In this episode, I chat with author Cory Doctorow about "enshittification," his viral term for how digital platforms and smart technologies inevitably get worse over time. We explore how monopoly power, aggressive IP protections, and lax privacy law enable companies to capture and exploit users — and what that might mean for the clean energy transition as our homes and vehicles become increasingly software-dependent.
(PDF transcript)
(Active transcript)
Text transcript:
David Roberts
Hello everyone, this is Volts for December 11, 2024, "Can we avoid the enshittification of clean-energy tech?" I'm your host, David Roberts. One thing that sets the current energy transition apart from previous transitions is that it is heavily digitized. Part of the promise of modern clean energy technologies is that they will be smart, i.e., infused with computing power and networked, i.e., connected to the Internet and one another. That will allow us to coordinate their operation, optimizing them to efficiently store and shift power to help balance the grid.
I am quite bullish on this vision, but lately, something has been nagging at me. In this glorious distributed clean energy future, most of the big items in a consumer's life — their EVs, EV chargers, solar panels, home batteries, appliances, their whole homes — will be controlled by software. And the thing is... have you met software lately?
Today's software often exploits corporate-friendly IP protections to lure customers in, lock up their data to raise the cost of switching, extract value from them while degrading their experience, deny them the ability to modify or repair their own products, and, in the end, remotely brick the products if consumers violate terms by, say, using the wrong brand of ink cartridges.
This is the process that author and thinker Cory Doctorow has termed enshittification. And, as he has recently warned, it's one thing when it affects your social media platform or your phone, another thing entirely when it's your vehicle or your home. So, I'm excited to talk to him today about what enshittification looks like in the clean energy sector and, above all, how it can be avoided.
With no further ado, Cory Doctorow. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Cory Doctorow
Thanks for having me on. I love talking about enshittification.
David Roberts
I know you've caused a bit of a cultural phenomenon with this term. I just saw that it is the Macquarie Dictionary's Word of the Year, that Australian —
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, the Australians know shit when they see it.
David Roberts
Yeah, they're familiar. And it's funny, you know, my wife is a normie, by which I just mean not Internet-poisoned like us. I told her I was talking to you. She had no idea who you were. I told her I was talking about enshittification. And it's funny, her eyes lit up and she's like, "Yes!" Like knowing, literally knowing nothing about it, literally having never heard the term before, she immediately grokked its significance in the modern world just by hearing the word. So, the first thing I wanted to ask you is, you know, this sort of term is catching on, this notion is catching on and I think it's in danger of becoming sort of like a general term for the zeitgeist, you know what I mean?
Just like, sort of — it seems like everything's kind of getting grubbier and worse. So, I wonder if you have, you know, like, what's the extension of the term in your mind? I know you have something more specific than just sort of like the general worseness of everything, right? There's a specific kind of extension of the term. So, maybe just talk about sort of like what are the class of things that are subject to enshittification.
Cory Doctorow
Let me start with a disclaimer here, because I am an English speaker, which means that I speak a mongrel language where a word's meaning arises out of usage and not because we have a committee that writes our dictionary and tells us what words we can use. And as someone who's spent the last 25 some years working with nonprofits like the Electronic Frontier Foundation trying to get people to care about digital human rights and has coined all kinds of words to get normies, as you say, to care about it, I am totally fine with people using this word in a colloquial way. I am convinced that the only way to preserve the precise technical meaning of words is to confine the usage of those words to irrelevant groups of insiders. And so by all means, let 10 million normies use the word loosely and let 1 million of them look up my article in which I explain it, and those 1 million people are a million more people than I would have reached otherwise.
So, you know, go nuts. You know, all of you who are native English speakers like me, revel in the glory of speaking a language where usage determines meaning and not the other way around. It's fine.
David Roberts
Yeah, yeah. So, what sort of things do you have in mind?
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, so enshittification. It's a term I came up with to describe what you might more politely call platform decay. And you know, from the outside, we've all seen it. You have a platform that is quite good to its end users, and then it starts to turn the screws on the end users once it has them locked in, takes away some of the value that those end users have been enjoying, and allocates it instead to a set of business customers. And then that's where a lot of people's analysis stops. Right. You may have heard people say, "Oh, if you're not paying for the product, you're the product."
But you know, products you pay for get rampantly enshittified — like, you know, John Deere tractors and iPhones and EVs, these are not free. And paying for the product does not make you not the product. Right? It's, you know, payment is not like a consumer loyalty program where if you pay, suddenly the venal, callow tech-boss suddenly thinks you're worthy of dignity and respect and stops screwing you. Tech bosses screw you if they can. And right now, we are at a point where they can. So, in this second phase, things are made worse for these platform's business customers as well.
So, you know, like advertising-supported websites suck for end users because of all the ads that bombard you. But the advertisers are paying higher rates with lower fidelity and more ad fraud than they ever have too, right? Everybody is getting screwed on both ends of this package. And then the final stage of enshittification is the platform sort of scrapes up all the value that had previously been enjoyed by business customers and end users, leaves behind a kind of homeopathic residue that is sufficient to keep everyone locked in and then just turns into a giant pile of shit. And when that happens, you know, sometimes people do start to bolt for the exits because this is a very brittle equilibrium, right?
Like the difference between "I hate this and I can't seem to let go of it" and "I hate this and I'm never coming back." It's just that, you know, one livestream mass shooting, one whistleblower, one Cambridge Analytica style privacy breach and people go. And when that happens, tech bosses, they panic. Tech has its own euphemism for panic; they call it pivoting. And you get these things like, Mark Zuckerberg wakes up one day and he says, "Look, I know for the last decade I've been promising you that the future lay in arguing with your racist uncle using the primitive text interface that I developed in my Harvard dorm room so that me and my creepy friends could non-consensually rate the fuckability of our fellow Harvard undergraduates.
However, I've had a revelation and the future is going to be that I'm going to turn you and everyone you love into a legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon character in a dystopian virtual world that I stole from a 25-year-old cyberpunk novel that I call the Metaverse." And you know, that is the point at which everything gets kind of silly and gross and they insist that we call it X. And you know, Mercedes wants you to pay for your accelerator pedal and just like, all of it is just terrible. And so that's the, like, the outer pattern, right?
If you were a medical professional, you know, you call this the natural history, right? It's the observed symptoms.
David Roberts
So first, you start with a product. You call this the difference between selling a product and extracting rent, which I think is a great distinction for all this. You start with sort of offering people a product. Like, "Come use this. It's fun, it's good." You're all about the user, you're all about the customer. But then, you lock the customer in somehow, and I want to talk a little bit about the mechanisms for that. Then you've got customers locked in, and then you're like, "Well, let me start extracting value from the customers to give it to business customers."
So, like, the people say, like, you start with Twitter, it's fun, people are catching up with one another. Then you bring businesses in, sell the users to the businesses as advertisers, you know, exploit the users in favor of the businesses. And then once the businesses are locked in, you exploit the users and the businesses for your own shareholder benefit, basically. And how long that last stage can go on depends on the strength of how much you've locked people in. Right. Like, how easy is it to let go? And it's funny, I think a lot of people are living through this now.
Like, we're walking through a real-world example of this, watching what's happening to Twitter, right?
Cory Doctorow
Or speedrunning it, more to the point.
David Roberts
Speedrunning it. Right. It was very fun at first. Then it got a little sort of grim; the advertisers came in. And now it's kind of grim for everybody. And you're starting to see the limits of the lock-in there. And I will say, like, the lock-in there lasted a lot longer, was a lot stronger, I think, than a lot of people thought it was going to be. It persisted a lot longer, but it seems like it's cracking now, which is why I think Twitter's about to do some pivoting.
Cory Doctorow
I'm sure there are many pivots in its future. Look, I think you latched onto something really important in your introduction, which is that smart objects. When we say something is smart — or digitized or digitalized, there's lots of different words for it — what we mean is that its performance or its characteristics can be changed, often remotely and very quickly. I don't know if you've ever seen, there's a famous video of Penn and Teller doing the cup and balls trick. And they do it really slowly with transparent cups. And you can see exactly how it's done. And you realize that this is not a complicated trick.
What makes it impressive is that it's done very quickly and smoothly. And when you can change prices, payouts, search ranking, when you can change contracting terms, when every time someone visits the platform, all the rules that they relied on have suddenly changed in response to either observed characteristics of that user or surveillance data about that user, then what you have is a shell game that's being played at machine speeds. Right? The quickness of the hand deceives the eye.
David Roberts
You call that fiddling.
Cory Doctorow
Twiddling.
David Roberts
Twiddling, yeah. Sorry, twiddling is your technical term.
Cory Doctorow
Twiddling, that's right. They're reaching in and turning the knobs. But this raises an important question, because it's not like these companies were charities and it's not like they weren't digital all along. So, why did they used to be good and why are they all bad? To understand that, I think you have to understand that companies under what we might call normal or historic circumstances faced a form of discipline. They were punished when they did bad things. The sources of that discipline have been eroded steadily over the last 20 years, and there's been a very sharp erosion in the last few years.
David Roberts
This is key. I want to emphasize this. It's not like — you are not saying that business executives have suddenly become shitty and greedy. They've always been shitty and greedy. They've just been historically restrained by some forces, some conventions, which have been eroding lately. So these enshittificatory instincts have always been there, they're just coming into full flower now because the forces that restrained them have eroded. So maybe let's talk briefly about what those forces are.
Cory Doctorow
So, this is an important point because a lot of people, the same kind of, or maybe the inverse of "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product" — which is kind of a hymn to capitalism and says, "You know, once we put markets in, everything gets better" — is the "Well, this is just capitalism. And capitalism always does this."
David Roberts
Yes, that is a question I had. Like, to what extent is this just capitalism you're describing?
Cory Doctorow
Well, look, it's a kind of capitalism, although, as you alluded to, it involves a lot of rent-seeking, which we can get into. It's a kind of technical economic term. But like, rents are, broadly speaking, what feudal landlords get and profits are what capitalists get. And capitalists and rentiers are kind of enemies because the capitalist wants to get the cheapest possible rent for their coffee shop and for their capital and for their, you know, all the things that are inputs to their product. Whereas the rentier, who owns the coffee shop premises and holds the note on the loan, it's not really any skin off their nose, right?
If the coffee shop goes under because a really good coffee shop opens next door, you know, the capitalist is exposed to the risk of competition. Here, then, you know, the rentier comes out ahead because now they've got an empty storefront in a neighborhood with a really hot coffee shop. Right? And that's worth more.
David Roberts
Yes, and the key thing about rent is you don't have to be particularly clever or innovative. You just have to own the thing. You just have to be sitting, sitting on something that someone else wants. Like say, for instance, oil in the Middle East.
Cory Doctorow
Or a patent on a key solar technology. Either way, the difference between a rent and a profit to get into a little — I try to keep the econo jargon to a minimum — but rents are income that you receive from owning what economists call a "factor of production," something that has to go into making something. Profits are what you get from production, making something. And you know, businesses, they often make rents and profits. You know, Apple owns the App Store. They take 30 cents out of every dollar that anyone spends in an app. But they also, you know, make phones, right?
And the money they get from the phones, those are profits. And the money they get from charging rent on the app store is rent, right? You know, the workers in both cases aren't necessarily getting a good deal, but to the extent that those workers are also consumers — and I always am at great pains to say, please don't consider yourself primarily to be a consumer. Like, what could be more pathetic than being a wallet with legs, right? Who only gets to express your opinions by choosing what you buy. So, you know, voting with your wallet is like, it's the most rigged election, right?
People with fatter wallets get more votes. Statistically, you do not have the fattest wallet. You always lose the vote with your wallet election, you know, like, it's just such a loser way to think of yourself. But if you're a consumer as well as a worker, which we all are, right? We buy things as well as making things or doing things that are productive, then living in a world with fewer rents and more profits is, broadly speaking, better for you. And in its purest form, feudalism has no what's called free labor. Under the feudal system, peasants were bound to the land; you couldn't move.
You had to grow up on the estate of your lord and stay there unless they gave you permission to leave, and you owed them rent every year. Capitalists wanted free labor. They wanted to turn the peasants off the land because they wanted them to come work in factories. And of course, capitalists, they all want to be feudalists because, like today, we have this —
David Roberts
Well, rent's a lot easier. I mean, you know.
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, but not just rent, but binding your workforce to you. So, look at the rise and rise of non-competes in this country. Now, they're illegal in California, but about 1 in 18 American workers is bound by an enforceable non-compete. The Biden administration's Federal Trade Commission tried to strike them down. They got hung up with right-wing judges appointed by Trump. And it's unlikely that this is going to go on appeal in the next administration. But most of the workers bound by a non-compete work in fast food restaurants or as pet groomers. And so, this is about stopping you from earning an extra quarter an hour by moving from the cash register at Wendy's to the grill at McDonald's.
Right? These are workers who cannot leave. Like, if all of the employers that you are qualified to work at in your suburb are fast food restaurants or gas stations or whatever, and you're under a non-compete. Like, say you work at a gas station for a year, then you quit, then you go work at a Wendy's for a year. Well, that's it, right? If you quit the Wendy's, none of the gas stations can hire you and none of the other fast food places can hire you. So, you are a kind of modern peasant bound to the land.
So, capitalists want rent. They also don't like free labor to the extent that they have workers who are locked to their fields. They don't like it when workers are locked to some other boss's field. They'd like to tempt them away, but once they've got them, they want to keep them.
David Roberts
And so, a platform like Twitter, the resource that they're sitting on to which they are charging people access, is the user base, right? I mean, that's the equivalent of the oil here. You've got a locked-in user base that you're charging rent for access to, basically. That's how it works in the case of platforms.
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, that's right. And you know, the users, it'd be nice if they could all just leave, but they're locked in. And the way that they're locked in is by something — again with the econo jargon — the collective action problem.
David Roberts
Yeah, yeah, again, something everyone's becoming very familiar with through Twitter these days.
Cory Doctorow
Look, you live the collective action problem every day of your life because you know you love your friends, but they're a giant pain in the ass. And there's like only six of you in your group chat. But can you agree on which board game you're going to play this Friday or where you're going for dinner? Now multiply that. So take Twitter or Facebook. It's the place where all of the people who have the same rare disease as you are hanging out in a support group. It's where you keep in touch with the people in the country that you moved away from.
It's where you organize the carpool for your kid's Little League game. It's where your customers are. And so, it's not just a matter of you and the 150 friends who matter to you on Facebook or Twitter organizing a day to leave and a place to go and a way to get reestablished when you arrive. It's that they have to all convince all those other people to go too. And so, you get these problems that just kind of snowball in complexity. And so, that creates one more economics term here, a switching cost. Thankfully, this is a very self-explanatory one.
David Roberts
Yes. And this is crucial to this whole discussion and it's how difficult is it to leave the platform?
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, or more to the point, in the case of a switching cost, what do you lose when you give up the platform? What is the cost of switching? So, you've bought an EV and it's a Tesla because you were dumb and you've put in a Level 2 charger and it's got the custom Tesla tip. And hypothetically, we're all going to be able to use that custom Tesla tip at some point. But for now, if you get rid of your Tesla and get another car, you're going to have to get a new Level 2 charger stuck in your house.
That's a switching cost, right? It's like whatever you're going to lose on selling the Tesla used and buying a new EV, add another $600 plus $1,800 bucks for the electrician and that's the switching cost. And on social media, it's all the people who matter to you and the company that they constitute for you that you lose if you switch and they don't.
David Roberts
Yeah, it's less financial than social, but it's powerful though. I mean, then you end up with a phenomenon like Twitter these days where it's just like, how bad Twitter sucks is the main topic of discussion on Twitter, and yet people are hanging out on Twitter to discuss how much Twitter sucks.
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, and in some cases, it is a financial cost, right? It's yes, you lose your friends, but also if you lose contact with your family back home, that is a tragedy in and of itself. And then on top of that, you have things like, hey, suddenly you're short on rent. And normally, your family would bail you out, but they can't, and so now you've been evicted. Or, you know, you're a creative worker of some kind, and this is the main way of reaching your audience. And you've got, you know, hypothetically speaking here, a new book coming out on February 15th called Picks and Shovels from the Good People at Macmillan.
And you're hoping to sell that book to some people, and you're going out on a book tour, and you're hoping that people show up. And again, hypothetically, you have 500,000 people who follow you on Twitter, right? That's a big cost to surrender. And it's not just the emotional cost. It's like, can I afford, or hypothetically, could someone afford to send their daughter to college next year?
David Roberts
Yeah. So, part of the thesis here is that there were these forces that restrained the impulses toward enshittification. We briefly touched on one or two, but let's just go through them as a list real quick. So, the first you said was competition. You know, if you made your thing shittier, someone would come along and make a less shitty thing and someone would switch. And competition has been reduced in a number of ways. Just briefly sort of touch on what's happening.
Cory Doctorow
So, yeah, we can think of competition as being disciplined by the market.
David Roberts
Right.
Cory Doctorow
And so, for markets to work, they need to be free, which is to say, they need to be contestable. Right? You need to be able to enter the market and do stuff and compete with people. They also need to be free from rents. Adam Smith, when he coined the term "free markets," he didn't mean free from regulation, he meant free from rents. You know, the more rents there are in a market, the less free it is. And, you know, about 40 years ago, a group of then-fringe economists came to prominence. These were called the Chicago School.
You sometimes hear them called the neoliberal economists. They were kind of Reagan's court sorcerers. And before the rise of Chicago school economics, there was this presumption both in law and in theory, that monopolies were just bad. Even if a monopoly could do something well, it would fail badly. That by preventing the entry of new competitors, by consolidating power, they were able to become structurally important. Today we'd say they were too big to fail. They also might become too big to jail.
David Roberts
Yeah, this was hard-won knowledge too.
Cory Doctorow
Over Rockefeller, over the oil barons. Yeah, I mean, this was a big deal. Now it's a thing that we keep discovering because if you remember, there was a thing called the Boston Tea Party about tea monopolies. Right. Like Ben Franklin tried to put a thing in the Constitution about monopolies being bad and was shouted down by a bunch of rich guys who we now lovingly call the Founding Fathers. And you know, monopolies were considered bad. You know John Sherman, who wrote the Sherman Act, the first anti-monopoly law in 1890, Tecumseh Sherman's brother. So you can imagine he was quite a bolshy guy.
He stood up on the floor of the Senate and he said, "If we would not allow a king to rule us, we should not allow an autocrat of trade to rule us." Right.
David Roberts
Love it.
Cory Doctorow
And so, this was the widespread understanding of monopoly law. Just don't let monopolies form because once they do, they're too big to fail, they're too big to jail, and then ultimately whatever benefits you're getting out of them are going to go away because they'll be too big to care. Right? Remember, Lily Tomlin used to do those ads for the phone company on Saturday Night Live, and they would always end with her turning to the camera and saying, "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company." Right? So, too big to care, too big to fail, too big to jail.
That's the thing we were trying to avoid. And then the 1970s arrived and these Chicago guys, led by a guy called Robert Bork.
David Roberts
The famed Robert Bork.
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, virulent racist. He was Nixon's most infamous henchman. You know, he's the Solicitor General who, during the Night of the Long Knives, fired all the people who were trying to bring Nixon to justice.
David Roberts
Rejected by the Senate for the Supreme Court, which conservatives whine about to this day.
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, the term "borked," right, if you've ever heard something screwed up being called "borked," it comes from Robert Bork. So, Robert Bork leads this charge of heterodox — at the time — economists who say actually monopolies are like super efficient. And what you see when you see a monopoly is a success story, right? So in modern terms, if all of us are searching Google, it's because Google is the best. And if they've got a 90% market share, it's because they're absolutely, historically, unprecedentedly the best. And how perverse would it be to take public money and punish the company that we all love for being better than everyone else?
We should just let monopolies be. If monopolies are bad, people will switch to another market entrant that will be able to enter because the monopolist won't be able to stop them if they're bad. And this has been an absolute fucking catastrophe. So, 40 years of antitrust neglect has given us cartels and monopolies in every single sector. Eyeglasses, glass bottles, vitamin C, cheerleading, professional wrestling. Like, you remember, there used to be, like, 30 professional wrestling leagues.
David Roberts
I think people have not fully taken this on board because there's still somewhat of an illusion, like, there's a lot of, like, company names that float around.
Cory Doctorow
Duff Beer.
David Roberts
You just poke into it a little bit and you find out they're all owned by the same three beer companies.
Cory Doctorow
You go on the Duff Beer boat ride with Lisa Simpson, and you see, you know, Duff Framboise, Duff Lite, Duff Classic, and Duff Bach. And it's all coming out of the same tube, right? And you know every brand of eyeglasses you've ever heard of, Dolce and Gabbana, Bausch + Lomb, Coach, Oakley, they're all made by one company. Every place you've ever bought eyeglasses, LensCrafter, Sunglass Hut, is owned by the same company. Also, all of the eye insurance policies you ever held are also underwritten by the same insurance company, which is owned by the same company.
And more than half of the lenses in the world are made by the same company. All one company. It's a French-Italian company.
David Roberts
There's a news story — just, I feel like, a couple of months ago — where people discovered that, like, this was when West Virginia flooded and everybody discovered that something like, whatever, 98% of some little...
Cory Doctorow
Oh, saline bags, saline bags, are made in two places, Puerto Rico and West Virginia, both of which have experienced catastrophic weather damage. Yeah, we can't make bags of salt water anymore.
David Roberts
All these little choke points that you don't even really know exist. We sort of have the illusion of diversity still. But like, and, you know, people know, Ticketmaster people are familiar with the dynamic of what happens when one company, you know, takes over everything.
Cory Doctorow
And the hilarious thing is that the economists who are responsible for this, right, they're still kicking. And a bunch of them are like, you know, their intellectual progeny and in some cases, their actual fail sons are still involved in the competition bar. Or their academics or their think tanks. And they continue to insist that all the problems we're having with monopolies are unrelated to their policy of tolerating and encouraging monopolies.
David Roberts
Well, certainly, the conservatives on the Supreme Court today —
Cory Doctorow
Oh yeah.
David Roberts
are still very Borkian.
Cory Doctorow
Very Borky. And it's like, you know, we used to put down rat poison and we didn't have any rats. Then these guys said, like, "How do you know rats are bad? Stop putting down rat poison." And now rats are just eating our faces. And they're like, "Who's to say whether our pro-rat, anti-rat-poison policy resulted in all these rats? Are you sure that it's not just the time of the rat? Maybe sun flares are causing rats to, you know, expand in population beyond all measures of fecundity. Why are you blaming me for this?" It's a really remarkable moment.
David Roberts
Although, it does seem like — and I hesitate to cite anything that sounds like good news in this current circumstance — but it does seem like intellectual opinion is trending away from that. It seems like there is a bit of a revolution underway. I don't know how well that'll survive.
Cory Doctorow
I absolutely agree with you. And the Trump administration's kind of all over the map on this, as you might expect. Right. And frankly, as the Biden administration was. So remember, you know, political parties are coalitions and they have their own way of doling out power to their coalition members. And in Biden's case, it was that he got these administrative enforcement agency heads, like the head of the FTC, Lina Khan, and the top DOJ antitrust enforcer, Jonathan Kanter, and Rohit Chopra at the CFPB who went off and just like kicked eleven kinds of ass. But he also appointed all these super corporate judges who just knocked back all the cases that were brought in front of them by these enforcement heads.
And it was like the corporate wing of the party that wanted these pro-corporate judges. And it was the Bernie and Liz Warren wing that got these enforcers. And the judges have lifetime appointments and these enforcers are probably going to be out on their—
David Roberts
Lina Khan is, good God, surrounded by piranhas.
Cory Doctorow
So, Matt Gaetz is a creepy sex offender, but he also is very pro-Lina Khan. JD Vance calls Lina Khan the only Biden official that he likes. They've tapped someone for Health and Human Services who's proposing to do more on a specific choke point in medical procurement where there are these intermediates. They act like pharmacy benefit managers who are these obscure guys who are in charge of making drugs incredibly expensive, except they do it for everything else. They do it for hospital beds, bedpans, and bags of saline, all that other stuff. And this guy who's going to run Health and Human Services, if, you know, if Trump doesn't change his mind, is an MD who hates these things and has promised to get rid of them.
So, you know, we don't know what the Trump admin is going to do. But the other thing that's going to happen is that other countries all around the world are all over this. Canada, you know, my native country, I'm a Canadian; we're like serial killers, we're everywhere and we look just like everyone else. Canada had this huge round of changes to its antitrust law this year, and its antitrust law has sucked. The Canadian Competition Bureau has challenged three mergers in its history since the mid-19th century and has succeeded in blocking zero. Right. So, Canada is incredibly concentrated.
We make Americans look like amateurs, proportionally speaking, when it comes to monopoly. But now, we've got this really muscular antitrust enforcement, and they've just announced a lawsuit against Google. One of the cool, interesting things about fighting multinational monopolies is that whatever crimes they're committing in one country are basically identical to the crimes they commit everywhere else. So, the UK has this agency, the Digital Markets Unit, which is part of their Competition and Markets Authority, that researched how Apple rips people off with apps. And because the British Parliament has been a mess since Brexit, this agency was created, but it wasn't given enforcement powers until this year.
So, they had 70 full-time engineers writing reports, but not able to act on them. And so, the report was picked up by the European Commission, which used it to bring a successful multibillion Euro prosecution against Apple. And then, the Japanese and South Korean antitrust enforcers translated the case and brought it successfully in both territories. Right. And the case that Canada has brought against Google is nearly identical to a case that the DOJ has just finished arguing here in the United States. So, you're going to see this kind of territorial, kind of copy-pasting of these cases.
And what I really hope is that the Global South starts to do this because, like countries in Asia, Africa, the subcontinent, they should be just tearing the shit out of these American tech giants and taking back the billions that were looted from their economy by them. And they can just copy and paste the cases that are developed in countries that have much more resources to do it.
David Roberts
So, this is competition. This is the reduction in competition, which was a restraining factor. And there were two others?
Cory Doctorow
Three more. Three more. So the next one is regulation. So, competition is getting punished by the market, and regulation is getting punished by the government. Regulation is something that you can think of as like a game where the government is the referee. And we all know that for the referee to call a fair game, they have to be more powerful than the players, right? If the players can tell the referee to get bent, then the referee can't call a fair game. And one of the things that we got when we saw this market concentration is the players became more powerful than the refs.
And not just individually, but collectively. So, when you have like 100 companies in a sector, like think of the web industry circa like 2002, right? When you've got 100 companies in a sector, they can't agree on anything. They have the same collective action problem you and your friends have when it's time to leave Facebook, right? Not only can they not agree on what they're going to tell a regulator, they can't agree on how to cater the meeting where they would discuss it. And so, they don't sing with one voice. Moreover, because they're competing with each other, they have lower rates of profit on average.
This is why monopolists like monopolies, right? You stop competing, you divide up your territory like the Pope dividing up the new world. And you know, you don't have to worry about wasteful competition. So, once you get market concentration, once there's like five firms in a company, once they have these like incestuous orgies of consolidation that give them all these corporate Habsburg jaws, they are able to not only agree on what they're going to tell the regulator, but they have so much money left over from screwing all of us, because they don't compete, that they can make it stick.
And what's worse, when a sector is really concentrated, when there's like four or five companies in the sector, to a first approximation, everyone who understands how that sector works, works in the sector. They're an executive there. And so that's why you see people rotating out of the cable industry to run the FCC. It's not just corruption, it's that these are purpose-built machines and they're all one of a kind and no one understands how they work except for the people who made them. And so you end up with what we broadly call regulatory capture. And in the case of the tech sector, that's, you know, the tech companies saying, "We haven't really violated your labor, consumer, and privacy rights. We did it with an app, so it's okay."
And you know, regulators saying, "Oh, that sounds good to me." And so, they are able to abuse us in lots of ways. They don't face penalty. So, you get a company like Google that first of all only had one good idea in its history. 25 years ago, they made a really good search engine. Every internal product launched since, almost without exception, was a fail.
David Roberts
What about Reader?
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, Google Reader.
David Roberts
Let's pour one out for Reader.
Cory Doctorow
What about G+? Or who can forget Orkut? And also the Wi-Fi balloons. And yeah, so they've had one success in-house. Everything else they've done that's successful, they bought from someone. Their networking stuff, their data centers, their document sharing, obviously, Android, YouTube — remember Google had a thing called Google Video that sucked and failed to get a successful video service, they had to buy a successful one from someone else. The whole ad tech stack. Google wouldn't have ads if they hadn't been allowed to buy other people's successful ad companies. One of the things that's happened as a result of the DOJ winning case against Google is they might have to sell off the ads, right? They might have to sell off.
David Roberts
I thought they were going to spin off Chrome. I heard they might have —
Cory Doctorow
Well, there are two cases. There's a Chrome case. And Chrome, remember, is some abandoned Safari code that they operationalized. But yeah, there's Chrome, Android, maybe, and then there's the adtech stack. And to give you a sense of like how bipartisan this stuff is. So, Google's ad tech stack is super corrupt. They have a platform that serves sellers, right? Publishers. They have a platform that serves buyers, advertisers. They have the platform where these two meet and then they compete, right? They also are an advertiser and also a place where advertising appears and they run the whole stack, right?
And they take 51 cents out of every advertising dollar.
David Roberts
That's wild.
Cory Doctorow
For comparison, you know, in the days of like print, radio, and TV ads, the take for the Intermedia was more like 15%. You know, this is like, you go to get a divorce and you and your partner get to the court and you find out that you've both got the same lawyer who is also the judge and is also trying to match with both of you on Tinder. And then the judge gavels down and says, "Right, I figured out who gets the house, it's me."
This is such a nakedly corrupt arrangement. So, last year, there was a bill introduced in the Senate, the AMERICA Act, to force a breakup of these adtech stacks. And its two main co-sponsors were, on the one hand, predictably enough, Elizabeth Warren, but on the other hand, Ted Cruz. Right. There's not a lot that they both agree on.
David Roberts
Yeah, there's some weird marriages in this, around all of this stuff. Some weird cross-partisan fringes.
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, it's not horseshoe theory. It's that these guys want the same thing for very different reasons. Right. You know, in the same way that there are people who are committed anti-war activists who want America to pull out of Ukraine, and there are people who are Russian partisans who want America to pull out of Ukraine. Those two groups of people don't agree on anything morally. But their very different moral postures sometimes produce an identical prescription.
David Roberts
Okay, so less competition because of less regulation, diminution of monopoly law, less regulation because of regulatory capture.
Cory Doctorow
And just to put a button on this regulation question: So, Google not only has bought its way to glory using mergers that would have been illegal before the Reagan era, but also it's only because there's no privacy law that they're allowed to do what they do. So, the last time America updated its privacy law was in 1988. It was after Judge Bork went in front of the Senate to be confirmed. And to embarrass him, his video store leaked his video rental history. And Congress passed the Video Privacy Protection Act that bans video store clerks from telling anyone which VHS cassettes you take home.
That's the last time we got a federal consumer privacy law.
David Roberts
Was Bork's rental record...?
Cory Doctorow
His rental history was the least embarrassing thing about him. The guy actually has legitimately good taste in movies. I think they were all like, "Oh wait, I've been buying a lot of very eye-watering porn from video stores in the beltway. I don't want that to happen to me."
David Roberts
Exactly.
Cory Doctorow
You know, that's what caused it. But like, surely video store clerks talking about your VHS habits is not the last time the American public has encountered a privacy risk since 1988.
David Roberts
All of the Internet, basically like all of the Internet: phones, digital everything, satellites, like every privacy-invading technology that exists.
Cory Doctorow
Congress suffers from privacy problems. Right. You could target ads to graduates in political science and law from Big Ten and Ivies within one mile of the Capitol building. And you get every congressional staffer and those ads could carry, like, malicious payloads. Right. This is a problem for Congress and Congress can't do anything about it.
David Roberts
Right. So, the lack of privacy protections is the third.
Cory Doctorow
And regulation more broadly. You know, Uber steals its workers' wages and you get ripped off every time you shop on Amazon. On Amazon, the first box in a search result page on average is 29% more expensive than the best match for your search because Amazon sells the search placement. They make $38 billion a year off it. That top row is 25% more expensive than the best deal on Amazon. And the best deal on average is at least 17 places down on the results page. So, if you went into the store and said, "Sell me your cheapest Duracells," and they sold you an own brand that cost twice as much, that would be fraud.
But you do it on Amazon, they're like, "No, we did it with an app. It's not fraud." So the third one is — so both of those are like, not tech-specific. Every kind of company can be subject to both competitive and regulatory discipline, markets and governments. But tech has got this very specific form of discipline, which is called interoperability.
David Roberts
Yes.
Cory Doctorow
So, I've given you some econ jargon, now here's some computer science jargon. We only know how to make one kind of computer. It's called the Turing Complete Universal von Neumann machine. And what that means is that every computer can run every valid program, like the computer in your car and the computer in your smart speaker and the computer in a singing greeting card and the computer in your phone can all run the same programs, albeit, like, some of them will run them very slowly and some of them will run them so slowly that, like, you have to wait till the end of the universe for the program to run.
But, like, they can all execute the same instructions. What that means —
David Roberts
It's all zeros and ones, right?
Cory Doctorow
It's not just zeros and ones. That's the binary part. It's all universal logic. Right? Like, we don't know how to make a printer that won't run malicious software. Like, this is kind of hard, right? Like, this is a hard truth for computer science. The fact that we only know how to make computers that can run all the programs means that not only can we not make computers that can't run programs the manufacturer doesn't like, but we also can't make computers that won't run programs that you don't like, like viruses. The computers can just run all the programs.
That's just like baked in. It's the only computer we know how to make. And so, what that means is that if someone enshittifies a product that you rely on, someone else can des-enshittify it. Right? Like, the program that checks your printer ink to make sure you're using original HP ink can be overridden by another program you could install in your printer that turns that off. Right? So, that has been a major check against the excesses of tech firms. Because once someone discovers third-party ink, they never go back to buying HP ink. Once someone installs an ad blocker, they never uninstall the ad blocker.
And so, there's always been this risk, but with the expansion of IP law, which is really just another form of regulatory capture, right? Like, regulatory capture isn't just ignoring the law, it's also like getting laws passed that you can use against your enemies, right? And with the expansion of IP law, we've gotten a thing that Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model." Where like, reverse engineering things, scraping things, giving people another alternative client so they can access things, all of that stuff becomes a copyright violation or a trademark or a patent or these exotic forms of IP law like tortious interference under contract or non-compete or non-disclosure or anti-circumvention, you know. So, in 1998, Bill Clinton signed this law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and section 1201 felonizes creating a circumvention device, something to defeat a lock and a device.
So, if you have to defeat a lock to reprogram your printer, it's illegal. And it's not just a little illegal. Violating the DMCA carries a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense.
David Roberts
So, if I hacked my printer in a way that caused it to accept third-party inks, I could go to jail for five years.
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, bypassing the lock is illegal. Using third-party ink isn't, but bypassing the lock is. So, if you just design a product so that using it in a way that the manufacturer doesn't like requires you to first unlock something because unlocking is illegal, then everything else becomes illegal too. And so, no one's ever installed an ad blocker for an app because you have to reverse engineer the app first. Browsers are open, so you can just install a plugin that blocks ads, but you can't just install a plugin that blocks ads on apps because you would have to reverse engineer the app first.
And so, apps are just this kind of locus of enshittification.
David Roberts
And this is why everybody wants you to download their fucking app. This is why everybody has their own app. Because they can't cheat you the way they want to cheat you on a browser. Because it's illegal.
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, an app is just a website wrapped in enough IP that it's a felony to modify it so that it works for you and not the manufacturer. And often, that's literally true. It's just a bunch of HTML and JavaScript, plus a digital lock that is illegal to unlock. And so, you know, you see how when this discipline collapses, firms are free to do terrible things. So, like HP, it's just like monotonically raised the price of ink year on year. Now, ink is the most expensive fluid you can buy. It's $10,000 a gallon. That's not just more than like vintage Veuve Clicquot.
It's on par with buying the semen of a Kentucky Derby winner. Right. And this is what you're using to print your shopping list and boarding cards.
David Roberts
Oh, I just have to insert here. I recently, last year, got a Brother black and white laser —
Cory Doctorow
That's where it's at.
David Roberts
printer. My God, my printing life has been transformed. It just works. It doesn't bug me. It doesn't cost me $500 for ink every year. Just throwing in a free endorsement there.
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, sure, I got a Brother too. It's humming away just a few inches from me here. But the thing is that, you know, this interop can be thought of as like counter twiddling. So they can change the rules and you can change them back.
David Roberts
Right.
Cory Doctorow
And when you take away counter twiddling, you just got twiddling. Right. You just got like, I call it the Darth Vader MBA. You know, "I am altering the arrangement. Pray I don't alter it further." You know, where, one day your car works in a certain way and the next day it gets an over-the-air update and all of a sudden you need to pay to rent your steering wheel heater.
David Roberts
You think you own it, but you don't really. You're just renting a bundle of services that they can change on you more or less without notice.
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, so again, this isn't about not paying for the product or paying for the product. This is about whether or not firms face consequences for screwing you. And when we allow IP to stop you from defending yourself, and when we take away regulation so governments can't defend you. And when we take away competition so competitors can't swoop in to offer you a better deal, well, then you have the collapse of nearly all the discipline. But there's one more source of discipline specific to the tech sector, and that's its workforce. So although tech has one of the lowest rates of union density of any sector, what it did have historically was a lot of scarcity.
And labor scarcity is its own source of labor power. When you can get another job by walking across the street, as we saw during the pandemic, when there's high demand for labor, people can bargain for better terms. And the problem with scarcity is that it's brittle. Once scarcity is met, once people flood in to fill the gap, then your bargaining power goes away. So for many years, when bosses said to tech workers, "Hey, I require you to enshittify that product," the tech workers who, like, missed their mother's funeral and slept under their desk to deliver that product on time because they were told they were part of a great holy mission to bring forth the future —
David Roberts
Yeah, pretty idealistic. Pretty idealistic set of people originally, still.
Cory Doctorow
I think often, not universally, but often. And because they had power — I mean, I don't even know if the idealism is any higher than it is in any other sector. The difference is it's idealism plus power which creates norms. Right. So if the norm is that when the boss says, "Enshittify this," you say "No, and you can't make me, and the guy across the street will give me a better job if I quit today. And you will never find someone who can do my job if I quit." Then everyone else around that worker who might be someone who's a little bullshier than their colleagues, they start to feel it too. It becomes a kind of workplace norm. But, you know, in 2023, the US tech sector fired 260,000 tech workers. And in the first six months of this year, another 100,000 were shown the door. And so these guys are not telling their bosses to go fuck themselves. They're saying, "Yes, sir. How high?"
David Roberts
Yes, and many are now just stuck, tortured in businesses whose executives they hate and are ruining America. And they're, you know, there's not much they could do about it.
Cory Doctorow
Yeah. So, this is the collapse of all the discipline.
David Roberts
Right. And so, enshittification is basically unrestrained at this point. Well, I want to, now that we've sort of established enshittification, the dynamics driving it, the lack of brakes on it, the loss of restraint on it. I want to talk about energy technology, which was what I wanted to get to in the first place. Because everything you've been saying all this time, I just keep thinking over and over again about the fact that we are rapidly entering an era when Internet-connected software is not just going to be controlling our phones and our TVs, but it's going to be our dishwashers, our appliances.
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, your house is a computer. You put your body inside.
David Roberts
Yes, our houses, our vehicles, hearth and home are all going to be software controlled. That's happening quickly and it's happening at a time when enshittification is rampant and almost unrestrained. And that just, to me, augurs trouble, big trouble. I thought the example of Fisker that you used in your piece was quite apropos here, maybe just mention.
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, Fisker, they called their car, I think they called it a cell phone on wheels or something. It was a smart car. It was a software-based car, they said. And so, when Fisker shut down, they went bankrupt. They were badly managed, whatever. That's a thing that happens. Then, all of the cars that hadn't been sold were bricked and all the cars that are on the road can't be serviced.
David Roberts
Yeah, which is wild. Like, you would think Fisker, facing bankruptcy, would sort of just out of the goodness of his heart, unlock that software and make it interoperable. Make it so that other people can program it or that they would be required by law to do so.
Cory Doctorow
Sure. Well, Fisker seems to have had a very chaotic wind down. Their landlord went in and their place looked like a tornado had hit it. So maybe they weren't thinking about that. But it's not necessarily a matter of unlocking it. It's a matter of maintaining and keeping up the server infrastructure. Because these things are designed so that when the server goes away, they stop working. And this is an intrinsically brittle design. And you're right, you would hope that regulators would step in. I mean, look, I have a solar and battery backup and in order to coordinate with the grid for management and two-way energy coordination, it requires an Internet connection.
And when the Internet connection goes down for any length of time, it all stops working. So, the thing that's supposed to keep my house going when there's a power outage stops working if the Internet isn't available. And, like the last time I checked, the Internet needs power.
David Roberts
You know, as I think about it, it's just wild to me that we're now entering a period where you can be sold a car that can be rendered inoperable if the company goes out of business. And that's not popularly understood. It's not discussed. There's no changes in law or regulation like that. Just seems like a fundamentally different thing than buying a dumb machine that you then own and can do whatever you want.
Cory Doctorow
At the risk of demoralizing you: it's substantially worse than that because not only can your car be rendered inoperable by the sudden bankruptcy of the manufacturer, the manufacturer often can reach into the car and kill switch it. There are immobilizers built in for multiple parties to access, so leasing companies and so on. And I have a theory I call the shitty technology adoption curve. So if you've got something terrible you want to do to people with technology, you can't do it to like middle class, mouthy white guys like me. At least not at first, because I'll complain.
David Roberts
We all have pods.
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, people listen to me at least sometimes, right? So, what you got to do is you got to find someone no one's going to listen to. Someone with no social power and you've got to inflict it on them and you got to sand down all the rough corners and edges on their bodies. So, you start with terrible technology with like refugees, prisoners, blue-collar workers, then white-collar workers, maybe mental patients in there somewhere, school kids, then university kids. So, you're working your way up the privilege gradient. And you know, so 20 years ago, if you're eating dinner and there's a camera watching you, it's because you're in a supermax.
And now it's because you were foolish enough to buy a camera system from like Google or Apple or, you know, God help us all, Facebook. And that's the shitty tech adoption curve. And with cars, it starts with subprime auto lending. And subprime auto lending is this real bottom-of-the-barrel industry where it looks a lot like subprime house lending, where you have loan origination and then those loans are then packaged up into bonds and sold out on Wall Street. And one of the ways that you make the bond valuable is by assuring the market that the car can be readily repossessed.
And so, to do that, you put remote kill switches in them, and you also put in programmatic kill switches. So, you might put in the terms of the lease, "You can't cross the county line," and if you cross the county line, your ignition won't start again. So, you have cases where people don't realize they cross the county line, they take the kids to the woods for a walk and then the car won't start and they're in the woods and their cell phone doesn't work. Right. And there are maybe wolves, you know, so these are like the foreseeable outcomes.
But also, no language on earth contains the phrase, "As secure as the IT at a used car lot." And so, repeatedly, people have seized control of used car lot systems and then immobilized every car they've ever sold. Right.
David Roberts
Yeah. This seems extremely hackable.
Cory Doctorow
It's like there are attacks in information security where it turns out there's a thing that you can do that invokes an unanticipated mode that causes a thing to stop working. But then there are the manufacturers who say, "No, I'm actually going to put the self-destruct button."
David Roberts
Yeah.
Cory Doctorow
You know, like, I'm a science fiction writer. That's my other life. And I go to science fiction movies to get angry because they get paid so much more than I do and their movies are so stupid. And every now and again, you go see a movie and like, they're on a spaceship and, like, someone trips and they hit the self-destruct button and this like, plummy English voice says, you know, "Self-destruct sequence initiated. Self-destruction in 10, 9, 8..." And I think, you know, like, look, I'm no aerospace engineer, but I think that would be a better spaceship if it wasn't designed to periodically explode.
Right. And like, I am not an automotive engineer, but I think your car would be better if it wasn't designed to allow third parties to immobilize it.
David Roberts
There's no customer justification for that. There's no justification for that that has to do with the customer's experience of it, right?
Cory Doctorow
Well, I can tell you what a Chicago economist would tell you. He would say that the advent of this kind of knee-breaker debt collector technology opens up a market for debt that would otherwise be foreclosed upon. And that the poor immigrant worker, hoping to get to three house cleaning jobs a day instead of two and work her way up the economic ladder and pay for her kids to go on the school ski trip this year, they're able to get a car where before they would have to take the bus only because a lender feels so confident that they can repo that car if they have to. This is the argument for usury.
It is always the argument for usury.
David Roberts
Yeah, you briefly alluded to this, but the more I think about it, the more sort of freaked out I get about it. But like we're just at the front edge of a market for virtual power plants, right? So, your appliances, your EV, your whatever are talking to the Internet and there's some third party that has signed you up for this that is using your energy along with everybody else's energy in a coordinated way to act like a power plant and do arbitrary arbitrage and make money. Then they share some of that money with you in exchange for you allowing them to do this.
A bunch of things about this: One, most companies in this space are startups who won't survive, right? That's kind of the nature of startups. So, like, you don't have a guarantee that if there's bespoke software that it's going to survive. And if it's your home, you know what I mean? Like, it's even one thing if it's your car, but it's your home or, you know, like a lot of these companies that are involved in this, I talk with a lot of them, I have them on the pod, you know, I know these people, they're all right now we're at a stage of the market where they're all good people, basically.
You know what I mean? They're like good, public-minded people who are trying to do something good for the grid and for climate. But like you say, there's no guarantee that a given company that is the third-party administrator of the VPP I'm involved in is going to stay good or might not be bought by someone less good. And then, if I have no protections, if I have no regulatory right to control this system that's running my home, they can start putting ads, you know what I mean? Like, God knows what they could start doing.
Cory Doctorow
Oh sure, I mean, Chamberlain garage door openers, right? They disabled integration with HomeKit so that you have to use their custom app, and then their custom app is full of ads, so you have to throw away all your HomeKit stuff. Also, you have to see ads every time you open your garage door.
David Roberts
I know, and maybe they won't do it now, maybe these companies won't do it, but once you're signed up, it's just wild to me that we're entering this new world so little protected by law and regulation.
Cory Doctorow
You're bringing us back to econ here, and specifically behavioral economics. In behavioral economics, there is a recognition that all of us are prone to rationalization, and that is a significant danger that we all face. We might rationalize our way into doing something that, in retrospect, we'll regret. But in the moment, it seems like the right thing. So, you know, you're a super moral person. You've started a clean tech company. You have convinced 150 people to leave secure jobs and come work for you on this. These are people who really care about the planet and really care about you and really believe in you, and you believe in them. You owe everything to them, and they have kids and families that depend on them.
And then one day, your venture capitalist comes to you and says, "If you don't make some compromise, I'll shut your business down. You're going to have to fire all those people." And you tell yourself, "I'm being the good guy here, in fact, I'm being the excellent guy here. Because not only am I saving these 150 people's jobs, but everyone's going to hate me for it, and I'm going to take the hit to do the right thing."
David Roberts
"Because if my company goes out of business, then I won't be able to save the world at all."
Cory Doctorow
You live to fight another day.
David Roberts
You live to fight another day.
Cory Doctorow
If you think that you will never rationalize your way into doing something wrong, you are a mark. Right. This is like the person who thinks they can't be conned. The person who thinks they can't be conned is a mark.
David Roberts
Yes.
Cory Doctorow
The person who thinks that they won't rationalize their way into doing something bad is a mark. And so, in behavioral economics, there's an idea called the Ulysses pact. So, if you know Ulysses from your Homer, he was a hacker, and so he didn't do things the way normies did. And when they went through the sea of the sirens, you know, the protocol was you fill your ears with wax because if you heard the siren song, it's so beautiful that you jump into the sea. And he's like, "Screw that. I want to hear the song. It's very beautiful."
So, he ties himself to the mast and he says to his sailors, "Whatever I say or do, don't untie me." So, it's not that he's not strong. He is strong. He's strong enough to know that he's going to be weak. And so, he takes a measure off the table. You know, if you're smart and you go on a diet, you throw away all the Oreos.
David Roberts
Yeah. Constrain yourself in advance. Constrain your future self.
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, the union negotiator says, "I'm never gonna bargain away your pension and I am not empowered to do so." And when the boss says, "It's the pensions or nothing," the union negotiator can say, "I believe you. I am not empowered to do that. So, I have to go resign. And they'll have to elect another negotiator. Sorry." Right. That's a Ulysses pact right there. Or, you know, you leave your credit cards at home and you only take 50 bucks with you to the fair, and you can't possibly spend more than $50 while you're there. Right. That's a Ulysses pact.
So, you can do things like say, "I'm going to design a device that the user can always override. I'm going to design a device that has an open bootloader so third parties can make firmware for it. I'm going to design a device that has a mode where you can always roll back an update."
David Roberts
Or where the API is open and accessible. Right?
Cory Doctorow
Where the API is resident on the device and not at the cloud level, so that even if I change the cloud, the device can work with another cloud. Right. You can do that. And if you do that and your boss shows up and says, "Either you wring extra money from your users by doing this terrible thing, or I'm going to pull the plug," you can say, "Look boss, it's your money, you get to pull the plug. That's the way business works. But I literally am physically incapable of taking this step." And the corollary of this is if you design it so that you can take that step, you should anticipate that your boss is going to show up and make you do it.
Right? This is Anton Chekhov's law, right? If you put a phaser on the bridge in Act 1, someone is going to shoot it by Act 3.
David Roberts
And also, it takes a lot of foresight and willpower to put those checks in place in advance, the restraints in advance. And then also, you're presumably in a market competing with other companies that may or may not do the same. So, like, if they can get an advantage by enshittifying a little bit, they will. So again, you're kind of back to the collective action problem. It's not even enough if one company sort of restrains itself.
Cory Doctorow
This is how it all rolls together. Because if, for example, we didn't have anti-circumvention law, right, that bans people from jailbreaking or reverse engineering this stuff, then no one would spend all the money engineering this stuff, because what a lot of extra work that is and what a lot of extra failure modes you introduce. And then all that happens is someone comes along and just hacks it, right? Like Apple spent all this money engineering iMessage so that you'd only have a green bubble if you were using an iPhone. And then like last year, a 16-year-old defeated it.
You know, what a lot of time and energy you put into making this thing. And now you gotta fight guerrilla warfare with 16-year-olds, you know, like what a pain in the ass. And you know, there is this idea in security called the attacker's advantage, which is that if you have a situation where you have an attacker and a defender, you know, they call them the red team and the blue team, the attacker always has an advantage because the attacker has to find just one mistake the defender made and exploit it. But the defender has to never make a mistake.
And so long as it's not illegal, so long as it's not a felony to jailbreak stuff, they're going to figure out how to jailbreak it. And in that case, why bother even making it? So that you need to jailbreak it in order to go after it. And so, this regulatory environment that we're in, it's a moral hazard. This is a temptation to the market to do the wrong thing.
David Roberts
Yeah, it's a competitive disadvantage to do the right thing in the current environment. So, by way of sort of rounding third here and headed for home, I have two wrap-up questions, both of which are kind of substantial. But one is just sort of like on a legal regulatory basis. When we're thinking specifically about interconnected clean energy technologies, are there particular regulatory or legal reforms that we should be pushing for, or is this just a subset of everything else? And this is just about better monopoly law, less regulatory capture, more interoperability? Are there specific things in the energy space that you think people should be advocating for so broadly?
Cory Doctorow
All of those things on an all-of-the-above approach and a real one, not the bullshit one where we say, "We're going to do all of the above, we'll do trains and cars," and then we design our cities so that they only can accept cars and then we don't get trains. An actual all of the above approach where we're working on reforming the various kinds of IP law we have, we're working on making regulation better and ending regulatory capture, we're working on demonopolizing different sectors and so on. All of those things are important, but there are like specific prescriptions that we can imagine that would work here. So one of the things that we learned over the last four years when the Biden administration's antitrust enforcers actually went back and read their enabling legislation and figured out what they had the power to do, was that the law broadly bans what is called unfair and deceptive methods of competition or unfair and deceptive conduct.
And that's a very broad catch-all that can be widely exploited. So, Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission used unfair and deceptive, that standard in Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, to go after things as diverse as non-compete agreements. Right. That is an unfair and deceptive way of doing labor relations. But also to go after pharmacy benefit managers and also to go after AI training and scraping. Like, I think the argument about AI scraping is weird and that the people who think that copyright is going to fix their problem are just super wrong.
I am a creative worker, and I believe in rights for creative workers. But, my publisher is going to just make me sign away any rights to control AI training that Congress gives me. There's only five major publishers; they're all going to put it in their contract, and then they'll just train models using my work and fire me. And the worst part is, the model can't actually do the job because AI companies are much better at convincing your boss that they have a chatbot that can do your job than they are at making a chatbot that can actually do your job.
David Roberts
It is the AI industry's one really transcendent, amazing, and admirable success.
Cory Doctorow
Oh, they're pushing on an open door.
David Roberts
They have bamboozled the entire executive class.
Cory Doctorow
But they're pushing on an open door. Bosses are insatiably horny for firing you and replacing you with a robot. And they will — literally, Elon Musk does demos of robots that can work in factories that are literally a guy in a robot suit. And bosses all over the world get, like, horrible priapism and have to go to the emergency room. Right? Like, this is — there is nothing easier than selling a boss on automation to fire workers. So unfair and deceptive is this very broad standard. And unfair and deceptive appears in other agencies' enabling legislation. So like the DOT, the Department of Transportation, has a transposition of the same language from the Federal Trade Commission Act in its own enabling legislation.
And so, after Lina Khan's head of staff went to help Pete Buttigieg actually run that agency, well, they went after the airlines. So, you remember Southwest had an outage where a million flyers were stranded over Christmas?
David Roberts
Vaguely.
Cory Doctorow
It was because they bought a whole bunch of other airlines and then had never upgraded the IT and then had started to do really funky things with the IT, where what they would do is sell tickets for like 110% of their capacity and then cancel the 10% of flights that had the fewest tickets sold on the day and then fly crews around to fly the flights that they were going to fly. And this was just so technically complicated for their creaking, you know, bailing wire and spit IT infrastructure that the whole goddamn thing fell over. And once Lina Khan's chief of staff arrived at the DOT to run things for Pete Buttigieg, she said, "Look, selling tickets on an airplane that doesn't exist is an unfair and deceptive method of competition. It's canonically unfair and deceptive."
Selling a car that you can't fix is unfair and deceptive. That an independent mechanic can't fix is unfair and deceptive. Gimmicking a part for a car, or anything else, so that it has a little encryption handshake to make sure that it's an actual OEM part and not a part from a third party that makes generic replacements, is unfair and deceptive.
David Roberts
Seems to leave an enormous amount of discretion in the hands of judges, though, right? I mean, that's the kind of thing where it's going to depend a lot on who hears it.
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, sure. But, you know, the way that you build up a jurisprudence about what is and isn't unfair and deceptive is by taking a lot of cases to court and trying it again and trying it in different circuits and trying it with different fact patterns. You know, like the number of times FDR had to bring the New Deal in front of the Supreme Court before the Supreme Court figured out that he was serious about firing them and packing the court and suddenly changed their minds. Right. Like they overturned themselves. Right. There were like 10 judgments from the Supreme Court in a row saying the New Deal was unconstitutional, and then an 11th one going, "Actually, no, it's fine."
And so, obviously, that's unlikely to happen under the Trump administration, but it is the kind of thing state legislators can do. And remember, you know, AG, Attorney General, also stands for aspiring governor. And AGs, like, they like doing this shit. And moreover, when they do it against big tech companies, they get millions and millions of dollars that go straight into the state coffers. You know, one of the reasons that Ken Paxton, the lavishly corrupt Attorney General of Texas, has been so ardent about suing Google is that, you know, the way you get reelected in Texas is by not levying any taxes.
But then, you can't pave your roads, and people don't like it when the main highway turns into a gravel road. So, you need to get the money from somewhere else. So, you sue "woke multinationals" from big blue cities and take them for hundreds of millions of dollars. And you know what? If they're cheating, go ahead, take them for hundreds of millions of dollars. That's great. You know how they can insulate themselves from that liability? Stop fucking cheating.
David Roberts
Also, on the privacy thing, like, this is another thing where the kind of data that these companies are going to have, again, it's just like a whole new level of intimacy, you know what I mean? Your home and hearth, like literally when you are taking showers. And again, it's like a little insane to me that we're just sort of launching into this VPP thing with no new privacy laws or regulations, and barely even a discussion of privacy, even though this is like the most privacy-threatening thing I can imagine.
Cory Doctorow
Well, I mean, the good news is that privacy is starting to change. The privacy debate is starting to change. At EFF, we talk about this thing called privacy first. So, there are a lot of problems that people have that have some nexus with the void in American privacy law. So, like, you know, if you think that Insta made your teenager anorexic, or if you think that Facebook made your grampy a QAnon, or if you're worried that the January 6th protesters or rioters were all rounded up because Google had their location and answered a reverse warrant from the DOJ, or if you're worried that that happens to people at Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
Or, if you're worried that, like, there's teenagers being followed around by red state attorneys general when they cross state lines to get an abortion using automated location tracking.
David Roberts
Or asking them to drop their pants in the bathroom to confirm their genders.
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, exactly. Or, I just spoke at a hearing the CFPB put on about privacy and data brokers, and the speaker before me works for the DOD. She was talking about how American military personnel with gambling problems are being targeted for in-app gambling and this is a huge problem in the American military. Or, you know, if you're worried that, like, someone's making deep fake porn of you, like, all of these things are different things. Some of these things I don't actually think are real or a problem, and some of them I'm deeply worried about, but they could all be substantially improved if we just had a federal privacy law with a private right of action.
And we've gotten closer in the last couple of Congresses. The last Congress, the only reason it died is the surveillance industry swooped in at the last minute and said they wanted what's called federal preemption, which means that all the state privacy laws — there's like, a pretty good biometric law in Illinois, there's a pretty good consumer law in California — that they would all be overridden, and so the federal law would become the ceiling and not the floor.
David Roberts
What happened to local control? I bet you get asked this a lot, but is there no market correction here? Like, is there not a market? Do you think an EV maker could get by saying, "Hey, here's a car that's just yours. It just belongs to you. We won't fuck with it," et cetera. Like, privacy focused.
Cory Doctorow
You're thinking the wrong way about this. This is not about a manufacturer. This is about a complementary manufacturer, an inter-operator. So, more than half of all Internet users have installed an ad blocker, which is also a privacy blocker. That's the largest consumer boycott in human history. If your independent mechanic, when you brought your car in, said, "By the way, this car is spying on you in every conceivable way." And if you look up Mozilla's privacy report on the automotive industry and data brokerages from last year, where they looked at just what the manufacturer said they had for sale for data brokers, like, "Hey, we're Nissan, we have data. You can buy it. Here's our rate card."
The data they were offering to sell was about their drivers' sex lives and the smells in the car. Right? Which you have to assume is just bullshit, right?
David Roberts
Like the level of flatulence for particular drivers, or...?
Cory Doctorow
You know, like, did you unwrap a burrito in there or something? There are old McDonald's wrappers in the back. But you know, like, the industry is really sleazy and it's full of people who are ripping each other off. They're not just ripping us off, right? But if you go to the mechanic and they're like, "Oh, you're driving a Nissan. Do you want to see what Nissan says they can sell about you? Tell you what, 50 bucks, I turn it all off." Everyone would turn it off. Yeah, right. And you can make a lot of 50 bucks doing that.
And you know, in Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Right to Repair bill passed by ballot initiative in 2020 for automotive with 76% of the vote, but it's been tied up in court ever since. What we've seen in Oregon, there was —
David Roberts
Something in Washington, too.
Cory Doctorow
Washington State. Yeah, Oregon, Washington State and Colorado, we've seen these good domain-specific right to repair bills. So, like Colorado's got a wheelchair one and there's an electronics one in Washington State and Oregon.
David Roberts
So, right to repair is about you not being allowed to require that only your parts work in your device, basically? Like, you're not allowed to do these little electronic connections.
Cory Doctorow
It's not just parts, it's also diagnostic codes. So, all of these things. Remember, we were talking about digital locks before? All these things have locks on them. And while it's not against the law to find out what's wrong with your car, it's against the law to remove the lock that you have to remove to read out the diagnostic information.
David Roberts
So, right to repair just makes the lock illegal.
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, so that's what they've done. The law that makes removing the lock is federal — Digital Millennium Copyright Act — and states can't repeal federal laws. So what they said instead is, "Here in Oregon, if you want to sell an electronic, it cannot have a digital lock on its parts. It's just not fit for consumption in the state of Oregon." And so manufacturers, well, they could try and do split manufacturing runs. And we've seen some of this. Like, Apple has been ordered to open up its app store in the European Union. And what they've said is that they're going to, like, have a version of their firmware that lets you install third-party app stores.
But if the phone detects that you're out of the EU for 20 days, it's going to delete all the apps and revert you to the regular app store. Right. Which is like, just clearly they're just like, fucking around here. That's just malicious compliance, but building, you know, split manufacturing runs is really hard to do. It's logistically —
David Roberts
But that's like most products these days, isn't it? I mean, that's not insubstantial.
Cory Doctorow
No, no, no. It would be like, one of the reasons that the right to repair has been so hard to pass is because the coalition against the right to repair is so large, because it includes, like, tractor makers. And, you know, one of the leading companies against the right to repair is Wahl, who make all the clippers. You remember, during the lockdown, we were all cutting our own hair. We all bought Wahl clippers. So, Wahl has started to put spring loads inside their shaver heads. And if you open it up to sharpen the blade, it springs apart and you can't put it together again without a special machine.
And they want you to mail the head to them, along with 15 bucks, to get your shaver sharpened.
David Roberts
Hilarious.
Cory Doctorow
So, you have Wahl, Apple, John Deere, GM, Tesla, and Google all showing up to fight against the right to repair. And so, you know, we saw it knocked back in like 18 legislatures in one year. I think it was 2018. And so, the repair coalition split it off and they're like, "All right, we're just going to do wheelchairs in Colorado. We're just going to do electronics here." And so, they're breaking apart the coalition. And then, you know, the idea is to then create a patchwork of state laws that's so hard to comply with that the manufacturers are just like, "Forget it. We're just going to not screw around with repair anymore."
David Roberts
Will they just forget it? Like, how attached are they? Like, how much of their profits are tied to this now?
Cory Doctorow
They're not irrationally attached to it. They are rationally attached to it. If it costs them more to comply with the patchwork of national rules, logistics lawsuits, and liability than it does to just do the right thing, they'll do the right thing. They're doing the wrong thing because they make money that way. It's not sadism, right? It's just dead-eyed cost-benefit stuff. And you know, they are projecting very large revenues into the future. And this anti-circumvention stuff, these digital locks, it makes them a lot of money, right? Like so, John Deere. If you've got a John Deere tractor, it's like a $600,000 investment.
You can't fix it yourself if you're a farmer; you actually do the repair yourself. You're expected to. You get the part, you put it in, but it doesn't start working until a technician charges you $200 to come to the farm, look at it, and type an unlock code into your keyboard.
David Roberts
God, that's irritating as shit.
Cory Doctorow
Oh, irritating. If there's a storm coming, you have to get the crop in. It's a lot more than irritating. But it's not just that because when you're tilling with your John Deere tractor, it has torque sensors and humidity sensors and it does centimeter-accurate grid surveys of the soil conditions on your farm. And Deere aggregates all of this information and sells it into the futures market to predict crop yields. And they're like thinking, "Oh, this is like a 10-digit bet, right? This is a $10 billion a year business that we can open up if we can do this."
But if you can modify your own tractor, then you just turn that off. You want to know about your soil telemetry, but why do you want John Deere to know about it? And so, that's the stuff that they're looking for. It's this kind of multilateral bet. During the first Trump administration, I went to D.C. and there are these kind of center-right think tanks that are kind of right on tech some of the time. And we agree with each other some of the time. They're like, "Let's have a meeting with industry reps and people who are likely to go into regulation and with some think tank people, and you can talk about this anti-circumvention stuff."
So, I'm sitting around a table and it's Chatham House Rules, so I can't tell you exactly who was there, but I can tell you roughly what they said. So, there are all these different industry reps from automotive, agriculture and so on and so on. And we're all talking about this stuff, entertainment, music, books, movies. We're talking about anti-circumvention. And the car person, the automotive person, keeps saying, like, "Well, but we have to be able to stop people from fixing their own cars, and we have to be able to stop people from modifying their cars." And everyone else around the table is just increasingly like, "You can't tell Americans they're not allowed to fix their cars. Like, this is. This is America."
David Roberts
Why, though? What's their purported reason?
Cory Doctorow
Because it would make the law unpopular. So they're like, "If this goes to court or if this ends up in front of Congress, there might be political will sufficient to actually strike down this law that we all are planning to extract billions in rent with. So we can't let you screw it up for the rest of us by making it look bad. You're going to bring our hustle into disrepute." It's like, you know, you got all the drug dealers and there's the one guy who wants to sell the crack in front of the kindergarten classroom, right?
And they're like, "You can't sell the crack at the kindergarten classroom. Sell it anywhere else, but not in front of the kindergarten classroom." This guy's like, "But I have to. That's where I sell my drugs." And they're like, "All right, fine, we're going to shoot you in the head." So what these guys said was, "Maybe we could just get the DOT to ban the use of digital locks in cars," right? They literally threw this guy under the bus because they were like, "We just don't want it used in a way that threatens our hustle." And so, finding these niches and then using them as a leverage point, sticking your lever in, and then wiggling it around, cracking it open, widening the crack.
I know it sucks, it's incrementalism, but it's a way to kind of build some momentum. And the same as with privacy, there are so many people who suffer as a result of this anti-circumvention felony, contempt of business model stuff, right? Like, you know, you think you got it bad in clean tech. Think about people who rely on medical implants. Like we've seen in the last year, firms that have bricked exoskeletons that paralyzed people depend on, bionic eyes that are wired into people's optic nerves, implanted insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitors — like this keeps happening. Neural implants that do deep brain stimulation for Parkinson's.
We've seen companies refuse to fix supply chain attacks on implanted defibrillators. This is like a car battery hooked up to your heart, and it's got a wireless interface, and it's insecure. Right. And like Medtronic, right, so this is a monopoly story too. Medtronic bought everyone who makes these implants. These are all Medtronic devices. All of them. With a couple of exceptions, everything I just mentioned is a Medtronic device. Medtronic bought everyone who makes med tech devices. They also make all the ventilators in the world. And you can't fix a ventilator yourself. If you're a hospital med tech, you've got to wait for Medtronic's tech to come out and type an unlock code, which they couldn't do during lockdown.
So, all the ventilators broke during lockdown. They're also a tax cheat. They did the largest tax inversion in world history. They pretend they're Irish. None of their money is taxed. And so, you know, if you're Medtronic, you rely on this anti-circumvention stuff to really make a bundle. And there are a lot of people who hate Medtronic and who hate anti-circumvention, though they don't know it. They just know that they're angry about their insulin pump.
David Roberts
It's wild how much the consumer's position and power in capitalism has changed due to all this stuff. And I just don't think people know. I just don't think people get it. I just don't think people have any idea how fundamentally different the relationship is now between customers and businesses.
Cory Doctorow
But look, before the term ecology came into popularity in the 1970s — this is a point my friend James Boyle makes — before ecology came along, you had people who cared about owls and you had people who cared about the ozone layer. And they didn't know they cared about the same thing. Because, like, facially, the destiny of charismatic nocturnal avians is not obviously related to the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere. But the term ecology turns a thousand issues into a movement. And the fight against excessive corporate power and its corrupting influence is something that touches all of us.
And some of us think that we're worried about clean tech. And some of us are patients' rights advocates, and some of us are disability rights advocates. And some of us are worried about national resiliency, and some of us are worried about armed service personnel being targeted for predatory gambling apps. But we're all fighting this one fight. We are a very big coalition. And it includes people who you may not agree with about anything else, but you agree with on this. And that's a very powerful coalition.
David Roberts
It is a bit of a populist moment. I mean, who knows? We've seen populist moments blow away like smoke in America before.
Cory Doctorow
Stein's law says anything that can't go on forever eventually stops.
David Roberts
Well, what about, you know, when I put it out on Bluesky that I was doing this? You know, I got a bunch of questions, and one of the frequent questions is, you know, if you're just — because a lot of the people listening to this pod are the very people who are going to be involved in designing, implementing, selling these technologies that are tying all these clean energy devices together on the Internet and thus opening them to all these problems. How much discretion, like, is there? If you're just a worker in one of these places, how much discretion do you have?
Are there principles? Are there things you can do?
Cory Doctorow
Join a union. Join a union. That's how you get your boss to listen to you. Join a union. It used to be you got your boss to listen to you because he was afraid you'd quit. Join a union. And you should join a union anyways. Because we all know how tech bosses treat workers they're not afraid of. Right, Jeff? Jeff Bezos does not allow his tech workers to show up with pink mohawks, facial piercings, and black T-shirts that say things he doesn't like or to work at home anymore. Because he's sentimental about them. Right? He's afraid of them. We know what he does to the workers he's not afraid of. Amazon warehouse workers are injured at 1.5 to 3 times the rate of other workers. They have to piss in bottles. Amazon drivers also piss in bottles, and they're watched by AI cameras that penalize them if they open their mouth too much because they're not allowed to sing along to the radio.
David Roberts
What?
Cory Doctorow
Right. Tim Cook became the CEO of Apple over all the other executives who might have succeeded Steve Jobs because he figured out how to successfully manufacture iPhones in China. And the way that he did it was by imposing terms on Foxconn that were so onerous, they had to install suicide nets around the factories. That is what Tim Cook does to workers that he's not afraid of. So, you need a tech union because your boss will treat you like those workers if they can. And your power from scarcity gets less powerful every day.
David Roberts
Yeah, and I just want to stress. I mean, you said this a number of times now, but I just want to stress again that, like, if you're in this business today, your boss is probably a nice person who cares about climate change and says all the right things and has all the right principles. But there's just no — relying on the goodwill of a boss is not a long-term plan.
Cory Doctorow
Your boss is going to save your job by taking capital from a company with a name like Blockchain Capital. And it will be run by the kind of people who think Blockchain Capital sounds cool. And then, in two years, they're going to own your ass.
David Roberts
Yeah, the hedge funds are going to own us all eventually. Well, okay, final question. Just because I'm curious and I know a bunch of other people are, you recently wrote that you're not coming to Bluesky.
Cory Doctorow
Yeah.
David Roberts
Despite Bluesky's purported openness, do you want to just explain that?
Cory Doctorow
Yeah. Look, I have figured out what happens when you join a platform that's really fun, run by people that you like and trust, but that you can't leave if they have a change of heart. Right. That's what happened to me on Twitter. I knew the people who started Twitter. I've had a Twitter account since it was delivered by SMS. They were nice people. And this is true of many other platforms that I use and don't like, but can't afford to leave and can't escape. So, Bluesky has said that they are going to be federated and that you'll be able to leave Bluesky without leaving the communities that you're part of on Bluesky.
David Roberts
Right. And the idea here is, you know, if there's a third party that designs a better interface or whatever, you should be able to interact with your same followers and the same people you're following —
Cory Doctorow
On another server run by someone else, like email, right? You can quit Gmail but continue to exchange messages with people from Outlook, and you can even do forwarding from Gmail. You can leave behind a little forwarding.
David Roberts
Right. Or you can export your contacts.
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, all of that stuff. And a bunch of that stuff has been built, but not the part where you can go somewhere else. And they say it has been, but whenever you try to pin them down on it, they're like, "Well, it doesn't, you know, that little one part of it maybe not." Right. Or you know, "we're working on it" or "it's coming soon," and that's great. I don't think they're delaying it because they're sneaky. Like, I think they're fine.
David Roberts
Well, they're kind of underwater right now.
Cory Doctorow
I mean, yeah, sure, I think they're great people. Remember when I said the way that you end up with an enshittified service is by doing the right thing? Right, by like saving your workers, protecting your users, whatever, but at the expense of teeing up bad things that can happen in the future.
David Roberts
So, if they unambiguously created that functionality and announced it and said, "Leave if you want, when you want," you would be okay.
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, no, I'd be there in a second. My Ulysses pact is I only will join new services if they're federated.
David Roberts
This is probably more than I need to share with my audience, but I'm on Substack and I can export my subscribers. But now, they've got this network started, Substack notes, which to me just looks like a really obvious attempt to get these dynamics started, these lock-in dynamics.
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, I think that's right. Firms are very attuned to lock-in. And even when they develop it accidentally, once it arrives, it becomes again a moral hazard.
David Roberts
And I'm already like, I'm already kind of so stuck that it would be a huge pain in the ass to get out of it and would probably lose me a bunch of subscribers. Like, I'm already kind of a little bit locked in.
Cory Doctorow
Well, and you know, for the record, Molly White, who's, you know, "Web3 is Going Just Great," really great tech critic and Wikipedian, she did a migration from Substack to Ghost and not just Ghost, but self-hosted Ghost and it went really well and she documented it in eye-watering detail. And so if you ever feel like doing that, people have written some guides and like that part's fine. Right? I'm actually cool with "Oh, it's a little esoteric. You might have to pay someone or monkey around or you know, read a guide" or something, like that's fine.
So, I'm not even calling for these companies to make it easy. I'm calling for them to make it not a crime. Because if it's not a crime, then if they start to suck, people will just figure out how to unlock their shit because they'll have an audience of people who will pay to get unlocked.
David Roberts
Yeah, you know, I remember you talking about this recalls me back to the early days of the Internet. You know, I'm old too. I remember the early days of just Windows. They were just little third-party programs that could do anything, like unlock anything. Do the music better than Microsoft's music program. You know what I mean? Do email better. Like any little esoteric thing you wanted. Somebody out there had hacked together a way to do it. And that whole vibe, that whole sort of culture just really dried up right in front of me, you know what I mean?
And now, here I am on Apple, like everybody else, in a pristine, sterile environment. Stuck with their products.
Cory Doctorow
So, let me make a pitch for you to come to Jesus here.
David Roberts
Jesus meaning Linux?
Cory Doctorow
Ubuntu Linux installs on any hardware, including your Mac. It has all the built-in apps that do all the things your Mac does. It reads and writes all the files almost without exception. It has all of those weird little fun utilities that you might want to use. The GUI is just like the GUI in your Mac. You know, it's like, it's different in the sense that like if you remodeled your kitchen, you'd forget where your cutlery was for two weeks and then you'd forget where the cutlery used to be, which is, you know, my experience. I used to administer Macintoshes.
I used to write POs for like a million dollars' worth of Apple equipment a year. I have a sad Mac tattoo on my right bicep from a particularly horrendous data recovery incident when I was a teenager. And so, you know, like I get it, but I sit down on a Mac now, I just can't remember how to use it anymore because I use Linux. But here's the cool thing: is the hardware on the Linux side, you have so much more choice and some of it's really cool. So, I have a laptop called a Framework laptop.
It costs less than a MacBook, weighs about the same, has about the same dimensions, but you can open it up with a screwdriver that it comes with and every part inside of it has a QR code that takes you to a video showing you how to replace it and a link to buy a replacement part. And it's designed to be maintained and upgraded. So, I'm on my, I think it's the fourth logic board now. So, they just, every year there's a faster processor and I whack a new processor in it. I broke the screen while I was on tour.
I got out of a cab in Edinburgh, a black cab, and dropped it from like six feet and it broke. And I only had like one third of the screen that was usable. And of course, this being Linux, there's like a way to just say, "Okay, just use this one third of the screen." But I was going back to London the next night and so I called the manufacturer and they're, they're good eggs. And I begged them and I said, "Please FedEx me a new screen to my hotel in London." So I get off the train at Kings Cross.
I go down to Clark and, well, where I'm staying. I get to my hotel desk and they're like, "Here's your screen." It's midnight. I go upstairs. I'm so tired. It took me 15 minutes to change the screen. I'd never done it.
David Roberts
No shit?
Cory Doctorow
And the next day, I did two remote conference presentations and wrote a column — like zero downtime. This is the first laptop I've owned long enough that the stickers have worn off and I've had to do new coats of stickers, right? Like, I used to buy a laptop every year. Like, talk about a climate disaster.
David Roberts
Yeah, no kidding, right?
Cory Doctorow
They just upgraded the battery. And so, the old battery, I still have the old battery. The new one's 20% more capacious. But the old battery, they've got a 3D printed printable case that turns it into a power bank for your laptop. There's also 3D printable cases for the old motherboard so you can turn them into bookshelf PCs.
David Roberts
Oh, hilarious. Do you have a 3D printer?
Cory Doctorow
I don't, but you can order them as readymades or get them from service bureaus. So, like, it's great. It's called a Framework. It's the best laptop I've ever owned. You should, like, switch to Linux and use a Framework and you'll love it. It'll take you three weeks to figure out where you're at and then it'll be fine.
David Roberts
All right, we'll leave it there then, and we'll leave it maybe with — if you're, you know, if you're out there listening and you're involved in the development of these kinds of programs, these kinds of VPP programs, these home energy management programs, maybe take that same, you know, come to Jesus sentiment to heart, let's make it all Linux based, or I guess whatever the whole home equivalent of that is.
Cory Doctorow
I mean, it's HomeKit and free open source firmware on stuff.
David Roberts
I mean, this is one of the things that your original article got me thinking about. Like, can you imagine? I was thinking about this sort of open season hacker kind of anybody can do anything vibe of the early Internet and early computers. I just think about, like, what people would — people are so clever, you know — what people would do with their homes and their appliances and their cars if they could hack them. Think of all the things people would do.
Cory Doctorow
More importantly, what would people do with those things after a protracted power outage, or a flood, or during a wildfire?
David Roberts
Yeah.
Cory Doctorow
When the assumptions that we make about infrastructure are no longer operational, and where it's a matter of life and death, right? This is how you build for resiliency. You build things that fail gracefully, not just things that work well.
David Roberts
Right. Perfect. Okay. Well, Cory, thank you so much. This has been super fascinating, and I hope you're right that this populist moment rises to, you know, accomplishes some things before we all are locked into some sort of obsolete home software and lamenting.
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, me too.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially, to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes me and my guests sound smart every week. And it is all supported entirely by listeners like you. So, if you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. Or, leaving a nice review, or telling a friend about Volts. Or all three. Thanks so much, and I'll see you next time.
Share this post