Cory Doctorow
Nineties kids had a good reason to be excited about the internet's promise of disintermediation: the gatekeepers who controlled our access to culture, politics, and opportunity were crooked as hell, and besides, they *sucked*.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/07/usurpers-helpmeets/#disreintermediation
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Cory Doctorow
For a second there, we really *did* get a lot of disintermediation, which created a big, weird, diverse pluralistic space for all kinds of voices, ideas, identities, hobbies, businesses and movements. Lots of these were either deeply objectionable or really stupid, or both, but there was also so much cool *stuff* on the old, good internet.
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Cory Doctorow
Then, after about ten seconds of sheer joy, we got all-new gatekeepers, who were at least as bad, and even more powerful, than the old ones. The net became @tveastman's "Five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four." Culture, politics, finance, news, and *especially* power have been gathered into the hands of unaccountable, greedy, and often cruel intermediaries.
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Cory Doctorow
Oh, also, we had an election.
This isn't an election post. I have many thoughts about the election, but they're still these big, unformed blobs of anger, fear and sorrow. Experience teaches me that the only way to get past this is to just let all that bad stuff sit for a while and offgas its most noxious compounds, so that I can handle it safely and figure out what to do with it.
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Cory Doctorow
While I wait that out, I'm just getting the job done. Chop wood, carry water. I've got a book to write, *Enshittification*, for Farar, Straus, Giroux's MCD Books, and it's very nearly done:
https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Adoctorow+%23dailywords&src=typed_query&f=live
Compartmentalizing my anxieties and plowing that energy into productive work isn't *necessarily* the healthiest coping strategy, but it's not the worst, either. It's how I wrote nine books during the covid lockdowns.
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Cory Doctorow
And sometimes, when you're not staring directly at something, you get past the tunnel vision that makes it impossible to see its edges, fracture lines, and weak points.
So I'm working on the book. It's a book about *platforms*, because enshittification is a phenomenon that is most visible and toxic on platforms.
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Cory Doctorow
Platforms are intermediaries, who connect buyers and sellers, creators and audiences, workers and employers, politicians and voters, activists and crowds, as well as families, communities, and would-be romantic partners.
There's a reason we keep reinventing these intermediaries: they're useful. Like, it's technically possible for a writer to also be their own editor, printer, distributor, promoter and sales-force:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/19/crad-kilodney-was-an-outlier/#intermediation
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Cory Doctorow
But without middlemen, those are the *only* writers we'll get. The set of all writers who have something to say that I want to read is *much* larger than the set of all writers who are capable of running their own publishing operation.
The problem isn't middlemen: the problem is *powerful* middlemen. When an intermediary gets powerful enough to usurp the relationship between the parties on either side of the transaction, everything turns to shit:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/direct-the-problem-of-middlemen/
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Cory Doctorow
A dating service that faces pressure from competition, regulation, interoperability and a committed workforce will try as hard as it can to help you find Your Person. A dating service that buys up all its competitors, cows its workforce, captures its regulators and harnesses IP law to block interoperators will redesign its service so that you keep paying forever, and never find love:
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Cory Doctorow
Multiply this a millionfold, in every sector of our complex, high-tech world where we *necessarily* rely on skilled intermediaries to handle technical aspects of our lives that we can't - or shouldn't - manage ourselves. That world is beholden to predators who screw us and screw us and screw us, jacking up our rents:
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/yes-there-are-antitrust-voters-in
Cranking up the price of food:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy
And *everything* else:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens
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Cory Doctorow
(Maybe this is a post about the election after all?)
The difference between a helpmeet and a parasite is *power*. If we want to enjoy the benefits of intermediaries without the risks, we need policies that keep middlemen weak. That's the *opposite* of the system we have now.
Take interoperability and IP law. Interoperability (basically, plugging new things into existing things) is a really powerful check against powerful middlemen.
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Cory Doctorow
If you rely on an ad-exchange to fund your newsgathering and they rip you off, then an interoperable system that lets you use other exchanges will not only end the rip off - it'll make it less likely to happen in the first place because the ad-tech platform will be afraid of losing your business:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shatter-ad-tech
Interop means when a printer company gouges you on ink, you can buy cheap third party ink cartridges and escape their grasp forever:
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Cory Doctorow
Interoperability means that when Amazon rips off audiobook authors to the tune of $100m, those authors can pull their books from Amazon and sell them elsewhere and know that their listeners can move their libraries over to a different app:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/07/audible-exclusive/#audiblegate
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Cory Doctorow
But interoperability has been in retreat for 40 years, as IP law has expanded to criminalize otherwise normal activities, so that middlemen can use IP rights to protect themselves from their end-users and business customers:
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
That's what I mean when I say that "IP" is "any law that lets a business reach beyond its own walls and control the actions of its customers, competitors and critics."
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Cory Doctorow
For example, there's a pernicious law 1998 US law that I write about all the time, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the "anticircumvention law." This is a law that felonizes tampering with copyright locks, *even if you are the creator of the undelying work*.
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Cory Doctorow
So Amazon - the owner of the monopoly audiobook platform Audible - puts a mandatory copyright lock around every audiobook they sell. I, as an author who writes, finances and narrates the audiobook, can't provide you, my customer, with a tool to remove that lock. If I do so, I face criminal sanctions: a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff
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Cory Doctorow
In other words: if I let you take my own copyrighted work out of Amazon's app, I commit a felony, with penalties that are *far* stiffer than the penalties you would face if you were to simply pirate that audiobook. The penalties for you *shoplifting the audiobook* on CD at a truck-stop are lower than the penalties the author and publisher of the book would face if they simply gave you a tool to de-Amazon the file.
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Cory Doctorow
Indeed, even if you *hijacked the truck* that delivered the CDs, you'd probably be looking at a shorter sentence.
This is a law that is *purpose-built* to encourage intermediaries to usurp the relationship between buyers and sellers, creators and audiences. It's a charter for parasitism and predation.
But as bad as that is, there's another aspect of DMCA 1201 that's even worse: the *exemptions* process.
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Cory Doctorow
You may have read recently about the Copyright Office "freeing the McFlurry" by granting a DMCA exemption for companies that reverse-engineer the error-codes from McDonald's finicky, unreliable frozen custard machines:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/28/mcbroken/#my-milkshake-brings-all-the-lawyers-to-the-yard
Under DMCA 1201, the Copyright Office hears petitions for these exemptions every three years. If they judge that anticircumvention law is interfering with some legitimate activity, the statute empowers them to grant an exemption.
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Cory Doctorow
When the DMCA passed in 1998 (and when the US Trade Rep pressured other world governments into passing nearly identical laws in the decades that followed), this exemptions process was billed as a "pressure valve" that would prevent abuses of anticircumvention law.
But this was a cynical trick. The way the law is structured, the Copyright Office can only grant "use" exemptions, but not "tools" exemptions.
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Cory Doctorow
So if you are granted the right to move Audible audiobooks into a third-party app, *you* are personally required to figure out how to do that. You have to dump the machine code of the Audible app, decompile it, scan it for vulnerabilities, and bootstrap your own jailbreaking program to take Audible wrapper off the file.
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Cory Doctorow
No one is allowed to help you with this. You aren't allowed to discuss any of this publicly, or share a tool that you make with anyone else. Doing any of this is a potential felony.
In other words, DMCA 1201 gives intermediaries power *over* you, but bans you from asking an intermediary to *help you* escape another abusive middleman.
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Cory Doctorow
This is the exact opposite of how intermediary law should work. We should have rules that *ban* intermediaries from exercising undue power over the parties they serve, *and* we should have rules *empowering* intermediaries to erode the advantage of powerful intermediaries.
The fact that the Copyright Office grants you an exemption to anticircumvention law means *nothing* unless you can delegate that right to an intermediary who can exercise it on your behalf.
Cory Doctorow
A world without publishing intermediaries is one in which the only writers who thrive are the ones capable of being publishers, too, and that's a tiny fraction of all the writers with something to say.
A world without interoperability intermediaries is one in which the only platform users who thrive are also skilled reverse-engineering ninja hackers - and that's an *infinitesimal* fraction of the platform users who would benefit from interoperabilty.
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Cory Doctorow
Let this be your north star in evaluating platform regulation proposals. Platform regulation should *weaken* intermediaries' powers over their users, and *strengthen* their power over other middlemen.
Put in this light, it's easy to see why the ill-informed calls to abolish Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (which makes platform users, not platforms, responsible for most unlawful speech) are so misguided:
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Cory Doctorow
If we *require* platforms to surveil all user speech and block anything that might violate any law, we give the largest, most powerful platforms a permanent advantage over smaller, better platforms, run by co-ops, hobbyists, nonprofits local governments, and startups.
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Cory Doctorow
The big platforms have the capital to rig up massive, automated surveillance and censorship systems, and the only alternatives that can spring up have to be just as big and powerful as the Big Tech platforms we're so desperate to escape:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/23/evacuate-the-platforms/#let-the-platforms-burn
This is especially grave given the current political current, where fascist politicians are threatening platforms with brutal punishments for failing to censor disfavored political views.
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Cory Doctorow
Anyone who tells you that "it's only censorship when the government does it" is badly confused. It's only a First Amendment violation when the government does it, sure - but censorship has *always* relied on intermediaries.
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Cory Doctorow
From the Inquisition to the Comics Code, government censors were only able to do their jobs because powerful middlemen, fearing state punishments, blocked anything that *might* cross the line, censoring *far* beyond the material actually prohibited by the law:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/22/self-censorship/#hugos
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Cory Doctorow
We live in a world of powerful, corrupt middlemen. From payments to real-estate, from job-search to romance, there's a legion of parasites masquerading as helpmeets, burying their greedy mouthparts into our tender flesh:
https://www.capitalisnt.com/episodes/visas-hidden-tax-on-americans
But intermediaries aren't the problem. You shouldn't have to stand up your own payment processor, or learn the ins and outs of real-estate law, or start your own single's bar. The problem is power, not intermediation.
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Cory Doctorow
As we set out to build a new, good internet (with a lot less help from the US government than seemed likely as recently as last week), let's remember that lesson: the point isn't *disintermediation*, it's *weak* intermediation.
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Cory Doctorow
Next weekend (November 8-10), I'll be in Tucson, AZ: I'm the Guest of Honor at the Tuscon science fiction convention:
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Cory Doctorow
Image:
Cryteria (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
CC BY 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
eof/
lamp
madopal
@lamp @pluralistic Totally. Like, would anyone today even do something like this without weird paywalls and video ads?
madopal
@lamp @pluralistic Every time I have to look something up about bike repair and Sheldon's website is outliving him, it gives me hope. Like visiting an ancient monastic library.
Kyle Memoir 🍉
The battles outnumber us; this is an excellent snapshot of one that’s key to the rest of them.
haR
@madopal @pluralistic @lamp https://www.seat61.com/ i think this might be close 🙂 and possibly https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/
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