different benefits offered to workers with employee status, including time off, unemployment insurance, and healthcare.[56]

Other research focused on the automated management of the digital workplace by algorithms, without worker recourse. For example, the wage-per-mile by drivers on the Uber platform is controlled moment-to-moment by a surge pricing algorithm,[57][58] and its drivers can lose their jobs if they fall behind any one of a number of metrics logged by the platform including ride-acceptance percentage (minimum 90%) and customer-rating (4.7 out of 5).[58] Sharing economy workers who complained about this algorithmic management were often ignored, (e.g. a TaskRabbit discussion forum was shut down in response to worker unrest)[59] and sometimes told that, insofar as the platform owners do not employ their contracted labor force, they were not actually being managed by the technology companies behind the platforms on which they worked.[60][61]

Insofar as platform cooperatives offer worker-owners a more robust degree of control of the platforms they use, the model was seen as offering an ethical alternative to existing sharing economy platforms.[62] As these early critiques of the sharing economy remain relevant, platform cooperatives tend to highlight their efforts to provide their worker-owners with a living wage or a fair share of revenues, benefits, control over the platform's design, and democratic influence over the management of the cooperative business.

Public policy[edit]

The platform cooperativism movement has seen a number of global policy proposals and successes.

Spain[edit]

Barcelona[edit]

Barcelona has a long tradition of connecting cooperativism and collaborative production.[63] On 30 October 2011, an event was held to "Promote dialogue between the cooperative tradition and digital commons".[64]

The Social Economy and Consumption Commission of Barcelona City Council in 2015 started a program on platform cooperativism.[65] The program includes the provision of match-funding to support entrepreneurship and "La Communificadora", an entrepreneurship training and support course, among others.[66]

A March 2016 international event by BarCola (node about Collaborative Economy and Commons-Based Peer Production in Barcelona) produced a set of 120 policy proposals for European governments. Integrated as concrete actions for the Municipal Action Plan of the Barcelona City Council, following a consultative online participatory process, as well as aiming at other local authorities in Spain and the Government of Catalonia, the resulting document criticized the organizational rationale of "multinational corporations based in Silicon Valley" which, though similar to collaborative-Commons economic models, "behave in the style of the prevailing globalized capitalist economic model, based on extracting profits through networked collaboration".

That joint statement of public policies for the collaborative economy, which integrates a Commons-oriented vision in such an emerging paradigm, claimed that by privatizing certain aspects of the collaborative Commons model these companies created "severe inequalities and loss of rights". The organization and participants at the event proposed the creation of favorable regulations for truly collaborative economic models, with measures like the funding of an incubator of new projects in the collaborative economy, including platform cooperativism, as well as the reassigning of public spaces for jointly managed working and manufacturing spaces. Embedded in a wider framework of action research for the co-design of public policies, some of these policy proposals have been met with support by members of the Barcelona city government. Outputs from that process have resulted in specific measures like the incubation of new collaborative economy initiatives following a cooperativist model, or the possibility of new funding schemes for civic projects via transparent "match-funding".

United States[edit]

NYC Council Member Brad Lander of Brooklyn's 39th District, founding co-chair of the Council's Progressive Caucus, released a report in 2016 entitled, "Raising the Floor for Workers in the Gig Economy: Tools for NYC & Beyond",[67] which analyzes the contingent work sector in New York City and "presents policy tools for cities seeking to protect gig workers from wage theft and discrimination, provide access to portable benefits, and establish new frameworks for worker organizing".[68] Under his leadership, the NYC Council unanimously passed the "Freelance Isn't Free Act", which provides freelance workers with a right to full and timely payment, along with new tools for enforcement, and amendments to the NYC Human Rights law to clarify that employment protections apply to independent and contingent workers.[69] In his report, NYC Council Member Brad Lander presented platform cooperativism as a model to help laborers in the digital economy.[68][67]

The US Department of Agriculture appeared to offer its support for the platform cooperativism movement with a feature story in the September/October 2016 issue of its magazine, Rural Cooperatives.[70]

"Rural Americans have been organizing cooperatives to develop countervailing economic power against larger investor-owned corporations for more than a century. This cooperative movement has now moved into the sharing economy that has been developing throughout the country. Wherever investor-owners of software platforms are satisfying the needs of rural asset owners and users, the sharing economy will be welcomed. However, when the need arises, cooperatively-owned software platforms are proving to be a viable alternative."

United Kingdom[edit]

In 2016, Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party and the Opposition in the United Kingdom, released a digital democracy manifesto calling for, among other policies, the fostering of "the cooperative ownership of digital platforms for distributing labour and selling services". He proposed that the National Investment Bank, as well as regional banks, would "finance social enterprises whose websites and apps are designed to minimise the costs of connecting producers with consumers in the transport, accommodation, cultural, catering and other important sectors of the British economy".[71]

Advocacy[edit]

Organizations[edit]

Platform Cooperativism Consortium (PCC)

The Platform Cooperativism Consortium is a "think-and-do tank"[72] for the platform cooperativism movement based at The New School in New York City.[73] As a "global network of researchers, platform co-ops, independent software developers, artists, designers, lawyers, activists, publishing outlets, and funders",[74] it engages in research, advocacy, education, and technology-based projects. It was launched in November 2016 at the occasion of the "Building the Cooperative Internet" conference.[75]

The Internet of Ownership

Beginning in 2016, The Internet of Ownership was a website that included a global directory of platform cooperatives[76] and a calendar of events[77] concerning the platform cooperativism movement. It was maintained by Nathan Schneider and Devin Balkind. In 2020, the Internet of Ownership directory stopped being maintained and was superseded by the Platform Cooperativism Consortium's directory of platform cooperatives.[76]

Campaigns[edit]

In September 2016, Nathan Schneider wrote the article "Here's my plan to save Twitter: let's buy it"[78] in which he asked "What if users were to band together and buy Twitter for themselves?" Once in users' hands, Schneider suggested, Twitter could be turned into a platform co-op.

Criticisms of the viability of platform cooperatives[edit]

Dominance of established players[edit]

Some critics of platform cooperativism claim that platform cooperatives will have trouble challenging established, venture-capital-funded platforms. Nick Srnicek writes that, due to "the monopolistic nature of platforms, the dominance of network effects, and the vast resources behind these companies ... even if all that software would be made open-source, a platform like Facebook would still have the weight of its existing data, network effects, and financial resources to fight off any co-op arrival."[79] Rufus Pollock expresses similar concerns that platform coops will face major challenges reaching adequate scale, particularly given their inability to raise traditional equity capital.[80] In addition, he argues that coops often have slow and inefficient decision-making processes which will hamper them in their ability to compete successfully. Finally, he points out there is the risk that platform coops will go "bad" becoming an exclusive club for their members (for example, a ride-sharing coop might end up controlled only by drivers who then exploit consumers). Evgeny Morozov writes that "Efforts at platform cooperativism are worthwhile; occasionally, they do produce impressive and ethical local projects. There is no reason why a cooperative of drivers in a small town cannot build an app to help them beat Uber locally. But there is also no good reason to believe that this local cooperative can actually build a self-driving car: this requires massive investment and a dedicated infrastructure to harvest and analyze all of the data. One can, of course, also create data ownership cooperatives but it's unlikely they will scale to a point of competing with Google or Amazon."[81]

While this may be true in certain sectors, Arun Sundararajan claims that, "Economic theory suggests that worker cooperatives are more efficient than shareholder corporations when there isn't a great deal of diversity in the levels of contribution across workers, when the level of external competition is low, and when there isn't the need for frequent investments in response to technological change." Using Uber as an example of a dominant platform, he continues: "Cab drivers, after all, offer a more or less uniform service in an industry with a limited amount of competition. Once the technology associated with 'e-hail' is commoditized, the potential for a worker cooperative appears to be in place, since each local market is contestable."[82]

Regardless, the possibility of dominant platforms turning the flows of data they receive from their larger user-bases into market-securing technological innovations remains a challenge. For example, Uber seeks to use the data they currently collect from drivers using their app to automate the taxi industry, thus eliminating the need for their workforce altogether and likely dropping the value of a ride below that on which a human laborer can survive.[citation needed]

Difficulty securing early-stage capital[edit]

Though Sundararajan believes there are markets in which platform cooperatives might thrive, he finds their primary barrier to entry to be the initial securing of funds, especially given their ideological devaluation of the need to generate profits for investor-stakeholders. He does note, however, that a number of alternative fundraising models may pave the way for the widespread market-entry of platform cooperatives. Among those he mentions is Fairshare, a stakeholder model that differentiates between founders, workers, users, and investors, each with distinct voting rights, payouts, and permissions to trade shares on the open market. Other models he mentions include crypto-coin crowdfunding, philanthropic investment, and "provider stock ownership programs" that mimic the traditional joint-ownership form of the "employee stock ownership program".[83]

See also

Table of Contents

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