Hello Friends,
While the frightening and exhausting aspects of life seem to overtake us, let’s not forget that good people do good work and we should keep up with that, too. Remember, every Sunday, Jess Craven posts lots of good things happening.
Here’s a little thanks I got for giving blood in 2025. That felt good.
Although I am still mostly reading research books for a novel I’m working on, I’ve had a chance to listen to a few wonderful novels. I finished A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews. It’s that story of Nomi Nickel, whose life in the Mennonite colony of East Village, Manitoba is without fun and without prospects (unless slaughtering chickens as a job counts). Both her sister and her mother were excommunicated and left three years earlier. Full of grief for her missing family members, Nomi breaks all the rules, numbs herself to pain, and longs for escape.
I also listened to Whose Names are Unknown by Sanora Babb thanks to a recommendation by Beth Peyton. It’s a realistic look at farmworkers’ lives in the Great Depression. The characters in this novel flee the Dust Bowl and find an equally difficult situation on California. While the novel I’m working on has characters coming from Mexico during the same time period, they share some of the same issues with an abusive labor system. Sadly for Babb, her book was scheduled to be published, but just before, John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath launched and was a runaway best seller. Babb’s book was finally published in 2004.
Enshittification Part Two
For Part One, check last week’s post.
Let’s look at Cory Doctorow’s discussion of how we ended up in the internet platform mess. There are obvious issues with companies that can act as monopolies with no serious oversight (lax government regulation). But additionally, various companies figured out how to override the interoperability of computers at the same time that their work force became less valuable to them.
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Getting Past the Interoperability of Computers
Pretty much every computer in existence is capable of running every computer program that people know how to write. This has been beneficial to industries and customers with computer technology becoming faster. Computer chips also became faster and cheaper. Great stuff until companies started planting chips in everything including your car, your thermostat, your medical implant, even in the ink that goes into your printer. Suddenly, they can control your options in relation to that product. An example: You can’t buy a third-party ink cartridge that’s safe for an HP printer because it has a computer chip installed that will only read its own cartridges. Doctorow says that this allows HP to charge $10,000 a gallon for ink. While this sounds like hyperbole, he appears to be serious about that cost.
Changes in the Work Force
When companies like Google and Facebook were new, tech workers had a lot of power because if they quit, they could easily find a job elsewhere. This is no longer true. These workers had a sense of mission and were spending all of their time at work, dedicating their lives to companies whose mottos were “Don’t be evil” (Google) and “Connect every person in the world” (Facebook). Today workers don’t feel any sense of ownership over the products. They are more likely to feel betrayed.
Enough Money to Acquire Everything
The root of the problem goes back further than these companies to the 1970s when Democrats and Republicans both declined to enforce antitrust laws. (Joe Biden embraced the ‘consumer welfare standards theory’ of antitrust law, but then he was out of office.) Unregulated, companies like Amazon are able to create monopolies in many areas. For example, diapers.com was an e-commerce leader. To put them out of business, Amazon sold diapers significantly below cost, losing $200 million over a single month on these products. Diapers.com went bankrupt. Amazon picked it up and then shut it down. So now they exercise a great deal of control over the diaper market. This takeover also sent a message to companies: if Amazon makes you an offer, you have to sell or else you’ll go broke.
While Google has only made one great product (a search engine), they have been able to acquire many other people’s inventions. So Google Docs, Google Maps, their navigation system, their satellite images, their server management, and their customer service were all other people’s or other companies’ inventions that Google bought and integrated into their own company.
Enshittifying That One Great Product
The great product that Google created, its search engine, has been enshittified.
According to Google internal documents displayed by lawyer Megan Gray in the Google DOJ trial in October 2023, Google uses a semantics-matching technology to invisibly append brand names to queries. An example Doctorow gives is a search for kids’ snow pants. The customer query is “kids’ snow pants.” Google would add the words “North Face,” unseen by the customer. Ads for North Face come up first. North Face pays Google a lot of money to have their ads triggered when their name is searched. Google gets paid. “Depending on your point of view, this is either merely very sleazy, or it’s actual fraud.” (79) Google claims that this is not true and that Gray misunderstood what was going on; however, they refused to explain themselves any further.
Google also makes a lot of money by selling its search engines to other companies. This matters if you are an Apple user who believes you are not being tracked when you use Apple products. If you search using Safari, you’re actually using Google search. “Google has a non-consensual dossier on the behavior, social ties, purchases, economic status, employment history, and physical location of virtually every Internet user.” (81-82) Google gets $20 billion a year for this service.
“It turned out that ‘If you are not paying for the product, you’re the product’ was wishful thinking. It is true to say, ‘Even if you pay for the product, you’re the product if the company can get away with treating you as the product. ‘” (83)
There’s no end to bad actors running similar scams. Apple requires app makers to exclusively process payments through Apple’s system which takes a 30 percent commission on every purchase. (To place this in context, that’s ten times as high as the fees credit card companies charge merchants, which are already “sky-high.”) (84)
Adobe planned to train AI on the work people create on it until creators rebelled en masse and moved to smaller company’s products.
“The ability of purveyors of cloud-based products to alter their terms, prices, and features at will enables one of the most beloved Enshittification tactics of tech business leaders: bait and switch.” (100)
Use an App; Do as You Please
The most common tactic tech companies use to flout regulation is to break the law with an app, and then insist that the law hasn’t been broken at all, because the crime was committed with an app. (111)
One of the best examples would be Uber’s argument that it’s not an employer because it directs workers with an app. Companies can also say that they’re not committing wage theft if they do it with an app. Again Uber is an example with their algorithmic wage discrimination. When they offer jobs to all the drivers in the neighborhood, they calculate a different wage for each driver based on the driver’s recent behavior.
Uber can raise the cost of a taxi for riders if their phones are about to run out of batteries. That’s called twiddling, the process of changing the price (recommendation weights, search rankings, etc.) through automated or semi-automated means. Like ‘We’ll just twiddle all of these knobs in order to make more money.’ Offline companies can’t do these kinds of things. Doctorow imagines a gas station owner seeing someone leaving a vehicle that’s stranded in the snow and coming toward the station to get some snow chains. He doesn’t have the opportunity to change the prices on all of those before the customer walks through the door. In digital business, they can change everything all the time instantly and do that based on their surveillance data and other information.
Amazon takes the app scam to a whole other level. Since it uses delivery service partner (DSP) companies for its vans, it has fired the companies when their drivers unionize. If those workers were employees of Amazon that would be illegal, but Amazon can claim that it exerts control over the drivers through an app. So it’s an intermediary.
Amazon surveils delivery drivers with sensors in the vans that record the traffic around a vehicle. Inside the van cameras monitor the drivers down to the motion of their eyeballs and mouth. So if they’re singing along with the radio, Amazon can tell them they’re not paying attention to driving. They tell the drivers what route to drive and set crazy quotas for deliveries. Since they demand the dismissal of drivers who don’t live up to the standards it sets, Amazon drivers end up urinating in bottles. The fix? They get in trouble if they come back to the depot with bottles full of urine, so they throw them out the window and then you have roads leading to Amazon depots that are littered with sealed bottles of human urine.
Twisting Intellectual Property Law
When big tech companies say it’s impossible to run code of your choosing on their computers, what they’re really saying is it’s illegal to run code of your choosing on that computer. Now, there isn’t a law that would make it illegal for you to install non-company approved software on your computer. That, according to Doctorow would be like saying you had to put Nike approved laces into your air Jordans. Once you buy them, they’re your shoes and then it’s none of Nike‘s business what laces you put in them. Everything you buy that uses digital technology is also your property. So what’s the issue with tech?
The issue lies in intellectual property (IP) law.
Companies can design their products in such a way that they have a legal right to reach beyond the things themselves to control the conduct of their competitors, their critics and their customers.
There’s one section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or the DMCA that receives a lot of discussion in Enshittification: section 1201. It’s an anti-circumvention law, and it regulates bypassing access control for copyrighted work. It prevents you from breaking a digital lock. Think of the HP printer cartridges discussed above. The ink isn’t copyrighted. But you can’t fill the cartridge with your own ink because the printer cartridge has a chip in it that runs a copyrighted program. That program authenticates with a printer to verify that you bought HP ink. If you have the computer know-how to defeat that program on the chip, then you have gotten access to a copyrighted work illegally. Which is a felony. This may be the reason why more devices are becoming ‘smart.’ They can only be used in ways the manufacturer approves.
I haven’t had a baby in the house in decades, so I’d never heard of the SNOO smart sleeper, but it is a great example of this ploy. For those like me who are not in the know: the SNOO smart sleeper is a bassinet with a high-tech self-rocking cradle. When the baby cries, the cradle goes into rocking mode (back to sleep, dear little one!) while playing some sounds. It’s wildly expensive, about $1700. And like most expensive baby products, people reuse it—on second and third children, lent out to friends and family who are expecting.
The parent company 😊wanted to extract new revenue from owners after the purchase. Bait and switch—suddenly you’re going to lose the advanced features unless you pay $20 a month (not in the original bargain). Value moves away from the end users and back to the shareholders. Well, lots of companies would like to make money off of old things that they’ve already sold. The reason why SNOO can do it is because the product has a continuous internet connection that they simply downgrade if you don’t pay (for the thing you’ve already paid for—feels like mob protection, doesn’t it?) Again, if you try to make an alternative app that restores the features, then you are breaking the IP laws/committing a felony.
Are We Now Serfs to Techno Overlords?
Doctorow has an in-depth discussion of his belief that we have moved away from capitalism to something he calls technofeudalism. Technofeudalism’s understanding of ‘free markets’ is not that they are free from regulation but that they are free from rents. And now we are serfs in the digital environment, renting our space from the overlord. The argument requires a review of Econ 101. It’s more than I can get into here, but it’s worthwhile reading. As a quite incomplete summary of the idea:
In the years after the great financial crisis of 2008, tech was transformed from a primarily profit-seeking enterprise to a primarily rent-seeking enterprise and the things that make the giants powerful is that they control the factors of production that they rent to actual productive businesses.
We work in a monopsony, an economic system where markets are dominated by powerful buyers like Apple, Amazon, etc. These platforms (rentiers) have enormous control over software authors and anyone who wants to place their products for sale on these platforms (the actual productive businesses). The law comes down on the side of the rentier over the capitalist via the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, section 1201.
In our next discussion of Enshittification, we’ll look at what we can do to change things. (There must be some kind of way out of here…)
The Jimi Hendrix Experience - All Along The Watchtower (Official Audio)
Writers
Publishers Charge Anna’s Archive with Copyright Infringement from Publishers Weekly
A group of publishers including the Big Five is taking legal action to prevent the pirate website Anna’s Archive from illegally copying and selling their copyrighted material.
In a filing made March 6 in the U. S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, 13 book and journal publishers filed suit seeking a permanent injunction to stop Anna’s Archive from copying and distributing millions of infringing files. The suit highlights the magnitude of the material Anna’s Archive has stolen and the unorthodox methods it uses to monetize the material. …
The lawsuit also asserts that Anna’s Archive “publicly claims to have given ‘high-speed access’ to its illegal collection of more than 140 million copyrighted texts to companies in China, Russia, and elsewhere, many of them LLMs. One court in the Northern District of California recently found that Meta Platforms torrented the contents of Anna’s Archive for use in developing its LLM model Llama.”
In an e-mail exchange with a researcher inquiring about the cost of the collection for AI training, Anna’s Archive offered premium access for $200,000 and suggested payment be made using cryptocurrency, the complaint states.
