#right of exit
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Better failure for social media
Content moderation is fundamentally about making social media work better, but there are two other considerations that determine how social media fails: end-to-end (E2E), and freedom of exit. These are much neglected, and that’s a pity, because how a system fails is every bit as important as how it works.
Of course, commercial social media sites don’t want to be good, they want to be profitable. The unique dynamics of social media allow the companies to uncouple quality from profit, and more’s the pity.
Social media grows thanks to network effects — you join Twitter to hang out with the people who are there, and then other people join to hang out with you. The more users Twitter accumulates, the more users it can accumulate. But social media sites stay big thanks to high switching costs: the more you have to give up to leave a social media site, the harder it is to go:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs
Nature bequeaths some in-built switching costs on social media, primarily the coordination problem of reaching consensus on where you and the people in your community should go next. The more friends you share a social media platform with, the higher these costs are. If you’ve ever tried to get ten friends to agree on where to go for dinner, you know how this works. Now imagine trying to get all your friends to agree on where to go for dinner, for the rest of their lives!
But these costs aren’t insurmountable. Network effects, after all, are a double-edged sword. Some users are above-average draws for others, and if a critical mass of these important nodes in the network map depart for a new service — like, say, Mastodon — that service becomes the presumptive successor to the existing giants.
When that happens — when Mastodon becomes “the place we’ll all go when Twitter finally becomes unbearable” — the downsides of network effects kick in and the double-edged sword begins to carve away at a service’s user-base. It’s one thing to argue about which restaurant we should go to tonight, it’s another to ask whether we should join our friends at the new restaurant where they’re already eating.
Social media sites who want to keep their users’ business walk a fine line: they can simply treat those users well, showing them the things they ask to see, not spying on them, paying to police their service to reduce harassment, etc. But these are costly choices: if you show users the things they ask to see, you can’t charge businesses to show them things they don’t want to see. If you don’t spy on users, you can’t sell targeting services to people who want to force them to look at things they’re uninterested in. Every moderator you pay to reduce harassment draws a salary at the expense of your shareholders, and every catastrophe that moderator prevents is a catastrophe you can’t turn into monetizable attention as gawking users flock to it.
So social media sites are always trying to optimize their mistreatment of users, mistreating them (and thus profiting from them) right up to the point where they are ready to switch, but without actually pushing them over the edge.
One way to keep dissatisfied users from leaving is by extracting a penalty from them for their disloyalty. You can lock in their data, their social relationships, or, if they’re “creators” (and disproportionately likely to be key network nodes whose defection to a rival triggers mass departures from their fans), you can take their audiences hostage.
The dominant social media firms all practice a low-grade, tacit form of hostage-taking. Facebook downranks content that links to other sites on the internet. Instagram prohibits links in posts, limiting creators to “Links in bio.” Tiktok doesn’t even allow links. All of this serves as a brake on high-follower users who seek to migrate their audiences to better platforms.
But these strategies are unstable. When a platform becomes worse for users (say, because it mandates nonconsensual surveillance and ramps up advertising), they may actively seek out other places on which to follow each other, and the creators they enjoy. When a rival platform emerges as the presumptive successor to an incumbent, users no longer face the friction of knowing which rival they should resettle to.
When platforms’ enshittification strategies overshoot this way, users flee in droves, and then it’s time for the desperate platform managers to abandon the pretense of providing a public square. Yesterday, Elon Musk’s Twitter rolled out a policy prohibiting users from posting links to rival platforms:
https://web.archive.org/web/20221218173806/https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platforms-policy
This policy was explicitly aimed at preventing users from telling each other where they could be found after they leave Twitter:
https://web.archive.org/web/20221219015355/https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1604531261791522817
This, in turn, was a response to many users posting regular messages explaining why they were leaving Twitter and how they could be found on other platforms. In particular, Twitter management was concerned with departures by high-follower users like Taylor Lorenz, who was retroactively punished for violating the policy, though it didn’t exist when she violated it:
https://deadline.com/2022/12/washington-post-journalist-taylor-lorenz-suspended-twitter-1235202034/
As Elon Musk wrote last spring: “The acid test for two competing socioeconomic systems is which side needs to build a wall to keep people from escaping? That’s the bad one!”
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1533616384747442176
This isn’t particularly insightful. It’s obvious that any system that requires high walls and punishments to stay in business isn’t serving its users, whose presence is attributable to coercion, not fulfillment. Of course, the people who operate these systems have all manner of rationalizations for them.
The Berlin Wall, we were told, wasn’t there to keep East Germans in — rather, it was there to keep the teeming hordes clamoring to live in the workers’ paradise out. In the same way, platforms will claim that they’re not blocking outlinks or sideloading because they want to prevent users from defecting to a competitor, but rather, to protect those users from external threats.
This rationalization quickly wears thin, and then new ones step in. For example, you might claim that telling your friends that you’re leaving and asking them to meet you elsewhere is like “giv[ing] a talk for a corporation [and] promot[ing] other corporations”:
https://mobile.twitter.com/mayemusk/status/1604550452447690752
Or you might claim that it’s like “running Wendy’s ads [on] McDonalds property,” rather than turning to your friends and saying, “The food at McDonalds sucks, let’s go eat at Wendy’s instead”:
https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1604559316237037568
The truth is that any service that won’t let you leave isn’t in the business of serving you, it’s in the business of harming you. The only reason to build a wall around your service — to impose any switching costs on users- is so that you can fuck them over without risking their departure.
The platforms want to be Anatevka, and we the villagers of Fiddler On the Roof, stuck plodding the muddy, Cossack-haunted roads by the threat of losing all our friends if we try to leave:
https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms-9fc550fe5abf
That’s where freedom of exit comes in. The public should have the right to leave, and companies should not be permitted to make that departure burdensome. Any burdens we permit companies to impose is an invitation to abuse of their users.
This is why governments are handing down new interoperability mandates: the EU’s Digital Markets Act forces the largest companies to offer APIs so that smaller rivals can plug into them and let users walkaway from Big Tech into new kinds of platforms — small businesses, co-ops, nonprofits, hobby sites — that treat them better. These small players are overwhelmingly part of the fediverse: the federated social media sites that allow users to connect to one another irrespective of which server or service they use.
The creators of these platforms have pledged themselves to freedom of exit. Mastodon ships with a “Move Followers” and “Move Following” feature that lets you quit one server and set up shop on another, without losing any of the accounts you follow or the accounts that follow you:
https://codingitwrong.com/2022/10/10/migrating-a-mastodon-account.html
This feature is as yet obscure, because the exodus to Mastodon is still young. Users who flocked to servers without knowing much about their managers have, by and large, not yet run into problems with the site operators. The early trickle of horror stories about petty authoritarianism from Mastodon sysops conspicuously fail to mention that if the management of a particular instance turns tyrant, you can click two links, export your whole social graph, sign up for a rival, click two more links and be back at it.
This feature will become more prominent, because there is nothing about running a Mastodon server that means that you are good at running a Mastodon server. Elon Musk isn’t an evil genius — he’s an ordinary mediocrity who lucked into a lot of power and very little accountability. Some Mastodon operators will have Musk-like tendencies that they will unleash on their users, and the difference will be that those users can click two links and move elsewhere. Bye-eee!
Freedom of exit isn’t just a matter of the human right of movement, it’s also a labor issue. Online creators constitute a serious draw for social media services. All things being equal, these services would rather coerce creators’ participation — by holding their audiences hostage — than persuade creators to remain by offering them an honest chance to ply their trade.
Platforms have a variety of strategies for chaining creators to their services: in addition to making it harder for creators to coordinate with their audiences in a mass departure, platforms can use DRM, as Audible does, to prevent creators’ customers from moving the media they purchase to a rival’s app or player.
Then there’s “freedom of reach”: platforms routinely and deceptively conflate recommending a creator’s work with showing that creator’s work to the people who explicitly asked to see it.
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen
When you follow or subscribe to a feed, that is not a “signal” to be mixed into the recommendation system. It’s an order: “Show me this.” Not “Show me things like this.”
Show.
Me.
This.
But there’s no money in showing people the things they tell you they want to see. If Amazon showed shoppers the products they searched for, they couldn’t earn $31b/year on an “ad business” that fills the first six screens of results with rival products who’ve paid to be displayed over the product you’re seeking:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola
If Spotify played you the albums you searched for, it couldn’t redirect you to playlists artists have to shell out payola to be included on:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing
And if you only see what you ask for, then product managers whose KPI is whether they entice you to “discover” something else won’t get a bonus every time you fatfinger a part of your screen that navigates you away from the thing you specifically requested:
https://doctorow.medium.com/the-fatfinger-economy-7c7b3b54925c
Musk, meanwhile, has announced that you won’t see messages from the people you follow unless they pay for Twitter Blue:
https://www.wired.com/story/what-is-twitter-blue/
And also that you will be nonconsensually opted into seeing more “recommended” content from people you don’t follow (but who can be extorted out of payola for the privilege):
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/Twitter-Expands-Content-Recommendations/637697/
Musk sees Twitter as a publisher, not a social media site:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604588904828600320
Which is why he’s so indifferent to the collateral damage from this payola/hostage scam. Yes, Twitter is a place where famous and semi-famous people talk to their audiences, but it is primarily a place where those audiences talk to each other — that is, a public square.
This is the Facebook death-spiral: charging to people to follow to reach you, and burying the things they say in a torrent of payola-funded spam. It’s the vision of someone who thinks of other people as things to use — to pump up your share price or market your goods to — not worthy of consideration.
As Terry Pratchett’s Granny Weatherwax put it: “Sin is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”
Mastodon isn’t perfect, but its flaws are neither fatal nor permanent. The idea that centralized media is “easier” surely reflects the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been pumped into refining social media Roach Motels (“users check in, but they don’t check out”).
Until a comparable sum has been spent refining decentralized, federated services, any claims about the impossibility of making the fediverse work for mass audiences should be treated as unfalsifiable, motivated reasoning.
Meanwhile, Mastodon has gotten two things right that no other social media giant has even seriously attempted:
I. If you follow someone on Mastodon, you’ll see everything they post; and
II. If you leave a Mastodon server, you can take both your followers and the people you follow with you.
The most common criticism of Mastodon is that you must rely on individual moderators who may be underresourced, incompetent on malicious. This is indeed a serious problem, but it isn’t the same serious problem that Twitter has. When Twitter is incompetent, malicious, or underresourced, your departure comes at a dear price.
On Mastodon, your choice is: tolerate bad moderation, or click two links and move somewhere else.
On Twitter, your choice is: tolerate moderation, or lose contact with all the people you care about and all the people who care about you.
The interoperability mandates in the Digital Markets Act (and in the US ACCESS Act, which seems unlikely to get a vote in this session of Congress) only force the largest platforms to open up, but Mastodon shows us the utility of interop for smaller services, too.
There are lots of domains in which “dominance” shouldn’t be the sole criteria for whether you are expected to treat your customers fairly.
A doctor with a small practice who leaks all ten patients’ data harms those patients as surely as a hospital system with a million patients would have. A small-time wedding photographer who refuses to turn over your pictures unless you pay a surprise bill is every bit as harmful to you as a giant chain that has the same practice.
As we move into the realm of smalltime, community-oriented social media servers, we should be looking to avoid the pitfalls of the social media bubble that’s bursting around us. No matter what the size of the service, let’s ensure that it lets us leave, and respects the end-to-end principle, that any two people who want to talk to each other should be allowed to do so, without interference from the people who operate their communications infrastructure.
Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
Heisenberg Media (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elon_Musk_-_The_Summit_2013.jpg
CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en
[Image ID: Moses confronting the Pharaoh, demanding that he release the Hebrews. Pharaoh’s face has been replaced with Elon Musk’s. Moses holds a Twitter logo in his outstretched hand. The faces embossed in the columns of Pharaoh’s audience hall have been replaced with the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The wall over Pharaoh’s head has been replaced with a Matrix ‘code waterfall’ effect. Moses’s head has been replaced with that of the Mastodon mascot.]
#pluralistic#e2e#end-to-end#freedom of reach#mastodon#interoperability#social media#twitter#economy#creator economy#artists rights#content moderation#como#right of exodus#let my tweeters go#exodus#right of exit#technological self-determination
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Yeah, Kris is definitely NOT alright.
FIRST - PREVIOUS - NEXT
MASTERPOST (for the full series / FAQ / reference sheets)
#undertale#deltarune#utdr#crossover#crossover comic#undertale fanart#deltarune fanart#twin runes#twin runes comic#twin runes au#kris dreemurr#frisk#and we arrived at the breaking point#i know the last pages have been very depresso but i swear once this arc is over we'll get right back on track with the funnies#but first we have to deal with some DRAMA#imagine what it would be like if some otherworldly entity took over your body#and suddenly you start making friends and patching up old friendships#Something even your mother is proud of you for#even though it's not YOU doing that#you'd feel like people don't like YOU but only that parasite in your body#because without it you're just that creepy kid next door#you'd feel like the world would be better without you#at least that's what Kris must be feeling right now#i DO wonder what's up with this cave though#it clearly is NOT the exit#and what's with those markings outside and inside the cave?#hmmmmm
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Murderbot September day 3: (Alternative prompt) “I don’t like you.” / “I know.”
#mbs24#the murderbot diaries#murderbot#gurathin#I always liked this bit in the book! I hope I got MB’s ‘loading…’ right hehe#might do a part 2#exit strategy spoilers#tmbd spoilers#tmbd#my art#Fanart
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i love when wilson pops into an episode only to psychoanalyze house to the point of endangering both of them and then fucks off.
#look cute and read boyfriend to rubble and make a swift stage right exit#james wilson#hilson#house md#house md rewatch#job well done
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#trump#donald trump#trump 2024#he must be doing something right!#current events#they keep trying to kill him and he keeps surviving#god bless#trump assassination attempt#trump assassination attempt number 2#golf course#news#america#world events#us elections#election 2024#american politics#God bless Donald Trump#fight#MAGA#Protect Trump#murder has no place in politics#so leftists may need to exit politics stage left if they're going to keep trying to kill people because they don't agree with them LOL#murdering someone because you don't agree with them is wrong#DUH
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Feel free to reblog and talk in the tags about the first time you played!
#technically i played in late 2015#but i just loaded it and then exited right back out#didn't play for another year after that#undertale#deltarune
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European Elections - Exit polls show gains for the far right in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Austria, and Italy.
#i wanto to fucking break something#eu politics#eu elections#headlines#far-right#fascism#germany#france#the netherlands#austria#italy#news#italy tag#exit polls
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♪ Worldwide - Big Time Rush
I'm gonna be honest- these episodes kind of fell apart while I was making this. The more I re-wrote the story for it's second draft the less this version made sense and the less interested I was to work on it. I have not much else to say except sorry this part is kinda iffy and sorry it took so long. I promise you I'll make up for this in the next episode I PROMISE
Notes on both episodes under the cut!
Sweden Sour
* (I think it’d be really funny if Cody just doesn’t talk at all this episode. Not a word. Just nods and head shakes and depressed faces.)
* Cody’s incredibly depressed after Noah’s elimination. Sierra’s over the moon, though. She sees Cody depressed and gives him a tight side hug, petting his head. She tries consoling him with “I know you’re sad, but it’s ok! At least I’m still here~.” Cody starts sobbing, head in hands. Heather is sick of this already.
* The teams get their “ibuilda” pieces and the Amazons argue on what it’s supposed to be. Cody stares at the pieces for a few seconds before the light briefly re enters his eyes. He starts building. Courtney tells him to stop but Heather tells her he’s obviously got it, so let him work. They start helping him build… something.
* Once the Amazons are done, Heather, Sierra and Courtney take a step back to see what they’ve built. It’s a giant wooden Noah head. Their faces drop. Heather is filled with murderous rage.
* We built Noah’s face (We’re gonna take first place) Cause we built Noah’s faaaace
* Tyler’s jumper would be white.
* Cody doesn’t sing in this number. Chris notices and stares at him threateningly. He reluctantly hums the chorus and Chris takes what he can get.
* (Alejandro takes off his shirt to pull the boat like a freak. Duncan is unfazed and Tyler will deny it if you ask him if he blushed.)
* Sierra hits Noah’s Head hard enough it falls over on its side and suggests sawing off the side to ride in him like a boat. Heather and Courtney agree to this. Cody has no comment.
* Duncan and Alejandro don't bother bending over backwards to please Tyler. Duncan makes himself captain and no one argues.
* When the Amazons go to pick a captain, Courtney grabs the hat and declares herself captain without input. Heather tries to argue but Courtney argues back- Cody is in no condition, no one trusts Sierra and Heather took control the last challenge so this time she’s in charge. Heather reluctantly backs down.
* Amazons catch up to team Chris in the water. Alejandro sees them approach and makes note of Cody’s face, making fun of him for being so upset about “the Noah thing”. Cody furrows his eyebrows and points furiously at Chris’s boat. Courtney agrees that yes, they should shoot their boat.
* It doesn’t matter who wins the challenge since it’s a non elimination round, but I want to say the Amazons persevere. The massage helps Cody enough that he’s not stone faced next episode at least.
Aftermath III (Aftermath Aftermayhem)
* Gwen, Owen and Noah are introduced together. Gwen walks out first and Owen, hugging Noah to the point of lifting him off the ground, walks behind her.
* Geoff asks what all that’s about and Gwen responds that Owen refused to let him go until Noah “understood just how sorry he was”. Noah insists he forgives him, but Owen still won’t let him go.
* The Owen square is replaced by the Tyler square. The prompt is survive. (The hosts throw a bunch of debris at the contestant for thirty seconds and if they dodge everything they move on.)
* (For brevity’s sake, assume all of the contestants that participated in the board game in the original episode participated here [with the exception of Tyler, who is replaced with Owen]. They all get eliminated the same way as well, Noah getting got by aliens, Owen falling down the booby trap square and Beth making it to the final question.)
* When Beth gets stumped on the last question (What was Duncan's band called) Noah yells at her, frustrated: “Oh my- It’s Der Schnitzel Kickers, Beth!!” Confetti and balloons fall from the ceiling.
* (He knows this because Cody had mentioned it in a conversation after the London challenge.)
* Noah initially complains about winning the game, but Owen reminds him that he gets to see Cody again and he shuts up immediately.
* “Noah wins!” “Wasn’t he disquali-” “NOAH WINS!! Let’s wrap it up. We’re done here.”
#world tour but noco are the only ones kissing#wtbnatook : main#total drama#total drama world tour#tdwt#total drama noah#td noah#total drama cody#td cody#cody anderson#noco#total drama noco#td noco#I am aware eliminating Noah just to bring him back after an episode is cheap i know. believe me this gets rectified in the second draft#for now I need you to go with the flow#ESPECIALLY cause the next episode makes this worth it#do you think they've been thinking about eachother worldwide (yes they have)#They're never as far away as it may seem (no)#soon they'll be together- they'll pick up right where they left off!#for real though the next episode is stacked as hell#im so exited to be moving on from these two and get into my favorite episode of the rewrite
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Sneaking out of the office early on a Friday like…
Deep-sea giant isopods use their 14 legs to tiptoe along the seafloor. When the need to move a little more quickly arises, they fan out their uropod and pleopods (their tail and swimming limbs) and paddle away. Either way, they’re getting a jumpstart on the weekend.
#monterey bay aquarium#if i walk very slowly they wont notice#im about to roly poly right outta here#taking my exoskeleton to the exit
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DNP saying thank you & goodbye to the meet & greet people, Berlin 08.09.24
#hskfkdhsjskkdfkkendkwks i didn't expect him to just appear right in front of me#everyone was standing up to go ahead into the theater and then suddenly a wild dan appeared#never knew my camera reflexes were that good#dan and Phil#dnptit#terrible influence tour#terrible influence spoilers#gonna tag it as spoiler just in case#tit spoiler#dnp spoiler#terrible influence tour spoiler#tit tour#my video#btw for anyone concerned about space issues that's the door that the meet & greet people exited from into the main foyer#where they made us wait before we could go into the actual theater (on the other side)#we were crowding ourselves not dnp 😂
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Podcasting "Twiddler"
This week on my podcast, I read “Twiddler,” a recent Medium column in which I delve more deeply into enshittification, and how it is a pathology of digital platforms, distinct from the rent-seeking of the analog world that preceded it:
https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/27/knob-jockeys/#bros-be-twiddlin
Enshittification, you’ll recall, is the lifecycle of the online platform: first, the platform allocates surpluses to end-users; then, once users are locked in, those surpluses are taken away and given to business-customers. Once the advertisers, publishers, sellers, creators and performers are locked in, the surplus is clawed away from them and taken by the platforms.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
Facebook is the poster-child for enshittification. When FB welcomed the general public in 2006, it sold itself as the privacy-respecting alternative to Myspace, promising users it would never harvest their data. The FB feed consisted of the posts that the people you’d followed — the people you cared about — published.
FB experienced explosive growth, thanks to two factors: “network effects” (every new user was a draw for other users who wanted to converse with them), and “switching costs” (it was practically impossible to convince all the people you wanted to hear from to leave FB, much less agree on what platform to go to next). In other words, every new user who joined FB both attracted more users, and made it harder for those users to leave.
FB attained end-user lockin and was now able to transfer users’ surpluses to business customers. First, it started aggressively spying on users and offered precision targeting at rock-bottom prices to advertisers. Second, it offered media companies “algorithmic” boosting into the feeds of users who hadn’t asked to see their posts.
Media companies that posted brief excerpts to FB, along with links to their sites on the real internet were rewarded with floods of traffic, as their posts were jammed into the eyeballs of millions of FB users who never asked to see them. Media companies and advertisers went all-in for FB, integrating FB surveillance beacons in their presence on the real internet, hiring social media specialists who’d do Platform Kremlinology in order to advise them on the best way to please The Algorithm.
Once those business customers — creators, media companies, advertisers — were locked into FB, the company harvested their surplus, too. On the ad side, FB raised rates and decreased expensive anti-fraud measures, meaning that advertisers had to pay more, even as an increasing proportion of their ads were either never served, or never seen.
With media companies and creators, FB not only stopped jamming their content in front of people who never asked to see it, they actively suppressed the spread of business users’ posts even to their own subscribers. FB required media companies to transition from excerpts to fulltext feeds, and downranked or simply blocked posts that linked back to a business user’s own site, be it a newspaper’s web presence or a creator’s crowdfunding service. Business users who wanted to reach the people who had explicitly directed FB to incorporate their media in users’ feeds had to pay to “boost” their materials.
This is the (nearly) complete enshittification cycle: having harvested the surplus from users and business customers, FB is now (badly) attempting to surf the line where nearly all the value in the service lands in its shareholders’ pockets, with just enough surplus left behind to keep end-users and business-users locked in (see also: Twitter).
There have been lots of other abusive “platform” businesses in the past — famously, 19th century railroads and their robber-baron owners were so obnoxiously abusive that they spawned the trustbusting movement, the Sherman Act, and modern competition law. Did the rail barons do enshittification, too?
Well, yes — and no. I have no doubt that robber barons would have engaged in zuckerbergian shenanigans if they could have — but here we run up against the stubborn inertness of atoms and the slippery liveliness of bits. Changing a railroad schedule to make direct connections with cities where you want to destroy a rival ferry business (or hell, laying track to those cities) is a slow proposition. Changing the content recommendation system at Facebook is something you do with a few mouse-clicks.
Which brings me to the thesis of “Twiddler”: enshittification doesn’t arise from the special genius or the unique wickedness of tech barons — rather, it’s the product of the ability to twiddle. Our discourse has focused (rightly) on the extent to which platforms are “instrumented” — that is, the degree to which they spy on and analyze their users’ conduct.
But the discussion of what the platforms do with that data — the ways they “react” to it — has echoed the platforms’ own boasts of transcendental “behavior modification” prowess (c.f. “Surveillance Capitalism”) while giving short shrift to the extremely mundane, straightforward ways that the ability to change the business-logic of a platform lets it allocate and withdraw surpluses from different kinds of users to get them on the hook, reel them in, and then skin and devour them.
The Twiddler thesis, in other words, is a counter to the narrative of Maria Farrell’s Prodigal Tech Bros, who claim that they were once evil sorcerers, but, having seen the error of their ways, vow to be good sorcerers from now on, forswearing “hacking our dopamine loops” like vampires swearing off blood:
https://conversationalist.org/2020/03/05/the-prodigal-techbro/
People who repeat the claims of Prodigal Tech Bros are engaging in criti-hype, Lee Vinsel’s term for criticism that repeats tech’s own mystical narratives of their own superhuman prowess, rather than grappling with the mundanity of doing old conjurer’s tricks very quickly, with computers:
https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5
That’s what twiddling is — doing the same things that grocery store monopolists and rail monopolists and music label monopolists have always done, but very quickly, with computers. Whether it’s Amazon rooking sellers and authors, or Apple and Google’s App Stores rooking app creators, or Tiktok and Youtube rooking performers, or Uber rooking drivers, the underlying pattern of surplus-harvesting is the same, and so is the method. They do the same thing as their predecessors, but very quickly, with computers.
A grocer who wants to price-gouge on eggs needs to dispatch an army of low-waged employees with pricing guns. AmazonFresh does the same thing in an eyeblink, by typing a new number into a field on a web-form and clicking submit. As is so often the case when a magic trick is laid bare, the actual mechanic is very, very boring: the way to make a nickel appear to vanish is to spend hundreds of hours practicing before a mirror while you shift so it is clenched between your fingers, and protrudes from behind your hand (sorry, spoiler alert).
The trick can be baffling and marvellous when you see it, but once you know how it’s done, it’s pretty obvious — the difference is that most sleight-of-hand artists don’t think they’re sorcerers, while plenty of tech bros believe their own press.
There’s a profound irony in twiddling’s role in enshittification: early internet scholarship rightly hailed the power of twiddling for internet users. Theorists like Aram Sinnreich described this as configurability — the ability of end-users (aided by tinkerers, small businesses, and co-ops) to modify the services they used to suit their own needs:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vk8c2
Arguably the most successful configurability story is ad-blocking, which Doc Searls calls “the biggest boycott in human history.” Billions of end-users of the web have twiddled their browsers so that they aren’t tracked by ad-tech and don’t see ads:
https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2015/09/28/beyond-ad-blocking-the-biggest-boycott-in-human-history/
Configurability was at the heart of early hopes for mass disintermediation, because audiences and performers (or sellers and producers) could go direct to one another, assembling a customized, un-capturable conduit composed of an a-la-carte selection of payment processors, webstores, mail and web hosts, etc. Whenever one of these utilities tried to capture that relationship and harvest an unfair share of the surplus, both ends of the transaction could foil them by blocking, reverse-engineering, modding, or mashing them up, wriggling off the hook before it could set its barbs.
But — as we can all see — a funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century. The platforms seized the internet, turning it into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”:
https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040
Three factors let them do this:
1. They were able to buy or merge with every major competitor, and where that failed them, they were able to use predatory pricing to drive competitors out of the market:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked
2. They were able to twiddle their services, setting them a-bristle with surveillance beacons and digital actuators that could rearrange the virtual furniture every time some knob-jockey touched their dial:
https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6
3. They were able to hoard the twiddling, using laws like the DMCA, CFAA, noncompetes, trade secrecy, and other “IP” laws to control the conduct of their competitors, critics and customers:
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
That last point is very important: it’s not just that big corporations twiddle us to death — it’s that they have made it illegal for us to twiddle back. Adblocking is possible on the open web, but to ad-block your Iphone, you must first jailbreak it, which is a crime. Yes, Apple will block Facebook from spying on you — but even if you opt out of tracking, Apple still spies on you in exactly the same way Facebook did, to power their own ad-targeting business:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar
This is what Jay Freeman calls “felony contempt of business-model” — the literal criminalization of configuration. When Netflix wants to decide who is and isn’t a member of your family, they just twiddle their back-end to block the child that moves back and forth between your home and your ex’s, thanks to your joint custody arrangement:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/02/nonbinary-families/#red-envelopes
But woe betide the parent who twiddles back to restore their child’s service, by jailbreaking an app or the W3C’s official, in-browser DRM, EME — trafficking in a tool to bypass EME and reconfigure your browser to suit your needs, rather than Netflix’s, is a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine, under Section 1201 of the DMCA:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-director-ceo-team-and-membership
This is the supreme irony of twiddling: Big Tech companies love to twiddle you, but if you touch your own knob, they call it a crime. Just as Big Tech firms turned “free software” into “open source” and then took all the software freedom for themselves, configurability is now the exclusive purview of corporations — those transhuman, immortal colony paperclip maximizers that treat humans as inconvenient gut-flora:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=vBknF2yUZZ8
If we are to take the net back, we’ll need to seize the means of computation. There are three steps to that process:
1. Traditional antitrust: Merger scrutiny, breakups, and bans on predatory pricing and other anticompetitive practices:
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/01/federal-trade-commission-justice-department-seek-strengthen-enforcement-against-illegal-mergers
2. Anti-twiddling laws for businesses: A federal privacy law with a private right of action, labor protections, and other rules that take knobs away from tech platforms:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/you-should-have-right-sue-companies-violate-your-privacy
3. Pro-twiddling laws for users: Interoperability (both mandatory and adversarial — AKA “Competitive Compatibility” or “comcom”):
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/05/time-for-some-game-theory/#massholes
Monopolists and their handmaidens — witting and unwitting — want you to believe that their dominance is inevitable (shades of Thatcher’s “there is no alternative”), because the great forces of history, the technical characteristics of digital technology, and the sorcerous mind-control of dopamine-hackers.
But the reality is much more mundane. Digital freedom was never a mirage. Indeed, it is a prize of enormous value — that’s why the platforms are so intent on hoarding it all for themselves.
Here’s this week’s podcast episode:
https://craphound.com/news/2023/02/27/twiddler/
And here’s a direct link to download the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the Internet Archive ; they’ll host your media for free, forever):
TK
Here’s the direct feed to subscribe to my podcast:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast
And here’s the original “Twiddler” article on Medium:
https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6
Image: Stephen Drake (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Analog_Test_Array_modular_synth_by_sduck409.jpg
CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en
This Thu (Mar 2) I’ll be in Brussels for Antitrust, Regulation and the Political Economy, along with a who’s-who of European and US trustbusters. It’s livestreamed, and both in-person and virtual attendance are free. On Fri (Mar 3), I’ll be in Graz for the Elevate Festival.
[Image ID: A mandala made from a knob and button-covered control panel.]
#podcasts#enshittification#facebook#ip#configurability#aram sinnreich#prodigal techbros#maria farrel#criti-hype#lee vinsel#tech exceptionalism#platform economics#interoperability#right of exit#disintermediation#intermediation#activitypub#end to end#pluralistic#maria farrell
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i finished it, was kicked out of the game, and then spent the next 10 minutes drawing this. i will now go take a shower, most likely cry, and then go through the emotional turmoil of convincing myself to reset so i can do a geno run. i hate it here :D
#undertale yellow#uty#my art#<- ifg#spoilers under these tags beware. although it is mostly just me being very very sad#that entire thing was heart wrenching. anyways#CEROBAS FIGHT??? HELLO???#i had to exit out of it the first time (i got to the last phase) to get better items but i came back and won pretty quickly#but THE CUTSCENES?!?!?#JFC NO WONDER THIS WOMANS SO MESSED UP. HER HUSBAND PRACTICALLY DIED IN HER ARMS AND THE LAST THING HE LEFT HER WITH- HIS DYING WISH- COULD#ONLY BE FULFILLED BY PUTTING THEIR ONLY CHILD IN DEATHS WAY. AND THEN WHEN SHE TOOK THAT RISK THE WORST THING HAPPENED AND SHE NOW HAS TO#LIVE WITH THE GUILT OF BEING THE ONE TO. MOST LIKELY. KILL HER ONE AND ONLY DAUGHTER#ALL THE WHILE SHE WAS PUSHING AWAY HER CHILDHOOD BEST FRIEND AND CONVINCING HERSELF THAT SHE WAS IN THE RIGHT TO SACRIFICE CLOVER WHO HAD#BEEN ONLY KIND MERCIFUL AND JUST THIS WHOLE TIME. EVEN TO THOSE WHO WERE TRYING TO KILL THEM. FUCK.#AAND WHEN CLOVER HUGGED HER I DOUBLED OVER IRL BC *THATS EXACTLY WHAT I WANTED TO DO IN THAT MOMENT* I HATE IT (read: love it) HERE#n dont even get me STARTED on after that. when clover started moving on their own and the gd white screen came up and we got flashbacks of#everyone's words. thats when the tears rlly started coming bc it clicked for me. 'oh. this is it. isn't it?' and IT WAS#WHEN THEY GAVE THEIR FUCKIGN HAT AND GUN AWAY TO MARTLET AND STARLO WELL THATS WHEN I REALLY STARTED CRYING#AAND THE GROUP HUGG#I WAS SOBBING WHENEVER I HAD TO WATCH THEM CRAWL UP AGAINST THE WALL AND DIE AND HAVE FLOWEYS WORDS PLAY OVERHEAD#AND THE FUCKOGN#THE F U C K I N G#AFTEWRCREDITS SCENE WHERE WE GOT THE 'You heard someone calling for help. You answered.' I GOT CHILLS SO BAD#to think that all the other souls have stories just as expansive and emotional as clover n frisks. how fucked up is that. in a good way tho#and finally the last scene where we got all 4 of our main friends sending us off in waterfall and we see clovers items end up in the dump#just waiting to be found by bratty and catty. fucken hell man this was a masterpiece#anyways time to reset and obliterate everyone and never emotionally recover from that ever!! really is feeling like 2016-17 again w the way#this game has me sobbing my eyes out and feeling the guilt of knowing that i dont HAVE to kill them all but im too curious not to#oh well. at least i have the balls to do it this time around instead of letting a youtuber do it for me ig
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THE BEAR 2.10 The Bear 3.08 Ice Chips
#all i've been able to think abt#the bear spoilers#the bear#thebearedit#donna berzatto#jamie lee curtis#chewieblog#userbbelcher#thebeartv#filmtvdaily#tuserdee#useraurore#tuserpris#userrlaura#userallisyn#nessa007#userholtz#tuserhan#trueloveistreacherous#THE BLUE VS RED. DONNA TURNING RIGHT ON RED BUT STAYING IN THE LOBBY THIS TIME......#the exit symbol on the right but she stays to the left of the hallway....
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scenes I can't believe are directly adjacent =
Tommy gets his cake (and eats it, too 😉)
#the funniest invisible string theory evidence#I'll never be over that they show Tommy's exit and Buck's entrance scenes RIGHT NEXT TO EACH OTHER in “Bobby Begins Again”#and then reintroducing Tommy as Buck's love interest involves cake again#bucktommy#buck x tommy#buck/tommy#tommy kinard#evan buck buckley#bi buck 911#bi!buck#911 queer content#911 abc#lgbtqia#tommy definitely be eating that cake iykyk#I probably only make myself laugh with this crude humor but oh well lmao#also that's Josh's plate in the close-up I can tell by his shirt#also also anyone who says Hen and Chim aren't friends with Tommy are full of it; they've been friends for years
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Husk: When I said "bring me back something from the beach", I meant like a seashell.
Angel: *struggling to hold a seagull with all six arms* Well, you didn't fucking say that!
#epilogue#Angel: *motioning frantically to Charlie as Vaggie approaches*#“they didn’t mean a seagull!’’#Charlie: *currently fighting with her own seagull* oh shit#*seagull is quickly defenestrated*#that is the weirdest sentence I’ve ever written and yet I want it on a shirt#same energy as: exit stage right pursued by a bear#Vaggie: Charlie why are you covered in-#Charlie: WHAT BIRD?#Angel dust#husk#husk/angel#incorrect hazbin hotel#Hazbin hotel#incorrect quotes#angel dust needs a hug#CONSENSUALLY#the seagull Angel has ends up living a very pampered life alongside nuggets#fat nuggets is the best#incorrect hazbin hotel quotes#hazbin hotel angel dust#hazbin hotel husk#‘it was Cherri’s idea!’#Cherri: YOU LYING BITCH-#meanwhile#husk: *resisting the cat side of him that is super touched that Angel brought him back a ‘gift’*
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its still very scuffed rn but GUYSSSS
#wip#toontown#toontown corporate clash#ttcc#firestarter#flint bonpyre#cosplay#cosplay wip#the eyelid and mouth are just taped in rn and the eyes are temporary pieces of paper so yeah i think scuffed is the right word for now#that seam on the front wont be visible btw. there will be a piece there#YALL I AM SO EXITED RN THIS IS GONNA LOOK GREAT#also i have the brim for the helmet made but i dont think i would be able to securely tape the face to it with the eyelid on#also also the red parts are made of old foam floor mats from when i was a child. free foam!!!#i love talking#stupid made this#flint cosplay stuff
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