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This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column. “Ideas Lying Around,” about archivillain Milton Friedman’s surprisingly good theory of change, and how to apply it to progressive politics.
Enter Friedman: to people reeling in crisis, Friedman insisted that the missing oil was somehow the product of unionization, pollution controls, women’s lib, and the civil rights movement. Though this was transparent nonsense, akin to blaming witches for a crop failure, the crisis was so dislocating, and Friedman’s ideas had been lying around for so long, that they moved swiftly to the center.
(Image: btwashburn, CC BY 2.0)
This week on my podcast, I read my lastest Locus column. “The Swivel-Eyed Loons Have a Point,” about the unlikely – but undeniable – common ground I share with the most unhinged far-right conspiracists.
The swivel-eyed loons at the anti-15-minute-city protests point out that such a scheme constitutes a form of pervasive location-tracking surveillance, and that this surveillance could be leveraged to attack disfavored minorities. They’re not wrong. Just look at London, where a (again, perfectly sensible) system of “congestion charging” and “low-emissions zones” has made serious progress in improving the air quality, reducing traffic, and improving journey times for public transit.
London also uses ALPRs to enforce its traffic restrictions, and pairs this with a massive public/private network of street cameras aimed at pedestrians, backstopped by a public transit system whose Oyster payment cards are virtually impossible to use anonymously.
The thing is, the UK government has a long history of abusing this kind of power. The Metropolitan London police ran a 40-year covert operation to infiltrate, track, and disrupt trade union organizers and activists, from students to Members of Parliament. The Met also colluded with large construction firms to maintain a secret blacklist of union organizers who were denied employment and had their lives ruined.
Burbank: Apr 26, 6PM, Dark Delicacies
San Francisco: Apr 30, 2PM, San Francisco Public Library (with Annalee Newitz)
PDX/Cedar Hills: May 2, 7PM, Powell’s (with Andy Baio)
Mountain View: May 5, 7PM, Books, Inc (with Mitch Kapor)
Berkeley: May 6/7, Bay Area Book Fair (with Glynn Washington and Wendy Liu)
Vancouver: May 10, 9:50AM, Open Source Summit
Vancouver: May 10, 6:30PM, Heritage Hall (with Sean Cranbury)
Calgary, May 11, 7PM, Wordfest (with Peter Hemminger)
Gaithersburg, May 20, 3:15PM, Gaithersburg Book Festival
DC, May 22, Public Knowledge Emerging Tech Conference (keynote)
Toronto: May 23, 8PM, WEPFest (with with The Rheostatics’ Dave Bidini, Citizen Lab’s Ron Deibert, and the whistleblower Nancy Olivieri)
Hay-on-Wye: May 27/28, HowTheLightGetsIn
Oxford: May 29, 7PM, Blackwell’s (with Tim Harford)
Nottingham: May 30, 6:30PM, Waterstones (with Christian Reilly)
Manchester: May 31, 6:30PM, Waterstones (with Ian Forrester)
London: Jun 1, 2PM, UCL Peter Kirstein Lecture
Edinburgh: Jun 3, Cymera Festival
London: Jun 5, 7:15PM, British Library (with Baroness Martha Lane Fox)
Berlin: Jun 7, Re:publica keynote (with Rebecca Giblin)
This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column. “How To Make a Child-Safe TikTok: Have you tried not spying on kids,” about the bizarre unwillingness of considering a middle-ground between “unregulated TikTok” and “banning TikTok” – namely, prohibiting TikTok from spying on kids.
This week on my podcast, I bring you some clips of Wil Wheaton’s recording sessions for the audiobook of Red Team Blues, my next novel, an anti-finance finance thriller starring the 67 year old forensic accountant Martin Hench, who specializes in high-tech scams.
I’m currently kickstarting this audiobook, pre-selling audiobooks, ebooks and hardcovers. I have to self-produce my own audiobooks, because Audible – the monopolist audiobook division of Amazon – refuses to carry DRM-free titles like mine.
This week on my podcast, I read a selection from my next novel, Red Team Blues, an anti-finance finance thriller about Marty Hench, a 67 year old hard-charging forensic accountant who’s seen every finance scam that Silicon Valley has come up with over the previous 40 years. Marty’s ready to retire, but an old friend pulls him in for one last job, an offer he can’t refuse: recovering the stolen keys to a hidden backdoor in a cryptocurrency system that are worth more than a billion dollars. Recovering the keys turns out to be the easy part: the hard part is surviving the three-way war that is ignited in their wake, between Azerbaijani money-launderers, Mexican narcos, and crooked three-letter agencies.
I’m currently kickstarting a real audiobook of this one, and I’m going into the studio with Wil Wheaton on Monday. If you enjoy my stories, articles and podcasts and want to know how to show your gratitude, please consider backing this kickstarter by pre-ordering an audiobook, ebook, and/or hardcover.
One evening, I got a wild hair and drove all night from San Diego to Menlo Park. Why Menlo Park? It had both a triple-Michelin-star place and a dear old friend both within spitting distance of the Walmart parking lot, where I could park the Unsalted Hash, leaving me free to drink as much as I cared to and still be able to
walk home and crawl into bed.
I’d done a job that turned out better than I’d expected—well enough that I was set for the year if I lived carefully. I didn’t want to live carefully. The age for that was long past. I wanted to live it up. There’d be more work. I wanted to celebrate.Truth be told, I also didn’t want to contemplate the possibility that, at the age of sixty-seven, the new work might stop coming in. Silicon Valley hates old people, but that was okay, because I hated Silicon Valley. Professionally, that is.
Getting close to Bakersfield, I pulled the Unsalted Hash into a rest stop to stretch my legs and check my phone. After a putter around the picnic tables and vending machine, I walked the perimeter of my foolish and ungainly and luxurious tour bus, checking the tires and making sure the cargo compartments were dogged and locked. I climbed back in, checked my sludge levels and decided they were low enough that I could use my own toilet, then, finally, having forced myself to wait, sat on one of the buttery leather chairs and checked my messages.
This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk, making the Luddite case against bossware and other jobs where your boss is an app.
The rise of gig work produced a massive surge of “craft” workers who toiled on their own premises, most notably the drivers for Uber, Lyft, Doordash and delivery services who worked from their own cars, assured that they were independent businesspeople, able to book the hours and jobs they wanted. If the scenery caught their eye, they could pull over to the side of the road, get out of their cars and touch grass — and no one would even know they did it, much less punish them for it.
The pandemic lockdowns accelerated this process, as bossware made the leap from the low-waged, precarious Black women who were trapped by Arise’s predatory home call-centers to all kinds of white-collar workers who were told they were working from home, but who were really living at work.
Bossware — technology that monitors every click, every keystroke, and the streams from your device’s cameras and microphones — is everywhere today. Even so, blue collar workers have it the worst: they are the chickenized reverse-centaurs, forced to pay for their own working equipment, then minutely monitored, down to their facial expressions, and minutely choreographed, down to their eye-movements, to make sure their bosses are getting every penny’s worth of value out of their bodies.
This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, Twiddler, which further explores my theory of enshittification, and the factors that make it endemic to digital platforms.
The early internet promised more than disintermediation — it also promised endless configurability, where users and technologists could install after-market code that altered the functioning of the services they relied on, seizing the means of computation to tilt the balance of power to their benefit.Technology remains intrinsically configurable, of course. The only kind of computer we know how to build is the universal, Turing complete Von Neumann machine, which can run all the software we know how to write.
That’s how we got things like ad-blockers, the largest boycott in world history. The configurability of technology is why things like free and open software are politically important: in a technologically mediated society, control over the functions of the technology you rely on is control over every part of your life — your job, your education, your love life, your political engagement.
While it remains technically possible to reconfigure the technologies that you rely on, doing so is now a legal minefield. “IP” has come to mean “any law that lets a company control the conduct of its competitors, critics or customers,” and that’s why “IP” is always at the heart of maneuvers to block platform users’ attempts to wrestle value away from the platforms.
(Image: Stephen Drake, CC BY 2.0, modified)
This week on my podcast, I read my Pluralistic blog post, Tiktok’s enshittification, which sets out a kind of master theory of enshittification, illustrated by Tiktok’s platform dynamics.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus column, “Social Quitting, about the enshittification lifecycle of social media platforms.
But as Facebook and Twitter cemented their dominance, they steadily changed their services to capture more and more of the value that their users generated for them. At first, the companies shifted value from users to advertisers: engaging in more surveillance to enable finer-grained targeting and offering more intrusive forms of advertising that would fetch high prices from advertisers.This enshittification was made possible by high switching costs. The vast communities who’d been brought in by network effects were so valuable that users couldn’t afford to quit, because that would mean giving up on important personal, professional, commercial, and romantic ties. And just to make sure that users didn’t sneak away, Facebook aggressively litigated against upstarts that made it possible to stay in touch with your friends without using its services. Twitter consistently whittled away at its API support, neutering it in ways that made it harder and harder to leave Twitter without giving up the value it gave you.
When my daughter Poesy was four, her nursery school let us know that they were shutting down a day before my wife’s office closed for the holidays, leaving us with a childcare problem. Since I worked for myself, I took the day off and brought her to my office, where we recorded a short podcast, singing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (a frankly amazing rendition!).
We’ve done it every year since, except for 2016 when I had mic problems. Now she’s 14, and we’ve just recorded our tenth installment, and as always, it was a highlight of my holiday season. This year, our Christmas carol is back, along with a brief interview about her interests and hobbies, and a summary of a seriously creepy short story she’s writing.
Here’s this year’s recording, and here are the years gone by:
When Amazon bought Twitch, the story was that the new conglomerate would be more efficient and that would benefit everyone – streamers and audiences. That’s the story we hear about every anticompetitive merger, and it’s always a lie.
One major efficiency that the Amazon-Twitch merger was supposed to produce? Lower bandwidth costs. That’s one of the largest expenses associated with running a streaming service, after all, and Amazon Web Services is the 800lb gorilla of cloud computing. They’ve bought or built tons of infrastructure, and even for parts of the stack they don’t own, they are so big they can demand preferential treatment.
Hypothetically, cheaper bandwidth leaves more money on the table for the creative workers whose labor generates Twitch’s revenue, but that’s not how it’s played out. In incredible blog post explaining why Twitch is unilaterally canceling its highest-tier royalties, company president Dan Clancy blames the change on the cost of bandwidth:
With most streamers, Twitch takes half the money they earn. That’s a big chunk, which Clancy justifies by citing “continuous investments in the products and people that make your growth possible.” He describes some new features that have increased the revenue per audience member since Amazon’s 2014 acquisition of Twitch.
But for Twitch’s most valuable streamers – the ones it courted most aggressively – there’s a better revenue split: 70/30 (the worker gets 70%, while Amazon takes 30%). These are the deals that Clancy is unilaterally cancelling.
Clancy says it’s not fair that the company’s favored streamers should be earning more than the majority of streamers, which is a pretty good point. What he doesn’t explain is why the solution to that unfairness isn’t to just give all the streamers a 70/30 split – especially in light of all the new revenue he boasts about.
After all, nearly all of Twitch’s costs are fixed – adding a new monetization feature costs the same whether there are a million Twitch streamers or just two of them. That means that every streamer boosts the dividends from new monetization features.
The major variable cost for Twitch – the cost that changes based on the number of streamers on the service – is bandwidth, which may be why Clancy blames the clawback on it. But this is weird. As Sam Biddle wrote, “Amazon is charging Amazon so much money to run the business via Amazon that it has no choice but to take more money from streamers.”
https://twitter.com/samfbiddle/status/1572667269284777984
It’s not a very plausible explanation, especially when there’s a far simpler one sitting right there: Amazon is cutting the wages of its workers because it can. The streaming industry is highly concentrated, and Amazon is the largest player. It’s where audiences go to get their streams, so streamers who want to address that audience need to submit to whatever terms Amazon imposes. Whatever negotiating leverage creators were able to exert at the start of their tenure on Twitch has been incinerated by the growth of Amazon’s market-share, and so Amazon has torn up its contracts and handed those creators new ones.
There’s a name for an economic arrangement where there are just a few buyers, and they put the squeeze on sellers: a #monopsony. In the economic literature, monopsonies are considered especially dangerous because they are able to extract concessions from their suppliers far more easily than monopolies (concentrated sellers) can from their customers. Monoposonists who represent just 10 percent of their sellers’ business can start turning the screw.
Amazon’s pretty frank about this. In its own investor presentations, it describes its “flywheel”: bring in customers by subsidizing below-cost prices, lock those customers in with Prime, then extract price concessions from businesses that have to use its platform to reach those locked-in customers:
https://twitter.com/rgibli/status/1561761732108107777
This flywheel is at the center of California’s antitrust case against Amazon, where Attorney General Rob Bonta argues that the company claims so much of its sellers’ revenues that they have no choice but to raise prices, and that those higher prices spill over to all retailers, thanks to Amazon’s “most favored nation” contracts:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/15/prime-suspect/#consumer-welfare
For 40 years, the entertainment industry has grown ever larger and more profitable, even as the share of those profits going to artists has fallen and fallen. To solve this, legislatures have granted creators more copyrights – longer terms, lower barriers to enforcement, higher penalties for violations – and yet, the problem has only worsened.
There’s a reason for that: the major factor in suppressing creative workers’ wages isn’t copyright infringement, it’s monopsony. With four major publishers, three studios, three labels, one trade book distributor, one cinema chain, etc, there are innumerable chokepoints between creators and artists where giant companies can simply demand that creators hand over whatever copyrights they’ve been given, along with the lion’s share of the revenue those copyrights generate.
That’s the thesis of “Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back,” a new book that Rebecca Giblin and I have coming out on Sept 27 from Beacon Press:
http://www.beacon.org/Chokepoint-Capitalism-P1856.aspx
Our book is split into two parts. In the first half, we unpick a representative sample of the scammy accounting practices and shade contracting terms that different tech and entertainment giants use to screw creative workers, from ad-tech to Spotify to DRM-based lock-in to the unbelievably crooked “packaging fees” that prompted every Hollywood screenwriter to fire their agents on the same day and embark on a grueling two-year strike:
https://www.wga.org/the-guild/about-us/history/wga-agency-campaign-timeline
In the second half, we address ourselves to detailed, shovel-ready, technical proposals to put the brakes on those anticompetitive flywheels and put groceries in creative workers’ fridges; proposals like declaring NDAs over accounting fraud unenforceable in California, Washington and NY, the three states where most creative contracts are signed:
https://doctorow.medium.com/structural-adjustment-fded18104bbe
This half of the book is devoted to structural changes, because market concentration is a structural problem. As we see with Twitch, even if you’re the kind of streaming superstar who can demand a 70/30 split at the outset, the instant a company’s market share lets it demand a worse deal for you, you will lose your premium.
One of the best moments in the development of this book was when an editor rejected it, saying he liked it a lot but was disappointed that all our remedies were about structural change, not actions individual fans and creators could take on their own. We were like, “He’s so close to getting it!”
Just like you can’t recycle your way out of the climate emergency or shop your way out of a monopoly, you can’t individually bargain your way out of a buyer’s market for your labor. This is a lesson that the labor movement learned a long-ass time ago, but 40 years of neoliberal brainwashing has left many of us unable to imagine that we’d act as a movement, rather than as a bunch of individuals.
But you know who hasn’t forgotten that lesson? The buyers for our labor – and for all labor. Everywhere we see private equity financiers buying up companies, loading them with debt, and paying themselves stiff “management fees”, the first casualties are the workers in those companies.
But after the workers are screwed over by monopsony, the new owners start to use their monopoly power against their customers – think of how Amazon used its investors’ cash to subsidize the price of goods, locking in customers, then charging its suppliers such high fees that they had to raise prices.
The last chapter of Chokepoint Capitalism describes how the plight of creative workers is part of a cross-industry sickness, where concentrated buyer power for labor hurts all kinds of workers. Creative workers are very vulnerable to this because people make art because they can’t help themselves, which means that companies can offer the most abusive contracts and still get takers (“What, and quit show-business?”).
But there are many such professions. Workers in the “caring industries,” such as healthcare, show up for their patients, even when their bosses are driving them into the poorhouse. That’s partly why private equity is so obsessed with buying up and merging hospitals – they know they can cut pay for healthcare workers and many of them will still report for work:
Rebecca and I are on the road with the book right now. Tonight (Sept 27), we’ll be at Beverly Hills Public Library, where David A Goodman – who led the Hollywood writers’ strike – will host us at an event jointly presented with Book Soup:
https://www.booksoup.com/event/cory-doctorow-rebecca-giblin
I’ll also be in Miami on Oct 12 at the great Books and Books in Coral Gables:
This week on my podcast, I read “Sound Money,” my latest column for Medium, which explains why money creation is necessary for a prosperous economy, despite the scaremongering of “inflation hawks.”
This week on my podcast, I read “What is Chokepoint Capitalism?” a recent column for Medium explaining the thesis of my new book with Rebecca Giblin, which explains how creative labor markets got rigged, and how we can unrig them.
(Image: Erik B. Anderson, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified)
This week on my podcast, I read “So You’ve Decided to Unfollow Me,” a recent column for Medium describing the joys of writing to attract the audience of people who want to read what you want to write.
(Image: Sascha Kohlmann, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified)
This week on my podcast, I read “View a SKU: Let’s Make Amazon Into a Dumb Pipe,” a recent column for Medium discussing how interoperability could flip Amazon’s monopoly power on its head and enable us all to coveniently shop locally.
This week on my podcast, I read “Why none of my books are available on Audible,”
a short audiobook I produced to be distributed through Amazon’s ACX platform, explaining how that platform’s sloppy rights verification and mandatory DRM screws over writers.
(Image: Paris 16, CC BY-SA 4.0; Dmitry Baranovskiy, CC BY 4.0; modified)
This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, Reasonable Agreement: On the Crapification of Literary Contracts, about the growing trend of standard, non-negotiable contract terms in freelance writing contracts that are outrageous in their unfairness.
This week on my podcast, I read a recent blog post, Monopolists Want to Create Human Inkjet Printers, exploring the way that med-tech mergers are bringing the ghastly inkjet printer business-model to artificial pancreases.
(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; Björn Heller, CC BY 2.0 (German); modified)
Regulatory Capture: Beyond Revolving Doors and Against Regulatory Nihilism.
This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, Regulatory Capture: Beyond Revolving Doors and Against Regulatory Nihilism., about the origins of the theory of regulatory capture, and the all-important, but rarely discussed difference between right and left theories of regulatory capture.
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