#resist enshittification

[lilithsaintcrow]

"…we can restore the things we loved about the old web while incorporating the wonderful things that have emerged since and developing even better things as we go forward."

[pvp-enabled]

The next product or service that demands that I download their single use app before I can get the thing I paid for is getting a robust low-tech intervention delivered directly to their CEO

[songoftrillium]

Just remembered Netflix cancelling Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance is the reason I cancelled my subscription, and now I'm mad at them all over again

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Good riddance to the Open Gaming License

Last week, Gizmodo’s Linda Codega caught a fantastic scoop — a leaked report of Hasbro’s plan to revoke the decades-old Open Gaming License, which subsidiary Wizards Of the Coast promulgated as an allegedly open sandbox for people seeking to extend, remix or improve Dungeons and Dragons:

https://gizmodo.com/dnd-wizards-of-the-coast-ogl-1-1-open-gaming-license-1849950634

The report set off a shitstorm among D&D fans and the broader TTRPG community — not just because it was evidence of yet more enshittification of D&D by a faceless corporate monopolist, but because Hasbro was seemingly poised to take back the commons that RPG players and designers had built over decades, having taken WOTC and the OGL at their word.

Gamers were right to be worried. Giant companies love to rugpull their fans, tempting them into a commons with lofty promises of a system that we will all have a stake in, using the fans for unpaid creative labor, then enclosing the fans’ work and selling it back to them. It’s a tale as old as CDDB and Disgracenote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB#History

(Disclosure: I am a long-serving volunteer board-member for MetaBrainz, which maintains MusicBrainz, a free, open, community-managed and transparent alternative to Gracenote, explicitly designed to resist the kind of commons-stealing enclosure that led to the CDDB debacle.)

https://musicbrainz.org/

Free/open licenses were invented specifically to prevent this kind of fuckery. First there was the GPL and its successor software licenses, then Creative Commons and its own successors. One important factor in these licenses: they contain the word “irrevocable.” That means that if you build on licensed content, you don’t have to worry about having the license yanked out from under you later. It’s rugproof.

Now, the OGL does not contain the word “irrevocable.” Rather, the OGL is “perpetual.” To a layperson, these two terms may seem interchangeable, but this is one of those fine lawerly distinctions that trip up normies all the time. In lawyerspeak, a “perpetual” license is one whose revocation doesn’t come automatically after a certain time (unlike, say, a one-year car-lease, which automatically terminates at the end of the year). Unless a license is “irrevocable,” the licensor can terminate it whenever they want to.

This is exactly the kind of thing that trips up people who roll their own licenses, and people who trust those licenses. The OGL predates the Creative Commons licenses, but it neatly illustrates the problem with letting corporate lawyers — rather than public-interest nonprofits — unleash “open” licenses on an unsuspecting, legally unsophisticated audience.

The perpetual/irrevocable switcheroo is the least of the problems with the OGL. As Rob Bodine— an actual lawyer, as well as a dice lawyer — wrote back in 2019, the OGL is a grossly defective instrument that is significantly worse than useless.

https://gsllcblog.com/2019/08/26/part3ogl/

The issue lies with what the OGL actually licenses. Decades of copyright maximalism has convinced millions of people that anything you can imagine is “intellectual property,” and that this is indistinguishable from real property, which means that no one can use it without your permission.

The copyrightpilling of the world sets people up for all kinds of scams, because copyright just doesn’t work like that. This wholly erroneous view of copyright grooms normies to be suckers for every sharp grifter who comes along promising that everything imaginable is property-in-waiting (remember SpiceDAO?):

https://onezero.medium.com/crypto-copyright-bdf24f48bf99

Copyright is a lot more complex than “anything you can imagine is your property and that means no one else can use it.” For starters, copyright draws a fundamental distinction between ideas and expression. Copyright does not apply to ideas — the idea, say, of elves and dwarves and such running around a dungeon, killing monsters. That is emphatically not copyrightable.

Copyright also doesn’t cover abstract systems or methods — like, say, a game whose dice-tables follow well-established mathematical formulae to create a “balanced” system for combat and adventuring. Anyone can make one of these, including by copying, improving or modifying an existing one that someone else made. That’s what “uncopyrightable” means.

Finally, there are the exceptions and limitations to copyright — things that you are allowed to do with copyrighted work, without first seeking permission from the creator or copyright’s proprietor. The best-known exception is US law is fair use, a complex doctrine that is often incorrectly characterized as turning on “four factors” that determine whether a use is fair or not.

In reality, the four factors are a starting point that courts are allowed and encouraged to consider when determining the fairness of a use, but some of the most consequential fair use cases in Supreme Court history flunk one, several, or even all of the four factors (for example, the Betamax decision that legalized VCRs in 1984, which fails all four).

Beyond fair use, there are other exceptions and limitations, like the di minimis exemption that allows for incidental uses of tiny fragments of copyrighted work without permission, even if those uses are not fair use. Copyright, in other words, is “fact-intensive,” and there are many ways you can legally use a copyrighted work without a license.

Which brings me back to the OGL, and what, specifically, it licenses. The OGL is a license that only grants you permission to use the things that WOTC can’t copyright — “the game mechanic [including] the methods, procedures, processes and routines.” In other words, the OGL gives you permission to use things you don’t need permission to use.

But maybe the OGL grants you permission to use more things, beyond those things you’re allowed to use anyway? Nope. The OGL specifically exempts:

Product and product line names, logos and identifying marks including trade dress; artifacts; creatures characters; stories, storylines, plots, thematic elements, dialogue, incidents, language, artwork, symbols, designs, depictions, likenesses, formats, poses, concepts, themes and graphic, photographic and other visual or audio representations; names and descriptions of characters, spells, enchantments, personalities, teams, personas, likenesses and special abilities; places, locations, environments, creatures, equipment, magical or supernatural abilities or effects, logos, symbols, or graphic designs; and any other trademark or registered trademark…

Now, there are places where the uncopyrightable parts of D&D mingle with the copyrightable parts, and there’s a legal term for this: merger. Merger came up for gamers in 2018, when the provocateur Robert Hovden got the US Copyright Office to certify copyright in a Magic: The Gathering deck:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/14/angels-and-demons/#owning-culture

If you want to learn more about merger, you need to study up on Kregos and Eckes, which are beautifully explained in the “Open Intellectual Property Casebook,” a free resource created by Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle:

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/openip/#q01

Jenkins and Boyle explicitly created their open casebook as an answer to another act of enclosure: a greedy textbook publisher cornered the market on IP textbook and charged every law student — and everyone curious about the law — $200 to learn about merger and other doctrines.

As EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kit Walsh writes in her must-read analysis of the OGL, this means “the only benefit that OGL offers, legally, is that you can copy verbatim some descriptions of some elements that otherwise might arguably rise to the level of copyrightability.”

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/beware-gifts-dragons-how-dds-open-gaming-license-may-have-become-trap-creators

But like I said, it’s not just that the OGL fails to give you rights — it actually takes away rights you already have to D&D. That’s because — as Walsh points out — fair use and the other copyright limitations and exceptions give you rights to use D&D content, but the OGL is a contract whereby you surrender those rights, promising only to use D&D stuff according to WOTC’s explicit wishes.

“For example, absent this agreement, you have a legal right to create a work using noncopyrightable elements of D&D or making fair use of copyrightable elements and to say that that work is compatible with Dungeons and Dragons. In many contexts you also have the right to use the logo to name the game (something called “nominative fair use” in trademark law). You can certainly use some of the language, concepts, themes, descriptions, and so forth. Accepting this license almost certainly means signing away rights to use these elements. Like Sauron’s rings of power, the gift of the OGL came with strings attached.”

And here’s where it starts to get interesting. Since the OGL launched in 2000, a huge proportion of game designers have agreed to its terms, tricked into signing away their rights. If Hasbro does go through with canceling the OGL, it will release those game designers from the shitty, deceptive OGL.

According to the leaks, the new OGL is even worse than the original versions — but you don’t have to take those terms! Notwithstanding the fact that the OGL says that “using…Open Game Content” means that you accede to the license terms, that is just not how contracts work.

Walsh: “Contracts require an offer, acceptance, and some kind of value in exchange, called ‘consideration.’ If you sell a game, you are inviting the reader to play it, full stop. Any additional obligations require more than a rote assertion.”

“For someone who wants to make a game that is similar mechanically to Dungeons and Dragons, and even announce that the game is compatible with Dungeons and Dragons, it has always been more advantageous as a matter of law to ignore the OGL.”

Walsh finishes her analysis by pointing to some good licenses, like the GPL and Creative Commons, “written to serve the interests of creative communities, rather than a corporation.” Many open communities — like the programmers who created GNU/Linux, or the music fans who created Musicbrainz, were formed after outrageous acts of enclosure by greedy corporations.

If you’re a game designer who was pissed off because the OGL was getting ganked — and if you’re even more pissed off now that you’ve discovered that the OGL was a piece of shit all along — there’s a lesson there. The OGL tricked a generation of designers into thinking they were building on a commons. They weren’t — but they could.

This is a great moment to start — or contribute to — real open gaming content, licensed under standard, universal licenses like Creative Commons. Rolling your own license has always been a bad idea, comparable to rolling your own encryption in the annals of ways-to-fuck-up-your-own-life-and-the-lives-of-many-others. There is an opportunity here — Hasbro unintentionally proved that gamers want to collaborate on shared gaming systems.

That’s the true lesson here: if you want a commons, you’re not alone. You’ve got company, like Kit Walsh herself, who happens to be a brilliant game-designer who won a Nebula Award for her game “Thirsty Sword Lesbians”:

https://evilhat.com/product/thirsty-sword-lesbians/

[Image ID: A remixed version of David Trampier's 'Eye of Moloch,' the cover of the first edition of the AD&D Player's Handbook. It has been altered so the title reads 'Advanced Copyright Fuckery. Unclear on the Concept. That's Just Not How Licenses Work. No, Seriously.' The eyes of the idol have been replaced by D20s displaying a critical fail '1.' Its chest bears another D20 whose showing face is a copyright symbol.]

[autolenaphilia]

Why enshittification happens and how to stop it.

The enshittification of the internet and increasingly the software we use to access it is driven by profit. It happens because corporations are machines for making profits from end users, the users and customers are only seen as sources of profits. Their interests are only considered if it can help the bottom line. It's capitalism.

For social media it's users are mainly seen by the companies that run the sites as a way for getting advertisers to pay money that can profit the shareholders. And social media is in a bit of death spiral right now, since they have seldom or never been profitable and investor money is drying up as they realize this.

So the social media companies. are getting more and more desperate for money. That's why they are getting more aggressive with getting you to watch ads or pay for the privilege of not watching ads. It won't work and tumblr and all the other sites will die eventually.

But it's not just social media companies, it's everything tech-related. It gets worse the more monopolistic a tech giant is. Google is abusing its chrome-based near monopoly over the web, nerfing adblockers, trying to drm the web, you name it. And Microsoft is famously a terrible company, spying on Windows users and selling their data. Again, there is so much money being poured into advertising, at least 493 billion globally, the tech giants want a slice of that massive pie. It's all about making profits for shareholders, people be damned.

And the only insurance against this death spiral is not being run by a corporation. If the software is being developed by a non-profit entity, and it's open source, there is no incentive for the developers to fuck over the users for the sake of profits for shareholders, because there aren't any profits, and no shareholders.

Free and Open source software is an important part of why such software development can stay non-corporate. It allows for volunteers to contribute to the code and makes it harder for users to be secretly be fucked over by hidden code.

Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird are good examples of this. There is a Mozilla corporation, but it exists only for legal reasons and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla foundation. There are no shareholders. That means the Mozilla corporation is not really a corporation in the sense that Google is, and as an organization has entirely different incentives. If someone tells you that Mozilla is just another corporation, (which people have said in the notes of posts about firefox on this very site) they are spreading misinformation.

That's why Firefox has resisted the enshittification of the internet so well, it's not profit driven. And people who develop useful plugins that deshitify the web like Ublock origin and Xkit are as a rule not profit-driven corporations.

And you can go on with other examples of non-profit software like Libreoffice and VLC media player, both of which you should use.

And you can go further, use Linux as your computer's operating system.. It's the only way to resist the enshitification that the corporate duopoly of Microsoft and Apple has brought to their operating system. The plethora of community-run non-profit Linux distributions like Debian, Mint and Arch are the way to counteract that, and they will stay resistant to the same forces (creating profit for shareholders) that drove Microsoft to create Windows 11.

Of course not all Linux distributions are non-profits. There are corporate created distros like Red Hat's various distros, Canonical's Ubuntu and Suse's Opensuse, and they prove the point I'm making. There has some degree of enshittification going on with those, red hat going closed source and Canonical with the snap store for example. Mint is by now a succesful community-driven response to deshitify Ubuntu by removing snaps for example, and even they have a back-up plan to use Debian as a base in case Canonical makes Ubuntu unuseable.

As for social media, which I started with, I'm going to stay on tumblr for now, but it will definitely die. The closest thing to a community run non-profit replacement I can see is Mastodon, which I'm on as @autolenaphilia@chaosfem.tw.

You don't have to keep using corporate software, and have it inevitably decline because the corporations that develop it cares more about its profits than you as an end user.

The process of enshittification proves that corporations being profit-driven don't mean they will create a better product, and in fact may cause them to do the opposite. And the existence of great free and open source software, created entirely without the motivation of corporate profits, proves that people don't need to profit in order to help their fellow human beings. It kinda makes you question capitalism.

[thefugitivesaint]

Sasha Weiss, in a recent piece in the New York Times Magazine, offers an account of Ezra Edelman’s nine-hour documentary about Prince and how unexpected conflicts with the controlling interests of the Prince estate (who switched executors well into the process of making the documentary and those new executors took issue with the project) might mean that said documentary might never reach a viewing audience. Weiss' overview of the project inspired in me a strong desire to give it a watch. She writes that Edelman's work, "...offers one answer to a question that has agonized the culture at large for the last decade. How should we think about artists whose moral failings are exposed? Edelman manages to present a deeply flawed person while still granting him his greatness — and his dignity."

It's an engaging read and whether you're a fan of Prince or not. How do you explore the life of a man who resisted being known and who spent much of his life crafting a public persona that was always shifting and changing? Does exposing the flaws of an artist diminish that artist or does it help humanize them, giving them a deeper context, and, perhaps, allowing the public a better understanding of their art in the process? "As Edelman completed his interviews — more than 70 of them — he realized there wasn’t some big secret that people were hiding. Instead, what he found were the defining traumas of Prince’s childhood and his constant recapitulating of them. The story unfolds slowly, hauntingly, over the course of the film." ............. As a quick aside (and possibly unnecessary digression): buried in the piece is a brief discussion about the erosion of quality in the content being produced by Netflix, particularly in the field of documentaries, "Netflix, which is still the biggest platform for documentaries, has, in recent years, moved away from the kind of prestigious, provocative films that helped make the company’s reputation, toward content that is inexpensive to make and appeals to a global audience. Many people pointed to the platform’s increased appetite for gauzy, entertaining celebrity documentaries — of, for example, Beyoncé, David Beckham, Taylor Swift, Jennifer Lopez, all of whom were intimately involved in their creation." Of course, this "move away" from "prestigious, provocative films" for more superficially pleasing documentaries is about money. Whenever you see something getting worse, no matter what it is, usually the foundation for that degradation is avarice, greed, the chasing after profit above all things. It's the fundamental problem with the media (and the billionaires who own it), with the economy, it's the engine of the housing crisis, it's why the internet sucks (see Cory Doctorow's 'Enshittification' for an exploration on this particular topic). The list is potentially endless. The new executors of the Prince estate, so speculation goes, are resistant to the films release because they think that it will hurt the public image of Prince, get him "cancelled" posthumously, and "devalue the estate’s bottom line" (i.e. make them less money).

[recurring-polynya]

I mentioned the other week that I'd been thinking about doing this, but I've decided to lock down some of my fanfics to ao3 users only. For now, I'm just going to do the smutty ones. I wanted to give people fair warning, so I'll do it a week from today. Download 'em if you want 'em or perhaps consider actually getting an ao3 login? (There's a queue, so you put in your email address and in a few days you get an email with instructions. It's not that hard). It's free and their bookmarking and collection features are really powerful ways to keep track of your favorite fanfics and recommend them to others. We're getting wave after wave of bots scraping fic for 3rd-party profiteering or just leaving nasty spam comments. Lots of authors resist locking their fics down out of love for their lurkers and Guest commenters, and I think that making an account is a way of telling your favorite authors, "hey, I respect your right to put the tiniest possible amount of protection between the work that you do for free and the current enshittification of the internet."

We'll see how it goes, but in the future, I will probably end up doing something where when I write a new fic, I'll make it public, but then lock it down after a week or two. Thanks in advance for your understanding, and I'm sorry we can't have nice things, but that's how it is these days.

[sigridstumb]

The world got so wide

I am pondering, like many people more knowledgeable than me, the enshittification of the internet.

In my lifetime the world grew in ways that had hitherto been the provenance of science fiction. In my lifetime I could find information, people, connection, and conversation around the world at any moment. In my lifetime I could find products and services that I would never previously have heard of, could find organizations and social clubs that I never, ever would have imagined seeking out.

The world grew so very, very wide. I felt, for about fifteen years, that some part of me was always touching something live, powerful, and full of human promise.

That's changing. That's changed.

The wide, wide world of information is being poisoned. It is not accurate, reliable, or dependably real.

I am pondering how we all did this Before. How did we find things Before? How did we find people? How did we find groups? How did we find businesses? How did we learn, review, assess, and judge the information we were receiving about the world and the things in it?

We used to have Authoritative Tomes. The Encyclopedia. World Books. The Phone Book.

All of those things still exist, yes, but they mostly exist online where they can be poisoned. And the ones that resist the poison have been or are being killed - bought, strip-mined, and their corpse replaced on the internet full of poison.

I am turning slowly back to word of mouth.

My world is getting smaller, smaller again, in many ways. And I forsee it continuing on that trajectory. I ask friends and family what ad-blocker they are using. I ask friends for product recommendations. I ask the neighborhood list (which is NOT poisoned and is heavily monitored to keep ads and such out) for service and repair recommendations. I can't really go look at reviews, not any more. (I mean, I COULD, yes, but that's hours of my life trying to figure out whether something is even real, let alone whether it works as I want it to.)

It's a very weird thing to be living through.

I think of the people in the Jazz Age, the bright things with lives full of promise, with the future bright in front of them -- and then the Great Depression.

My world is still larger than it ever has been in some ways. But the seas we swim in are choked with poison, and I spend my time now rafting from land to land.

The world got so wide.

I miss it.

[theoutcastrogue]

by Mike Shea on 5 August 2024:

Hasbro may be hurling D&D towards a digital future but we already have everything we need to enjoy this game for the rest of our lives. Hasbro is super-excited for a digital D&D future. They're tired of selling us, as Penny Arcade perfectly describes, a single hamburger we can share with our friends every week for thirty years. Hasbro wants subscription revenue from every player every month – not just the single purchase of a book you can keep, share, and use for the rest of your life. Hasbro doesn't want to sell you D&D. They want you to pay rent. Chris Cocks, Hasbro's president and former president of Wizards of the Coast, is pushing hard for a digital future. He already said they're running experiments with artificial intelligence saying "D&D has 50 years of content that we can mine". The new head of Wizards of the Coast, the subsidiary of Hasbro in charge of D&D, is a former Blizzard executive who replaced a former Amazon and Microsoft executive. They posted a new D&D product architect job with a clear focus on digital gaming and a new "monetization designer" which is as close to "professional enshittifier" as I've heard of in a job description. So yeah, Hasbro is really excited to charge monthly fees and microtransactions for D&D and ensure you never stop paying for it. But I have good news for you. It doesn't matter. Here are four reasons why: 1. The three D&D core books are the only D&D books that really matter and they're going to be physical books. 2. With rulesets released into the Creative Commons, anyone can build digital tools, adventures, supplements, and even entire RPGs – all fully compatible with D&D. 3. We have 50 years of previous versions of D&D we can play, multiple competing and compatible 5e variants from other publishers, and hundreds of other RPGs we can enjoy. 4. We have several independent digital platforms we can use to run our games online.

[keep reading]

So Mike Shea's argument here is that no matter what Hasbro does, D&D is enshittification-proof. Personally, I agree that tabletop games (all of them, not just D&D) are to a large extent resistant to that, due to the nature of the game, but digital platforms are another matter. Then again, I have zero interest in digital platforms, so I don't know how they work. Can you incorporate non-SRD material in an independent VTT, for example? Does it matter? No idea!

For traditional D&D, I think it's always had (in its entire history, all editions!) two distinct modes of attracting people:

here is an Official Book of Rules! I should buy it (or borrow it, or pirate it) and use it, because it's an official and authoritative publication

here is a Good Rule! I should incorporate it in my D&D game because I like it, and I don't care where it came from and in what format, official book, third party, homebrew, DMs Guild, hardcover book, piece of paper, pdf, a reddit post, my own noggin.

But last year, they tried an new thing and released a set of 25 monsters for $6 only on D&D Beyond. No physical print, and no pdf. (Previously there had been digital-only releases, mostly short adventures, but in pdf form.) And although I have no way of knowing how sales went, I strongly suspect this will NEVER work. It's just a bunch of "assets", it doesn't register as an Official Publication, there's no incentive to get it as such. So we're left with "is it a good rule?", and there it competes with a million other rules published for fun and/or profit by other people. Why "buy" that one? (You're not quite buying it: if D&D Beyond goes down, poof go the monsters!)

So yeah, I think they'll try to enshittify tabletop D&D, but they'll go about it half-heartedly (to go full in, they'd have to drop the printed books, and there's NO WAY they'll do that), and simply no one will care, D&D doesn't work like that.

[charyou-tree]

Migrating to Tumblr

I've had my reservations about the owners of reddit for a while now, I'm pretty sure /u/spez is a fascist sympathizer, and the ongoing enshittification in the style of twitter/facebook has been the last straw.

I fully support the efforts of the subreddit blackout, but I'm not optimistic that the people running reddit will do anything about it, they've only shown intention to double down, and have no real legal obligation to do anything differently. tbh, subreddit moderators should form a genuine labor union, they do millions of dollars of UNPAID work for reddit, and that would give them actual power to negotiate, but the odds of getting anything like that done in a week or two are slim to none.

With this in mind, I'm going to be migrating to tumblr, which seems to be the most monetization-resistant social media site left, if yahoo selling them at a 99% loss is anything to go by.

Y'all are some of the best part of reddit, keep being awesome, and feel free to follow me over on tumblr too. No promises that it will be interesting or anything, I don't really know how tumblr works yet, but I'm petty enough to spend some time figuring it out to spite reddit.

[mariacallous]

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) is striking against studios in pursuit of a new contract that lets writers participate more fully in the industry. The central disagreements are about economics, but the issue that has captured the most public attention is the threat posed by so-called artificial intelligence—products like ChatGPT—to the livelihood of creative professionals, including writers.

ChatGPT is a generative AI program that has been trained on a massive corpus of text to predict the word or words that should follow a text prompt or word string. It is not intelligent, though its user interface has been designed to create that illusion.

Studios perceive that generative AI is a tool they can use against writers. Some kinds of programming can be formulaic—awards shows and sitcoms, for example—which encourages writers to mimic scripts that have been successful in the past. In theory, a well-constructed generative AI could provide a first draft of such a script. But studio executives have gone one step further, imagining that products like ChatGPT will transform the writing process for everything from awards shows to feature films. Studios see this as both a potential cost savings and a way to convert script writing from copyrightable work to work for hire.

It is almost certain that they will embrace generative AI, even if it produces nothing but junk, which is what they will get. They have drunk the Kool-Aid poured by Silicon Valley’s hype merchants.

My experience working in Hollywood—as a consultant on Silicon Valley for five seasons and through involvement in documentaries like The Facebook Dilemma, The Social Dilemma, and The Great Hack—has led me to believe that if studios are smart, they will understand that their interests are aligned with those of writers, directors, and all creative people. Silicon Valley is coming for their profit margin.

CEOs believe that generative AI will reduce their labor costs. What they are missing is that Silicon Valley plans to use AI to do to Hollywood what it did to news and music. Silicon Valley’s bait-and-switch tactics follow a pattern that Cory Doctorow, writing about social media, refers to as “enshittification.” Social media platforms offer benefits to users until they are hooked, then they “enshittify” the product to appeal to advertisers. Once advertisers are on board, platforms “enshittify” their experience, as well as that of users, to extract maximum value. They perfected the game plan at Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, SnapChat, and TikTok and are now extending it outside of social media.

We see this in video streaming technology, the first step in a siege against Hollywood. As Big Tech always does, it baited the trap with short-term benefits, such as an increased investment in programming, which emerged in the form of a golden age of high-quality, limited run series. Streaming caused an explosion in the number of shows, but each show had many fewer episodes, which meant writers would only be employed for eight or 10 weeks at a time. In addition, streaming undercut television syndication, which had been a big source of income for writers. Streaming’s touted benefits have eroded rapidly over the past two years as studios have entered the streaming market, saturating consumer demand and forcing all involved to cut costs.

Now, generative AI is the potential kill shot, the one that could cause copyright owners to surrender their library of scripts, created over decades, in exchange for promised benefits that will never arrive.

When it comes to generative AI and video, Silicon Valley only needs to hook one constituency— Hollywood executives. Once studios buy in, they will be at the mercy of the purveyors of that technology. It happened in journalism. It happened in music. Silicon Valley did not kill those industries, but it gained control of the audience and extracted a huge percentage of the potential profits. For studio executives, generative AI is an intelligence test.

The best path forward is for studios and writers to acknowledge four realities.

First, generative AI will eventually be a valuable tool in some creative realms, potentially including script writing, but only if the AI has been built from the ground up for that task.

Second, the flaws of today’s generative AIs make them unsuitable for serious work, especially in creative fields. General purpose AIs, like ChatGPT, are trained on whatever content the creator can steal on the internet, which means their output often consists of nonsense dressed up to appear authoritative. The best they can do is imitate their training set. These AIs will never be any good at creating draft scripts—even of the most formulaic programming—unless their training set includes a giant library of Hollywood scripts.

Third, Silicon Valley is the common enemy of studios and writers. It is an illusion that studios can partner with AI companies to squeeze writers without being harmed themselves. Silicon Valley is using a potential reduction in writer compensation as the bait in a trap where the target is studio profits.

Fourth, there is no reason Hollywood cannot create its own generative AI to compete with ChatGPT. Studios and writers control the intellectual property needed to make a great AI. A generative AI that is trained on every script contributed by a single studio or collection of studios would produce wildly better scripts than ChatGPT. Would it produce the next Casablanca? No. But it could produce an excellent first draft of an Emmy Awards show script. And it would safeguard the business model of Hollywood for the next generation.

If studios work separately or together to create AI they control, the future of Hollywood will be much brighter. Central to this fourth point is a legal strategy of copyright infringement litigation against the major players in generative AI. If copyright is to mean anything at all, Hollywood must challenge Silicon Valley’s assertion of the right to “permissionless innovation,” which has become a safe harbor for law-breaking in domains ranging from consumer safety to public health to copyright.

Some might say that Hollywood does not have the ability to “do technology.” That is ridiculous. Pixar, Weta Digital, and the CGI special effects industry demonstrate that Hollywood can not only master technology, but also innovate in it.

There are many open source architectures for generative AI. Studios and the WGA can license them cheaply and hire a handful of engineers to train their own AI. It will take many years, but copyright litigation will buy the industry the time it needs, and it may even become a giant profit center.

There are serious issues to be resolved between the writers and studios. AI is part of the negotiation, but it is substantively different from the other issues on the table. The tech industry wants to use generative AI to extract profits from film and television, just as it has done in other categories of media. The question is whether studios will repeat the mistakes of journalism and music.

[yaodunk]

The Bloated Carcass Of Reddit Festers

Enshittification is no subtle cancer; nor am I wise to what must be fathomless nuance in web design's infrastructural undertow and technological execution. But I've been around the virtual tesseract a few times, myself, and have a fair sense of any product's potential purpose and where one's function must have been waylaid mid-delivery in a given instance.

I thought I'd make this blog to bring my perspective of one puzzling example of a site to light, in some free time Reddit or its ilk may have similarly squandered for me otherwise. Having used Reddit on and off the past dozen years, its enshittification proves a vexation I'm perennially disappointed in. I've never built a site, or exercised my programming muscles beyond a handful of little games here and there; I've never managed a virtual service or product of my own, or worked in a field that does. And yet, some anomalies in how a service is delivered and utilized can stand out as “not fulfilling the user's expectations/experiences by any given metric” to any layman.

It's fair to say Reddit died a long time ago—that is, the full-functioning forum for netizens, by netizens. Feel free to consult anyone with any degree of internet history in their purlieu instead of my page here on the matter of where it went or what it did; I'm a singular perspective without the whole picture. I remember a less heavy-handed algorithmic advertisement application with broader respect paid to the range of user experience. I still use old.reddit, for however long it's useful—being able to see usernames and RES tags and what-have-you leaves some idea of what I'm looking at, at least—and it's been marginally efficient at killing time. But New Reddit (the umpteenth iteration) would likely cut those margins significantly. Alas, this is the obvious, surface-level enshittification anyone might pick up on. I'm writing to stick my scalpel into a few choice specimens that have piqued me from the wounds in its decaying flesh.

In general, I'd take a stab at the facilitation of pandering to conservative (supremacist) dogma and all its auxiliary fascism, as it stands a capitalist enterprise of data aggregation and exploitation. I'd hope to stomach the purulent cancers plainly visible in every one of its forums that happen to fall to the right of even Sanders-esque ideology. It's kith and kin to the idea that the present cost of sustainability be negligently passed upon until it grows into an unsustainable tumor everyone else must pay the longer, greater cost of treating. I would understand that connection to a desultory array of issues spawned from such a mutation: rampant astroturfing; bots spamming and scamming every page; further right-wing radicalization propagated with the aid or apathetic abetment of their veneer of official oversight. You'd be surprised how loud those who reflexively rage at anything left of hunting the homeless for sport can be. Or just further disappointed; it's not surprising, given their forums' mainstreaming.

But I would finally be incisive about less damning, smaller, banausic issues springing to ire. It seems the maintenance of the site has some shocking patterns of failure and malfunction. I'm not the first, nor in select company, in my experience with this. Despite the apparent resistance to improvement, there is room and need for some positive effort there. Give me my soapbox, be it in this void of nonsense as a long-winded spiel of questions whose answers may or may not find footing, and my flabbers will be gasted no more. These are but a few, specific examples of my vexation.

Have you had an account on Reddit simply no longer allow you access without reason? Apparently many people have. Just four posts in the help/bug reporting subreddits, or “communities”, in the last couple days by my count. The site seems to have just logged people out, told them their correct password is incorrect, and either refused to let you change it (An unexpected error occurred!) or say an updated password is also incorrect. Care to get help from the administrators on trying to fix this, or any word on what happened or why? Submit a ticket, and maybe in a few months someone will get back to you. I certainly have yet to receive a response in this time, at least.

Report something on their site that violates the “Content Policy”? Woah there, bucko, maybe the moderators of the subreddit want to violate the content policy and decide to warn you for “report abuse”, in which case you better not do it twice, or it'll get your account suspended. You can always use the report form that goes right to Official Administrators, though. Wait, you're reporting hate speech? Well, make sure whichever system it goes into has some idea of what that phrase means, or what constitutes its definition, because sometimes blatant dehumanizing rhetoric falls just short of “promoting hate” and their hands are woefully, carelessly tied. Don't have an account to report it? Just fill out the form email-only, and you'll have a quick response in your inbox telling you that they have different ways of dealing with reported Hate Speech and you'll have to use an account to report it instead, which sometimes tells you to reply via email with the report and doing so only gets you the exact same email in response telling you to fill out a report form and receive the same email again and again so nobody ever does anything about their site platforming hate speech, which is very much not allowed—except when it is, which is always.

Maybe you've filled out the form reporting a whole subreddit/community that exists only to violate this supposed policy against hate speech? Sometimes that works—I've seen subreddits banned after doing so, although the very same content just gets hosted on another, which inexplicably eludes the same treatment. Oh, but as of late, filling out that form simply gets you an email telling you your account has been suspended/locked. Didn't have an account? No such suspension possibly exists? Huh. Anyway, the communities posting about ethnically cleansing minorities aren't going anywhere. Whatever decayed code lingers in the system to automatically inform you of this rhetorical account's imaginary suspension will surely be looked at sooner than them, anyway.

Whether it's bringing attention to violent, supremacist behavior, or making sure it falls under the less-divisive category of “rude, vulgar, or offensive”—which will grant you but a quick “we care deeply about allowing conversations, even controversial ones, to exist” message—it seems Reddit has no bandwidth to be consistent with the idea of their supposed content policy, at least less than they have to platform its cancerous violations. But as the adage goes: The Purpose of a System is What It Does.

And Reddit, as a system of communication, is communicating quite effectively that it does not care to improve. The handful of uncurious administrators steering that ship won't look past the shareholders and exploitation money to seriously address the issues. Cancers don't do anything beyond make cancer; the regressive root that's forming the site's tumors will thus only enshittify. Cancer can grow with you—Reddit has certainly grown quite large; the internet has exploded with growth, after all—but it's not going to be a very healthy growth until the tumor is excised, treated, and repaired.

I leave room for my having been mistaken on the finer points involved, as anyone with critical-thinking skills would, however there's no denying the sheer malignancy of unsustainable practices at any scale. I find Mastodon and the federated social networks (shoutout to kolektiva.social) a nicer forum, nowadays—however long that might last—and take my news from the variety of sources available, as to diversify my consumption. I'm not attached to any one site, no matter how much I use it, but Reddit's bloated corpse provides a fascinating milieu to peruse while available. Perhaps, when the tumors finish growing over the rest, that will no longer be the case.

All that said, I have too much time on my hands, and I'd be better off further curbing my use of Reddit and its ilk. My blogging into the void is just a meager fancy that others might commiserate on the subject, so let it be just that: venting.

[a-silent-observer]

I am so glad that tumblr userbase resists enshittification. Truly, we are a community

[xtruss]

Can The Internet Be Governed?

Amid Worries About What Big Tech is Doing to Our Privacy, Politics, and Psyches, Many Stakeholders—From Activists to Technocrats—are Calling For a New Rule Book.

— By Akash Kapur | January 29, 2024

Will the Internet harden into an Oligarchic Playground or become something like a Digital Public Utility? Will it bend to the power of tyrants—or provide a resource for resisting them? Illustration By Till Lauer

On A Cold Night in February of 1996, John Perry Barlow found himself at a party in Davos. It was the closing event of the World Economic Forum, and the ballroom was filled with besuited masters of the universe and students from the University of Geneva. He danced with them, a little inebriated. But a thought nagged at him.

Earlier that day, in Washington, D.C., President Clinton had signed a bill that would for the first time bring the Internet under a degree of government control. The Communications Decency Act (C.D.A.), part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, included a provision that would criminalize “obscene” or “indecent” content on the Internet. In Congress, the Nebraska senator James Exon, who had co-sponsored the C.D.A., issued a dire warning: “Barbarian pornographers are at the gate, and they are using the Internet to gain access to the youth of America.” As evidence, he circulated a blue binder filled with pornographic material collected online, including an image of a man having sex with a German shepherd.

Barlow, a former cattle rancher from Wyoming, a sometime lyricist for the Grateful Dead, and a libertarian activist on the Internet, was convinced that the fledgling network should remain free of government interference. Incensed by what he would call a “stunningly dumb bit of legislation,” he set up a makeshift office adjacent to the party and, shuttling back and forth between his computer and the ballroom, banged out an eight-hundred-and-fifty-word manifesto. Barlow’s “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” would soon—in a term that gained currency only later—go viral. It is now recognized as a seminal document in the history of the Internet: a preamble to a constitution that the network would never formally have.

“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind,” the manifesto began. “On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”

Like so many constitutional provisions these days, Barlow’s “Declaration” has recently come under considerable strain. Critics denounce it as an exemplar of techno-utopianism, enabling the uncontrolled, mob-fuelled Internet we have today. The years have not proved kind to Barlow’s vision of “a civilization of the Mind,” more “humane and fair.” Amid the scandals concerning privacy, misinformation, polarization, threats to teen-age mental health, and even complicity in genocide, the radiant future that Barlow foresaw has given way to what the activist and writer Cory Doctorow calls the “enshittification” of the Internet.

In fact, for all Barlow’s outrage, governments remained mostly hands-off during the Internet’s early history. Clinton may have signed the C.D.A., but his real attitude was summed up by his statement that regulating the Internet was like “trying to nail Jello to the wall.” Large parts of the C.D.A. were later invalidated by the Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds, and buried within the act itself was a clause that has over the years come to emblematize the long leash granted to the Internet: Section 230 of the act protects online platforms from liability for content created by their users.

During the past decade or so, however, governments around the world have grown impatient with the notion of Internet autarky. A trickle of halfhearted interventions has built into what the legal scholar Anu Bradford calls a “cascade of regulation.” In “Digital Empires” (Oxford), her comprehensive and insightful book on global Internet policy, she describes a series of skirmishes—between regulators and companies, and among regulators themselves—whose outcomes will “shape the future ethos of the digital society and define the soul of the digital economy.”

Other recent books echo this sense of the network as being at a critical juncture. Tom Wheeler, a former chairman of the F.C.C., argues in “Techlash: Who Makes the Rules in the Digital Gilded Age?” (Brookings) that we are at “a legacy moment for this generation to determine whether, and how, it will assert the public interest in the new digital environment.” In “The Internet Con” (Verso), Doctorow makes a passionate case for “relief from manipulation, high-handed moderation, surveillance, price-gouging, disgusting or misleading algorithmic suggestions”; he argues that it is time to “dismantle Big Tech’s control over our digital lives and devolve control to the people.” In “Read Write Own” (Random House), Chris Dixon, a venture capitalist, says that a network dominated by a handful of private interests “is neither the internet I want to see nor the world I wish to live in.” He writes, “Think about how much of your life you live online, how much of your identity resides there. . . . Whom do you want in control of that world?”

Questions of Control Have Always Hovered Over the Internet. Its decentralized architecture has long been key to its identity, wielded as a form of originalist rhetoric against any suggestion of external intervention. The roots of this architecture are, in fact, somewhat murky—attributed, variously, to an effort at sharing computing resources more efficiently, a nineteen-sixties confluence of technocracy and hippie anarchism, and the search for a network design that could withstand nuclear attack (a claim disputed by some Internet veterans). In the 1999 memoir “Weaving the Web,” Tim Berners-Lee, often called the father of the World Wide Web, likened the network’s principles to those upheld by his Unitarian Universalist church—individualism, peer-to-peer relationships, “philosophies that allow decentralized systems.”

In truth, the notion of a fully decentralized network has always been something of a myth. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (icann), which has been described as the “secret government of the Internet,” has long managed a directory—the Domain Name System, or D.N.S.—that the Internet needs in order to function. (For Berners-Lee, the D.N.S. was a “centralized Achilles’ heel” that could bring the network down.) Until 2016, icann was under the authority of the U.S. Department of Commerce. In a 2006 book titled “Who Controls the Internet?,” the law professors Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu described “the death of the dream of self-governing cyber-communities,” and argued that governments had an array of means at their disposal with which to enforce their laws in cyberspace, even if imperfectly.

In retrospect, the real problem with the cyberspace-sovereignty argument was simply that it was blinkered. Early Internet activists like Barlow were so focussed on the risks of government intervention that they failed to anticipate the threats posed by private-sector control. This was perhaps unsurprising. Barlow was writing amid the end-of-history glow produced by the collapse of Communism, his techno-utopianism a variation of the era’s market utopianism. The mood has shifted considerably since then. Today’s digital activists came of age in the shadow of 2008; they tend to call for government intervention, in order to rescue the Internet from what the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis calls “technofeudalism,” in a book by that title.

The dramatic rise of generative artificial intelligence has only accelerated calls for government intervention—and, significantly, these calls are often coming from within the industry. Sam Altman, the recently reinstated head of OpenAI, went before Congress last spring and essentially demanded regulation; Elon Musk has called for a federal department of A.I. In “The Coming Wave” (Crown), Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of DeepMind and of Inflection, two leading A.I. companies, argues that government intervention is necessary to protect us from the technology’s enormous risks. (“At some stage, in some form, something, somewhere, will fail,” he writes, in what’s generally a judicious account. “And this won’t be a Bhopal or even a Chernobyl; it will unfold on a worldwide scale.”)

Activists have every reason to hope that A.I. anxieties will bolster their efforts at Internet governance. Yet they’re so attuned to the difficulties of the present that their remedies may do little to nurture a broader set of values—freedom, solidarity, equitable access to resources—that the Internet once promised to advance. The perils of the libertarian approach are now clear; we may soon be learning the costs of reflexive statism. More than a thousand A.I. policy initiatives across sixty-nine countries have lately been documented. In the U.S., some thirty states are debating (or have already enacted) digital-privacy bills, adding to federal oversight by agencies such as the F.T.C. and the S.E.C.

“Look, Dave, I can see you’re really upset about this,” hal, the digital brain in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” tells his human minder, in a tone that calls to mind the bland neutrality of today’s chatbots. “I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.” In the movie, Dave is right to fear the worst. Amid the rush to regulate, though, hal’s advice might be worth taking.

In “American Capitalism” (1952), the first volume in a trilogy on economics, John Kenneth Galbraith outlined his notion of “countervailing power.” He was living in a time—much like our own—of rising corporate concentration and faltering competition; at such moments, Galbraith argued, markets could not be relied upon to police themselves. The solution he favored was a form of ecological balance: forces such as trade unions and consumer coalitions would act as a constraint. “Private economic power is held in check by the countervailing power of those who are subject to it,” Galbraith wrote. “The first begets the second.”

The past decade has seen the search for a countervailing power to offset the mighty tug of commercial interests. As Galbraith noted, government is not the only—or even the preferred—option; various other ideas have been mooted. In “Internet for the People” (Verso), Ben Tarnoff calls for a “deprivatized” Internet with new “models of public and cooperative ownership”; in “Own This!” (Verso), R. Trebor Scholz likewise explores the potential of worker-and-user-owned “platform co-ops.” (He discusses, although does not endorse, the idea of nationalizing large companies like Amazon and Facebook.) Dixon, in “Read Write Own,” reverts to a form of technological purism, resting his hopes in the potential of blockchain. The trouble is that, after more than a decade of casting about for checks on Big Tech, the only countervailing power seemingly able to muster the required heft and legitimacy is the nation-state.

But the law is a blunt instrument. Despite an emerging consensus about the need for governance, policymakers, businesspeople, and citizens are left grappling with regulation’s numerous shortcomings. There’s the common, and not entirely unfounded, concern that regulation stifles innovation (“More upstream governance translates to less downstream innovation” as Andrew McAfee put it), and a growing recognition of what is known as law’s distributive effect—the fact that smaller companies are often disproportionately hit by the costs of regulatory compliance. In 2016, when Europe adopted the landmark G.D.P.R. (General Data Protection Regulation), Facebook, now Meta, is said to have hired some thousand people to help it comply. Such actions are well beyond the means of most businesses, especially startups; policies designed to weaken market concentration may actually strengthen it.

The sheer scope—and sprawl—of the regulatory onslaught is surely part of the problem, too. The theory of countervailance relies on a certain equilibrium: various forces operate together—sometimes in conjunction, sometimes in opposition—to maintain balance in the marketplace. But the pendulum of history swings wide; after decades of virtually unchecked corporate power, we may now be entering an equally pernicious period of regulatory free-for-all. The landscape of global digital governance is today characterized by a hodgepodge of overreaching, overlapping, and often contradictory laws, many more performative than substantive.

Consider the slew of European privacy regulations responsible for all those Whac-A-Mole cookie warnings which, it’s increasingly clear, do little to protect user data. Other measures have the flavor of New England’s nineteenth-century Watch and Ward Society. In Utah, legislators have proposed nighttime curfews on the use of social media by minors (the first “state-run internet bedtime,” as Gizmodo put it); in Arkansas, Virginia, and other states, suggested identity-verification requirements on porn sites, again aimed at minors, have raised concerns about the privacy rights of legitimate users. And governments, having promised to protect our information from corporate exploitation, now seem intent on maintaining their own peepholes. France recently passed a bill to let police remotely activate microphones, G.P.S. devices, and cameras on phones; the E.U. is considering mandating message providers (like WhatsApp and Signal) to enable “client-side scanning,” which would allow automated scrutiny of private communications. Surveillance capitalism, it seems, is reverting to good old-fashioned surveillance.

In “Digital Empires,” Bradford tries valiantly to impose some coherence on this distended terrain. She considers the efflorescence of Internet laws as part of a wider struggle for global power in an emerging multipolar world. As she sees it, the disparate strands of lawmaking can be grouped into three regulatory regimes, or competing “digital empires.” Despite some recent shifts, the U.S. continues largely to advocate for the Internet’s original “market-driven model”; China’s “state-driven model” represents a transposition of its general authoritarianism to the online realm; and the E.U.’s “rights-driven model” seeks to chart something of a middle way, more proactive and risk-averse than America’s but also more mindful of privacy and individual rights than China’s. Each approach corresponds, broadly, to a different calibration between the countervailing powers of nation-state and private enterprise.

As an analytical framework, this categorization is compelling, though it has worrisome implications. For years, opponents of regulation have warned about the dangers of a Splinternet—the prospect that state assertions of digital sovereignty could Balkanize the network into incompatible fiefdoms. Their dire predictions have mostly not been borne out; the core architecture of the network, its ability to transport data packets around the world, has remained essentially intact, governed by technocratic consensus in international standards bodies like the Internet Engineering Task Force and the International Telecommunication Union. But, as the Internet becomes increasingly intertwined with the unstable geopolitics of our era, the future appears more perilous.

That became clear one day in Geneva in September, 2019, when, as the Financial Times reported, a group of Chinese engineers entered the headquarters of the I.T.U. and gave a PowerPoint presentation to delegates from some forty countries. The engineers unveiled a futuristic vision of a reinvented Internet—“New I.P.,” or Internet Protocol—which had been conceived by representatives from the Chinese private and public sectors. New I.P. represented a “top-down” network that would enable capabilities such as “holographic communications” and a “tactile Internet.” It would also allow for something called ManyNets, permitting the Internet to be broken up into distinct networks that could be controlled by individual nations. One of the touted benefits of this new protocol was the ability to implement “shut-up commands” that would block users from a network.

The proposal, part of a bigger push for what Xi Jinping has called a more “sovereign” Internet, was supported by Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, among other countries. The E.U., the United States, and various technical bodies (including the I.E.T.F.) stood in opposition. The simmering divisions came to a head in 2022, during the election for the post of secretary-general of the I.T.U., which pitted Rashid Ismailov, a Russian official who had worked at Huawei, against Doreen Bogdan-Martin, a former U.S. Department of Commerce official. Bogdan-Martin won the election, and the threat of New I.P. appears to have receded, at least for now. But, for a moment, the Internet as we know it appeared to hang in the balance. An apparently arcane dispute over technology standards was really part of the clash between two very different visions of the economy, society, and the relationship between citizens and state in the digital era.

The Story of the Internet usually focusses on the United States and Europe, with a few recent cameos from China. Yet India is the key player in another approach that’s currently spreading across the so-called Global South, in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. As the journalist and academic Nalin Mehta writes in his recent book, “India’s Techade” (Westland), India has, in the past decade or so, launched a digital revolution “unlike any that came before”—one that started quietly but has recently gone “viral on a scale that is unprecedented.” India’s digital stack, as the basic technology is known, may ultimately shape the future of the Internet far more significantly than the efforts of Western regulators.

The origins of this technology can be traced to the state’s long-standing desire to create a national I.D. system, in part to reduce “leakage” (less politely, corruption-related losses) in its delivery of welfare. As Shankkar Aiyar reported in “Aadhaar: A Biometric History of India’s 12-Digit Revolution,” such ideas had been kicked around in the bureaucracy for many years. Then, in May, 2009, Rahul Gandhi, the scion of India’s leading political family, and a key figure in the then ruling Congress Party, sent a text to the Indian entrepreneur and billionaire Nandan Nilekani, asking him to fly to New Delhi. Nilekani soon joined the cabinet as head of a new digital-identity program, known as the Unique Identification Authority of India.

At an elementary level, the program was simply an effort to create something akin to a Social Security number—no small achievement in a country as large as India, but hardly revolutionary on its own merits. Under Nilekani’s guidance, the program has overcome public skepticism, bureaucratic inertia, and legal challenges to sign up 1.4 billion citizens. Each now possesses a twelve-digit identity number, known as an Aadhaar (Hindi for “foundation”), which is linked to biometric information such as iris scans and fingerprints. But Nilekani’s real achievement has been to use the I.D. numbers as the underpinnings of an integrated digital ecology (“the stack”). It consists of government-enabled modules (collectively referred to as digital public infrastructure, or D.P.I.) that allow citizens to make online payments, receive welfare, conduct banking, and store and certify official documents (e.g., covid-vaccine certificates). The government, in this way, is building what the World Bank calls “plumbing” for a more controlled—and possibly less toxic—version of the Internet, leaving space for private developers to build platforms and services on top of it.

Ten billion or so payments take place every month in the stack, accounting for almost half of the entire world’s real-time digital payments. The technology has enabled trillions of dollars in commercial activity, and is estimated to have saved around thirty-four billion dollars between 2013 and 2021 by impeding corruption. Beyond numbers, the stack’s impact is increasingly visible in daily life. Mehta’s book is filled with human stories that vividly illustrate technocratic terms like “financial inclusion” and “leapfrog development.” There’s Lakshmi, a fifty-eight-year-old widow, who uses her Aadhaar card and thumbprint to access a monthly pension of eight hundred rupees. There’s the village of Saharanpur, where government money for purchasing new toilets and even homes is directly deposited into residents’ accounts, thus cutting out grasping middlemen. And there are a multitude of small venders—fruit sellers, rural tea shops, thatched roadside restaurants—that now take payments via cell-phone-scanned QR codes, changing the way Indians conduct commerce. Such scenes, familiar to anyone who might have recently visited India, explain why the digital stack has been compared, in its potential consequences, to the Green Revolution of the nineteen-sixties.

As impressive as the stack has been for India, though, its most significant impact may turn out to be global. A growing number of countries, mostly in the Global South, either have started using elements of the stack or are considering doing so. The Philippines has issued digital I.D.s powered by Indian technology to seventy-six million of its hundred and ten million people; a pilot program in Morocco has enrolled seven million citizens. Singapore and the U.A.E. have connected their domestic payment networks to the Indian one. Jamaica used the stack to issue covid-vaccine certificates. For India, the stack represents an opportunity to project soft power and position itself as a global player—alongside China, the E.U., and the U.S. It wasn’t so long ago that the country was being hailed as the land of nonviolence and a birthplace of spirituality; in the twenty-first century, there’s a growing sense that, in the words of Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s C.E.O., the “magic of India Stack . . . is perhaps the greatest contribution that India can make to the world.”

The stack isn’t typically included in discussions of Internet policy (Bradford, for example, doesn’t mention it in her book); the complex interplay of technology, government, and private enterprise fits uneasily within the classic paradigm of regulation. But the stack is, in fact, emerging as another model for how countervailance between the private sector and the state can shape the digital world, perhaps productively. One way to think about the stack is as a publicly run app store, where the government (rather than private companies) sets the rules for developers, and where those developers, in turn, build their services in a manner that, at least in theory, is safer and more compatible with the public good than the Internet we have today. As Nilekani has put it, India’s approach offers a “new model of how citizens relate to the Internet”—a potential reworking of the digital social contract, a reordering of power so that it is more equitably distributed among citizens, the state, and the private sector.

Some of this is aspirational, of course; the stack is still evolving, and much depends on the benevolence (and the competence) of the state. India’s model is not without its critics, who point to the potential for surveillance and intrusive law enforcement, especially amid perceptions of an erosion in the country’s civil liberties. In a 2018 ruling, the Indian Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of using Aadhaar to deliver welfare payments, even while urging the government to “plug the loopholes” in the system. There have been reports of data leaks, and civil-society organizations worry about the ways in which less tech-literate citizens could be left out. These are the perils, in various iterations, and across jurisdictions, of the nation-state’s newfound determination to assert authority in the digital realm. A great rebalancing is under way; a new Internet may slowly be coming into view.

When was the Internet born? It depends on one’s definition of the Internet, but a plausible case could be made for the year 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee, then a fellow at cern, the physics research lab outside Geneva, submitted to his supervisor a document titled “Information Management: A Proposal,” effectively producing the blueprint for the realm of clickable links known as the World Wide Web. The supervisor returned the document with one line of feedback scrawled across the top: “Vague but exciting . . .”

His assessment remains true; the Internet is still full of promise but nebulous in its contours. There’s a reason that the current debate over its control is so fraught. How the Internet is governed—and who does the governing—will determine what the Internet is. The stakes in the ongoing tussle between nation-states and markets are, in other words, not merely managerial; they are also existential.

Will the Internet harden into an oligarchic playground, or will it become the tamer (and perhaps less innovative) place envisioned by European regulators, something akin to a digital public utility? Will large sections of it eventually bend to the power of tyrants and illiberal populists, determined to stamp out what Xi Jinping has castigated as the network’s “hidden negative energy”? Or will the more consequential influence be the model that India is pioneering, a walled garden in which private enterprise is allowed to flourish, but within confines established by the state?

The answer may at least partly lie in how—and where—the Internet is being used. In 1996, when Barlow wrote his manifesto, there were some eighty million Internet users around the world, eighty per cent of whom lived in North America and Europe. Today, there are more than five billion people on the Internet, roughly two-thirds of them from countries in the Global South. India and China now account for about half the world’s mobile-data traffic; the fastest-growing population of users is in Africa. The Internet remains a work in progress. But there’s reason to think that its future is being written in a very different place than its past was. ♦

[autumnwyvern]

tumblr and websites like it (cohost, pillowfort, waterfall, and all the others that have fallen out of memory) will never be successful if they keep trying to stand as a single website. the appeal, in my opinion, of these websites is how they handle media. and hosting all this media is a very, very, expensive endeavor that only increases in price as user base grows. I firmly believe the only way going forward someone could make a successful long lasting tumblr style blogging website that resists venture capitalist enshittification or having to close down completely... is to go open source and federated. This is how mastodon works, if you aren't aware. Anyone can make their own mastodon website and different mastodon websites can talk to each other. In this model instead of one company having to deal with all the costs, its hundreds of thousands single websites all splitting the bill. And then some of those smaller websites are funded by patreron or donations which splits the bill even further. It also is a safeguard from the whole thing being bought out and made terrible by a single person. Sure someone could buy mastodon.social but that wouldn't really change what I'm doing on dragon.style or my friend down on wetdry.world. Those websites have their own staff/admin team that enforce their own rules and update to whichever version or fork they see fit. Do you understand? Do you see the vision? We will keep chasing our tails in this endless cycle of venture capitalist bullshit unless matters are taken into our own hands. Now I'm an artist not a programmer, I don't have access to fancy servers or know how to code anything more complicated than a neopets petpage in html circa 2007 if i could I would have already tried making something like this. But I know people with the knowledge are out there! Thats how we keep getting all these little tumblr clones popping up every time theres a end of days scare. My hope and wish is that someone who does know these things sees what I'm saying, understands, and the next new thing that tries to replace tumblr does so with a federated approach.

[webionaire]

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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only the monetized are analyzed ... the not form's arc is the same -- all arcs are, but the gravity, lift and resistance are different..