, in which the forces of enshittification are turning everything from our cars to our streaming services to our dishwashers into t](https://media.kbin.run/e5/f5/e5f5ec717a0a5ecd19eee065d545fe2890f467742854839a76f7430a1023fea7.jpg){kind=link}
We’re living in the #enshittocene, in which the forces of enshittification are turning everything from our cars to our streaming services to our dishwashers into thoroughly enshittifified piles of shit. Call it the Great Enshittening:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain
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If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/13/solidarity-forever/#tech-unions
1/
HP tricks you into installing a “security update” that sneakily disables your printer’s ability to recognize and use third-party ink? Just roll back the operating system and you won’t be forced to spend $10,000/gallon to print out your boarding passes and shopping lists:
Self-help - AKA #AdversarialInteroperability - isn’t just a way to override the greedy choices of corporate sadists. It’s a way to hold those sadists in check. It’s a constraint.
27/
Imagine a boardroom where someone says, “I calculate that if we make our ads 25% more invasive and obnoxious, we can eke out 2% more in ad-revenue.” If you think of a business as a transhuman colony organism that exists to maximize shareholder value, this is a no-brainer.
28/
But now consider the rejoinder: “If we make our ads 25% more obnoxious, then 50% of our users will be motivated to type, ‘how do I block ads?’ into a search engine. When that happens, we don’t merely lose out on the expected 2% of additional revenue - our income from those users falls to zero, forever.”
29/
Self-help is the third constraint on enshittification. But when competition fails, and regulatory capture ensues, companies don’t just gain the ability to flout the law - they get to wield the law, too.
30/
Tech firms have cultivated a thicket of laws, rules and regulations that make self-help measures very illegal. This thicket is better known as “IP,” a term that is best understood as meaning “any policy that lets me control the conduct of my competitors, my customers and my critics”:
31/
To put an ad-blocker in an app, you have to reverse-engineer it. To do that, you’ll have to decrypt and decompile it. That step is a felony under #Section1201 of the #DMCA, carrying a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. Beyond that, ad-blocking an app would give rise to liability under the #ComputerFraudAndAbuseAct (a law inspired by the movie Wargames!), under “tortious interference” claims, under trademark, copyright and patent.
32/
More than 50% of web users have installed an ad-blocker:
But zero percent of app users have installed an ad-blocker, because they don’t exist, because you’d go to prison if you made one. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it.
33/
This is why self-help, the third constraint, no longer applies. When a corporate sadist says, “let’s make ads 25% more obnoxious to get 2% more revenue,” no one says, “if we do that, our users will all install blockers.” Instead, the response is, “let’s make ads 100% more obnoxious and get an 8% revenue boost!”
Which brings me to the final constraint: workers.
34/
Tech workers have historically enjoyed enormous bargaining power, thanks to a dire shortage of qualified personnel. While this allowed tech workers to command high salaries and cushy benefits, it also led many workers to conceive of themselves as entrepreneurs-in-waiting and not workers at all.
35/