Factually! with Adam Conover - The Ensh*ttification of Everything with Cory Doctorow

Episode Date: October 8, 2025

The internet is getting shittier. Hell, the whole world is getting shittier. The thing is, it’s no accident—it’s by design. The tech giants who run the internet have figured out how to make bank off of making our everyday experience with the internet worse, and this process is bleeding over into the physical world. This process is called “enshittification”, a term coined by the massively influential tech writer Cory Doctorow. In this episode, Adam sits with Cory to discuss where everything went so wrong as well as Cory’s new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.Find Cory’s book at factuallypod.com/books--SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a headgum podcast. A lot of short daily news podcasts focus on just one story. But right now, you probably need more. On Up First from NPR, we bring you three of the world's top headlines every day in under 15 minutes. Because no one's story can capture all that's happening in this big, crazy world of ours on any given morning. Listen now to the Up First podcast from NPR. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way.

I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's all right. That's okay. I don't know anything. Hey there. Welcome to Faxually. I'm Adam Kahnover.

Thank you so much for joining me on the show this week. I'm thrilled you're with us because this week we're talking about how. How much shittier everything is getting? Have you noticed that your entire experience of using the Internet has gotten worse over the last couple years? Google now buries your search results under unreliable AI overviews and paid links. Spotify pushes sponsored songs and video podcasts you have no interest in. And X, the site formerly known as Twitter, is spammed up with bots and Nazis and Nazi botsees.

Social media used to be useful. You could use it to see what your friends were doing and spy on your enemies. But now to do those things, you first have to cut through an endless stream of AI slop and sponsored posts. The entire experience fucking sucks. And it's not just internet companies. Appliances in your house will now require you to log in or disable entire features you relied on without any warning. Objects you use in your life. Services that you rely on in the real world.

even something as simple as making a phone call has become more difficult, more exploitative, more burdensome and horrible of an experience than it was just a couple years ago. Why is that? Because, hey, wasn't the internet, wasn't technology in general supposed to make our lives better and easier? Well, my guest today is the perfect person to explain this

because he actually coined a word for this feeling. That word is in shittification. And if you feel like you've heard that word lot lately, it's because insidification is everywhere. It is a playbook that companies across the country are using to screw us over time and time again. This guy is one of my absolute favorite guests. I know you are going to love this interview. Before we get into it, I want to remind you if you want to support the show. You can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad-free. We also have a lot of other wonderful

online features. We'd love to have you on the show. And if you'd like to come see me do stand-up comedy. I am back on the road, or really I'm perpetually on the road. I'm always traveling around the country, bringing my new hour of stand-up comedy to you. Coming up soon, I'm going to Tacoma, Washington, Spokane, Washington, Des Moines, Iowa, Atlanta, Georgia, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, New York on November 15th at the Bell House for the New York Comedy Festival. Don't miss that. Then Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and we're always adding more tour dates. Head to Adamconover.comnet to get tickets. And now, let's get to this week's guest. His name is Corey Doctoro. He is quite simply one of the most influential public intellectuals,

thinkers and writers on the internet and technology today. He was there for the early days of the internet. He saw the magic of it, and he has been an activist fighting to make the internet and all of our technology better for decades. He has a new book out, fittingly called, and shittification, why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it.

Please welcome, Corey Doctoro. Do you know the podcast, No Gods, No Mares? No. It is my new favorite podcast. So do you know trash future? I do know trash future. Same people or some of the same people, along with Maddie Lubchanski is a great graphic novelist.

And they do biographies of Mares every week. And their thesis is that mayor is the highest office to which a true oaf can aspire. And the history of mares is the history of people just being like terrible in very entertaining and really incompetent ways. So think Eric Adams, but like at every scale. And one of their thesis is that popes are. mayors because the pope is the mayor of Vatican City. And there have been lots of popes who've been really shitty mayors of Vatican City and the thousands of years that there

have been popes in Vatican City. So it scratches my politics itch, but it doesn't make me anxious because the stakes are effectively zero. It's so great. Yeah. Sometimes I think I need to take this show away from a catalog of all the horrible things wrong with the world and just have some fun learning some fucked up stuff. Because that's my favorite thing to relax to. Yeah. Is let's just listen to some weird-ass history, that you're just a step removed away. Bad things happened to people a hundred years ago. We can learn about those. We don't need to learn about the bad things happening to us right now. Well, and segueing into the book maybe, you know, like, unfortunately, that's what we're doing on the show this week. Yeah, one of the things that I'm interested in is what

made the old good internet great and how we can make a new good internet that's great too. And I mean, one of the things that made the old good internet great was that it was weird and nichey and Like you could have a niche without like Reddit being in charge of whether you were allowed to talk about it. And, you know, I think like one of the big mistakes that, you know, tech progressives made was stigmatizing communities that weren't on the big platforms and sort of making them the dark corners of the internet, which essentially I think the message was that you can only have a conversation without Mark Zuckerberg having a veto over it. If you're 4chan, 8chan, 8Koon or Kiwi farms and everyone else has to be managed by content managers, you know, at one of the, you know, five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four. Yeah. And, you know, we met 20 some years ago on a private image board.

We did, yes. And it was just people like wooing the muse of the odd in their own way and, you know, a little like a benevolent clubhouse. Yeah. And I just, you know, I think the new good internet is one where we have a lot more semi-autonomous spaces that are loosely federated, where you can leave. and it's not that hard, but you can find them if you like them. And, you know, people get to make up their own minds about how the technology they're using works.

I think, like, foundationally, people won't always choose wisely. But if people have the power to make up their own minds about their technology, it's much harder to abuse them because they might say, you know, screw this, I'm going somewhere else. Yeah. You know. I feel like we've done, we've done to the conclusion of this episode at the beginning. Sure.

So let's jump, let's loop back around to the beginning. So you have a new book. called Enshittification. I do. You have coined the word and shittification, which I just have to give you kudos for because that is like the goal

of so many public intellectuals is to just coin a word, you know? Like we had Gene Twangy on who writes about generations, and I have my disagreements with her, which you've discussed in the show before, but she's written about some really great stuff. But she has, for instance,

tried to coin generational terms that haven't taken off. Sure. And Gen Z took off. instead of like Igen or whatever she wanted to call it. People are, this is like the brass ring to grab. Yeah. And something about the term and shittification like really captured the public imagination

where I hear it like two or three times a day now. Yeah. Well, first of all, I'm like a bad public intellectual in this regard because I like, I'm like, okay, I coined that term in shittification. I got this critique. It's very nice. But I'm not going to do like in shittification for the chicken soup for the soul. I'm not going to do Tuesdays with inshittification.

Like the seven point insidification diet, right? Like, you know, if you want to inshidify your life. Right. Disnchitify your habitat, you know, like all of the, like, so here's the thing. I, as you know, spent my whole, almost my whole adult life at this point, more than half of it, working for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, EFF.org, on tech policy issues, on digital human rights. And the thing is that these are like super abstract, complicated ideas until they're not, right? until like it's too late and your house is on fire and ideally you'd like people to care about

this stuff before it's really like chewing their legs off and so you're always on the lookout for ways to kind of frame it or words to use for it or metaphors or similes or framing devices or whatever and you know you get a good one and what it is is it's like a handle that you can use to hold on to it and make sense of it i think that's what in shittification is good for because on the one hand it's like a funny dirty word people love a minor license to profanity. Yeah. Like, you know who loves it is like people on FCC regulated broadcast media because

they're like, oh, my editor. My editor is going to have to bleep so many words in this one. Oh, it's going to be great. They're titillated by it. Yeah, it's just like, it's just awesome. I have to say it because I have you on the show. That's right. And like the New York Times.

So it's been like word of the year in the U.S. And in the U.S. Dictionary and stuff. It's in the Webster's dictionary. It's in the Webster's dictionary. It's now in Webster's, you know, slang. but it's there. Sure.

You know, and the New York Times, I found out when an editorialist used it. So someone put it on the op-ed page, and they wouldn't let them use it. He had to say something like, you know, a rude word that sounds like in poopification but rhymes with, I don't know, like mitt or something, like some kind of dancing around it. But then when the American Dialect Society made it their word of the ear, they put it in, and it's because it's a reported piece. So if it's a reported piece, you can say shit in the New York Times. but if it's an editorial, you can't.

Wow. And so, like, everyone's, like, just, just, like, grooving on this. I have, um... They're like, we have to call it Mr. Inshittification. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. There's weird style guide from the 1890s. I wrote a reported piece.

Yeah, and it's got an umlaid over it, and only in the New Yorker. Uh, I wrote a peer-reviewed piece for communications, the American, uh, the Association for Computing Machinery, and they, there was a whole debate about whether we could put in shitification and CACM. So anyway, this, this word, it's rude. It's fun to say. But then it's attached to this very detailed, nuanced, technical, political, and economic critique. And I use the word first just in a bad-tempered tweet about like TripAdvisor sucking when I was on a trip.

I was in like a cabin and we had microwave internet in a cloud forest and microwaves don't go through clouds. And so like it would just time out and TripAdvisor had like 87 trackers and we'd load like 47 of them and the Fabico, the little icon and the tab. And then it would time out. We're trying to figure out like if we could go into town for a dinner. that night. It would just be this giant vector art of the trip advisor logo in the browser page. And I tweeted like, this is the most inshittified website I've ever seen. Has anyone a trip advisor ever been on a trip. And a few people were like, ha ha, that's a funny word. So it kind of stuck in my head. You know, you do, you go up on stage, you say a thing. People laugh. It sticks

in your head. You double down on it. And then I was building out this critique that I had been building out for decades. And I was like, I'm going to call this in shitification. And that's stuck, right? So it's like, it's definitely the marriage of this complicated idea, which I guess we can get to, and the swear word, and you put them together and like, that's perfect. I have a friend who's a security expert who is like, I wish you weren't swearing in it because I can't use it in front of a NATO general. And I'm like, come on, first of all, liberals have heard the assword. You don't think the NATO generals are swearing. They're not going like, what the fuck? Like military slang is full of foobar and stuff like that. And then the other thing, well, I think

there are very few American generals in NATO at this point, thanks to Trump. But they're saying the French version or the Canadian version, I guess. They're going like, what the fuck, eh? But the other thing is that, like, use another word. Like, call it platform decay. I did for a long time. No one gave a damn. Like, very clearly, like, the thing here is, like, it's this fun word and it's the critique.

It's because it expresses anger, anger that everybody feels. I mean, why did the word catch on? is because everybody is feeling this happening to them and everybody is angry about it. And it's the kind of complaint that I think would have seemed niche maybe a couple years ago. But now it captured the zeitgeist, right? It captured the spirit of the age. And like, you know, here's your permission officially to use this word in a loose non-technical term. There are a bunch of weird, you know, scolds who follow people around online and say, no, you're using and shitification wrong.

You have to use it in the strict technical sense. like use it to mean things getting rotten. That's fine. I don't want to confine it's used to a group of irrelevant insiders who use it in the precise technical sense. Use it loosely. That's fine. Yeah. So what do you mean by it? Great. So incitification describes a pattern of platform decay. It proposes a reason for ubiquitous platform decay and simultaneous platform decay where all the platforms rely on are going bad. And it proposes a remedy, a way of out of it. And so the pattern of platform decay, that kind of the pathology, the symptomology, is that you have companies that are good to their end users, and they find a way to lock the end users in.

And then once those end users find it hard to leave, they make things worse for those end users in order to make things better for business customers. And they lure in those business customers, they lock them in to. This is an area where I sort of depart from people like Shoshana Zuboff and surveillance capitalism. And if you're not paying for the product, you're the product. Because I think that whole critique assumes that it's like internet users versus the unholy alliance of platforms and advertisers.

And actually, the advertisers get screwed, too. Like, the platform is on the platform side. Both sides of the platform are getting screwed. The same way that, like, Uber drivers and Uber riders are getting screwed, right? And so once the platform business customers are locked in, they make things worse for those business customers, too. They withdraw the surplus from them. And the idea is to, like, arrive at a steady state where there's the minimum amount of value

to keep users locked in, and those users are sufficient to keep business customers is locked in. And then all the other surplus is harvested by the firm, its investors, and its executives. And that's when it turns into a pile of shit. Yeah. And the thesis about why this is happening is really about why it didn't happen before. Because obviously greed's not new. All the digital tricks they do to move the value around where like they change the prices or they increase the ad load or they change the costs or they change the search ranking or they charge you for a thing that used to be free. Those are things you get with digital platforms and they've been available to digital platform

proprietors since the AOL days. So it's not like, and I don't think that like there's a mind virus that made tech bros worse, right? Certainly like Mark Zuckerberg has been in charge of Facebook since Facebook was useful and he presided over it when it became terrible, right? So it's not like, I don't think he decade.

Actually, if you read Sarah Wynne Williams' amazing whistleblower book, she was a top Facebook executive in their international apartment, their first international executive, she wrote this tell all book that they've suit her for because she violated her non-disparagement clause and she'd also signed a binding arbitration waivers that didn't even go in front of a judge. So a guy who works for Facebook is fining her $50,000 for every mean thing about Facebook in the book. It's kind of bankrupt her.

Jesus Christ. Read the book and you'll see from the first days. What's the name of the book again? It's called Careless People. Yes. Really good. I've not read it, but I know people love this book. We're doing an event together. It's her first public event. She's not allowed to talk about her book. So I'm going to talk about her book. And we're going to do it at the Barbican in London, and it's going to be chaired by the guy who made Four Lions, Ed Brass Eye. Wow. Oh, Chris Morris. Yeah.

So it's going to be a great event. So you read this book, and you find out Mark Zuckerberg was always a creep. I mean, this is a guy who cheats at Settlers of Catan, right? Like, just always a creep. So it's not like he got worse either. Yeah. So what used to happen, I think, is there used to be consequences for screwing business customers and end users.

There were competitors that we stopped enforcing antitrust law. We let the companies buy their competitors. There's nowhere to go. There used to be regulation. But when a sector like collapses with one of these, you know, sort of orgies of merger and acquisition into like five or four, three or two or one company, first of all, they can all agree on what their lobbying posture is going to be. And second of all, they have so much money left over from not competing with each other that they can turn their lobbying position into the actual political posture. Right. So, you know, if you follow the Google antitrust case last year, Google is bribe.

Apple 20 something billion dollars every year not to make a search engine. Yeah. Right. So like these are companies that just have like lots of money on hand to make their policy preferences felt. They used to have a workforce that really cared about users. You know, I think you and I both know a lot of old internet people. Yeah.

Became tech workers. A lot of those people I call them tron-pilled. They fight for the user. You know, and like they had power, right? They were hard to replace. Yeah. There's a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper that estimated the contribution of each tech worker in Silicon Valley to their employer's bottom line at a million dollars per worker per year.

Wow. So this is why you're getting like free kombucha and massages and a ball pit and dry cleaning. And the culture of those workers, like they actually did care about the internet. They actually cared about the people on it. They were like, they remembered what it was like to make a website in 1996. Right. And they were like into it. And they could make it stick, right?

Because their bosses needed them, million bucks a year per worker. There was a job waiting for them across the street whenever they wanted it. was no one else who could do their job. Yeah. And so they weren't unionized. They missed that opportunity, right? They thought of themselves as temporarily embarrassed founders and, you know, entrepreneurs and waiting, right?

So they never unionized when they had all this power because they had power. I think the irony of powerful workers is that they don't understand why they need a union. There's a really interesting labor conversation in there. And it's actually, we can't go too deep into it. But it's really interesting in the context of Hollywood unions because the Hollywood talent unions, the Directors Guild, the Writers Guild, the Actors Guild, those individual workers often do have a lot of power. And yet we also have strong unions that were started in the 30s,

probably when those writers, I think it was because it was under the studio system when the writers had less power. That's right. And so they banded together. And then when the studio system was broken up by strong antitrust laws, then the writers gained even more power. And that made the union itself even more powerful. Well, and following the writer strike, you know,

the incredible, both the writer strike and the boycott of the talent agencies was so amazing to see these really powerful actors and writers have solidarity with their junior colleagues, right? Who, you know, those people weren't going to get displaced by AI, right? They were, you know, they were millionaires, but they were out on the picket line. And that was, that was very inspiring. Yeah, and that's the secret of the success of the Writers Guild is that, you know, J.J. Abrams is like, you know, pulling in the same direction as like me or a writer who's

a staff writer on, you know, as a sitcom or on Abbott Elementary or something like that. But yeah, but the tech workers missed the chance to do what Hollywood workers did. They used to stand up for users, right? And they could make it stick. And then we lost that because supply cut up with demand. There's been half a million tech layoffs in the U.S. in the last three years. And, you know, the reason the tech bosses won't shut the fuck up about AI is because they want to scare tech workers. Right.

I mean, that's like, that's the whole like vibe coding story. It's just a terror campaign against tech workers. Yeah. I'm going to, you know, it's like, do you remember sysadmins used to wear a TV? shirt that said, go away, I'll replace you with a small shell script, right? This is the boss version of that, right? Go away. I'll replace you with a crummy chat bot, right? Yeah. And you know, what's funny is I've mentioned in past episodes where we're talking about AI, you know, that I find large language models pretty useless. But I'm like, oh, but I understand programmers find them

useful. It's a labor saving device for programmers. And I've had developers in my comments come in and say, actually, Adam, no, it's useless to us too. Like, this is also a lie on the part of the companies that employ us. So I got so fed up with having conversations about AI that went nowhere that over the summer I wrote a book about AI called The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI that's going to come out in 2026. What the fuck, Corey? You're like the only you're the only author I have on. I feel like every time I talk to you, you're like, yeah, we're talking about this book, but also I need to tell you about my next three books. I do have four books in the pipeline at the moment. Jesus Christ. So anyway, I mean, my thesis is that

So a centaur and automation theory is someone who's assisted by a machine. Okay. And a reverse centaur is someone who's conscripted to be a peripheral for a machine. So you know, like I love Lucy where she's got to get the chocolates into the chocolate box and the conveyor belts. She's only in the factory because the conveyor belt doesn't have hands, right? She is the like inconvenient, inadequate hands for the conveyor belt. And it works, it uses her up, right? And I think that, you know, there's plenty of senior devs who are like, oh, this routine task, I can tell right away if the AI does it wrong.

It's sort of time-consuming. Like one of the canonical examples is I have this like one data file that's in a weird format and I need to convert it to another format. And I could, you know, do some regular expressions and Python and whatever and make it happen. Or I could just ask, I could one shot it with a chat bot and then I can validate it really quickly because I can check if the tabular data adds up or whatever. And I hear from devs all the time, I say this is great. And the thing is they're in charge of their work, right? And this was like the thing the Writers Guild won in the AI strike, right? we don't have to use AI we don't have to not use AI you can't pay us less for not using for

using AI the writer's still in charge and we're in charge and like I don't think AI makes good art and I we could talk about that at some other show about my theory about why AI makes bad art but like if if there's an artist out there who enjoys using AI in some part of their process like you do you brother like maybe it'll be shitty art there's lots of bad art out there it's fine I just you know it's the conscripting of people to assist a chat bot that I think is the thing that makes the difference. So anyway, that's the third constraint was labor. And then the final constraint was interoperability.

Because we only know how to make one kind of computer. It's the touring complete universal von Neumann machine. It's the computer that can compute every valid program. And what that means is that if there's a 10-foot pile of shit that some tech boss installs in a product, there is an 11-foot software ladder that can go over it, right? If someone locks your printer so it won't take generic ink, someone else can unlock the printer. If someone locks your phone so it only uses their app store, someone can unlock your phone. If someone invades your privacy, you can install a privacy shield that

doesn't leak your data, right? All of those things are around. If, you know, Adobe Creative Cloud takes away a feature that you use, like they took away pantone colors, which are critical to print designers. They said, now it's a $21 a month upsell. Someone could just write the plug in that puts the pantone colors back in. Wow. And they turned all those colors black in every file you'd ever created. So you had to give them $21. You wanted to look at your own. I just I stopped, I stopped using Adobe. This is a perfect example of incitification because I, when I was a video editor making my own comedy sketches, I, uh, well, I was the post guy for my comedy group and I used Adobe After Effects. And I was like a wizard at that application, Photoshop too, but After Effects was like my jam.

But I stopped doing that in about like 2010. And everything I hear from anyone who uses Adobe in the years since they're all screaming. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we used to have interrupt, right? We used to just like unilaterally be able to seize the means of computation, right? Like 51% of web users have installed an ad blocker. It's the largest consumer boycott in human history. And that's an open platform.

But the expansion of IP rights means that if there's any kind of digital rights management, any kind of digital log, any kind of IP that can be asserted by a firm, then that kind of stuff is off limits. Jay Freeman calls it felony contempt of business model. You can't reverse engineer and mod the product to make it more useful for you. without, you know, for example, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Section 1201, it's a felony punishable by five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine to bypass DRM. Wow. And so if you put DRM around a product, even if you want to do something legal with that product, breaking the DRM is so illegal that that thing becomes illegal as well.

So it lets firms conjure up a kind of private law, right, and declare certain things to be unlawful. Like, if I make an app, right, and you have an iPhone, and I give you the app so you can install it on your iPhone, obviously, this is not a copyright violation, right? I'm the proprietor of the copyright. You have a license to install it. But in order to sideload it, which is like what we used to just call installing software, right, you need to break the bootloader on your iPhone. Yeah. That is a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence. Really?

Yeah. Wow. So, you know, this is the state. we've arrived at now where the monotonic expansion of IP law has meant that there is infinite flexibility for firms that want to twiddle the knobs and change the way the platform works from day to day. I sometimes call it the Darth Vader MBA, right? I have altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it further, right? The features you like of now and upsell, right? But no self-defense, right? No self-help. You can't twiddle back. So you combine all this, regulatory capture and

poor privacy protections and concentrated markets and and all of these things along with no interop. And you get situations like nurses. So in America, hospitals like to preferentially hire contract nurses rather than staff nurses because it lets them do union avoidance. And it used to be that a nurse would be hired out through a local staffing agency. There'd be a few in every town. Those have all been replaced by four apps, all nationwide.

All of them call themselves Uber for nursing. And we have not had a new privacy law in this country federally, a new consumer privacy law, since 1988, when Ronald Reagan signed the Video Privacy Protection Act, which bans video store clerks from disclosing your VHS rentals. Every other technological invasion of your privacy is leaked. Ronnie rented some porn. No, it was Robert Bork. Robert Bork rented some porn.

Well, no, it was that during his confirmation hearings, a video store clerk leaked his video rental happens. And Congress passed a lot. Now, the funny thing about Robert Bork, virulent racist, vicious criminal. colossal asshole pretty good taste in movies but i think a bunch of congresspeople were like oh wait oh wait this is going to be bad and so they like beat all land speed records passing a law banning the disclosure of video rentals oh my god but we haven't had a single one since so the um apps that hire nurses they can go to a data broker and in real time look up that nurse's credit card

debt. And if the nurse is carrying more credit card debt, they are inferred to be more economically precarious and are offered a lower wage. Wow. Right? So this is like, so in shittification, there's aspects of insidification that are very digital, right? Like this ability to change the rules digitally and so on, the position of tech workers. But it's not just digital firms that can insidify. It's any firm that is digitized. Right. So the digitization of nurse hiring makes nursing vulnerable to insidification. Grocery stores, you know, Jeff Bezos owns two grocery chains. He owns Amazon Fresh, and if he wants to raise the price of eggs, he moves a slider.

And he owns Whole Foods. And if he wants to raise the price of eggs, he needs an army of teenagers on rollerblades with a pricing gun, right? But electronic shelf tags are now moving to grocery stores all over the place. They're networked e-ink tags. They were first rolled out in Norway. Norway does like 2,000 to 3,000 price adjustments a day in their grocery stores. Wow.

So you can see how inshittification is going to kind of escape containment. William Gibson in one of his books, he says, cyberspace is averting, turning inside out, right? Cyberspace is turning inside out. The physical world is being subsumed by the digital world. When EFF started, we were mostly concerned with making sure your real world human rights made it onto the internet. Now we're like stopping the internet from taking away your real world human rights

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This is funny because in like two recent episodes of this podcast, I've found myself emphasizing that despite everything shitty that happens on the internet, Like, I'm still flesh and blood. Like, I live in a physical world. It's not actually pixels and bits and, but despite the fact that I've loved the digital world my whole life. And that, like, sometimes I, I, like, go outside and I blink my eyes and I need to, like, remember that that's the reality I actually inhabit. Yeah. But I think it becomes harder and harder to do that every day.

And you're making me realize that it's partially for this reason that the digital world is, is starting to infest the, Like, I don't know, isn't there a part of the, one of the many Matrix sequels where, uh, uh, you know, Agent Smith like escapes the matrix and like, oh, I don't remember. Maybe in one, maybe in the animated one. Could be. But this is, this is like sort of what's happening. But a car is a computer you put your body into. Right.

A house these days mostly is a computer you put your body into. An airplane is definitely a computer you put your body into. Yeah. Right. Like, it's a case mod. An airplane is a case mod. Yeah. For, for, uh, like, some terrifyingly badly secured.

Scott of controllers and like PCs, right? And you put your body in it and hope it doesn't crash, literally and figuratively. And it's funny how over the past couple years, I found myself resisting that in ways I hadn't expected, like smart home stuff. I have always been fully against, apart from, I have like Google smoke detectors when I moved into a new place a couple years ago. I got Google smoke detectors, the nest smoke detectors, for one reason, which is that when they first hear, smell smoke, they go,

smoke detected and they don't beep and then you can just press the button they go right okay alarm silenced right it's toast it's fine yeah but that's it apart from that i don't use them every other smart home appliance like uh we we had a doorbell like a remote way to open the gate from inside the house right right um and this guy wanted to install like a Wi-Fi enabled thing and i was like no i i don't want it and instead he installed something that works over a phone line, like a low voltage phone line, and so I pick up a landline phone on my house and I press the six button when I want. Well, now everyone knows your password.

It's six. Only you got to be inside the house, Corey, to press the six. The call is coming from inside the house. But like, this is a system that never needs to be upgraded. Sure. It will always work in the house. It's a little electromechanical what sets. Exactly.

And that, I'm like, that's better than something that is like going to be needing a firmware update. Sure. So let me try and split the baby here. So I think there's a kind of vulgar Thatcherism that is practiced by tech giants. So Margaret Thatcher's most famous maxim was there is no alternative or Tina. I used to actually call her Tina Thatcher, right? And it's this way of trying to extinguish your imagination to say, like, stop trying to think of an alternative.

It's like a demand dressed up as an observation. And, you know, my other life, I'm a science fiction writer. And my job is to think of like 11 alternatives before breakfast. Yeah. And when, you know, I think when tech bosses say there is no alternative, what they mean is that you have to take the bad with the good, right? If you want the advantage of being able to talk with all of your friends in a convenient place, Mark Zuckerberg has to be listening in.

And to imagine like chatting with your friends without Mark Zuckerberg listening in, it's like imagining water that's not wet. It's just not reasonable, right? This kind of indivisibility that they impute to their creations. And what it does is it disguises the extent to which the negative features of their products are choices, right? They don't come automatically with the product. Yeah. And one of the things that I like about interoperability, which is a really key piece of both how things got insuredified and I think how we get rid of inshittification is that it lets you renegotiate which parts of the

product you're going to use, right? You can throw away the parts you don't like and keep the parts that you do. And that constitutes a kind of pushback for firms. So like imagine we're in a product meeting for our website. And the person running the meeting says, all right, gang, we know that our key performance indicator, our KPI, it's top line ad revenue. I think if we make the ads 20% more obnoxious, we can get a 2% lift in our ad revenue. Everybody gets a really big bonus. It's going to be great. So someone who doesn't give a damn about user welfare or product quality might put their hand up at that point and say, Elon, I love how you think. But as it occurred to you that if you make the ads 20% more invasive, 40% of our users are going to go type

how do I block ads into a search engine, right? And the revenue from those users is zero, and it never comes back. No one ever types, how do I start seeing ads again into a search engine, right? So that's the it. That's it, right? That's all you get. Now, we move on to the next item of business, which is apps. Now, there are no ad blockers for apps because you'd have to reverse engineer them and bypass the DRM,

and that's a felony. So this person says, well, I was thinking also we'd make the ads in the app 20% more obnoxious. And the same person puts his hand up and he says, why are you stopping at 20%? right why do we make them 100% more obnoxious it doesn't matter if someone types how do i stop seeing ads in this app the answer is you can't yeah right and this is why like companies are so horny to get you to stop using their websites and start using their apps an app is just a website wrapped in the right kind of IP to make it a felony to defend yourself while you use it Jesus Christ and you know you combine this with monopoly and you've got like a company called chamberlain they

bought every garage door opener company you've ever heard of doesn't matter what the little label says is a Chamberlain garage door opener. And originally they supported HomeKit, right, which is the standard way of integrating with a lot of different apps so you can open your garage door. And once they had a critical mass, once people had installed physically, like there's a big switching cost, right? You have to have like a handyman come and install it and it's a lot, right? So once they like achieved kind of escape velocity, they pushed an update, Darth Vader

MBA, to all of these apps. They took away HomeKit integration. Now you have to use their apps. And there's seven ads on the screen where you open your garage door. Wow. And so, like, this is just a perfect example of how it is that beyond the cupidity of individual bad executives, beyond the failure of consumers to be conscious consumers and vote with their wallet, a thing I have no confidence in at all. Yeah. What you have is an inshidogenic policy environment, right?

Like, you're conjugating insurification. Oh, I can declench it all day long. And shittogenic. Yeah. An insidic, and an insidogenic environment leads to the endemic insidification. The insidicine, right? That was the new scientist word of the year last year, Enchidocene. Wow.

Like, I like these brags. Like, it's cool to have the words. I won't, I won't say that it's not. But, like, I've not made it my whole thing. I, I'm still doing new stuff as well. I'm very restless. But, but this is like the responsibility of policy people and the, Thing about tech executives, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, all the lesser trolls that we don't know the names of, is they're not smart enough to be the cause here.

They are the effect. Like, they're stepping into a Mark Zuckerberg shaped hole in the policy environment. And you get rid of Mark Zuckerberg, you get another one right behind him. You get rid of, you know, Elon, if like Elon Musk ODs on ketamine tomorrow, they'll be like 10 big balls, like tearing each other's throat out for the right to succeed them. And they'll be indistinguishable from him. and like inside of a year, right? Like, yeah, it's not, be careful, be careful what you wish for. It's not the guys, right?

Well, it's funny, my friend Charlie Strauss is another science fiction writer once wrote a very funny story about the time cops whose job it is to stop people from killing baby Hitler because it turns out that that Hitler was like the 11th in a line of European dictators and the other 10 have all been killed by time travelers and each one is worse. And it's like, don't kill baby Hitler where you don't want to know what comes after baby Hitler. That's great. Yeah.

So, you know, like the people who made this policy environment, we mentioned one of them, Robert Borg, the architect of the dismantling of antitrust. Yeah. Right. That guy did the damage we're living through now. It's a guy called Bruce Lehman, who was the IPsar for Bill Clinton. And when Al Gore was doing these internet hearings, the national information infrastructure hearings or the information super highway hearings, Bruce Lehman went to him with the DMCA, with this anti-circumvention rule where you can't break a digital lock, even if it's for. for a legal purpose. And Al Gore was like, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Get out. So he went to Geneva. He went to the World Intellectual Property Organization, this UN specialized

agency. He got them to pass two treaties, the WIPO Copyright Treaty and the WIPO Performers and Phonographs Treaty, they're the Internet treaties. And then he went back to Congress and he said, now you must pass this because we have a treaty obligation. And later on, he subsequently, on many occasions, described this as, quote, doing an end run around Congress. Wow. Right. So you have all these people, like, like in living memory who were who enacted these policies they were warned at the time of the likely outcome they did it anyway they you know linger among us without bearing any responsibility for these actions they never you know they they walk out in public without worrying that someone's

sizing them up for a pitchfork right and like i think that it's important to recognize the role policy plate here because if we fire mark zuckerberg there'll be another mark zuckerberg but if we change the policy environment, it won't matter who's sitting in Mark Zuckerberg's chair. In fact, we will get rid of Mark Zuckerberg's chair, right? The problem isn't the wrong guys the social medias are for a life of four billion people. The problem is that we have that job, right? We need to abolish Mark Zuckerberg, not reform Mark Zuckerberg or replace him. Let's drill down on Facebook for like one second because I think it's maybe the Paragon case

of insidification. I remember Facebook first appears, right? It's like, oh, you can connect with your friends. You can talk to them. You can share photos. It's a place to gather with your friends. We'll also show you some ads, just sort of like a normal website. It's like, oh, it's like MySpace, but it's better.

Right. It was, oh, I remember using it. Oh, you can make a little photo album. It's like, it's better coded. It works a little bit better, right? To today where Facebook is used exclusively by your parents to look at AI memes. Shrimp Jesus. Shrimp Jesus and bizarre custom made AI memes, recycled reels content.

et cetera, and yet is still one of the biggest and most profitable companies. How does the insudification process get us from the one or the other? So, yeah. So remember, it's a three-stage process, right? And so in stage one, the firm is good to the end users, but finds a way to lock the end users in. So with Facebook, what they're doing is they're saying, come use Facebook. So in like 2006, they opened up to everyone. You didn't need a dot edU American College address.

So they were like, come use Facebook. We know, you've already got an account on MySpace. But has it occurred to you that MySpace is owned by an evil, crampulent senescent Australian billionaire named Rupert Murdoch who spies on you with every hour that God sends? Facebook is infinitely superior. We have a better UI, but we will also never spy on you.

That was the 2006 promise that Facebook made to users. And also, we will only show you the things that you asked to see. So you articulate your social graph. Tell us who matters to you. Follow those people. When they post things for their followers to see, that's all you're going to see. Yeah.

Right? So the users pile in, And they get locked in and Facebook doesn't really have to do much to lock them in at this point because when you have a social media network like this, people lock themselves in because of something that economists call the collective action problem, which is like, you know, you love your friends, but like the six people in your group chat can agree on what board game you're going to play this weekend. So like when there's 200 of you on Facebook, some of you are there because there's people who have the same rare disease as them and that's where they hang out with them. And some are there because they emigrated from another country. And that's how they stay in touch with people back home. And some are there because that's, where their audience or their customers are, or that's where the Little League team carpool is put together. It's really hard to coordinate a mass departure. And because all those things are so valuable, you not only have a collective action problem, but it imposes what economists call a high switching cost.

When you leave, you have to endure high costs. So Mark Zuckerberg, at a certain point, realizes that people aren't going anywhere. And he starts to turn the knob to make things worse for end users to make things better for business customers. So to advertisers, he says, hey, do you remember we told these robs that? that we weren't going to spy on them. Obviously, that is a lie. We spy on them from asshole to appetite.

And if you give us a remarkably small amount of money, we will target extremely high fidelity ads based on your demographic criteria and your behavioral criteria. And not only that, but we are like such like good-natured slabs who really care about the quality of our product. So we filled a whole building with engineers

who are just going to police ad fraud. So you give me a dollar to show an ad to that kind of person, that ad will be shown to that person. And they go to the publishers and they say, hey, you remember, we told these roofs, we're only going to show them things they asked to see, right? Also, obviously, a lie. Put excerpts from your website and your Facebook feed. Add a link back to your website. We'll just cram it non-consensually into the eyeballs of people who never asked to see it.

Yeah. Some of them will click the link. Some of them will subscribe to you, free traffic funnel. So those people get locked in too. Now, I think a lot of people underestimate how easy it is for a supplier to be locked into a platform. How important monopsony, not monopoly is, where you have a powerful buyer. So, you know, think about it like a coffee shop, right? If you're a coffee shop and there's like an office building next door and 20% of your sales

comes from that office building, right? And that office building shuts down and overnight your sales go to zero from that coffee shop. You have a 20% drop. You might not even make the rent that month. Yeah. Right? You might not be able to pay the coupon on your loan for your espresso machines.

You might have to lay people off. You might never recover. But say you're someone who lives in that neighborhood and there's five coffee shops in that block and one of them shuts down, right? It's going to be really easy to get a coffee. Right. Right. So monopsony is so much more durable and easier to attain.

And so Facebook very quickly becomes integral to the business of publishers and advertisers and it squeezes them too. This is stage three. Yeah. So advertising prices go way up. Advertising fidelity goes way down. And then advertising fraud explodes because. beyond all imagining.

So Procter and Gamble had a $200 million a year budget for surveillance ads, sometimes called behavioral ads, euphemistically. And they took that budget to zero one year, and they saw a 0% drop in sales. Wow. Because like to a first approximation, no one saw the ads, right? $200 million just disappearing in the fraud hole. Yeah. Right?

So publishers then find that they have to put bigger and bigger excerpts into Facebook, or they won't be seen by anyone, not even by their subscribers. Eventually, it's like a full-text reproduction of their own website. So they're like a commodity backend supplier with a substitutive product on Facebook. And they can't even put a link to their website or it's downranked for maybe being a malicious link. And so the only way they can monetize that content is with the super broken ad network. And so Facebook then attains this kind of equilibrium where, you know, the quantum of material in your feed that you want to see is like this homeopathic residue. you. There's this void that is filled by boosted content and ads, but the people paying

to boost the content and place the ads are also getting stolen from. And everything is going to Facebook. And you know, you are in this like moment where it's every day you're like, I hate this, but I can't seem to stop coming. And the difference between that and I hate this and I'm never coming back is pretty thin. And so you get the occasional like a scandal like Cambridge Analytica or whistleblower or whatever and people leave. And then Facebook panics and being tech bros, they have a technical term for panicking. They call it pivoting. And so, like, one day Mark Zuckerberg, you know, arises from his sarcophagus. And he says, harken to me, brothers and sisters, for I've had a vision. I know I told you that your future consisted entirely of arguing with your racist uncle using the primitive text interface that I created to, you know, non-consensually rate the fuckability of Harvard undergraduates. But it turns out that the true future is for me to convert you and everyone you love into a legless, sexless. low polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon character so that I can imprison you in a virtual world

I stole from a 25-year-old satirical cyberpunk novel that I call the Metaverse, right? And that is when Facebook turns into a pile of shit. And that is end stage in shittification. Yeah. But what you're talking about, the Metaverse, period, that was like three years ago he was talking about that. I know because I made a video about it.

Sure. And it's over. It never happened. Oh, you're not in the Metaverse still? No. Oh, my gosh. No, I never even... How do you spend your day?

You don't have a brick on your face all day? I have a MetaQuest, too, that I was given for free by a video game publisher that I have a connection with that wanted me to play their video game. Played the video game. It's a very fun. It sat collecting dust in a drawer because I haven't wanted to feel nauseous for six hours after wearing a headset for 30 minutes. That hasn't been something that I've been interested in. What about that documentary, The Carousel of Progress at Disney World that assures me that in the future, we'll all have a brick on our face at Christmas and be shooting spaceships. I mean, surely.

Like, that's the end stage of insidification, but like even that itself is a scam, right? Like the Metaverse was a transparent scam on who then, the investors? Yeah, so this is getting into the thesis of my AI book again. But I think that if you have a growth company, right, if you have a growth stock, the market values at a really high, what's called price to earnings ratio, which means that for every dollar you bring in, your stock is worth several dollars, right? And that gives your stock a high degree of liquidity. and it means that other people will accept your stock as though it were cash. So if you want to do things that help you grow, like buy a company or, you know, Mark Zuckerberg just hire these people for $100 million each, right?

You don't, you're not doing that with money. You're just doing it with stock. And like you make the stock on the premises. You just type zeros into a spreadsheet to get stock, right? Whereas the mature companies that have a much lower price to earnings ratio, they're bidding against you using cash. And you're not allowed to make cash on the premises. The Treasury Department really frowns on it.

So if you want to bid against a growth stock, you've got to do that with like the dollars you get from a creditor or a customer. And that's kind of a death spiral because you never win those bidding wars, right? And so you can never do that fast growth through acquisition or through key hiring. And so these firms, they have this paradox, right? When they reach a 90% market share, it's not a lot of growth left. And like, where does Google going to get its search growth from once they have 90% market share? I mean, sure, you can breed a billion humans to maturity and make them Google users, which is call. Google Classroom, but it takes a minute, right? And so you've got to have a growth story.

And so we got pivot to video. We got Metaverse. We got NFTs. And now it's AI. And it's not even AI anymore. Now it's superintelligence. It's just keeping the bubble inflated. And, you know, I think that incitification plays a role here because these growth stories involved doing things that significantly worsen the product. So Facebook's pivot to video is a really good example, right? They just lied about users wanting video, but they tried to make it just a premature truth and not a lie. They just crammed video into every part of the platform, which the users just didn't like. Yeah. Right. That's why the bubble eventually burst, right? They, they hope that they could make fetch happen. They didn't make fetch happen. But, you know,

you get that with like every platform is doing this to create the illusion of growth. Like, if you stream a video on your device, if you're like watching this on YouTube and you go full screen on your device, you have to hold your phone like it's a photo negative because if you graze any part of that screen, right? You're going to go to a totally different video with no back button. The back button was in the first browser, right? It's not like it's a novel invention. The thing is, if you're a streamer, like a streaming company, you want to minimize your investment in new content, as you know, right? And you want to convince the street that people are going to stick around, even though you're not making new things because you're so good at

recommending stuff to them. And so you need a certain number of successful recommendations. You You need a number that goes up. And so they have created a fat finger economy where if you graze any part of the screen, and now it's AI, right? Like the companies are looking statistically at the parts of the screen you touch most often, the buttons you use most often, moving that button somewhere else and putting an AI summoning button there. And there's no AI dispelling button.

So you interact with it for at least 10 seconds. That's counted as a full interaction. Right. Right. And then they get to count that as a statistic that they can use both internally, right, to get their bonus this year, but also. in external communications with shareholders to say number go up, right?

Our, we're getting more pickup of AI with our product. It's doubled this quarter, by which they mean they replace three more extremely useful buttons with AI summoning buttons, right? And so that like only works if you're not worried about people leaving.

That only works if you're not just like too big to fail, but like too big to care, right? Yeah, that's like the Instagram effect of, I mean, I deleted my Facebook account years ago, but I'm trapped on Instagram. I can't leave. It's where my friends actually are. Sure.

And it's the most important sort of like promotional vehicle for my comedy, for the most part. It's sort of the most active social network I'm on. And they're just always adding shit. They're always just putting, hey, here's an AI thing. And you just sort of ignore you go, oh, yeah, here's the thing that they put in this week. I don't know. Whatever. It's like a new billboard up in Times Square.

You're like, who gives a fuck? I have to be here. So I'm not going to like sweat it. Right. And yeah, maybe you tap it. Maybe you interact with it. Like, oh, yeah, I chatted with the, I let it make a little image for me or whatever. I let it give me a suggestion.

I was kind of stupid. Okay, whatever. Like, none of this has any utility. None of the AI features in Instagram have any utility whatsoever. They're just sort of there because they know I can't leave. Yeah. Yeah. You know, Lily Tomling used to do those bits on Saturday Night Live.

You started them on Laugh and continue on Saturday Night at Live. Ernestine the telephone operator. Yeah. And so she'd do these ads. for AT&T and at the end of it she turned to the camera and she'd say we don't care we don't have to we're the phone company back when AT&T was a true monopoly and you look at Google right so one of the stories of tell in the book it's a story that was first reported out by previous guest Ed Zittron is wonderful guy he's also he's got the um epigram in the book so the epigram

for the book is um I hate them for what they did to the computer at Zitron this is like uh or I'll never forgive them I'll never forgive them for what they did to the computer I love So sometimes I just text that to Ed. Yeah. Like, it's just such a funny line. Yeah. Especially because you,

you picture it in his delightful accent. Yeah, that's right. His West London accent is the computer. It's very good. Yeah. So, so,

you know, Ed reported this out from the Google trial last year. In 2019, Google search growth had stalled because they had 90% market share. And there was a battle internally between two Google executives. One was a guy called Prabagar Raghavan, who's an engineer, but ex-McKinsey,

management track. He had come from Yahoo, where he oversaw the collapse of Yahoo search from 99% to 0%. They put him in charge of Google search revenue, right? That was his, that was his role. And then Google search technology was run by this guy called Ben Gomes. And Ben Gomes was like an OG Googler. He had been there from the time that it was one server under a desk. And he'd built it out to the whole network of data centers, and he was in charge of search technology. And Raghavan's idea for increasing search revenue is to make search worse, right? Turn off auto correct. Turn off the query stemming where you look for synonyms. So if someone searches for pants, you also search for trousers in the background, turning off just a whole ton of like context features that make

search better, looking into trending searches to see if like if everyone's searching for, I don't know, like big pens. And it's because, you know, some late night talk show host just put a big pen up his nose or something, then you know what that person is looking for. for you're not just showing them the Bickpen website. You're surfacing that immor highly. And the idea was that you might have to search twice or three times or four times to find the thing you used to find in one query. Wow.

And that's four chances to show you an ad. Yeah. Right. And so there's this internal battle. It's going all the way up to the top of the firm between these two factions within Google. And the faction that wins is the inshittifier faction. And it's because there's nowhere else for people to go. Yeah.

So why wouldn't you inshidify it? Yeah. You know, I'm not proud to say so, but I need constant stimulation or I get bored. I need something to look at, a podcast to listen to, a little tasty treat here or there. I have a million ways to jangle the shiny keys of life in front of my face and to stay entertained and stimulated. But the thing is, I can't always say the same for my dog. And that is why I do everything I can to make sure that my little dog isn't bored. And the number one place to do that is at meal time.

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and the reason there's nowhere else for people to go like google is a very strange ship of monopoly because there are other search engines but like you have to be so stubborn to use them they bought all the shelf space yeah right they bought it's like yes there are other you don't have to buy proctor and gamble but if you go into the grocery store all you're going to find is proctor and gamble and unilever yeah right so they're paying apple 20 billion dollars a year to be the default search on apple and for apple not to make a search engine they are the default search search in Firefox. The default search for every carrier. I believe them paying Firefox is like basically what has kept Firefox in business. Like the only thing that it's a it's a nonprofit like they're

not selling Firefox. So like what what's keeping the lights on? It's the Google money. It's the Google money. And I have to say like I've been disappointed with the things they've tried to do to diversify their income. But like they have tried. You know, they made a mobile OS at one point. They did some other things. And none of them had great offerings. You know, they're much better at making browsers and everything else. And now, for some reason, they keep shoving AI features into the browser. I don't know what that's in aid of. Some of them are useful.

They have an AI local translate. So you don't have to go to Google Translate to translate blobs of text on your screen. Sure. And it's privacy preserving happens in the browser. I like that. But there's a whole bunch of AI features that have just got no use for. And, but, you know, so every browser you could use, every mobile operating system you could use, every operating system you used

because even though you're using Bing on edge if you've got Windows Edge itself is just Chrome right edge is like a rebadged Chrome it's in every carrier it's their default browser they lock the phone to when you get a subsidy phone

from a carrier with a contract right so they've just bought all the shelf space and so the thing is no one is going to capitalize a rival search engine when there's no shelf space for it. Right. Right. So what you get are these kind of minority projects. Some of them are quite good. In fact, it's remarkable how good they are. And it shows you how bad Google is. So there's one that I use called caggy. I also use caggy. I have no relationship to them. I don't give

I used it as a trial for a little bit. And then at some point, I forget why they reached out and they gave me a free year. As a demo, we want you to use it and didn't ask anything. Like, sure, I'll use it. I've been using it for a year. Before that, I used duck, duck go. They both both have, I like them better than Google. I'll go use Google once in a while if I want to double check the search results. I like the bangs where you go exclamation point, exclamation point, YT, space, and it'll search YouTube for me. Yep. I love all that stuff. And recent guest of yours, Jason Kebler from 404 Media, did an amazing article about Kaggi and taught me something I didn't know. I'd already been using them for months. I was at my editor's place in

Tucson. And he's like this autodidact who's just like brilliant, about a million things, never finished high school. And an incredible researcher. And he's like, you're not using Kagi. Let me show you what I do with it. And I bought it immediately for my whole family. So I never got a free flag. I've just been paying for it since day one. And what I didn't know, what Jason taught me is that Kagi is a front end to Google. Their search index is almost entirely Google. There's a little bit of the index and a few other search indexes in there. Mostly what they're doing is using Google's API, syndicating its results, and then tweaking them using their own algorithm. Wow. So Caggy, which is, I don't know how big it is, like 12 employees, 20 employees,

right? It's pre-profit, right? They're not in profit yet. Tiny Fern is so much better than Google. And like, we haven't said this part yet, but it is like using Google in the Ask Jeeves Day, right? Whereas just like, all of the side, it's like, wait a second. I asked Jeeves a million questions, And I did not get an answer as good as the vague query I formulated for Google. And here it is. That's what using Kaggie is like. Yeah. And it's like, whoa, this is a choice, right?

Of course Google could be this good. And there's no way hiring like the, you know, significant plurality of all the PhDs in math and computer science and computation linguistics graduating from every top university in the world for 20 years. Right. They cannot ship this product. They just don't want to. Yeah. The stuff that makes Kagi better is those bangs, those. quality of life features.

They have a feature where you can exclude a site from your search results. Oh, it's so great. I never want to see this again. Pinterest. Remove it. Yeah. It's gone from your search results. Like that's a pretty transformative feature.

But again, it's kind of a small bore feature. It's just user interface stuff. Yeah. They're using the Google tech, but they're just doing a better job of certain users. They don't have an index, right? They don't have a crawler. They're just querying, sending queries into Google's crawl. Wow.

And they're paying for it. They're licensing Google technology. Wow. Yeah. But they are, because they're a paid service, they're serving the user, not the, you know, Google Megalopolis. Let me stop you there. Okay.

I don't think it's because they're paid. I think that I think that's why they do it, but I don't think the fact that other services aren't paid services are why they abuse us, right? Because Apple abuses the hell out of its customers. Sure. They, you may remember, they rolled out this box where you ticked it and then Facebook couldn't spy on you via the app anymore. And 96% of iOS users tick the box.

The other 4% were either drunk. or Facebook employees or drunk Facebook employees, which makes sense because if I worked at Facebook, I'd be drunk all the time. But as they rolled that out, they started spying on iOS users to do their own ad targeting. And there was no opt out.

And when Gizmoto broke the story, they lied about it. Wow. Right? And so Apple, like the distraction rectangle in your pocket that you paid a thousand bucks for is not ad supported, right? It's like, it's your phone.

Yeah. You get treated like the product if the company can get away with it. John Deere tractors are not freebies. There's $600,000, you know, the threshing robots. And farmers are the product, you know, not just because you can't fix your own tractor, although you do the repair. It doesn't get activated until you spend $200 on a John Deere technician to come and type

the unlock code into your tractor's console. But also, the tractor is not just harvesting your crops. It's using moisture sensors like humidity sensors in the undercarriage and torque sensors on the wheel. to do centimeter accurate soil surveys, which are then aggregated by John Deere and sold into the futures market. Right? So like this is, you are the product.

You're like literally the product for a John Deer tractor. And so, you know, obviously like take surveillance advertising or just advertising, invasive advertising in general. When we started Boing Boing, this website I used to edit, I still own us, very widely read blog. When we started, our advertisers

really wanted us to serve pop-up ads. And not the denatured, you know, sick, weak pop-up ads you get now where it's just a CSS box in the window. It was a whole other window. Yeah. And not only that, it was like one pixel square and it auto-played audio and it had a thing where it would run away from your cursor when you tried to close it. And, you know, we argued mightily with our advertisers. And they were like, this is non-negotiable, right? We believe that pop-up ads have a higher conversion rate and we want pop-up ads.

We're like, oh, you guys are the boss. But then Mozilla, which precursor to Firefox and Opera started searching pop-up blockers, and then they turned them on by default. And we could look at our logs and we could go to our advertisers and say, we can serve you a pop-up ad. 95% of our viewers aren't going to see it. It's just going to disappear. And they're like, oh, yeah, I guess we don't need pop-up ads. All the shitty things that Google does, it's not because they're losing money on you. Google makes a lot of money on you.

It's because they can make more money by maltreating you and you can't leave. Right. And so like I use the term equilibrium a lot. It's a term out of economics. Right. Like the the equilibrium between Google's and shitification and the value you get from it is determined by the policy environment. You know, can you reverse engineer Google? Can you make a thing? You know, I've got an Android phone. And on the screen is the Google pill that that is the default search thing on the front screen. You can't remove it. Wow. Right. So like someone could just make a mod, but you can't make the mod. because it's illegal, right? You know, and we've been talking about this for a while, and we haven't talked about what you can do to fix it, but I actually think we're in a moment right now where there's some real opportunities to do something about this, ironically because of Trump.

So when I was the European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, I worked in 31 countries. I stopped plugging in my fridge because I was on the road so much. It cost me $10 a month to keep my ice cubes frozen. And I, everywhere I went, would speak to policymakers, and I would say, like, you should legalize jailbreaking. You should have more privacy protections. You should do all these things.

And they would say the U.S. Trade Representative has threatened us with tariffs if we pass those laws. And if we don't have laws that mirror the American laws, well, a deterrent only works until you use it. So Trump's shot is Wad, right? And now, like, so like all the best Americans, I'm Canadian. And in Canada, our plan for the Trump tariffs so far has been retaliatory tariffs. It's a terrible idea because Canada extracts raw materials, sends them to America.

They get turned into finished products and we re-import them. So really all we're doing is we're making the things we buy from America, which is almost everything 25% more expensive. This is a very weird way to punish America. It's like punching yourself in the face really hard and hoping the downstairs neighbor says, ouch. Meanwhile, what if we just legalize jailbreaking, right? What if we like, what if a Canadian firm could make the kit that anyone who wanted to make an app store for iOS, for Android, for PlayStation for Nintendo for Xbox could use.

So weird like the white label backend OEM that anyone wants to make these app stores can use. So like if, you know, Epic Games wants to make an app store or if, you know, if like the rump of Olivetti and Italy wants to make an app store, if there's some smart Ghanaian technologists who want to make a Pan African app store, that opportunity is sitting there for them. And we just export the tools, right? What if we did that for car mechanics? So, you know, right now, every mechanic's paying $10,000 a year per manufacturer for the tool that turns the diagnostic light, you know, check engine light into a diagnosis, right? So we could just make the tool, it's $25 a month per mechanic.

Every mechanic in the world is paying some Canadian company $25 a month. We could, rather than just like fetching about Elon Moss Nazi salute, which like he likes the attention, we could make it legal to jailbreak Tesla's so that every mechanic in the world can unlock all the DLC, all the software upgrades, all the subscription features without any money. going to Elon Musk, really kick him in the dongle. You know, that's how you win a trade war, right? It's not with like saying, oh, we're going to stop drinking delicious American bourbon and start drinking extremely mid-Canadian rye, right? It's like it's making the things Americans sell cheaper. And not only does this have the opportunity to make Canada the, you know, powerhouse

in this sector the way, say, Finland was for mobile phones for 10 years when Nokia ruled the world, it's also a way for Canada to liberate our American cousins. Because the first victims of the scam were Americans. Yeah. Right. And like anyone with a payment method and an internet connection can download these digital tools. So Canada doesn't have to limit itself to exporting the tools of, you know, reasonably priced pharmaceuticals, right? We can export the tools of technological self-determination to everyone.

And that doesn't have to be Canada. Whoever does it first is going to get that industrial policy. Everyone else gets the consumer surplus. Everyone else gets stuff cheaper. but the country that does this first gets the industrial policy. They get to boost a tech sector into a stable orbit for a decade or more, spin at all kinds of related businesses, become, you know, globally important with a cool export market that attracts foreign investment, the best and the brightest, all the PhDs that Trump is

deporting that gives them someplace to go and work, all the capital that wants to leave the American market. Are you pitching this to different governments at this point? I am giving the keynote at, I won't say which government. I'm giving the keynote at a large government's CIO's annual innovation summit whose theme is, what do we do about tariffs? Wow. So, yes, I'm pitching this all over. My EFF colleagues and I are talking about how we make this something that European policymakers are involved with.

And I like how it's a end run around the problem with how do we do this in America? Because in America, we, A, have a paralyzed legislature and B, the tech industry is propping up our entire economy. And so how do we regulate the tech industry, you know, A, even in California, B, you know, let alone in the entire country. Yeah. Well, let me push with that a little bit, though, because what's to stop these companies from, you know, leaving the country or, you know, you hear this about, you know, I read the Apple blogger John Gruber. I've read him for 20 years. He's very often disagree with him. You're in.

He annoys me. But he's an engaging writer and I just can't stop reading. And he writes about really fiddly user interface. details, which I enjoy. And I'm a Mac guy. But so he's written a lot. He's very critical of, you know, the EU has put a lot of rules in. Some of them about interoperability that they've put on Apple. And, you know, the response has been, and his sort of argument is all that's going to happen is Apple is going to not bring certain features to the EU or worse, maybe leave the EU entirely because if you look at how big of a part of their business it is, it's not that big. And let's maybe

concede the point, hey, maybe some of the EU's regulations they put in place, you know, they're put in place by bureaucrats. Sure. And maybe some of them are, you know, they're well-intentioned, yada, yada. That happens in any lawmaking process. Of course, of course. It's not going to be perfect as us progressives would want it to be. Sure.

So, so how do you get around that problem? Yeah, so I just don't think that's plausible in the context of the EU. So like specifically the Digital Markets Act, which is the thing that Gruber and Apple are pissed off about, it's a big gnarly hairball of a law and not all of it is perfect. The interrupt parts are the good parts. And really what the interrupt parts say is that Apple cannot take countermeasures to block European firms from extending the functionality of Apple's products. And Apple's argument is, well, we can't protect our user's privacy if European firms can do this.

And there's some truth to that. But Apple has a decidedly spotty record when it comes to protecting its user's privacy. So remember, when Apple turned on Facebook spying blocking, they also turned on. Apple spying with no way to turn it off. You know, Apple's argument that they will leave an important market if they are called upon to weaken the privacy guarantees is really belied by their track record in China, right? In China, they removed all the working VPN tools from the app store. And because you can only install apps from the app store, that means there's no way for

Chinese users to have privacy. They backdoored iCloud for the Chinese government. And then when AirDrop was being used by Chinese dissidents, a head above party conference to anonymously spread literature. It was going, it was fueling this independent protest movement. Apple broke that feature for every Apple user in the world. Wow. They took that feature out, right?

So the argument that Apple would never kowtow to a foreign government that did things that in their estimation weaken their user's privacy is nonsense. That's such a great point of comparison. They'll do bad things when China wants them done. Sure. So why wouldn't they do a good thing when another. company, one other country wants it to. And the EU has 500 million affluent consumers, right? So I, like Apple shareholders, like, we always bitch about the fact that, um, investors are only looking

at the next quarter. Yeah. But like, it's a feature or not a bug in this case, right? They're not going to say, oh, well, you know, hypothetically in the future, uh, the European Union will cave to you and you'll be able to like, you know, rip the steel beating hard out of a European Union commissioner from their chest and then paraded around Strasbourg with, for a, you know, audience of, like, cowering Eurocrats who will learn their lesson and never come after you again. They want to know about the next goddamn quarter, right? And if in the next quarter you don't sell phones in Europe, that's going to be bad, right?

And so, you know, I just don't buy that it's a small market. But also, let's say Apple leaves, one of the major projects in Europe right now is something called Eurostack. And it's been spurred by the fact that American tech companies are no longer pretending that they are anything but an arm of U.S. foreign policy, you know, when they, you international criminal court indicted Israeli genocides. Microsoft terminated the prosecutor's email address the day after Trump gave an executive order in which he named that prosecutor as a sanctioned individual. Microsoft, and they deny that the two facts are related. I think the president

of Microsoft Bradstone perjured himself when he denied it. You have Microsoft just being asked by the, I think it was the European Commission, maybe it was the Council of Europe, whether data stored on European servers that Microsoft operates is safe from access by the U.S. intelligence agencies without notification or the opportunity to challenge that access in court. And Microsoft said, we cannot guarantee you that your government and corporate data on our servers in Europe won't be accessed by the U.S. government without your knowledge, right? So they're like, well, this is a hostile occupying foreign power. We need to get the hell off of this.

And a lot of the Eurostack efforts so far has been about building. So building data centers, building fiber lines, not having all the fiber terminate on American soil, which Snowden showed us was like just a way to wiretap the whole internet. And also making clones, right? Making an Office 365 clone or an I work clone or whatever,

making these apps that you could migrate your data to. Really what they need to be working on, though, is the migration tool. Because if the only way that a ministry or a corporation or an institution can switch from Office 365 to a Eurostack alternative is by abandoning all of their documents, all of their data, all the edit history, all the permissions, all the records, all the log files, no one's going to switch. And the way that you make that switch is not by begging the tech companies to ease your

passage. It's by doing adversarial interoperability, reverse engineering, jailbreaking, and making the tools that scrape and move that data without the tech companies. consent, right? The way that when Apple made IWorkSuite, they made it possible for you to import all your Microsoft office documents without Microsoft's consent. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander here. And so if Apple says, oh, we're out of the EU, and there's umpty million Europeans who have Apple phones that are their property. Yeah. And a European company wants to assume software updates, app store, if features interoperable hardware,

as a matter of policy, the European Commission should encourage them to do that. I mean, you know, the European Union is not UBI for Tim Cook, right? Like, if he doesn't want Europeans money, that doesn't mean that the European Union should just say, all right, everyone's phones is a brick now, right? Like, they should say, great, don't let the door hit you in the app on the way out, right? Like, this is now a European market. But so you feel that like governments of other countries should be, like, like, like creating open software, open markets, like more regulation in order to...

Yeah, so they should be getting rid of some regulation, right? Like, get rid of these anti-circumvention laws. That's deregulation. I think, you know, the argument of deregulation, regulation per se is silly because what matters is what the regulation says, right? It's deregulation is good when it's a bad regulation. Regulation is good when it's a real problem that you're addressing with an administrable remedy that addresses the problems.

So, you know, I think that, like, if you were to pick two policies that we're would disandshitify things beyond competition law itself, merger scrutiny, the stuff that our mutual friend, Lena Kahn, was doing, and Jonathan Cantor and Rohit Chopra, and in addition to being joined by Sarah Winn Williams, I'm being joined on this tour that's coming up by Ed Zittron, by Lena Khan, and by Rohit Chopra. It's going to be an amazing tour. How do I get on this tour? You know, the L.A. stuff is David Dian, who I think you probably already had on the show. You did my last LA tour. It's fine. Yeah, but I would love to have you for a future event in LA. I love all my amazing. Don't stress. Antitrust pro-labor friends. But, you know, that that work, in addition to that

work, the two policies that I would institute, one is a right to exit. So right now we have some federated social media, Blue Sky, Mastodon, and these have tools that let you move your account from one server to another. And what that means is that if you're on a server and you don't like the way it's being managed. You go to another server, but all of your connections stay intact. It's like porting your phone number, right? Yeah. When you switch from T-Mobile to Verizon, you don't need to get new friends.

Right? They just follow you over. In fact, it's kind of weird to even care, like, about which network your friends are on. I think ultimately, like, the trajectory we should want for social media is for which server or network or technology you're using to communicate with your friends to be as weird as, like, calling your friends. end up in saying, you wouldn't believe whose SIM is in my phone today, right? A good example of this is it was only, I think, 10 years ago or so, there was a regulation put

in place that when you change phone companies, you get to keep your phone number porting. Yeah. And that's like a basic thing. If you want to switch from Verizon to T-Mobile, you don't need to tell everybody a new phone number because that was a recognition that's too high of switching costs. And the reason that's a good policy is it's very administrable. So can you tell whether a firm is following that policy? Sure.

If a user says I port in my phone number and it didn't come over, then you just call the phone. And if it doesn't ring, then you know the company is out of compliance, right? And does it create a capital amount? No, because there's a standard way for even small mom and pop phone companies, which do exist in America, to do number porting. So it's not like you have to be a billion dollar phone company with a million subscribers to do this. any phone company of any size can just use open standards defined code to do this. So we already have this with account porting in social media. We have two different stacks with open code and open standards for it.

Administering, it's really easy. So if I'm on your server and I switch to someone else's server and you never give me the file I need to move over, I call the regulator. And the regulator goes to you and says, Adam, I know you told me and you told Corey that you gave him the file. Corey says he never got it. Rather than figuring out what happens, you give me the file and I'll give it to Corey and we'll call it a day. One person could administer 100 million people's social media remedies through this.

So it's a highly administrable remedy. And because we have open source code for this, it's not a capital mode. So you could start your own social media platform tomorrow and you could support Approto or you could support activity pub or you could do something that was plug compatible with it. And so there's room for innovation. and you wouldn't have to worry about being out of compliance with the rule. So it's like it's a really good rule because it means that firms will either have to get better about respecting their users or they will lose users. And either one of those is a win, right?

The worst firms losing users, that's good. The worst firms cleaning up their act, also good. And, you know, when we look at the conduct of the platforms and the remedies we've proposed for them historically, we've looked at these platforms, we've observed that they do not take their user welfare seriously. and we have acted to make them behave better, right? And this has been a failure, 20 years of trying to make Mark Zuckerberg be a better community manager.

I think we can declare it just a disaster. And what we don't spend enough time focusing on when we think about the true harms of people being harassed and brigaded on these platforms is why people stay. Like, why does someone who gets so much abuse on this platform stay? Well, it's because it's where their life is, right? like the only thing worse than being a member of a disfavored, marginalized minority who's heaped with abuse and discrimination is having all of that stuff in being alone, right? So people don't leave the, so make it so they can leave the platforms, right?

Don't try and, you know, improve life in East Germany, tear down the wall so people can leave, right? And, you know, then the people who stay might be able to improve things or not, right? So that's the first remedy. And the second remedy is the end-to-end principle, which is very key to the history of the Internet. The end-to-end principle was the thing that replaced circuit switching, the thing that the bell system used to use, where every phone call went through a central switch, and the person who operated that switch, the bell system, decided whether to connect that phone call and on what terms. And in the end-to-end network, the internet, the packet switch network, the role of intermediaries, right, of the server, the routers in the middle of the network is to deliver packets from willing senders to willing receivers as efficiently and as reliably as possible. When we talk about this at the network transport layer, we call it net neutrality. And even though net neutrality has had a checkered history with being enacted and being torn down and so on, it has been the de facto policy of internet service providers since the earliest days.

Yeah. But what we've never had is neutrality at the service layer. So there's never been a guarantee if you go to Amazon and you search for a product that the best match for the product comes up. In fact, it's quite the opposite. Amazon has this business. They call it an advertising business. When I wrote the book, it was a $32 billion a year business. It's now a $52 billion a year business.

And it's payola to be the top search result. So the top search result on Amazon is not the best match for your query. It's the match that paid the most to be there. On average, the top result on Amazon is 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. The top row is 25% more expensive. And the best result is somewhere around position 17 on the second screen. Wow. Right.

So we could say if there is an exact match for a query, that has to be the best result, right? That has to be the first result. So in the same way that if you walked into Best Buy and said, give me 10 Duracel batteries and they gave you four, you know, house brand batteries that cost three times as much, that would be fraud.

I mean, just say like, if you tell me the best match for this query is a thing that isn't the best match, it's fraud. But the same thing we could do for social media, where we say, if I subscribe to your feed, then when you post something,

I should see it. Because that is the purpose of offering people's subscriptions. Yeah, I remember when that would happen on the internet. How many times have you said and press the little bell so that when I post you get an update? I've never said it and maybe I need to start fucking saying it. Right. It sucks. Yeah.

Right? It really sucks. And, you know, if they are required to deliver the things you ask to see, there is less space they can use to boost garbage into your feed and they have to treat you better. And these also highly administrable remedies because how do you find out whether the stuff that's people that you follow are being uh is showing up in your feed it's a really easy to experiment to do you follow someone you look at their feed and you look at your feed and you go oh they're they're omitting things right yeah how do you know whether a search engine is delivering the best result well you know what the best result is you search for it if it's not the top you know that it's a bad

result and is this a capital moat no because like if you were to go interview for a job at twitter when twitter was twitter and they said all right here's the whiteboard draw me the diagram of how you would make twitter right the diagram you would build is the one in which the things you subscribe to showed up in your feed, right? Making stuff that you didn't subscribe to show in your feed takes extra code, right? If you write a search engine, making the best match go first is the default, right? It takes extra code to put things that aren't the best match in the top box on the search. So these are both highly administrative remedies that cut against the most important forms of inshidification that platforms use that you don't need a giant staff.

You don't need a lot of technical capacity. not a fact-intensive question like, you know, was this user harassed? Okay, well, first we figure out what we call harassment. Then we figure out whether this is harassment. Then we figure out whether Facebook did the steps that they needed to block their harassment. That's like a 10-year process for a thing that happens a hundred times a minute on Facebook. Yeah. Right. Just let people leave. Just let people leave. Right. And so those are the policy remedies. You're not going to get them by voting with your wallet. You're only going to get them by being part of a polity. Here in the United States, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has this national network of community groups.

They're independent. They work at the local and state level, and they share information, tactics, and solidarity with coordination from EFF. We pay really good organizers to help them work at it. It's called the Electronic Frontier Alliance. If you go to eFA.eff.org, electronic frontier alliance at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, eFFF.org, you will find your local groups. And that is one of many ways that you can join a polity and be more than an ambulatory wallet hoping desperately to vote with your wallet, which like, you're going to lose that election because you do not have the thickest wallet, right? The people who got the most votes in that in that election do not want what you want.

You can be a member of a polity. You can make systemic change rather than agonizing endlessly about whether you're bad to shop at Amazon or, you know, use Twitter. Yeah. You can actually focus on structural remedies. You guys are organizing. You're doing real organizing around these issues. on, like, what, local community level?

Local community level ordinances that ban facial recognition, ordinances that require open procurement processes, ordinances that, that, and state laws for right to repair. All of this stuff is running at the grassroots level. I am not one of the organizers. My colleagues who do that organizing work are brilliant. They're much better at that stuff than I am. And it has been one of the biggest growth areas for EFF is working with these community groups. And through that kind of work, I mean, we should end there because that's a wonderful, you know, pitch to the audience to get involved. But I just want to hear you speak to my pessimistic view sometimes, which is, you know, the open internet that I loved that was full of, you know, niche interests and surprising things and gave people megaphones who didn't have one before.

Well, I'm also aware it was the hobbyist internet, right? It was code your own websites, you know, buy a book on HTML from the Barnes & Noble. And like, I literally coded my own website. And the world that we're in now is just so often I read open web advocates who say, well, if we do this or if we do that. And my response is, people aren't going to do that. They don't have time. Most people aren't going to become hobbyists, you know, like for the same reason that most people aren't going to put together their own weight training schedules. Sure.

Or they're not going to like learn to bake their own bread. Right. They're going to go to the main thing. They just want the thing to work quickly. Yep. And so much of the inshittification process seems to be. focusing on down to that like there's the you know the Apple's point of view on why close down the platform well the users actually well they're kind of lazy and dumb you know they they don't

they're not that invested they just want the thing to work if we lock it down it works better works more smoothly it becomes a toaster rather than like a fire that you build in your own backyard sure and and so how do we get around I think it's a real observation about people how do we can this what you're talking about get around that so I think that sensible defaults are great, but that no one can anticipate all the ways that people are going to need to use a technology in the future. And when it's lawful and possible for end users to modify things, or for people who act as their proxies to modify things, then we get real progress. There is this story among, for example, Apple, which is a really good example here,

that users don't want independent repair, they don't want independent app stores. Apple does not act like this is the case, right? Apple acts like if there isn't a law banning you from going to an independent repair store, you will go to an independent repair store, right? If Apple really thought no one wanted independent repair, they would just like take five, right? But when we had 18 repair bills defeated in the state ledge in 2018, led by Apple,

it wasn't because Apple thought that you didn't want to get your phone fixed. They wouldn't invent a new type of, type of screw every six months that requires a proprietary screwdriver if they were just like, people don't want to repair their own computers. Right, right. They're trying to prevent something that they actually expect will happen. And you may not want to fix your phone, but you might know someone who does, right? And repair is a really good example here.

So landfilling a ton of e-waste creates one job. Repairing a ton of e-waste creates 150 local jobs because like no one sends their phone or their car or their dishwasher to another state or another country to have a fixed. When your screen breaks, you want to fix today, right? Yeah. And so, you know, that is a really powerful engine of economic development. And I'm not saying everyone's going to fix their own phone. But like, look, I'm never going to plumb my house.

But I wouldn't want the guy who built my house to be the only person who could fix my plumbing. Right. And like, how do we make the plumbing good without giving that person a veto over my plumbing? With a building code. Yeah. Right? Not with, not with like the property. developer, you know, Mr. Leavitt of Levitown deciding how the plumbing is going to work and having

a veto over it. You know, I liked Web 2.0. I thought that it was great when all my Normie friends could get on the internet. I loved that because the only defect in the old good internet was it was too hard for all my normie friends to use. And then they got to join the party. And back to vulgar Thatcherism, I think the tech companies want you to think that ease of use and flexibility are antithetical to each other, that they sit on a teeter-totter, and you get one or the other, and the more you have one,

the less you have of the other, like that if there was a box on your iPhone that said, let me choose my own app store, that all the elegance would just run out of the box, like it was, you know, hydrogen gas or something. Yeah. You know, you puncture the phone

and it would all escape. And I just don't think it's true. Like, for one thing, Macs are good computers. Yeah. And Max let you choose your software vendor, right? So, you know, like,

but they lock it down, more every year, you know, it's harder to get that unlicensed. Does it make the Mac better? No, it doesn't. Right. So Tim Cook, I'd like you to meet Tim Cook, right? The guy who makes the Mac. Yeah.

Who will tell you that the Mac is a wonderful computer and who was telling you the Mac was a wonderful computer five years ago. Yeah. You know, I think that there is a role for consumer advocacy, for user advocacy. And I think that that role, to the extent that manufacturers, OEMs fill that role, they fill it out of a mix of genuine. commitment to user welfare and fear of user defection. And it has to be boat because as Pregavar Ragavan and Bangome showed us, there will come a day

when there will be an argument in the firm about trading user welfare for more profit for the firm, changing the distributional output outcome of the benefit or the surplus is created by the firm's products. And if the users can't leave, the person who wants to make the user's lives worse wins the argument every time because money talks and bullshit walks. But if the users can leave, then the people in the firm who want to make something good will win the argument. If Apple is truly making an app store that genuinely makes its users lives better,

it doesn't need to make it a felony to install a different app store. Users will just use it. And no one is going to be able to predict all the ways you're going to need to use your computer now and in the future. Yeah. Right? There's just no one can know. it. You know, like, I worked on a terrible acrimonious fight over DRM and web browsers for video

streamers, for Netflix. They were really driving this bus. And they were threatening to leave the web. They said, we won't, we won't make video available for the web anymore. All the big streamers said this unless you put DRM in web browsers. And DRM, it's protected by the Digital Melaname Copyright Act, which means you wouldn't be able to fully audit a web browser anymore. And it's a thing two billion people use. So open source web browsers would cease to exist. Yeah. And that's more or less what's happened. There's this close source proprietary component that is part of every web browser that can play a video. And they all ship with these components, something called encrypted media extensions.

And this thing's called a content decryption module. And there have already been security breaches involving these. And when security researchers report on these, they risk felony prosecution because they're revealing defects that might help you evade the DNA. This has happened. This has already lost the fight. Yeah, we lost the fight. And one of the things that we argued about back then was disability rights. and we said, look, you know, you've built a lot of usability features into this video streaming

platform. It has secondary auto tracks. It has secondary description tracks, right? It has secondary video tracks. It has subtitling. You haven't considered everything. And so there was a great guy. Actually, my book, Red Team Blues is dedicated to him. This guy, Dan Kaminsky, died during the pandemic. He was diabetic. And he couldn't manage his meds alone. And he got cognitively impaired from not taking his meds and then he couldn't fix it. It's a wonderful guy, real hero. Do you remember there was this time where there was this defect in DNS that threatened the whole internet?

And one guy fixed it. Yeah. That was Dan. Wow. So Dan, among his many amazing accomplishments, he built this thing called Dan Camp. So his last name was Kaminsky. So it was Dan Cam. And it was a thing where it would put you through a quick vision test to determine which

color you were colorblind in. And then it would shift the gamut of all the video you watched into a gamut that you could perceive. And people who use Dan Cam, would cry with joy because suddenly the world was in color and you couldn't do Dan cam with this with this stuff wow and then I had a pal who had photosensitive epilepsy and she was watching a Netflix movie once and she had three grandma seizures and ended up in the hospital because of strobe effects wow and it's not that hard to write a look ahead

that looks into the future checks to see where there's a strobe effect and then dampens it or skips it or warns you if the streamers were willing to open their video that's That's right. That's the video equivalent of like a screen reader or like a braille device that turns text into. But they just couldn't imagine all these uses. And these are two uses I thought of. But when you think of all the different ways people become disabled, I worked on a treaty, the Treaty of Marrakesh, which guarantees the rights of people with disability to access copyrighted works.

And the publishers wanted to limit it to people who are vision impaired or legally blind. We were like, well, there are a lot of people who are print disabled, who have perfect vision, but they don't have hands, right? Or they're paralyzed. Or they are neurodivergent and they can only process audio and they need text to speech. or, you know, whatever, and you just go through all the different ways people are print disabled. It is essentially an infinite list. You will never, ever accommodate all of those different use cases at the design stage.

You always have to have open space to adapt technology to uses that you've just never thought of. It's true always, it's especially true if your design process is a bunch of middle-aged white guys who look like us in a coastal state in the United States. Yeah. Right? Because we are so weird, globally speaking, compared to the uses that most people are going to have. We just not fit to do this. And so, yeah, the tech companies make great products. They make great defaults.

They think really hard about inclusivity in their design and they will never be complete. And to have the epistemic humility to say, I don't know how every person who uses this is going to need to use it. I can't anticipate using this during wildfires when the internet goes out and where it's going to be really important to be able to access things offline that you can't normally save offline so that you can get a map so that you can escape, you know, from a blaze, right? Or that you can do point-to-point communications with AirDrop that Apple is just nerfed to make Xi Jinping happy, right? Like, you just never know. You never know how people are going to need it. I like the word humility because, you know, I do think. think, like, I've had a long relationship with Apple as a company, right?

Sure. And sometimes they do create stuff where I'm like, I never even thought that I would need to use this. And, you know, you'll be using your iPhone, like, oh, holy shit, they added a feature that did this thing. I didn't even think that my phone could do. They also have a lot of great accessibility features, right? I think to their credit.

They really do. They have a huge number. And I've read testimony by blind users who've had, you know, incredible revelatory experiences with iPhones. But they don't have the belief that the user. might come up with a use that they never anticipated. It's like all of the genius comes from inside the building of Cupertino, not the outside. And you know, John Deere, they're one of the great adversaries in repair.

And in John Deere's early years, and their argument is like, these farmers have got cowship between their toes. This is a really expensive computer with wheels. They have nothing to say to our design process. When John Deere started, they used to have field engineers who had visit farms to understand the modifications farmers had made to their tractors and reintegrate them into the products, right? Today, in design circles, we call that paving the desire paths. So, you know, you lay out a campus, but you don't put, you don't put pavement down for the

paths. And you come back a year later and you see where people have cut through the grass. Right. You pave that stuff because you just don't know. Users can figure stuff out that you don't know and that you can't anticipate. Yeah. History of Twitter is this history, right? Yeah.

Retweet, quote tweet, all this stuff comes from user innovation. The users literally invented the at symbol. Yeah, right. So here we have these incredible innovations that come from users that spread among users that are kind of commons, right? They don't belong to anyone firm or any individual. I guess one of the things that firms like about keeping innovation in house is that it all becomes IP and all becomes something that's proprietary to the firm and not something

that can be shared. But I also think IP is grossly overstated and overrated. I think that the recipe to make a thing is way less important. and then the process knowledge to follow the recipe. And the reason- Tell somebody in Hollywood that, Jesus Christ. Right. And the reason firms love IP is because IP can be alienated from workers.

Oh, yeah. But process knowledge leaves the door with the worker every night. You put that so well, IP can be alienated from workers, because the argument I always use is like, hey, the studio can't own the actor or the writer or the director, but they can own Batman. Right. And they can go, okay, well, the audience is coming for Batman.

They're not coming for the rest of it. But actually, at the end of the day, what the audience goes, hey, you know, the new Batman movie is actually pretty good? Like, this one's good. Right. Right. Like, oh, you know, did you go see this one? It's actually good. Right.

Because the process knowledge of the people who made it. That's right. And I've heard you talk about Adams Rins Everything in the writer's room and, like, the way that evolved and, you know, you had commercial pressures, but you figured out how to adapt to them. And, you know, I worked on an episode of Adam Rums Everything with you was really cool. Yeah. And so that process knowledge, it's really, um, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, you know, uh, uh, The Germans call it finger-spitzing-giffel, the fingertip feeling, right? The feeling of like, finger-schmutzeng-gifel.

Finger-spitzing-feel. Yeah, so it's like the feeling of like having a ball balanced on your fingertips and knowing like which way it's going to tip and being able to. So that fingertip feeling where you just know how the process is going. Yeah. That's a thing, you know, when you look at like industrial processes, this is all really well elucidated in a new book by Dan Wang called Breakneck about Chinese and American industrial policy.

And he talks about how like process knowledge and manufacturing. is stuff like, oh, when this machine jams, the thing you need to do to clear it is this, and the rate that you put the feedstock in to stop it from jamming is this. And if the person who recalibrates it is off sick, the guy who used to do is retired, and this is his cell phone number, right?

And that's process knowledge. It's not IP, right? It's, but you can't run a factory without it. And it doesn't matter how great the patent is for the thing the factory makes. Without the process knowledge, the factory can't make the thing. And it's industry-wide.

It's extra enterprise, right? So you get a bunch of off-tolerance components from an upstream supplier. You know who to call there and say, hey, this RAM is not running at high clock speeds, right? And then you figured how to integrate that into a lower-end model of your product. You know who to call it your downstream retailers to say, do not clock this above so many megahertz. This is now like a lower-end component because our supplier had an upstream problem, but we've managed to salvage the run. that's all process knowledge. It's knowing people's phone numbers.

Yeah. Right? It's knowing the org chart of other firms in your supply chain. And it's not IP. It's people. It's people. It's important people. That's the IP we care about.

That's right. Very good. Thank you. Here's my last question for you is I feel like when I hear you talk, I still hear a lot of optimism about technology and what it can do, whereas I'm literally in a place right now where I've been in love with technology my whole life. I was the first person I knew to ever use the internet. My history with it goes very deep.

But at this point, I'm sitting around going, like, are things really better than they were in 1998? Like, is my life or the lives of other people, like, yeah, is streaming actually better than cable was? You know, is the internet, is the information available on the internet really better than what I could get at the library and the bookstore? Like, are the material content?

of people's lives actually improved by this stuff. And I really, I spent most of my life really believing, yes, yes, of course, it's great that I can send a photo, my sister can send me a photo, my niece. That's nice. But like, you know, everything else, I'm not totally a pessimist yet, but, you know, the, the way that these companies have used technology as a means of control over people, as a means to enrich themselves and impoverish everybody else, has started to, outweigh the benefits to me.

And so I'm curious how you look at the cost-benefit analysis of what we've been through, but also, like, do you have optimism about the future of technology to make human life actually better and why? So I think you've fallen into a trap of vulgar Thatcherism, right? You're like, well, is all the benefit we've got worth the cost as opposed to how do we get rid of the costs and keep the benefits? Yeah. Right?

You know, you're taking it as a package when it really should. It's not a pre-feast menu. It should be an a la carte. And it's only because they want to cram a bunch of stuff you don't want to eat down your throat that this meal sucks. And you could just throw away the stuff that's gross, right? Yeah. The salmon foam with, with, you know, mineral salts or whatever. And at the beginning, all the benefits were there, right?

And then the costs were imposed upon us. And so we could get rid of those. And so we could get rid of those. And we could have stopped them. So here's a way out of that trap. And it's to throw away pessimism and throw away optimism, which are both fatalism, right? Pessimism, the belief things are going to get worse no matter what we do. Optimism, the belief things are going to get better no matter what we do.

Right. Right. What we do matters, right? We are steering history. And what we call that belief is hope. And hope is the belief that even though you can't see your way from here to the end state that you want to achieve, that if you ascend the gradient towards that future, that as you ascend it, you will attain new advantage points from which will be revealed to you terrain that was invisible when you were at that

lower spot and that that will be your next step. So I don't know how we get to the best world, but I know how we get to a better world. And even if it's just a little better, we might get somewhere better than that. One thing I do know is that there were huge problems with the old world from my perspective as an activist. So, you know, I grew up in Toronto. I spent my winters riding bicycles around the street of Toronto with a bucket of wheat paste and a stack of flyers trying to get people out to protest. And if you think you're going to build a mass movement without the internet, I want you to spend a winter of sub-zero weather,

fliring with weight pace that gets, soaks through your gloves and your coat. Okay, the civil rights movement did it, you know, in the 60s, right? But I tell you what, their adversaries didn't have the internet. And today, our adversaries do, right? So they have instantaneous cost-free organizing. And what are we going to have? Flyering, right?

Like, so we got to have it. We need to seize the means of computation. Right? We got it. That's how we get out of this math. Seize the means of computation. Okay, great. Give us the pitch for EFA, EFA one more time.

So EFA. EFF.org, network of autonomous community groups, networked by EFF paid organizers who help share tactics, solidarity, make sure that one victory can be repeated elsewhere. They work at the local and state level. They work on things like privacy, policing, abortion rights and data control. uh consumer advocacy right to repair uh they've been very effective they're all over america eFA.eff.org you can either find one near you or you can start one incredible and the book

is called in shittification out now you can pick up a copy at our bookshop which is part of bookshop.org factually pod dot com slash books uh we do receive an affiliate uh commission off of that where else can people find it uh well you by the way you publish your shit in more interesting places than almost anybody else so you're going to have the best answer to this question so I do, you know, because I won't let digital rights management of my audio books, Amazon won't carry them. Yeah. And so I make my own audiobooks. I go into the studio and I record with the director and have an engineer, master them. I love you for this. And then, and then I sell them everywhere that audiobooks are sold except for Apple, Amazon, and Audible and audiobooks.com, which are like just the ones that

start with A, all seem to manage. Just the big monopolies. Okay. Yeah. So you can get them for me, craftbound.com slash shop. But you can also get them at like Google Play and Downpour. And my favorite is company called Libro. I love Libro. They are the bookshop. org of audiobooks. They're a B-Corp, and they share some of the proceeds with whatever local bookstore you choose.

Mine is diesel out on the west side in Santa Monica. And the idea is that you're showrooming the books there. You're going and you're reading the shelf talkers, the bookstore clerks have written, but then you're going home and buying the audiobook from them. And they're all DRM free. And what I love about this is I have an underwater MP3 player and I have a bad back. And I swim a mile every day listening to audiobooks. Wow.

And it is so great. It's the thing that makes swimming not boring. And that underwater audio player doesn't have an audible app. No, there's no audible app for it. And this is the usage that no one at Amazon ever thought of. That's right. And at Libro, this, hopefully this is one of those things where we talk about them on the podcast and then they decide to sponsor us because I really do like the company.

Because one of the things I like about it is you go, you buy the book. I just did this yesterday. You go buy the book and then you log in to your account and then it's just like download MP3 of the book. And you can get your own MP3 and it's, legal. It's your copy and you can do whatever you want with that. And if you're like a super nerd audiobook guy, they now have MB4s, which is, it's like, well, now we're really getting into the weeds. But AAC is the audible format that iTunes made that it has chapters and remembers where you

were. AAC without DRM is MB4. And so you can get it as an MB4. So DRM free single file chapter headings and time code and all the rest of it. It's so cool. So head to Libro.fm. Or once again, our bookshop, factuallypod.com, or crapphound.org slash... Dot com. Craphound.com slash shop. Corey, thank you so much for being on the show. And I can't wait until you write another book in two weeks and we can have you back. There will be one in 20...

There'll be two in 2020s. I think we need to have a conversation about how you write so many fucking books. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks, Adam. Well, thank you once again to Corey for coming on the show. Once again, if you want to pick up a copy of his book and I know you do, head to factuallypod.com slash books. If you'd like to support the show directly, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover.

For five bucks a month, you get every episode of the show ad free. For 15 bucks a month, I will read your name in the damn credits, and I'm pulling up some of those names right now in order for me to read them. I would like to thank Oros Harman, Dylan Roy, Jake, Callan, hey, look a distraction, Uber Elder, and Navarro Egg Burger. Those are the most recent supporters, but who can we pull from the middle of the list to thank? I'd also like to give thanks to Tara Wilson, Brennan, Peterman, Ultrasar, and Josh Davies. If you'd like me to read your name or silly username at the end of the show, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover.

Of course, if you want to come see me live in Des Moines, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Pittsburgh, Tacoma, Spacan, a bunch of other great cities as well. Head to Adamconover.com for all those tickets and tour dates. I want to thank my producers, Tony Wilson, and Sam Rowdman, everybody here at HeadGum for making the show possible. Thank you so much for listening, and we're going to see you next time on Factually. That was a hate gum podcast.