Carl Miller (4:09)

It is fun to say. It does make me feel a little naughty. I'm going to be saying a lot in this interview. It is a great word. Congratulations. That it now is one of the words that encapsulates the zeitgeist, as you say. And let's start then on the zeitgeist. So the kind of thesis is the in shitter scene that we're living through a great big pile of shit. And I think the idea that all these different services have got worse, that things aren't actually moving forwards even technically.

Cory Doctorow (4:37)

Yeah. So we are in this moment where it seems like lots and lots of things are getting worse and that is coterminal with firms getting larger and with in many ways them getting harder to avoid. So it's quite a disheartening factor to realize that companies are making more money by providing something worse that we can't seem to wean ourselves off of. And you know, there's a kind of economist or political scientist who will try and move all of this stuff into a kind of mystical realm. They'll say that, oh, this is, you know, the great forces of history. These are iron laws of economics. It's returns to scale, it's network effects, it's, you know, all of this stuff that kind of. You have to be steeped in jargon to understand. And my thesis about inshidification is that we took decisions in living memory. That they were made by policymakers who were warned at the time that the kind of decay that we see was the likely outcome of taking those decisions. And that here we are in an environment in which all of those prophesied harms have come true. And the people who ushered them in, you know, they stand to one side with the most innocent face imaginable and say, well, how can you know it's my fault? You know, sure, we used to not have a rat problem when we put down rat poison. And sure, I told you to stop putting down rat poison. And sure, the rats are eating your face off, but maybe that's because we're living through the time of the rat, right? Maybe. Like some celestial occurrence has made rats fecund beyond all the imaginings of history, you know. And yes, of course, the rats did buy all the rat poison factories and shut them down. But look, if you're not going to put down rat poison, that's just economically rational. It's practically Pareto optimal. And I think one of the things about the insidification thesis is that by grounding it in actual material choices made by named individuals, we take it out of this helpless world in which humans have no agency and move it instead to an environment where not only do we know why it's happening, but it kind of suggests a response. Because if you know which policies caused it, then at the very least you could start operating different policies. And at the most, you might actually, I don't know, hold those people who made those bad decisions to account and never let them near any kind of lever of policy again.

Carl Miller (7:08)

Shocked the gambling is happening in this casino.

Cory Doctorow (7:11)

Indeed.

Host/Producer (7:11)

Yeah.

Cory Doctorow (7:12)

Yeah.

Carl Miller (7:13)

Okay. Well, let's go actually through the process of initiative. Location first. So this is, I think, the kind of pathology as you write it, the kind of diagnosis it's for tech policy standards, a pleasingly straightforward one. Stage one, and this is a general argument you make of basically almost every single and shittified service that we. We now experience, isn't it? So, I mean, feel free to dwell on any case study you want. Maybe let's take Amazon.

Cory Doctorow (7:41)

I was going to say Facebook. Amazon's fine, too. Facebook's really a great case study. Here, because they really do fit the template so perfectly. And my argument is that this is a template that it's not exactly followed by everyone. There's differences of degree, but those don't amount to a difference in kind. So when Facebook launched, the first thing it did was be good to its end users. That's stage one of insidification. So Mark Zuckerberg, his initial pitch to all those MySpace users was, sure, all your friends are on MySpace, but has it occurred to you that MySpace is owned by an evil, crapulent, senescent Australian billionaire named Rupert Murdoch who's spying on you with every hour that God sends. If you come to Facebook, I will run a Service much like MySpace, with the exception that we will never, ever spy on you, and we'll only show you the things that you asked to see. So you tell us who your friends are, who you want to follow, and when they post something for consumption by the people who follow them, they. You're going to see it. And while Facebook was doing this, they were also finding a way to lock in their end users. And this is part of phase one, a way to keep end users from defecting. And with social media, you kind of get that for free through something economists call the collective action problem and also switching costs. So the collective action problem, you experience it all the time. You're in a group chat with six mates, and you want to figure out where you're going to go for drinks on Friday or what board game you're going to play, and you just can't agree. It's really hard to get people to agree on stuff. And. And it's much harder when we're talking about Facebook because then we're talking about hundreds of friends who have a lot of reasons to be there. So some of them are there because, you know, they move from another country, and that's how they stay in touch with their friends at home. And some are there because they have a rare disease, and that's where the other people who have that disease gather to talk about it and offer mutual aid. And some are there because that's where their customers, their audiences are. Some are there just because, like, their kids are in a little League, you know, five aside game. And the way they organize the carpool with the other parents is by being on Facebook. And so not only do you have to convince your friends who you care about to leave, they have to convince all those other people to leave. And so it becomes kind of paralyzing, a kind of mutual hostage taking. And at the same time, the fact that we get all of these communities and all the value of these communities from Facebook means that if you just say stuff it, I'm leaving, you lose all that value. That's what economists call the switching costs. And so, so long as you love your friends more than you hate Mark Zuckerberg, you're going to stay, right? So Mark Zuckerberg, he's looking for this equilibrium where he doesn't make you hate him more than he loves your friends. So that's where stage two comes in. He starts reducing how much you love Facebook in order to make some of his business customers love Facebook more. There's a bit of wisdom from MBA programs that goes, if your customers are too satisfied, you're leaving money on the table, right? So he goes to the publishers and he says, do you remember we told these numpties that we were not going to spy on them and that we weren't going to show them things that they didn't want to see? Well, we will actually show them your stuff. Just put short excerpts of your content from your website, which you're monetizing in your own way on Facebook and we'll just like cram it non consensually into the eyeballs of people who we promised we would only ever show the things they asked to see. And if some of them click the link, well, that's a free traffic funnel for you. And so the publishers pile in, become very dependent on the audience, and they go to the advertisers and they say, hey, do you remember we told these rubes we weren't going to spy on them. We are spying on them from asshole to appetite. And for a remarkably small amount of money, we will target ads to them with exquisite fidelity. And because we are so committed to your business success, we've got whole buildings full of engineers who do nothing but police ad fraud. And so we'll make sure that if you give us money to show an ad to a user, that that's the user who sees it. And they really do see it. And so the publishers, the advertisers, they get locked in too. And you know, when we talk about competition, we usually focus on monopoly powerful sellers. But monopsony is also very important. Powerful buyers. You know, once, once like 20% of your income as a business is coming from one source. If that source goes away overnight, you are in really deep trouble. You probably can't make payroll or the rent and you need to go to your bank manager and try and get a bridge loan while you try to scramble for Another customer. So monopsonies are actually much easier to form and much more durable than monopolies. And now Facebook is really powerful buyer in the market for ads and publishing, and they become locked into Facebook too. And that's phase three where Facebook claws back the value from them. And so, you know, advertisers suddenly discover that the rate for ads is double or triple what they used to pay, the fidelity of the ad targeting is very low, and ad fraud goes, you know, bananas. Procter and Gamble, they zeroed out this $200 million a year ad spend on programmatic ads. That's the euphemism Facebook uses for surveillance ads. And what they found is that when they eliminated that $200 million spend, they saw a zero dollar drop in their sales because to a first approximation, no one saw the ads. They were just, it was just pure ad fraud, just being skimmed off in this, you know, crooked casino. Publishers, meanwhile, found that they couldn't reach their audiences of their subscribers, much less people their content would be recommended to, unless they put the whole article up, not an excerpt, something that was fully substituted for their own website. And then for good measure, Facebook started to punish anyone who put a link off the platform into a post because maybe that's a quote unquote malicious link. And so the publishers are locked to those end users, the advertisers locked to the end users, the end users locked to each other. The quantum of material in your feed that consists of people that you've asked to see things from has dwindled to a kind of homeopathic residue. The resulting void is being filled with slop and bad ads and political disinformation that they're being paid for and stuff that publishers are desperate to get you to see and that they're losing money on besides. And everyone's just kind of locked in, in this like, brittle equilibrium where not one penny of surplus is being left on the table, where there is no customer who is too happy for Facebook and Facebook is clawing all that back. And the problem with that equilibrium is it's really brittle, right? The, the difference between I hate this but I can't bear to leave and I hate this and I'm not coming back. It just takes one little push to tip it over, right? Live stream, mass shooting, whistleblower, Cambridge Analytica style scandal and people bolt for the. Since when that happens, the market stops treating Facebook like a firm that's growing and starts treating them like a mature firm and starts to do mass sell offs like we saw in January 2022, when Facebook experienced just slightly fewer new American users than they'd projected. And they lost a quarter of a trillion dollars in 24 hours when the market sold them off. You know, Facebook doesn't like this. And they don't like it for lots of reasons, but one is that Facebook's top managers and executives, their stock portfolios are stuffed full of Facebook shares because that's where much of their compensation comes from. And so when these sell offs happen, when the equilibrium tips, you get these platforms that go into a panic, although in Silicon Valley they use a euphemism, they call that a pivot. And so this is why a few years ago, Mark Zuckerberg kind of rose from his sarcophagus one morning and said, friends, I have had a vision in the night. I know that I told you that from now till the end of eternity, you would be doomed to arguing with your, you know, racist Facebook uncle using a primitive text interface that I designed in my dorm room so that me and my creepy friends could non consensually rate the fuckability of our fellow Harvard undergraduates. But the reality is that your future is then I'm going to convert you and everyone you love into a legless, sexless, low polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon character and I'm going to imprison you in a world I stole from a 25 year old satirical cyberpunk novel called Metaverse. Right? And that's when it turns into a pile of shit. And platforms have turned into piles of shit before, but then they died. And the difference between then and now, because of the external factors, because of the way markets are structured, because of the way our policy environment works, is that even after these platforms become monumentally unfit for purpose, they retain their lock in and they stay alive. They live to fight another day and do another grift. This time it's AI.

Carl Miller (15:51)

So it all does begin with these companies genuinely delivering a great service, doesn't it? And that's the thing that's kind of difficult, I think, for people to let go that Google really did re index the Internet in a better way than its competitors. Apple really did build a better phone than anyone else. But then there's this kind of inexorable logic where ironically, I suppose the entire reason why the company managed to gain an audience and get lock in pivots 180 degrees and instead becomes the kind of opposite logic of not allowing people to leave.

Cory Doctorow (16:30)

Yeah, I would say that it's not inexorable though, because it's the result of specific policy choices. So as you say, these platforms used to provide real value to their users and then they stopped. And while some of these platforms have had to change over in management sense, you know, you have the replacement of like Bill Gates and his successors from the tech side of the business with, you know, these bloodless McKinsey guys like Satya and Adela in many cases, you know, Facebook being a great example. It's literally the same people, right? It's just Mark Zuckerberg running the firm all along. And it's not that he got like stupider or worse. You know, if you, if you read Careless People, Sara Wynne Williams wonderful memoir of being an executive at Facebook that she is now enjoined from discussing because Facebook had bind bound her over to non disparagement and non disclosure when she went to work there. And so they've now attacked her legally. So you have to read it for yourself. You can't hear her talking about it. What you'll discover is that from the earliest days, Mark Zuckerberg was terrible. But the difference was that he had discipline imposed on him. And this is the kind of the next stage of the insidification analysis. That the reason companies act bad is not that their managers are bad people. The reason they act bad is because these bad people are freed from consequence when they yield to their bad impulses. That in the old days Facebook faced discipline from competition. That was before they were allowed to engage in nakedly anti competitive acquisitions like the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. Mark Zuckerberg actually sent an email to his CFO in the middle of the night saying like, I know you're angry that we're going to give this company Instagram, with only 12 employees, a billion dollars, but you have to understand that people like Instagram more than they like Facebook. And they leave Facebook for Instagram and don't come back. And so we can recapture them. We can reduce competition by buying them. He previously said again in writing, it is better to buy than to compete. You know, this is like a confession of guilt. You know, the competition law often turns on the intention of a firm to reduce competition. But this is like sending an email to your pal saying like, hey Bob, you know that guy we're going to kill tomorrow? I just want to make sure that you understand that this is a murder and I'm definitely premeditating it. And nevertheless, the Commission, the Competition and Markets Authority, the Federal Communication Trade Commission and the DOJ all let that merger go through. Same with WhatsApp. So you have the collapse of competition. These firms are mostly just buying things. Companies, they don't invent stuff, they buy other people's good ideas. And that allows them to form a cartel, to collapse into what Tom Eastman calls five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four. And the thing about a cartel is they solve a collective action problem. When there's 200 companies in a sector, they compete, they don't like each other, they're stealing each other's customers, they're stealing each other's key employees, they're really competing. But when there's like five of them or four or three or two or one, as we see in many sectors, they don't have to worry about those problems of coming to an agreement about what they're going to tell policymakers, what they're going to say in Westminster or Brussels or dc. When there's just five companies in a sector, not only do they find it easy to come to an agreement, find it easy to come into agreement not to compete with each other as well. So they all have these super normal profits that they can mobilize to buy off the policy environment. If you want to see an example of that, Keir Starmer in January fired the head of the Competition and Markets Authority whose job it is to police big tech, and replaced him with the former head of Amazon uk. Right, like this is, you know, you couldn't ask for a more on the nose example. So they're not bound by regulation, they're not bound by competition, they get the whip, hand over their workers. Where tech workers often really care about their users. A lot of tech workers found their way into the field because their lives were transformed by the better, by tech. And they wanted to bring that to everyone else. We all know that, like Spittle fleck kid at the company at the family dinner who's like 14 years old and incredibly excited about some technology they just discovered and wants to ensure that you understand how exciting it is those people grow up to be tech workers who really want everyone to have the wonderful experience they're having. And they could do it when they were in high demand because if their bosses fired them, they could get a job across the street. And their bosses couldn't find anyone else to hire to replace them. And they didn't use that power to unionize. They just thought of themselves as temporarily embarrassed founders. They couldn't see why they would need a union because they had all the power. And so now that supply is caught up with demand, we've had Half a million redundancies in the US tech sector in three years. Tech workers don't hold the line anymore. And then the other thing that used to discipline companies was the power of technology itself. That, you know, one of the things you can do with digital technology is make counter technologies. The only computer we know how to make is something called the Turing complete universal von Neumann machine. And that's Turing, as in the guy on the five pound note. Alan Turing proved at a certain point that the only computer that you can really build that can do lots of things is one that can do all the things. A computer that can run every valid program. That means that anytime there's a tech platform or device or service that has a 10 foot wall in it that's keeping you in, some other technologist can make an 11 foot ladder that lets you escape if there's ads you don't like in the platform. Someone can make an ad blocker if they're stealing your private information, someone can make a privacy blocker if your printer ink has risen to $10,000 a gallon. And the way they enforce that is by checking to make sure you don't have generic ink, you can install another program in your printer that disables that check. But the US passed a law in 1998, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It was the first anti circumvention law. It bans technology that modifies other technology without permission. And then the US Trade Representative made all of America's trading partners adopt this law. The European Union got it in 2001 through Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, which the UK transposed into law and still has on the books. And this is a law that just makes it illegal to change how technology works, even if you're doing it for a legal purpose. So you don't have to worry that some smart hungry technologist will come along and alienate your relationship with your customer by giving them an alternative client, a mod, another technology that lets them get more out of the thing you offer to them and remove the insidification. And so the final constraint falls away. So you have these people who are terrible people, but when they were worried about the consequences of indulging their callous disregard for our well being, they actually behave themselves. Who now we've taken away those consequences and they're acting in exactly the way that you would anticipate that these awful people would act.

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Carl Miller (25:50)

We've got the diagnosis then Corey. We we we we've seen a decline in or in competition in regulatory power, in tech worker power. The fight back. Now I know an idea you like is adversarial interoperability. The the idea that there is a kind of there's always going to be opportunities for us to build new tech that can begin to plug into enchitified tech that can begin to drain away some of those network effects. Where does the fightback begin? Does it begin there? Does it begin with us creating a new or leaning into a new tech development agenda that can begin to give people more choice again?

Cory Doctorow (26:34)

Yeah. So I think that if you stipulate that there's four things that used to prevent competition, regulation, tech worker power, and interoperability and they went away, then restoring those has a colorable chance of making a new good Internet. One that's not just nonified, but is inshidification resistant the way the old good Internet was until we took those forces away. And which one you start with is really a contingent matter. It's about where the lie of the land is. At the moment that you're starting in eastern Canada, we have this saying, if you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here. And you know, certainly an environment where we have these mature, powerful monopolies is a very hard environment to escape because they have the power. That's why historically, until the, you know, 1980s, until the Thatcher era, really, we used to prevent monopoly formation. Rather than waiting for a monopoly to form and then checking to see whether it was bad, we used to just say don't, don't allow firms to merge to monopoly or take other steps that would give rise to monopolies. Because if they, if they start to abuse that monopoly power, they'll be very hard to defeat. You know, IBM, when it was sued by the US government for having an illegal monopoly in 1970, spent the next 12 years in a court battle. They called it antitrust Vietnam. And in each of those 12 years, IBM spent more than the entire US government did on antitrust lawyers trying to overpower them. Yeah, they. And they did. They ran out the clock. Reagan got elected, he called the dogs off. But not just the antitrust lawyers that the U.S. government was spending to fight IBM. The antitrust lawyers, all the antitrust lawyers who work for the US government cost less than IBM was spending every year for 12 consecutive years. Very hard to get rid of monopoly. Once it's there, they're very pernicious. So what's the lie of the land right now? Well, as of a year ago, the environment was pretty hospitable to union formation in the US because the Biden administration had done some very good things on that score. That's obviously over now, but in the rest of the world there is a scramble, and I think a justifiable one to try and create a kind of Digital sovereignty to get away from dependence on American tech. I think there have been many wake up calls for this, but one particular one was the fact that the International Criminal Court relies on Microsoft for their email and office software. And after they indicted Benjamin Netanyahu, the email account of the chief prosecutor was summarily canceled by Microsoft without any adequate explanation. And I think a lot of people are starting to realize that when your critical infrastructure is provided by a nation that sees its interests as hostile to your own as a zero sum game, as Trump does, that it is extremely bad statecraft and foreign policy to allow these devices to be in places of import. And so in the eu, there's this talk now about Eurostac, right? About building a stack of technologies starting from data centers and data lines and working their way all the way up to the applications we use that will help us resist the sabotage, politically minded sabotage from, from hostile powers, including the US government. But they're also worried about China and other large states, Russia and so on. And I think this is a, a great opportunity because while building these technologies is quite laudable, you know, cloning Office 365 and Gmail and all the other applications we use, building the data centers they can run in and so on, unless there's a migration path, right, unless there's an easy way to go from one to the other, then European businesses and agencies are going to be stranded on American platforms. They're going to be hamstrung by the collective action problem and the switching costs. You know, it's one thing to say, okay, well, here's a way to continue to read and reply to your email that doesn't involve being at the mercy of Microsoft. But if you have to abandon all the email that you have and no one can email you at the new address unless you manually make contact with them and give it to them, most agencies aren't going to switch. Same goes for social media, right? If you're the NHS and you're reliant on Twitter to reach people so that you can tell them about, you know, pandemic news or whatever, you can't really afford to say, well, we don't like Elon Musk, so we're just going to start using a service that no Britons are on. You have to fulfill your mandate. So this is where interoperability takes center stage because we can create bridges between the old technology and the new, and big tech has shown us how to do it. So remember when Mark Zuckerberg was pitching those MySpace users on getting the Hell, away from Rupert Murdoch and using Facebook where they would respect your privacy. Mark Zuckerberg understood that for a Facebook user, or Rather for a MySpace user, Facebook's privacy policy was not the most important thing in the world. You weren't going to go just hang out on Facebook rereading its privacy policy while you waited for your foolish friends to see the errors of their way and join you on Facebook, right? So he gave those users a bot. It was a scraper where if you gave it your username and your password for MySpace, it would go to MySpace several times a day. It would scrape everything waiting for you there and put it in your Facebook inbox and you could reply to it and then it would push it back out to MySpace. So you didn't have to choose between Facebook and its privacy policies and MySpace and the people who were there. You had effectively an open border between the two. It was forced open unilaterally by a technologist doing something that's come into very bad odor, which is moving fast and breaking things. And I think it all depends on whose stuff you're breaking. I'm perfectly fine with moving fast and breaking Mark Zuckerberg's thing. I just don't want to move fast and break all the rental stock in a city by converting it to an unlicensed hotel room. That's obviously bad policy, but that doesn't mean that moving fast and breaking things is itself bad. There are lots of things that stand to be broken, and if we have to get permission from the people who made them to break them, we're going to be stuck with them for a long time. And so Europe and any other country interested in digital sovereignty could start by repealing the laws that ban reverse engineering. Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, which were passed under threat of tariffs from the US Government if they weren't enacted. Well, like happy Liberation Day, right? Like the. We are now in a circumstance where those tariffs are coming no matter what. And even if you cut a deal the way Starmer has, it's no guarantee that you're not going to come under tariffs later. And Trump has shown himself to be very fickle here. We should just not take the idea of tariff free access to American markets seriously ever again. And the way that we've hamstrung ourselves by blocking adversarial interoperability, reverse engineering and modification, that's not something that we should continue first. Because if we can reverse engineer and modify the big tech platforms fielded by the American firms, then we can make it easier for people to Leave those platforms and go somewhere else. We can write the scraper that gets all your data and all the file permissions and all the users you're allowed to share with and the identity information, everything that rip it out without their permission, without their say so that just do so unilaterally. But secondly, that's a business opportunity, right? If you're trying to figure out how to stem the great stagnation of your national economy, one of the things you can do is approach those giant margins that those tech companies have acquired by dint of being able to block reverse engineering and disinfitification. Just take printer ink, right? I mentioned before, printer ink is now $10,000 a gallon. It's the most expensive fluid you can buy as a civilian obtaining a special government permit. The colored water you print your grocery list with costs more per milliliter than the cement of a Kentucky Derby winner, right? And the only reason that that market persists is that it's illegal to change a printer. So it doesn't check whether you're using generic ink. So take away that law and, you know, you do it in the uk, Suddenly, some smart kid in Silicon Roundabout, if they're still calling it that, can write the software for every model of printer, raise venture capital and sell it to every ink refiller in the world from the uk, including in America. Because all you need is an Internet connection and a credit card to buy the software from them. And they can sell that as a $25 a month subscription for every seat or for every shop, because they will keep that software up to date against all the updates made by the four or five printer monopolists. You could do the same for automotive repair tools. You could do the same for social media. You do the same for any of those things where money is piled up to the sky from these American companies. You can treat that monopoly rent as the fuel for a disposable single use rocket stage that boosts your economy into a stable orbit selling the tools to disinfitify American big tech. It's good industrial policy, it's good national policy, and it's good for consumers, too. It produces a consumer surplus. And unlike retaliatory tariffs, which just whack everyone in America, irrespective of how they're related to the Trump administration, when you go after tech monopoly profits, you are going after the companies whose CEOs spend a million dollars out of each of their pockets to sit behind Trump on the dais, right? This is very targeted retaliation.

Carl Miller (36:03)

Well, we're almost out of time. But, Corey, just before we go, I just wanted to briefly talk to you about privacy. You've mentioned it quite a few times. I know it's important both to the Electronic Frontiers foundation, to digital rights activism in general. Is it important for disincentification, though, as well? I mean, it seems to be one of the kind of key power imbalances that you often point to when talking about these tech monopolies and kind of exposing the kind of huge asymmetry in what's known by them about us and not vice versa.

Cory Doctorow (36:37)

Yeah, privacy is a really good example of regulatory capture. So in the US There hasn't been a new consumer privacy law nationally since 1988, when Reagan signed a law called the Video Privacy Protection act, which bans Clarks at video stores from telling the newspapers which VHS cassettes you have. That's the last technological privacy threat that the US Federal government has addressed itself to in Europe. Obviously, there's the gdpr, which is a very muscular privacy rule. But they couldn't enforce it because the tech companies all pretend that they're Irish. And Ireland, in order to maintain its status as a tax haven, has to be a crime haven, because any company that can pretend to be Irish this week can pretend it's Maltese or Luxembourgian or Cypriot next week. So you have to keep those companies happy to keep them stuck in Dublin. And that means you can't enforce European privacy law. So every GDPR case against a big tech company went to Ireland and died. So the Irish data commissioner basically spent a decade not bothering to get out of bed or, you know, when they did, they, like, sat around in their underwear eating breakfast cereal and watching cartoons all day. So, you know, privacy has been flouted by these American tech giants for years, and it's allowed them to do a lot of things that are very insidifying. So take labor markets in America. The heavily consolidated hospital sector is trying very energetically to avoid paying unionized nurses. And so what they do is they reduce nursing staff to a skeleton crew, and then, like the nhs, they buy in nurses on a shift by shift basis from staffing agencies. And the staffing agencies used to be quite multiplicitous. There were hundreds and hundreds of them all across the US Competing directly with each other in regional markets. And now that's collapsed into three giant apps, each of which calls itself Uber for nurses. And because privacy is such a wild west, when a nurse signs on to take a shift, these apps are able to do an automated lookup through a data broker of the nurse's credit history. And if a nurse is carrying a lot of credit card debt, especially overdue credit card debt, they are offered a lower wage per hour on the grounds that they are desperate for work because they're indebted. Right. So this is, like, obviously very bad. No one wants their catheter inserted by a nurse who, like, had to drive Uber until midnight the night before to make rent. Right. Like, you know, even if you don't care about the nurses, yourself, themselves. Right. If you care about your own care, you should care about this. And obviously, there's a very strong labor dimension to this. And repairing labor law would do a lot here, but without the privacy wild west, this wouldn't work. You know, McDonald's has a company in its investment portfolio called Plecture from New Zealand. And in Plecture's investor pitch deck, they advertise that they can reprice the food you buy in the drive through in the morning based on whether you've been paid recently. And so they can add 50 cents to the cost of your breakfast burrito on payday in order to pick your pocket. That's a privacy story, too. In fact, there are so many people who are harmed by this lacuna in our privacy rules that it's a really good candidate for repair. Because the coalition of people who care about some harm that is downstream of a lack of privacy enforcement is so large that if they can ever get it together and realize that they're actually all on the same side, they could really strike a huge blow against this kind of commercial surveillance. You know, whether you think that, you know, the reason your grandpa has become a QAnon is because Facebook built a mind control ray out of private data. Or whether you think that's why your Instagram using kid is now an anorexic. Or whether you think that's why the millennials in your life are quoting Osama bin Laden on TikTok, or whether you're worried that you're a protester whose location was turned over to the cops by Google when they got served with a reverse warrant, or whether you're worried that you're being, like, racially discriminated against in hiring or lending by online platforms, or whether you're worried about someone making deep fake porn of you. Like, obviously those all have different dimensions to them, but they all start with the vacuum and privacy law. And in the 1970s, we had the situation where there are people who cared about a lot of different issues that didn't know they were on the same side because we didn't have the word ecology in our lexicon yet. So you have people who cared about owls and you had people who cared about the ozone layer. But they didn't understand that, you know, charismatic nocturnal avians were somehow related to the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere and ecology turned them into one movement. You have all these people who are furious and sad about harms that are downstream of the lack of privacy enforcement, who, if we could show them that privacy is the thing we should do first to address all of their problems. Not the only thing we do, but the thing we do first. Then you get everyone under one tent and you can be a very powerful force.

Carl Miller (41:35)

Well, Corey, thank you. That was an extremely vivid gallop through an enormous amount of, as you say, extremely relevant and important technology policy. So that was wonderfully interesting. Really appreciate you joining us today. That was Cory, doctor of Everyone. He's the author of Enchitification Where Everything Suddenly Got Worse and what to Do About It. Corey, thanks so much for joining us. I've been Carmilla.

Cory Doctorow (41:58)

Thank you. And happy cursing everyone. Enjoy. Enjoy saying the dirty word. You have my permission.

Carl Miller (42:03)

You have my permission as well. So I've been coming everyone. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thank you so much for joining us.

Host/Producer (42:10)

Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Mia Sorrenti and edited by Mark, Robert.

Cory Doctorow (42:30)

And Doug.

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