Citation Needed - Enshit*ification

Episode Date: March 11, 2026

Enshit*ification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to both users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders.

Hello and welcome to citation needed. The podcast where we choose the subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts. Because this is the internet? And that's how it works now. I'm Eli Bosnick, and I'll be the pre-roll auto ads to this feed drop mini trailer tonight. But I'll need some dynamically placed co-hosts. First up, two men who remember when auto ads were about buying a vehicle, Cecil and Noah.

Get into the zone. Yeah, I also remember I'm trying to. make me come by rolling a ball bearing around Alexis, Eli. It's not as good as you're making it sound, man. And it worked. It did work. I'm not saying it didn't work. My God, that was a sexy ball bearing.

And also joining us tonight, two men so in it for the money, the feeling is reciprocal. Heath and Tom. Okay, I just, I actually really like factor meals. I really like them. They're chilly. It's great. So the money is only in it for me,

too? I'm very confused. Well, compensated but confused jokes. Very well. Before we begin tonight, I'd like to take a moment to thank our patrons. Patrons, without you to remind us that what we already do is enough to give us money, we'd begin the desperate cycle of all failing podcasts of trying out new stuff and scaling back the release schedule. And then, of course, becoming big old bigots. And if you'd like to keep three out of five of us from becoming bigots, be sure to stick around to the end of the show.

And with that out of the way. We know. We know. Company meeting? We know. It doesn't matter, guys. We don't need to have the meeting. We know. It's free.

I didn't get invited to the meeting. I feel. Anyways, Heath, what person's listening? Why didn't I get invited to the meeting? What would we be talking about today? We're going to be talking about in shitification. So tell us, Heath, what is in shitification?

It's a word to describe the way that unfettered capitalism eventually turns everything into shit. It was coined by the delightful journalist, activist, political economist, public policy expert, podcaster, sci-fi author, and sci-fah author, Cory Doctoro in a blog post from November of 2022. Whom Heath is angling for a fucking date with, apparently. Oh my God, I love him so much. I heard him interviewed.

Is he going to be at a party? A bunch of like really cool econ nerd shit without sounding obnoxious and boring the way I do when I try to do. It's the best. Anyway, Corey Doctoro in early 2023 wrote an article in Wired that described in Shodification further saying, quote, Here is how platforms die. First, they're 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 inshidification. Dr. O followed up on the concept in more detail in October of last year with a book called Inshittification, why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it. It's a great book. Everybody should check it out, and that's going to be the main source I'm using. So here's the basic idea. Platforms like Facebook and Amazon and Twitter started out by providing a bunch of value to their users.

Okay, well, Facebook actually started as a place for, obnoxious Harvard bros to rate the fuckability about students. So the level of the original value is debatable in some cases. Mark Zuckerberg literally made his fortune by creating a site for giving a fuck score to people who definitely didn't want to fuck him. And the fortune he made from that idea is about $230 billion. Jesus. Yeah.

And just for context, Jonas Saul was worth about $3 million when he died in 1994. So like $6 million in today's money. So here's a more detailed picture of insurification using Facebook as the example. I mean, everyone listening to this podcast lived it, but go ahead. The original fuck scoring idea, not great, but decent human people started using the site to create community in a positive way. That's the before times when there's a bunch of value for the user. Fast forward to 2006, when Facebook got expanded out beyond just university students to be a competitor with MySpace, and that's when the inshutification began. Facebook decided to eliminate the competition with two pretty sophisticated business techniques called Lying and Stealing.

I'll start with the lying part. See if you can spot the lie in here. This is Dr. O'clock. This is Dr. O describing the early pitch from Facebook to potential users. quote, sure, we understand that most of you already have a social media service that you enjoy called MySpace. But as it occurred to you, MySpace is owned by an evil, crampulent, senescent Australian billionaire named Rupert Murdoch, and he spies on you with every hour God sends. Come to Facebook where we will never spy on you. End quote.

Oh, the lie is that there's no God. God doesn't send the hours. They just happen. For those who don't remember MySpace, that was a social media site coded with a potato that users could very slowly post blurry photos to

and then force everyone to listen to highly compressed clips of music you stole from LimeWire. It required you to Thunderdome your friends and choose your top aid. It was so hard. It was a fucking hoon. Super easy.

But you could pimp your space. I only chose two. I was like, fuck the rest of you. Fuck six of you. It was just Tom and Tom. Tom and eventual Tom is what I call them. Okay, so that was the lying part about God and possibly the spying. We'll see, here's the stealing part.

Facebook provided all their new users with a bot that would literally steal all the social media content from your MySpace feed and post it into your Facebook. So, you know, you can still keep in touch with your good friends like Tom, but you can move over to Facebook. Oh, thanks. I think we're good friends too. Okay, so that's why he's talking so much shit about Myspace because he just hated being everybody's other friend Tom. Yeah. So that led to a huge migration to Facebook and the beginning of their near monopoly. And once they got millions of users and they had a legal department to prevent anyone from doing the thing they just did to MySpace and they knew everyone was kind of locked in, the company moved to stage two of institutionification.

They started to insidify the user experience by selling ads, specifically targeted ads, which also involved selling the spying that they would never ever do. Here's how Dr. O describes the pitch to potential advertisers. Quote, hey, you remember when we told those rubs that we'd never spy on them? We were lying, obviously. We spy on them from asshole to appetite. If you give us a remarkably small sum of money, we'll use that surveillance data to do extraordinarily precise. targeted advertising on your behalf.

What's more, we are such upright, good-natured slabs that we filled a whole building with engineers who labor day and night to fight ad fraud. If you give us a dollar to show an ad to a specific kind of person, you can be sure that ad is going to be shown

to the right person. And then, because Facebook is litigious as fuck, Dr. O added, footnote, not an actual quote, but rather a hyperbolic rhetorical interpretation of the corporate messaging. End quote.

Hundreds of millions of people, though, were genuinely surprised to learn that if they were using a product for free, it was because they were the product and they just sold themselves cheap. Yeah. Listeners will be pleased to learn that our relationship with our advertisers consists of fine, you can have a make-good and we understand sorry to see you go. Yeah. Dr. O says a lot of that thing, Tom, that you mentioned.

that like, you know, if you're not paying for the product, you are the product. Yeah. Also, if you are paying, you're still the product a lot of the time. And it should have been obvious. It should have been obvious indeed. So from there, Facebook found a way to get ad money from publishers. Here's the pitch to the publishers as hyperbolic rhetorical interpretation. Quote, hey, remember when we told those rubs that we'd only show them the listings they asked to see?

That was a total lie. If you post short excerpts from your own website content to your Facebook account, complete with the link back to that website, we will non-consensually cram those excerpts into the eyeballs of users who never asked to see them, end quote. And George Decay was like, sounds great. I'd love to be every two Facebook posts Eli ever sees. So now the users are stuck on the only platform where they can network with all their friends. And they're co-workers who won't learn slack. It's confusing. It's like intentionally confusing. And the advertisers and publishers are stuck on the only platform where they can reach all those users.

And with everyone locked in, it's time for more in shittifying. This is phase three. They take all the value from both users and advertisers and give it to shareholders themselves. Facebook starts charging more and more for targeted ads and also gets lazy about preventing ad fraud. It got so bad that Procter & Gamble got suspicious and they decided to test it. Procter and Gamble entirely canceled the $200 million they were spending annually on allegedly targeted ads. And that cancellation led to a decline in their sales of $0. So the ads were getting shown to random accounts that didn't matter or not getting shown at all.

They did appear on a ton of satanic panic Facebook group showing their mascot as the king of darkness. You have to remember that. Yeah, that's true. You know what would make for a better world? What if we gave all the weirdos and creeps who get laughed out of the pub trivia and night a way to connect with each other and only each other and amplify their worldview? And then run for Congress. Run for Congress, importantly.

Yeah. I want to point out how fucked up you have to be before Proctor and fucking Gamble goes, I think these guys are being too dishonest. I'm able, guys. Thank you. The guys who had asbestos in all their facilities and then lied about it. They were the good guys here. Yeah.

They had to ferret out the evil of Facebook. So now the value of the platform is way down for the user and the business side. It's probably obvious to anyone who still uses Facebook, just how in shitified it's been for a while. It started as a place to see what your online friends were talking about, but now your feet has pretty much nothing in terms of actual human beings that you want to interact with. But instead of just leaving, it turns out lots of people are now addicted to that. They're addicted to algorithmic fake news and crazy political arguments between yelly strangers. And pretty much all those strangers are literal neo-Nazis or they, like, voted for Jill Stein in the 2016 general, which is pretty much the same thing in terms of election outcomes that they create.

Meanwhile, lots of advertisers keep paying Facebook because the billions of addicted users are just, you know, barely worth it. or the advertisers think it's worth it because they never check like Procter and Gamble. All the value is gone for everyone except Zuckerberg and his budget for buying Hawaii and Donald Trump getting a big bribe to pay for his inauguration. And maybe fuckbots, maybe, but probably bad ones that try to sell you dumb shit while you're fucking a mom. As a fuckbutt connoisseur, I am insulted that you would compare with Facebook offers. to my harem of cortisol.

Fair enough. Point taken. So now Facebook is fully inshidified. And it seems like the final phase that you'd hope would end in death of whatever, the guy, the company. But it seemed like that was going to happen a couple times already. And they just don't fucking die. Small example. They spied for Russian spies.

They did that a whole bunch. We learned from a whistleblower. 2018 that Cambridge Analytica was secretly harvesting tons of spying data that Facebook promised it would never collect on the platform. And that data was sold to political operatives like, I don't know, Russian intelligence that used it to help Donald Trump win the fucking election in 2016. Of course, that led to the delete Facebook movement. The what exactly?

People used a hashtag for like a fucking day. And then they got distracted by an ad for a game that lets you. run down a road and shoot fucking cool monsters, but that game doesn't even exist. You get it, it's not even a real game. Somebody created a demo for the game that doesn't exist, but you can't fucking play it. It's just bait for some other worst game

or an online casino or a meme coin that's owned by the Trump game. Admittedly, Cambridge Analytica sounds like an e-cigarette with tweed elbow patches. That's why it doesn't sound threatening. So, Keith, I was going to write a joke about how we should just make that game, and then we'd make a bunch of money from the people who really want to play it.

And then I remember that there was actually another different fake game whose marketing was pretending that they were the actual game of the fake game, even though that was also a fake game. And then I went Tom alone in my office for like four and a half minutes. I was just full Tom. I'll send you a new door. I've got a guy. So I'll get you.

Yeah. That guy's making so much money. You buy enough you just like they punches a little card. It's a punch door. You get a punch door actually, yeah. Yeah. Also, side note, the Trump family meme coins, they're also half owned by the royal family of the UAE after being purchased from Trump and his family through a spy. I know he's a spy because he's literally known as spy sheet in like the world.

Oh, God. This is fascinating. People need to know about, I'll be right back. I'm going to make a post. I'm going to make a post about this. Okay. All right. You guys, I think you're missing the fact that Facebook is also where, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're.

people get to see my cats and tell me how interesting my witticisms are. It's not all in shit yet. It's all, it has some uninshitted parts. So I got the cat part, yeah. So without any serious antitrust action, Facebook just kept rolling.

But they finally hit another big snag in 2022, another moment when they should have easily died. Here's the description from Doctoro. Quote, in the first quarter of 2022, Facebook posted lower than projected user growth, and the stock market responded, with a mass sell-off, dumping $250 billion worth of Facebook shares in 24 hours.

At the time, the largest decline in any corporate valuation in the history of the human race. But note, you'll love to see it. When their company's fortunes turn uncertain, tech leaders panic. Being techies, they have a technical name for this panic. They call it pivoting. Facebook's pivot was decidedly weird. Mark arose from his sarcophagus and said, Look, I know I spent the past decade insisting the future would consist solely of you arguing with your racist uncle using a primitive text interface of my own devising.

But I've had a revelation. It turns out the future really will involve me converting you in everyone you love into a legless, sexless, low polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon character in a virtual world called the Metaverse, which we ripped off. from a 25-year-old dystopian satirical cyberpunk novel, end quote. So, yeah, yeah, shitty fuckbots. And yet somehow, this book still won't die. I think I heard Megan Kelly saying the relationship in that novel was fine and that 15 was pretty much an adult.

So it's... In case anyone doesn't know already, the book is Snow Crash and also, we really need to stop reading dystopian literature as aspirational. It also gave us Google Earth, Tom. Okay, it did do that, yeah. All right, so now that you got the idea from the Facebook example, you're probably thinking about so many other insuredified companies.

And Amazon is a prime example. They start by getting you to prepay for a year of shipping, which makes almost everyone start and end their shopping by searching on Amazon. And they also fuck around with irregular prices and quantities, so most people don't get a basic price per unit comparison. And people are fucking stupid. So they don't even realize that's happening. And also,

everyone thinks they're getting free shipping that they already paid for in advance by an entire year. And of course, Amazon inshittified the search function too, giving priority to sellers that paid to be a top result. A study from 2023 showed that the first result on Amazon is about 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. And that best match is usually about 17 spots down on average. And who the fuck has time to click onto page two or more?

Nobody. Nobody ever. I mean, Heath, the alternative is buying from a person. Have you seen how long it takes a real person to ship something? Yeah. It's like receiving news from the old country that Babushka died. It's just not tenable. Three weeks?

It's really dead in three weeks. It's hard to be good now. I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't want to use Amazon. So the Amazon story is pretty much the same as Walmart. They both had a bunch of investor money, and they used it early on to sell everything at a loss for a while until every smaller competitor got killed.

And once they were in near monopoly, they clawed back all that value. Of course, that includes fleecing the merch. too. If you want to sell anything on Amazon, the largest online marketplace in the world, you're required to offer the lowest price on Amazon. You can't even offer a better deal at your own site. If you do, Amazon throws you to the bottom of the search results or drops you entirely. They call this requirement. It's so obnoxious. Most favored nation status, you have to do that. Oh, that nation being China.

Yeah, no, that's fair. So, thanks to all this monopolistic power, Amazon is able to take about 51% of every sale on the platform. Jesus Christ. This leads to a very literal Amazon tax on just about everything that we're all paying. Pretty much no retailer has a 52% margin under normal conditions, so they all had to raise their prices. And that Amazon tax is happening everywhere you buy stuff, not. just on Amazon because retailers have to grant most favored nation status to the fucking noble liege of the Amazon kingdom. And therefore, those retailers have to raise their prices anywhere they sell.

So even when you're shopping at, you know, artisanal mom and pop stores like Walmart and Target, you're paying the Amazon tax in the form of inflated prices. Man, the free market sure has taken a sweet fucking time correcting for this, huh? Maybe somewhere for the government could give it a little Nudge, Lelba. Oh, sorry, no, wait, sorry, that's communism. My bad. I mean, I amused communism again.

Hey, the fucking invisible hand fell asleep or something. It sat on itself trying to do the stranger. I don't know what happens. So another big culprit, of course, is Google. And I say that as a fan, sort of, I guess. I'm actually a Googlement myself. I have one of their phones. I use Gmail.

I use Google Drive for documents. And I always thought of them as slightly less evil. I mean, it's right there in the motto, right? Be slightly less evil, I think is what they said. Turns out they were lying. A huge amount of their business model is classic in shudification, full of spying and manipulation. Even their best thing, pretty much their only successful thing,

the search engine, is so much worse now. And they did it on purpose. They realized they could make their search results worse on purpose. and that would make people do more follow-up searches and see more ads because the searches were dumb. The only reason we know about that is because internal emails got revealed during an antitrust case. And sorry, an antitrust case, it's this old thing that we used to have, but we do not now. I remember those. We also used to have trust, Heath, so it's hard to explain to people, you know, when the...

Okay, let's just check something here. Gmail's free, drive is free. search is free, Chrome is free. Average salary at Google, a little over $330,000 a year. How did anyone imagine all of this was working? Exactly. You're the

fucking product. Yeah. Absolutely. So much. The best image generator. All by ourselves. All right. So yeah, Google's one of them. Use it. And of course, no discussion of insuffication is complete without talking about Twitter.

Hell, you can't even have a complete discussion about just shit without talking about Twitter. And the craziest period of insidificatory acceleration, perhaps in all of inshittification history, insidificatory is what I said. It happened once Elon Musk took over at Twitter. His very first thing, of course, was to inshittify the extremely well-known brand name that he got for free. And then everything else on the platform, too.

He inshittified everything. But my favorite part, just a little detail, I guess. guess in the grand scheme is the blue checkmarks, the insidification involved in this stupid scheme he did. So for years, those checkmarks were only given to serious public figures, so the check marks actually mattered. But Elon decided to ruin that, and he started offering checkmarks to anyone who paid a monthly fee. So it went from something meaningful, something available to anyone with $8 and the willingness to give $8 to a urine-soaked neo-Nazi. Turns out that was a lot of people.

It also led to blue checkmarks getting purchased by anyone running a scam on Twitter, hoping that would help with legitimacy, which it did for a bit. But then everyone realized that checkmark just meant a scam, a neo-Nazi, or a neo-Nazi scam. So everyone who's paying for the checkmark hated having it, and Elon had to offer a feature that let people hide the checkmark that they were paying for. Come on. I love the solution of not giving him money never occurred to any one of those people. Yeah.

I mean, even how history is going, Cecil, no. It hasn't. Still really hasn't. Right. Also, most of the celebrities refused to pay the grubby little fee. So Elon took away their check marks, thus lowering their value even more. And then somebody at Twitter told him how that was fucking stupid. So Elon tried to fix the problem by forcing the checkmarks back onto the celebrity accounts,

non-consensually. But celebrities hated that because the checkmarks had negative value at that point. And a whole bunch of his highest profile users just left and never came back. Footnote, you love to see it. All right. Well, Elizabeth Warren needs to take a second to write Heath. another fan letter. So, y'all...

Keith prepares for that email. We'll take a quick break for some apropos of nothing. Next. Ooh, you hate to see it. Yeah, that's a not for good. Oof, really painful. Hey, guys. Yeah, Mitch.

What's up? You ever wonder if it's wrong for us to throw ourselves into this giant buzz sound? Oh, God. Here we go again. What? Dude, we've been over there. this. Yes, some people who jump into the buzzsaw get sliced in half.

Next! Ooh, like that guy. Yeah, like that guy. But if you jump into it just right, it cuts your butthole open and it never hurts when you poop. It's going to be so awesome. Just great. Right? Oh. Okay. But like, we've never seen that happen, right? All we ever see is people getting sliced and a half. That is not true. No, that's not true. Boy, Floyd. Grockman jumped in. No, no. Boy Floyd

Grockman says he jumps in. I read online that his parents just got him butthole surgery as a kid. Next. Oh, that was a rough one. Look, I'm not saying that some people don't have it easier. I'm saying that I'm going to

jump in just right. I'm going to do it correctly. But even if that was true, maybe we shouldn't want buttholes where the poop just falls out of us. Like maybe the goal itself is a weird thing to want. That is...

What? I don't even know what you're saying. Guys. Hey, Steve, what's up? Okay, I've got great news. We can make the buzzsaw way less dangerous. We can? Yeah.

How much does it cost? Oh, it's free. And we actually all get the day off to do it. All we have to do is vote for a woman. I'm not energized by her campaign. I think she's doing a bad job as the Prime Minister of Israel. You know how expensive groceries are right now? You know what?

Never mind. Never mind. I'm sorry, is she the Prime Minister of Israel? No, why do you ask? Okay, and this one, her name's Penny. She's Penny. Yeah, no, I got it. Hey guys, Marsh.

Marsh, what are you doing here, by the way? Same thing as last week, Tom remembered the copy. Oh, okay. It's not a memory thing. Send me the email when they send me the email. Tom, you're interrupting Marsh. I was introducing him to my money. Your money? Yeah. I'm a guy who likes his cash. That's why I switched to Mint Mobile.

What's Mint Mobile? Damn it, Martin. I said I was using the bathroom. You snooze, you lose, Enright. I am never peeing again in my life. Mint Mobile is here to rescue you with premium wireless plans starting at 15 bucks a month. All plans come with high-speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. But have you actually tried it? I have. I switched to Mint Mobile when they became a sponsor. I love how I get the same amazing service without the hassle. That's why I, Eli Bosnick, personally endorse Mint Mobile.

All right, guys, I'm sold. Where do I sign up? If you like your money, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans at mintmobile.com slash citation. That's mintmobile.com slash citation. Up front payment of $45 for a three month, equivalent to $15 a month. New customer offer for first three months only. Then full price plan options, available. Taxes and fees extra. See MintMobil for details. All right. Now, who's ready to meet Twento? Is he a 20? Oh, so you've met Twento. Okay, and then what would Joe Rogan say? I don't know, man. Probably, whoa. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Whoa. Hey, podcast listener. I'm Eli Bosnick. Thanks to extensive blackmail material and a deep and abiding loyalty to my genius, I get to listen to the No Rogan experience with Cecil and

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20% off. That's pretty sweet. Indeed it is, Marsh. As sweet as the softball questions Joe Rogan delivers to white supremacists on his podcast. A couple of features that make them my everyday go-to. Up to 32 hours of battery life with the case. The quick charge function, 10 minutes gives you 90 minutes of playtime. Awareness mode. When I'm out walking the dog or running errands, let me hear what's happening around me while still enjoying my podcast. That's why I, Eli Bosnick, personally endorse Raycons. All right, Eli, we're sold. Where do we sign up? The everyday earbuds classic are perfect for refreshing your routine this spring.

Go to buy Raycon.com slash citation to get 20% off. Thanks, Raycon, for sponsoring. Okay, but then what would Joe Rogan say? Probably something racist with a question mark at the end. Oh, I love when he does that. Hey, podcast listener. I'm Heath Enright. and we called in

a pressed foreign national Michael Marshall talk about how he watches porn. Wait, what? No, Heath, I got on the Skype call because you said someone was dying.

Someone is dying, Marsh. Lady Liberty. See, in backwards nations, like, like Marshes, and all the states in this country

that are bad, they've gone full tom on the porn laws. Stop making porn laws a Tom thing. They're a Tom thing. They just are.

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When we left off, Keith was about to sell us Bitcoin. So it's on the boat? It was. Why should we decentralized fiat currency? Well, that wouldn't be fiat currency, stupid. So another big component of insuffication that I haven't mentioned yet is the use of copyright shenanigans. Ooh, nice. We landed on my crazy.

No, no, we did not. No, we did not. So lots of the copyright-based incitification centers around a 1990. law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. And part of the law made sense. The internet had become ubiquitous, and we made a law to prevent digital pirating. Boo, if you still have it, I didn't steal it.

Boo! Content creators getting compensated for their work, boo. Thank you, Noah. Noah gets it. So my fellow olds might remember the very serious FBI warning at the beginning of every VHS movie. We would wait until after that before we started recording ours. We would wait until after the FBI agency.

They'd record that part. As they requested. I want to feel guilty every time I watch it. Yeah, right, right. So the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was basically an extension of that FBI warning thing for the Internet age. But the law also included a provision that makes it a felony to do anything at all that bypasses digital rights management or DRM or even helps with that concept. Again, some of that made sense at the time, like you weren't allowed to rip DVDs and sell bootleg copies.

But a bunch of companies started using this provision in the law as a technicality to prevent common sense things like, you know, fixing your stuff, also known as the right to repair among sovereign citizens like Eli. Okay, but why would you even want to repair something yourself if you could just pay an extra 20% of the original purchase price for a two-year contract? extended warranty that comes with its own deductible. I mean, that's not just smart. That's maritime law smart.

It works on the high seas. You think of high seas, Tom. Amazing. Exactly. So, okay, here's the thing. After learning about a few versions of this technicality getting abused, I think I'm a sovereign citizen now. There we go.

For example, John Deere figured out they could insert a microchip into all their equipment that makes it so every farmer who wants to fix just a basic part on their tractor, has to call a John Deere only technician and pay some guy way too much money to show up and press a button, just like press a button, that's it. You can't do it yourself or find a workaround because the data on that chip is technically copyrighted material that you'd be feloniously bypassing.

Okay, I am not saying that it's okay to sell someone a half-million-dollar farming implement and then treat him like this, but you almost have to admire whoever figured out how to make a tractor a subscription service. I mean, by admire, I mean,

bury in a shallow grave dog with an international harvest. Sure. Okay, all right. Yeah, because if we were using Admire in the traditional sense,

I don't think you can get me to do it at a gun point. I like your version I can do. Yeah. And another big, very similar example was a ventilator company. This one is, this seems to be too dark.

Their shenanigans probably caused a bunch of people to die during the COVID pandemic. The ventilator company did the same thing as John Deere. So nobody at the hospital was allowed to just fix a basic problem on a ventilator or switch out a broken part. And even if they decided to just break the law, it was a big pain in the ass. It was kind of difficult to do.

And the officially sanctioned ventilator button presser guy or the four of them that existed at the time, they weren't showing up very quickly in the spring of 2020. to every hospital around the world. You had to switch to the off-brand ventilator, which is like a turkey-based or attached to a bicycle pump that someone has to be crank. To be fair, it's not like ventilators were life-saving equipment before COVID.

How were they going to know? Right. Yeah, so the unnecessary suffocation of people during a global pandemic, pretty bad, but the most obnoxious version of the repair monopoly scam, I know it's weird for me to say, that's the worst, but it's very obnoxious. It comes from the platonic essence of inshidification.

We haven't talked about it yet. Apple. Okay, you know, they've made some cool stuff, but for a few decades now, pretty much their entire business model is creating a product line that's physically allergic to every other tech device. It's not in their stupid little walled garden. And it trapped people into their ecosystem forever.

I'm not sure how this worked, but now they have a weird cult of lunatics yelling about their amazing overpriced devices from inside their cage that they can't see. I can see it. I just like it in here. It's like the cast system. So in fairness, Windows and Android

are kind of doing the same thing with even bigger numbers, but the cult is less culty. So Apple's insidification scheme is enormous and obvious, just like Amazon and Facebook. But here's the very specific copyright scam from Apple that I'd never heard about until I read this book.

So when iPhones started breaking, people, of course, wanted replacement parts. But Apple wanted to own the entire market for everything, including that. So they started putting microscopic etchings of a tiny little Apple logo on their official replacement parts. And then they called up customs and the FBI. and they demanded seizures of shipments of any phone parts that fit into the iPhone, claiming there was a trademark violation of their invisible Apple etchings. And it worked.

Those seizures happened. Fucking Christ. Yeah, if you need an extra reason to hate Apple, the world's third richest company's latest gambit is to go after 40% of our income through Apple Store regulations. But yeah, no, their phones sure do fucking, phone better? I don't know. I call people all the time on not an iPhone.

For so long in my life. Well, that's an obvious lie. Yeah. It was making great people and then you fucking tornadoed him. Last time he made a phone call was 2017, guys. That was the last time he talked on a phone. I'm just saying it's possible. Last phone call someone answered from Heath was on a Nokia.

I had the bleep bleep, thing, yeah. So another big version of copyright-based insurification is moving everything to apps and clouds. Like, when you buy a movie on Prime, you don't actually own a copy

of the movie that you bought the way you think you might own something that you bought. You kind of lease the right to maybe watch it. Assuming you have a good internet connection at that moment and they still have the movie in their catalog and you keep using their platform. And that locks

people in because nobody wants to give up their movie collection. Same for e-books on Kindle and audiobooks on Audible. On top of all that, Amazon demands a creepy level of control over all their connected devices. For example, Amazon designed the Kindle platform with a back door that let them reach into your device remotely and just delete stuff if they felt like it. And this got revealed when e-books of 1984, the novel, got released by a publisher who didn't have the rights to it.

In response, the estate of George Orwell demanded that Amazon used their creepy deletion power, Amazon did it without telling people and without asking permission. They literally used their big brother backdoor spying thing to erase copies of 1984.

Those copies never existed, Heath. So eventually there was a, that's such a good joke. Eventually there was a class action suit and Amazon settled, but they're still spying on your shit all the time. Oh yeah. Plus, I am flipping every single dystopian toggle. This one is up to 11 on the simulator. There's, you can't go higher. Hey, Audible, if you're listening, I will give you any amount of money not to release how many times I've listened to the goblet of fire to the public.

Just name your price. We don't have to go into the what you know. You can just send me a number. The estate of George Orwell is remarkably Orwellian. Learn from the best. Right. Basically, they fucking took a hit out on Ireland. Sounds like we're all in agreement.

The copyright is theft. Maybe we want to read this literature. Eli's been sending in the group chat. So I may be agree. I don't know. So that brings. us to Adobe. They pretend to have the only software that can handle a PDF, and it requires acrobatics. They are lying. They're lying about that. But in terms of providing actual value,

the pre-insidification stage, Adobe made some good stuff like Photoshop and Illustrator that worked well for lots of graphic artists. They sold those programs for a while and made plenty of money, but then they wanted plenty of way more money. So they stopped letting you actually have the software and they switched to the new SaaS model, which means software as a service. They moved everything to the cloud and you lease a subscription to Adobe Software instead of buying it. And just to be extra obnoxious, they shut down their activation server, which meant you couldn't even open your old software that you bought. So you had to start paying rent to not lose access to your life's work for a whole bunch of artists. You wouldn't steal

the car back from us. Doesn't have the same ring to it, doesn't. So, Dr. O calls this manipulation of the cloud model a Darth Vader MBA technique, as in, I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further. I love that so much. Well, Adobe altered it further. Here's how it happened.

Adobe had been working with a company called Pantone for years. And Pantone, if you're not familiar, they own all the colors, something like that. weird. They don't own like the concept of blackety black black like Anish Kapoor thinks he does, but they have intellectual property rights to thousands of obscure specialty colors. And serious designers actually need those. It guarantees that some very specific shade of like fluorescent greenish yellow purple on your screen will show up exactly right when your work gets printed. Okay, that was actually octarine I described and Perry Pratchit owns it. But Pantone has most of the ones. So for years, Adobe paid a license fee to Pantone to use the color collection. But then in

2022, Adobe stopped paying. And they told all the customers on their Adobe Creative Cloud that in addition to the rent, they were already paying. They needed to kick in another $21 a month to cover the Pantone license. Naturally, a bunch of people got mad about the money grab and they refused. But when those people opened their old work, they saw that. that all the pixels with tan tone colors were turned to black. Shut the fuck up. Adobe literally stole the colors

from everyone's already finished work. They fucking stole the colors from the art and where were the fucking care bears? What the hell are we even paying them for? This is exactly their kind of thing. So everything sucks. What do we do about it? According to Dr. O, the solution has four components.

Regulation, competition, interoperability, and labor fighting back. Oh, didn't he want to include us singing like the who's down in Whoville and holding the capitalism heart those three sizes? Those are all things that have been successfully done in my lifetime, Eli, in America, in my lifetime. Yeah, 1948. And those things are happening. Yeah, it's been a while. but they're happening successfully right now in the EU. So it's fucking possible.

I mean, regulation is the most obvious answer and the most powerful answer, but also rich people have money. So much. Money. For Republicans. I mean, say what you will about Joe Biden, but he was the first president in my entire lifetime to actually enforce antitrust laws in a meaningful way. Just one clear example. The most favored nation scam by Amazon that I was talking about. It's the subject of an antitrust case by the Federal Trade Commission.

That was going great under the leadership of Biden's FTC chair and my fellow Eve, Lena Kahn. Everyone, she's amazing. Everyone should do everything Lena Kahn ever says. I want her to be president. Also, she is no longer in charge, obviously. And the current FTC is, they're taking a little nap for four years or something like that. So we can all go fuck ourselves on the regular. front for at least a while. Oh no, I have been forced to do a crime. So in terms of competition

as a solution, there might be a little help. Not really until we break up monopolies. But when you paired the idea with interoperability, there's maybe a step in the right direction. For a near monopoly like Windows, solution would be, don't use Windows. Real simple, right? Get Linux, for example. It's free and it's better. It even runs nicely on a really old computer. My old gateway from 2007, I have a laptop from 2007,

and it's actually functional now after I wiped it and installed Ubuntu, a version of Linux. It's not full of bloatware like Windows. There's way less risk of malware, and if something stops working,

I don't have to find the fucking 800-character recovery code that I wrote on a post-it 12 years ago or whatever. I don't know how it works. That said, You have to become a Linux weirdo if you want to get Linux. But I will say it's awesome being a Linux weirdo.

I love it. Sure, but it's not awesome knowing a Linux weirdo. Exactly. That's my favorite part of being a Linux weirdo. You want to sound like this episode podcast listener because that's what Linux will do to do. I am doing it just for being a not. It's so fun just being like, I run a Linux box now. Yeah, that's right.

Okay. Another strong option. Finish raising your kids. put everything with a screen in your oven, set it to clean and just walk into the woods. That's my retirement plan. That's your solution to so much stuff, Tom. Okay, so here's the thing.

You can do the same thing with all the other insuredified software. Pretty much. There's an open source version of almost everything. Most of them are free, or maybe give a couple dollars to a nerd. That's good, too. Like, instead of Microsoft Office,

use Libre Office. Instead of Audible, use Libro FM. A lot of them have Libro. in the name, they like that, sovereign citizens, Maritime Law. And in terms of a platform like Twitter or Facebook, just, well, just stop doing social media entirely. That's my first recommendation. Just don't do that. But if you really find value, and some people do, there's something called the Fediverse, a federated collection of social media servers. You might know this as Mastodon. Basically, they created the old good version of social media

that's just a timeline of people you chose to connect with like it used to be. And you can bounce around and find the survey you like best in terms of their moderation rules. They're all actually connected. And you can easily leave any particular node of the Fediverse and join a new one without losing all your friends. But again, maybe just switch over to real human conduct if you get a chance. Mostly do that. Yeah. And while you're there, maybe you can try to start like a free town project and spend a lot of time arguing about trash pickup until you're being.

by a bear. There's lots of options. Also, Heath, I agree. Also, the kids these days don't even know good music when they hear it. Well, yeah, that's just obviously true. It just sounds the same. And buttress is exactly what I was saying. We're both

speaking non-ironically. I agree. And that brings us to labor fighting back. Obviously, it'd be great if we invented some sort of like a labor collective, united something like that, but absent that, no, not onion.

One possible technique is using tech to fuck with tech. No, still no. Still no to the thing you're indicating with that noise. Monoplies are always abusing the labor force because they can. And with big tech platforms, it's become even easier. Companies like Uber and DoorDash rig their app to do algorithmic wage discrimination. For example, if drivers agree to take lots of rides, the algorithm starts offering lower pay because those companies know they can offer lower pay.

And of course, Amazon did plenty of similar shenanigans. In one example of workers fighting back, sort of, Amazon flex drivers, noticed they would only get routes when they were right near the Amazon warehouse at the time of the job offer. Of course, Amazon demanded access to everyone's GPS, so Amazon had that information. eventually drivers realized they could get a burner phone and hang it from a tree right outside an Amazon house and control it remotely from their main phone. So that got them more rounds, but that really just fucked over the other drivers who didn't think about getting a burner phone and hanging it from a tree.

And it only worked until Amazon figured out the thing and wrote some more code to get around the trick. But the point is good tech can help against evil. text. Is this a cell phone on the ground? I guess the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Apple. Some mom who just finished explaining the cell phones don't just grow on trees. Hated this fucking trick. Throw right by that afterwards. All right. So I'm going to add one more type of solution to the four from Dr. O. That would be pranks.

because my favorite story of fighting back is an amazing piece of prank slash journalism. UK prankumentarian. I'm going to call him Uba Butler, who will be getting his own episode. He's got a whole bunch of cool stories like this. He decided to reveal the absurdity of Amazon's insidification

by focusing on urine. So you might be aware of this already. Thanks to the crazy abuse of Amazon's delivery people, the roads near Amazon depots are often littered with full pee bottles from those drivers. So Butler collected a bunch of those and re-bottled the pee and put them up for sale on Amazon as a bitter lemon drink called Release Energy. And Butler figured out how to gain the search algorithm well enough that Release Energy became the number one bestseller in the bitter lemon category.

Piss perverts are like, oh my God, he got us. Such a good prank before. Here's what happened next. Soon after the P bottles hit number one in category, some guy from Amazon actually called up Uber Butler and tried to sell him on using Amazon's delivery service to more efficiently ship the bottles of pee. Butler eventually explained that it's all a prank

and he never actually sent people bitter, lemon urine. But he did make a documentary called the great Amazon heist about going undercover and revealing a bunch of the abusive business practices. Okay, not to diminish the value of this prank or anything, but if he didn't send anyone to re-bottled piss, why did he collect and re-bottle all that piss? some some efforts are their own reward

were you listening to elie a moment ago all right so one last thing before we wrap it up Corey Dr. O refuses to put any of his work on audible because he hates the way they use digital rights management and because authors get fucked on the deal but there's one exception to his rule he has one single audio book on audible and it's just 24 minutes

of spite and grievances about how he hates Audible and Amazon. The highlight is the story of how Audible is extremely lazy about verifying authorship. So liars, fraudsters, are constantly putting up bootleg audiobooks, which is exactly what happened with one of Corey's books. The liar ended up selling 129 copies on Audible for $24.95 before Audible eventually took it down. So that's $3,218. $35. In fraud money. And the title of Corey's

one book on Audible is why none of my books are available on Audible and why Amazon owes me $3,218. $0.55. So check it out, but, you know, not on Audible.

It's free as episode 431 of his crapphound.com podcast. All right. And if you had to sum up what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be? Let's just say I have a modest proposal deal with the rich people. And are you ready for the quiz? Ready. All right, Heath, in literally every single instance, if someone is getting rich and you're getting something you didn't directly pay for, A, you are paying way more than you think you are.

B, seriously, how did any of you think this worked? Or C, you'll still go to Porn Hub. Okay, go to OnlyFans. Pay for your porn. I like paying for porn. There you go. There you go. No, no, you can pay for your porn.

Don't be gross. Tom wants there to be more Tom states. Hey, Heath, what's the best feature of running a Linux system on your 2007 gateway? A. It allows single-page printouts of your MapQuest directions. A desktop-integrated Napster icon. Oh, shit. The pre-loaded Auto-Cad software lets you redesign your C-stetting blueprints. D, the download music interface with your Zoon or I-River is seamless.

Or E. I had an off-bend Zune. E. You save $400. bucks on it signing up for CompuServe. Oh my God. I fucking love it. Okay, I feel like it's about downloading the music so that you can side load it onto your

off-brand Zoom that I definitely... Wrong. You are working on your C-steading blueprints and you're lying to me. Okay. Fun fact about Corey's book. He puts just an MP3 out of his audio book. That's how you get it. And then there's a giant instructions page for like everybody that's younger than

about how it's extremely difficult to put an MP3 onto a phone. Amazing. And it's like really long and people are like baffled by this concept. It's kind of outstanding. It is not difficult. That fucking Linux runs to like crazy though. Guarantee. You do it from the command line.

All right. Heath, what are some of the good parts of the Apple ecosystem that you left out because you're a bitter, jealous for? Hey, having to get a new phone every three years is pretty much the only time I do anything nice for myself anymore. B, the employees at the Apple store

are really nice without it feeling sexual like it does at like Hooters or Trader Joe's. So I just get to think maybe I'm like really good with customer service people and like maybe a little smart. Like they probably go back to the other geniuses after my visit and they're like, oh, that guy knew his stuff. I wish they were all like that.

They probably say that. Do you think like at Trader Joe's or at Hooters or both? You weren't paying attention. C. C. Liquid class. D. I wasn't paying attention.

Oh, you win by not paying attention to someone when they talk about Apple. All right. So Heath, what are some of the good parts of the Facebook ecosystem that you left out because you're a bitter, jealous whore? A, Pigaboo, B, Binky, C, Lila, D, Nibler, or E, all of the above. Delightful cats, that is a really, really good, you know, last remaining vestige of what's good there. That counter is a lot of shit. Yeah, that counter is a lot of shit. So, E, all of the above. And it is, but I still win. Yeah. I, uh, I tried to tell Noah that he lost on Slack, but it was

impossible for him to see the message. I couldn't find the damn thing. Yeah. I would like a Tom message because like this one really makes me feel like we owe Tom some time to talk. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. We'll give a Tom. All right.

Well, for Tom, Noah, Cecil. And Heath, I'm Elon. Tom, if me and you hung out with Corey, I think like, I think he would enjoy us. I think we'd all be like a really good friends, right?

Best friends. We wouldn't need those strap-ons. Absolutely. Or we could have lunch. We just wouldn't need it. I mean, that was the last episode. So I love the idea of that people.

are just listening to this one's like a first episode and they're like strap-ons, huh? What? I had forgot about that. I meant it just maybe Corey's listening and he's like all right, I was going to say no. My email is pinging. Hang on. That's, huh. All right well. For Tom, Noah, Cecil,

and Heath, I'm gonna put it right in my own. Thank you for hanging out with us today. We'll be back next week and by then, Tom will be an expert on something else. You loop up before you put it right into your boom to all the other podcast. And if you'd like to help Keep this show going.

You can make it for episode donation at patreon.com slash citation pod or leave us a five-star review everywhere you can. And if you'd like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes. Connect with us on social media

or check the show notes. Be sure to check out citation pod. I like the little pause that he put in there. He's like, do you guys have any more bullshit? You got any more bullshit? I was pausing considerably. Yeah.

Do piracy. Guys, guys. I did it. I ran into the buzzsaw just right. And now it doesn't hurt when I poop. Amazing. How did you do it? Sorry, fellas. If you want to know that, you have to jump into this buzzsaw that teaches you how to jump into that buzzsaw. But won't that...

I jumped into the most expensive bus saw in the country. Here it is. Number one dream buzzsaw.