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   Alexandre Oliva (lxo@snac.lx.oliva.nom.br)'s status on Friday, 03-Jul-2026 05:29:45 JST Alexandre Oliva

   in reply to

   • Cory Doctorow
   it looks like you're saying that the enshittocene is technocarcinogenic
   and that freedom is some kind of vaccine against it
   
   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Friday, 03-Jul-2026 05:29:46 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     What can we do about it? Well, we're going to have to remake the landscape to punish (rather than reward) enshittification:

     https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

     And in the meantime, there is one inhabitant of the 2x2 that hasn't drifted up and to the right: free and open source software. It's still snugly nestled in the low-surveillance/low-control box, and if you live in that box, your life will be much, much better for it.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Friday, 03-Jul-2026 05:29:47 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Sure, the worst people imaginable run these companies, but the *reason* they're able to yield to their most venal impulses and succeed is because the world has been re-arranged to make sociopathy and greed into fitness factors. We get technocarcinization because the most fit organism for a landscape without consequences is a zuckerbergian techno-crab:

     https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Friday, 03-Jul-2026 05:29:48 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Today, Apple and Google are run by bloodless business sociopaths who go to enormous lengths to project an air of sober adulthood. And yet, these people - who would never be caught dead bow-hunting their own livestock or climbing into an MMA cage - have steered their companies into Facebook's quadrant on our enshittification 2x2.

     I think this shows just how much the enshittification of tech is a matter of the policy environment, not the personalities of the people involved.

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   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Friday, 03-Jul-2026 05:29:49 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     He can ignore or fire his board at will. He is the move fast/break things guy, whose every foolish whim can become policy that impacts billions of people.

     By contrast, Google and Apple are no longer run by their flamboyant founders, who were every bit as prone to folly as Zuck. They were constrained by their shareholders, which meant that the blast-radius of Steve Jobs's worst ideas (like treating his otherwise curable cancer with green juice) were confined to his own person.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Friday, 03-Jul-2026 05:29:50 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     It turns out that "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product" is only half-right. The other half is, "even if you pay for the product, you're the product." Pay, don't pay: companies will productize anyone they can. And thanks to our enshittogenic policy environment - where the worst ideas of the worst people make the most money - you can *always* be productized:

     https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/10/say-their-names/#object-permanence

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Friday, 03-Jul-2026 05:29:50 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     This is independent of the kind of person running the company. Facebook is run by Mark Zuckerberg, a cringe halfwit whose only successful idea was to offer Harvard bros a way of nonconsensually rating the fuckability of female undergrads. Everything he's done since was an acquisition (Whatsapp, Insta) or a flop (metaverse, Libra), or both (Oculus). Zuck owns the majority of the voting stock in the company, which means he has total control over its actions.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Friday, 03-Jul-2026 05:29:51 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Control lets platforms block competing products, extract massive junk fees to the businesses they connect you to, and control repair and end-of-life, forcing you to replace hardware by blocking parts and independent service:

     https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/10/markets-are-regulations/#carney-found-a-spine

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Friday, 03-Jul-2026 05:29:52 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     What's driving this technocarcinization? Well, the obvious answer is that the more Facebooklike a company becomes, the more ways there are for it to rip you off. Surveillance can be monetized by selling your data, by ad targeting, and by surveillance-based pricing and wage-suppression:

     https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/21/cod-marxism/#wannamaker-slain

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   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Friday, 03-Jul-2026 05:29:53 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     And Google has also announced that they're going to turn Android into an iPhone, making it both technically challenging and radioactively illegal for you to install software of your choosing on your own property:

     https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/google-will-block-sideloading-of-unverified-android-apps-starting-next-year/

     Google is adopting every one of Apple's worst practices, and Apple is adopting all of Google's worst practices, and so they're both turning into Facebook: technocarcinization!

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Friday, 03-Jul-2026 05:29:54 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Google also took the idea of a free/open browser and ran with it, rehabilitating some discarded Apple code and turning it into Chrome, the internet's most dominant browser - by far. Now, Google is nerfing that browser's plug-in architecture in a way that blocks all kinds of user-tunable options, including and especially ad-blocking:

     https://protonprivacy.substack.com/p/google-is-finally-killing-ublock

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Friday, 03-Jul-2026 05:29:55 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Google used to pride itself in its ability to send you to the open web, viewing search as a conduit to other people's resources. Now, with AI search summaries, Google is harvesting the open web and then eating the seed corn, keeping searchers inside of Google's walled garden:

     https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/29/arsonist-firefighters/#im-feeling-lucky

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Friday, 03-Jul-2026 05:29:56 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     For example, every year or two, Google floats a proposal to use secure hardware in your device to rat you out if you've got an ad-blocker, privacy blocker, or other aftermarket add-on that lets you choose how you experience the digital world:

     https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

     It's an idea they just can't quit, despite the fact that it's fucking abominable and everyone hates it:

     https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/12/compelled-speech/#quishing

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Friday, 03-Jul-2026 05:29:57 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Then there's Google, the company that ran a free-range livestock operation in which you could roam wherever you liked, because they could always find you when it was time for the slaughter. For years now, Google has been moving inexorably to the kind of control-freak nonsense that you used to only find in one of Apple's crystal prisons.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Friday, 03-Jul-2026 05:29:58 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     And thanks to Apple's control-freakery - which prevents you from overriding Apple's decisions about your own devices - once Apple decides to spy on you or sell you out to fascist goons, there's nothing you can do about it:

     https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Friday, 03-Jul-2026 05:29:59 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Apple can't even claim to protect you from third-party surveillance. Sure, they block Facebook from spying on you, but they have barred ICE Block, an app that tells you if there are ICE chuds hunting in your neighborhood, looking to kidnap you and send you to a concentration camp. Apple declared ICE mercenaries to be a "protected class":

     https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/rogue-capitalism/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Friday, 03-Jul-2026 05:30:00 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     The grid was useful, until technocarcinization started to push *all* the tech companies into that top right quadrant. Apple is no longer the company that protects you from surveillance - they're the company that spies on you, having secretly added a total surveillance system to the iPhone to target ads to you:

     https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Friday, 03-Jul-2026 05:30:01 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     I've used this comparison many times over the years. I included it in my 2023 book *The Internet Con*, along with the joke that Tiktok's position on the grid was so far up and to the right (maximum surveillance and control) that we'd had to put its logo on the back cover. Enough people took this joke seriously and wrote in to complain that they'd gotten a misprint without the logo that we added it to the paperback:

     https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con

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   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Friday, 03-Jul-2026 05:30:02 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     The non-spying/non-controlling option is free/open source tech (of course), which doesn't care what you do, and doesn't watch you do it. And the most spying, most controlling company was Facebook, a company whose products did everything they could to imprison you within their virtual walls, from which vantage they could effect maximal surveillance.

     4/

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Friday, 03-Jul-2026 05:30:03 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Each quadrant had its own canonical company. The most surveillant/least controlling company (top right) was Google. They would let you roam the whole wide internet and exert no control over your conduct, but would spy on you wherever you went. The least surveillant/most controlling company was Apple, who imprisoned you in its manicured walled garden, but promised never to spy on you.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Friday, 03-Jul-2026 05:30:04 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Lately, I've watched the American Big Tech platforms as they underwent their own form of technocarcinization, which is when every tech company turns into Facebook.

     For a long time, it seemed to me that you could make sense of the tech platforms by placing them into one of four quadrants on a 2x2 grid, in which one axis denoted "control freakishness" and the other, "surveillance."

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Friday, 03-Jul-2026 05:30:05 JST Cory Doctorow

     "Carcinization" is a curious biological phenomenon: given time, across environments, many species evolve into crabs. The body of a crab, with its low center of gravity, sideways gait (for evading predators), ease of concealment and protected organs is endlessly suitable.

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation

     --

     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/2026/07/01/ontogeny/#recapitulates-phylogeny

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