 All right, our next speaker is someone I think a lot of you already know. He is renowned Corey Doctorow. He is a science fiction novelist, blogger, technology activist. He's also the co-editor of the popular web blog Boing Boing and contributed to many magazines, websites, newspapers. He writes a lot. He's also an MIT Media Lab affiliate and visiting professor of practice at the University of Southern California. Today he's going to discuss the phenomenon of online platforms downgrading the quality of their services and how we might fix it. Please welcome Corey. Hello, hello, hi. So I don't know if you've noticed, but I am officially old now. I'm 51 years old. I am old enough that I have weird conditioned reflexes. So like whenever anyone says open source, there's a part of me that twitches and goes free software. I'm old enough that I miss the weird jolt of pleasure you got when your sound card finally worked and you heard those magic words. My name is Linus Torvalds and I pronounce linux linux. I'm old enough that I'm now writing novels about supply chain hacks. And as happens when you and I'm old enough that I have two artificial hips. But as happens whenever you turn 50 and the AARP tracks you down and sends you a membership pitch, you also become old enough that you are officially required to start telling people that things used to be better in the good old days and now they're going to hell. And I'm here to tell you that I actually think it's true. I think that there was a time when the web did not consist of five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four and that that was better. And I think that it was not an accident. It wasn't the great forces of history that bore down upon our weird and amazing and variegated internet to homogenize it and turn it into this kind of smooth normalized slurry of stuff that we have now. I think it was policy choices. I think it was stuff that is endemic to platform economics. So platforms, you know, they're the dominant form of the business on the internet. A platform has business users and it has end users. It mediates between them. That can be anything from like eBay to Amazon to Uber, where you have two different groups of people and you mediate between them. And in the platform life cycle, there's a kind of predictable set of phases that see things getting first better and then worse. So in the first phase of the platform life cycle, you need to bring in end users. And so you do nice things for those end users. As the economists would say, you allocate surpluses to them. You give them goodies and you do that until you find some way to lock them in. And once you have them securely locked in, you start to withdraw some of those surpluses and you give them to business users to lure them in. And once the business users have piled in and they've become locked in, then you withdraw the surpluses from those business users and you give them to your shareholders. And there's a name for this that I've coined. It was actually in the title of the talk. I guess they omitted it for streaming purposes, but the name of this is inshidification. And inshidification is the reason that things really are worse these days. So I'm going to give you a little inshidification case study. I'm going to use Facebook. So if you recall, there was this moment when Facebook transitioned from being a service that was just available to American college kids and people with K to 12 official email addresses and opened up to the whole world. And they had this pitch, right? Stop using MySpace, which is the service that spies on you all the time and is owned by the evil Australian billionaire. Come and use Facebook. We will never spy on you. Instead, what we're going to do is offer you an incredible value proposition. Show up on Facebook and articulate your social network. Tell us who matters to you and who you love, who you want to hear from. And then whenever they post something that they want other people to hear, we'll put it in reverse chronological order and a feed for you. And you're going to know about it in this deterministic way. So users piled in and they locked in. They locked in through the collective action problem. The collective action problem, you're going to experience it here like when seven of you want to go to dinner somewhere in Vancouver and you can't agree where. That's the collective action problem. It's much worse when it's like you and everyone you care about. And you're all in a cord that you don't like Facebook very much anymore, but you can't agree on whether you should go. And if you should go where, you should all go next. And so as a result, you engage in this kind of mutual hostage-taking. Right? And so you can't leave because your friends can't leave. Your friends can't leave because you can't leave. And so at this critical juncture, Facebook pivots, and they turn to two different groups of business customers, advertisers and media companies, and they say to the advertisers, do you remember when we told end users that we would never spy on them? Well, we've been doing the Darth Vader MBA and we have this new iron rule we've acquired. I have altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it further. We are going to start spying on those users and we're going to give you an incredible value proposition. We will allow you to target users for ads really cheaply and with a high degree of accuracy and we're going to put a lot of engineering into fighting ad fraud. So when you pay for an ad, we're going to deliver that ad. And they turn to media companies and they said, do you remember when we told end users that all we're going to show them is the things that they asked to see? Well, Darth Vader has given us the same advice. I've altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it further. If you post little excerpts from the things that you've put on the open web, along with a link to it, we will non-consensually ram that into users' eyeballs in place of the things they actually asked to see. Some of them will like it and will visit your website and you'll get a funnel and you can monetize that traffic. Some of them will even subscribe to you so that you'll show up in the feet of the things that they want to see instead of the things that we want them to see. At a certain point, Facebook found that those media companies had become locked in. They'd found that the advertisers had become locked in. They'd retooled their businesses around it and they started to draw down the surpluses from both of them. They started to take away the goodies. So if you're an advertiser, the rate of advertising went up, the price to advertise went up the accuracy to targeting went down, the anti-adfrot stuff was drawn down and those dollars were instead allocated to dividends and to other goodies for shareholders. If you were a media company, it got harder and harder to reach those readers. For one thing, you had to put more and more of your articles in Facebook before they would be delivered even to your own subscribers. Eventually it got to the point where if the whole article wasn't there and if you also didn't omit a link that would turn that into a funnel back to your own website, it just wouldn't show up at all. And then it got even worse where you had to pay to boost your materials to be shown to the people who'd asked to see them. And this is kind of end stage in shitification. So this is Facebook wanting to scoop up all the ad revenue to do ramp and ad fraud if you follow the Texas Attorney General's lawsuit over ad fraud and ad tech monopolization. You'll know that Google and Facebook had an illegal, collusive arrangement called Jedi Blue where they were harvesting more dollars for themselves at the expense of both advertisers and publishers to rig the ad markets. And where the media companies, materials are not reaching the people who asked to see them and where the people who signed up to see the things that mattered to them see very little of it. Instead, what they see is what matters to Facebook's shareholders to optimize their feed for Facebook's commercial interests. So in shitification, it tries to attain this equilibrium in which nearly all the surplus has been withdrawn from end users and from business customers, but enough remains so that the lock-in is durable so that they don't just pick up and leave and go somewhere else. But that is a very, very brittle equilibrium. All it takes is just one kind of ghastly misstep, a whistleblower, a live stream mass shooting, a horrible privacy breach like Cambridge Analytica, or the stuff that Elon Musk has been doing and just overnight, a service that you absolutely rely on turns into a service that you don't even understand why you're still using, and then people run for the exits. Now, when that happens, the platform starts to flounder and we're seeing that now. We're seeing Google announce that the problem with search quality will be resolved by replacing links to web pages with florid, lengthy paragraphs written by a habitual, confident liar, chatbot. We're seeing Facebook announce that the future of our online social spaces is to be reinvented as legless, sexless, low polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon characters and a metaverse named after an idea from a literal satirical science fiction dystopian novel. And it's okay that the platforms collapse. I started off my career as an SGI technician. It's fine that old companies go away. But for so long, as the platforms have gotten larger and larger, more and more powerful, we've devoted our regulatory energy and our public policy energy to making the platforms better on the assumption that they would be here forever and what we needed to do was make them into safer spaces for the people who'd be locked into them. Now that we're reaching this end stage in shitification and rampant platform incipient collapse, it's time to turn our focus to protecting users as the platforms collapse, to make the platforms easier to lose, not to prolong the crepuscular senescence of these dying platforms, but to find ways to route around them, to treat them as damage and leave. So I've got two proposals for you, concrete proposals for policy things we can do that'll make it easier to abandon shit. The first one is the end-to-end principle. You should be familiar with the end-to-end principle. It's what gave us the internet. It's the idea that the role of an intermediary is to make best effort to deliver data from willing senders to willing receivers. That's what gave us the internet as we understand it. It's the feature that underpins ideas like network neutrality and we see it nowhere at the service level. You just have no guarantee that the people who want to see the things that you're posting will get them, nor is there any guarantee that if you ask to see something that it'll be delivered to you. So how could we apply end-to-end to online platforms? Well, we could say that if you subscribe to a feed, then you should see the things in the feed. If you search for a specific SKU or good on an online marketplace, and that marketplace has that SKU, has an unambiguous match, that should be at the top of the list, not buried after five screens of ads. We can say that if you hoist an email at a spam folder and webmail, that nothing else from that sender should go back into the spam folder. Now, the next principle I'm going to articulate is... So that's end-to-end. The next principle I'm going to articulate is the right to exit. So many of you will be familiar with the burgeoning Fetaverse. It's gotten a big shot in the arm thanks to changes in the other platforms. And you may have heard the story about the server called mastodon.lawl. Mastodon.lawl was a volunteer-hosted server where just some rando said, I believe in the Fetaverse and I'm going to let as many people as want come and use my server to participate in the Fetaverse. And then his users got into a horrible argument about the new Harry Potter video game. And he got so sick of it, and they were all like trying to get the mods to step in. And he was like, oh, don't make me deal with this dumb argument that he said, all right, guys, I started this to have a nice time. I'm not having a nice time. I'm shutting down my server. And for a lot of people who are paying attention to the Fetaverse, the lesson that this taught them was that as bad as things are on the big platforms, at least you have some sense of who's running these servers when you sign up to them. You don't have to worry about them pulling the plug. But here's the thing that I think a lot of people missed. Built into Mastodon, which is built on top of Activity Pub, built into Mastodon is a process for exporting all the people you follow and all the people who follow you with one click and importing it into any other service such that they are all moved over automatically in the same way that you can do with RSS feeds and redirect directives that you can embed in XML that cause people to move their feeds over. And what that means is that when this mod decides to shut down the server, if we were to have a rule that said, yeah, you can shut down the server, but you have to give users the data they need to establish themselves on another server, that these users wouldn't have to care so much about how that mod was running their shop. All they would have to care about is that the mod would give them the data that they needed to leave if they did a bad job of running the shop. There are hundreds of millions of Twitter users who would like very much to leave Twitter but can't because they don't have that facility. And so if we were to introduce a right of exit into the way that we think about platform regulation, especially as Twitter starts to rack up future settlements with the Federal Trade Commission and European regulators where they're going to try and say, all right, you broke the rules, now here's your remedy. If we made that remedy making it easier to leave Twitter, then we would discipline Twitter because the equilibrium that firms have when they know you can't leave is they try to withdraw surpluses from you. They try to treat you badly enough that they can take away everything that they can get and leave just enough that you stay. If we make it easier to leave, then they have to treat you better. So where does this platform decay come from? What are the origins of insidification? Well, it shares a common route with lots of other industries which is that for 40 years, basically since Ronald Reagan, we haven't enforced antitrust. And so we've allowed companies to gobble up their competitors, to buy nascent competitors, to do predatory pricing and other things to prevent competition from the market. Capitalists hate capitalism. They would like very much, as Peter Thiel said, to live in a world in which competition is for losers, to have that thing that Warren Buffett waxes so horny about businesses with wide sustainable moats that prevent competitors from forcing you to actually provide a better service so that you can just concentrate on lining your own pockets. And so just like every other sector, whether that's shipping or beer or professional wrestling or eyeglasses, we see massive concentration in the tech sector. But this isn't just an epiphenomenon of concentration. There are specific things about tech that make it particularly vulnerable to this kind of inshidification. And that's the flexibility of digital platforms. Think about Jeff Bezos the grocer. Jeff Bezos the grocer owns a grocery store called Whole Foods, you may have heard of it. And if Jeff Bezos the grocer wants to do price gouging with eggs, he needs an army of teenagers with pricing guns to go out there on roller skates and reprice all the eggs. Jeff Bezos is another kind of grocer, though. Jeff Bezos is the grocer who owns Amazon Fresh. When Jeff Bezos the grocer owns Amazon Fresh wants to reprice his eggs, he moves a slider. He twiddles a knob. So, you know, J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, the monsters of history who caused us to pass antitrust and competition law, they weren't dumber or smarter than Jeff Bezos. They just couldn't click a mouse and lay railroad track to put a ferry line out of business, right? What tech firms are able to do is the same shell game that the railbarons played, but they get to play it faster. And in any shell game, it's the quickness of the hand that deceives the eye. So this I call twiddling, right? Twiddling the knobs on the back end. And twiddling is what keeps platform users from being able to claw back some advantage for themselves. You'll often hear YouTubers and other kind of platform performers. These are people who work for a boss that docks their paycheck every time it's time to get paid for violating rules that the boss won't tell them what the rules are. Because they say, if we told you what rules we have to decide whether or not the algorithm will show the content to the people who's asked to see it, then you'd figure out how to break the rules. Content moderation is the only domain where security through obscurity is taken seriously. And those people spend endless hours just trying to second-guess the algorithm. And you can see them on message boards just going through this bizarre exercise where it's like, I think if I use primary colors in my thumbnail, I will be shown to the people who ask to see me. Well, I think if I swear in the first 19 seconds, I won't be shown to the people who ask to see me. They may even be right, but they're only right until someone reaches out and touches the knob and twiddles it. And the people who run these services can't stop touching their knobs, right? But there's another thing that happens because twiddling isn't all bad. There is a user kind of twiddling. User twiddling is amazing. User twiddling is what we call adversarial interoperability where users figure out how to add or remove features from existing technologies that benefit them instead of the people who made them. You know, ad blocking is the largest consumer boycott in world history. One of four web users installed an ad blocker. But you can't install an ad blocker on an app because you have to reverse engineer it, right? Because we have made it illegal for users to twiddle. We've made it illegal to remove DRM, to jailbreak devices, to install alternative app stores. All the user side twiddling has been taken away. So we need to allow users to once again seize the means of computation to claw back value from platform operators not as a means of unjustly enriching themselves at the expense of those platform operators, but to discipline those platform operators. If you know that if you show an ad that's too obnoxious to a user that'll install an ad blocker, you will moderate your conduct as to how obnoxious the ad is. Ask me about the pop-up wars, right? When pop-ups in browsers used to spawn one pixel wide playing meaty songs, run away from your cursor, the way we solved that wasn't by passing a law against pop-ups. We put pop-up blockers in browsers and it disciplined the ad sector so they made their ads less obnoxious. If reverse engineering an app violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and makes you a felon libel to a five-year prison sentence, what will discipline the people who puts ads in apps? So the issue isn't merely that platforms twiddle with every hour that God sends. It's that they hoard the twiddling, that anti-circumvention, terms of service, tortuous interference claims, cybersecurity laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, patents and other rules turn user-side twiddling into felony contempt of business model. So to get the internet back to save the internet, we need to de-insidify it. We need to engage with the material forces that contribute to the decay of platforms and throw them into reverse, which means that on the one hand, we should do the standard antitrust stuff that is back for the first time in 40 years. There's real antitrust happening all over the world. In the UK, they just introduced new muscular antitrust law yesterday. In Canada, we're having a review of our competition law. In the US, you have incredible trust busters like Lena Kahn and Jonathan Cantor doing incredible work. And so we need to do that. We need to do that for everyone. If you care about professional wrestling, you should care about this stuff because if you remember, there was once 30 professional wrestling leagues. Now there's one that's owned by a rapey Trumpy billionaire who misclassified all of his employees as contractors, took away their health insurance and sent them out to beg for pennies on GoFundMe so they can die with dignity of their work-related injuries. Right? There are a lot of people who should care about antitrust and want to do something about it. But in tech, we have special remedies because tech is different. So on the one hand, we can slap constraints on twiddling on the back end, privacy laws, fair wage laws for gig workers, rules about interoperability that mandates interoperability between services. And we can restore to end users the right to twiddle, down-regulate the twiddling on the back end, up-regulate the twiddling on the front end so that you can add block. You can reverse engineer. You can make interoperable products that go beyond what the service wants to do or is mandated to do and does whatever you can do with scraping and bots that are constrained not by the whims of the firm but by a democratically accountable privacy law. So that's how we know whether your bot is doing something wrong, not whether it makes Mark Zuckerberg angry, but whether it violates a privacy law. A world where platforms are not constrained by competition and regulation, where they can build as many knobs as they want into the back end and twiddle them as often as they'd like to, where we are legally prohibited from twiddling back, that is a world where we are doomed to be twiddled to death. Thank you.