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- [00:01]
A
Stocks, ETFs, or what about mutual funds? Choosing your investments is easier with Fidelity. Our step by step experience can help you pick out the right investments for you. Plus, with recurring investments, you can decide how much and how often to invest. Lastly, there's 247 help if and when you need it. To find your next investment, head to fidelity.com trading. Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC Member NYSC SIPC Good Morning Brew Daily Show I'm Neal Freyman.
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B
And I'm Toby Howell.
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A
Today, how the Internet Became Inshittified Neil.
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B
That'S actually not a curse word. It's the brainchild of today's guest, Cory Doctorow. It's Wednesday, December 24th. Let's ride.
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A
Merry Christmas Eve everyone. For our final podcast before you unwrap your presentation presence, we're bringing you a chat with someone who will change the way you think about the Internet. Cory Doctorow is a prolific author and Internet scholar who coined the term insidification to describe the decay you experience every day on platforms like Amazon, Facebook and Google. He has just come out with a book that explains how and why insertification happens and what can possibly be done about it.
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B
Now, forewarning, you're going to hear a lot of words that are reminiscent of bowel movements. But as Corey will explain, it's the perfect word for describing what everyone on the Internet feels right now, which is things just feel a little bit worse these days. But first, a word from our sponsor, Public. Neil, I got to tell you something.
- [01:38]
A
I know you're the one who ate the rest of my bagel out of the fridge.
- [01:41]
B
For the last time, that wasn't me. What I wanted to tell you was about public. You know how on public you can build a multi asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options and crypto? But now they have a generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into to an investable index with AI.
- [01:57]
A
Okay, that is legitimately cool. So with generated assets you can create investable indexes, kind of like ETFs, but they are your own ideas.
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B
Yes sir. Completely customizable. You can type in any prompt like AI powered supply chain companies with positive free cash flow or defense tech companies growing revenue 25% year over year. It screens thousands of stocks and will build you a one of a kind index that you can then invest in with just a few clicks.
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A
Get started at public.com/morning brew and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com/morning brew paid for by Public Investing. Full Disclosures in Podcast Description now here's Corey.
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B
Corey, thank you so much for joining us.
- [02:39]
C
My pleasure. Thank you for having me on.
- [02:41]
B
All right, so the first question I had after I read your wonderful book is how the heck did you come up with this term? Were you sitting on the toilet one day and. And you thought, ah, brain blast. There is something here?
- [02:55]
C
No, it's both less exciting and sort of more contingent than that. So I work for a nonprofit called the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We're sort of the leading digital rights group in the world and I've been there for 25 years. And getting people to care about digital rights, it's hard, right? Because you're asking them to care about things that are abstract and far in the future and technical. You can just like wait until their lives have been destroyed by technology and then they'll care about it. But you'd ideally like to raise the salience while there's still time to do something about it, right? So I have just spent a couple of decades coming up with words and concepts and framing devices and metaphors and similes and whatever. And in this case, I was on vacation with my family in Puerto Rico and we had rented a little cabin in a cloud forest and it was serviced improbably by microwave Internet. And one of the reasons that's improbable is that if you know one thing about microwave Internet, the one thing everyone knows is that it doesn't go through clouds. And I remind you, we were in a cloud forest. And so before we would drive down into town, which was a couple hours away, there are a couple little towns we could go. We try and look up on TripAdvisor, which restaurant to go to, whether it was open, that kind of thing. And you'd load like 20 TripAdvisor tabs and they just time out because there's like 75 trackers on TripAdvisor and it would load about 40 of them and then just die. The only thing in the window would be what's called the favico. It's the little icon that goes in the tab and it would just fill the whole screen like a high res vector image of the Travel TripAdvisor logo. So in a fit of peek, I I tweeted, has anyone at TripAdvisor ever been on a trip? This is the most insidified website I've ever used. And people did what you're doing. They, they kind of polite chuckle. And then, you know, a year later I was thinking about this bigger Critique of. Of platform decay. And I was like, you know, I kind of got a laugh out of that word. And ification. Maybe I'll use that to describe this thing. The reason I think that story matters is it tells you that it's not merely the minor license to vulgarity, although I think that's important. People love cussing. But it's the combination of the technical critique and the minor license to vulgarity that was like the magic peanut butter and chocolate here. That if it were just the vulgarity, people would have just been using it for all the interim.
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A
So you said you've been making up similes and metaphors and weird words to describe things for a long time when what were some of the other ones?
- [05:21]
C
Oh, so, like, we. So there's this idea that's very critical to insertification called adversarial interoperability. And this is a technical term, and no one understands what it means unless you're already someone who understands what it means. And so we came up with this thing called competitive compatibility, or com. Com, which we thought would be fun to say. No one liked it. In the end, I didn't like it. But adversarial interoperability, it's like, it's super important. It's when you take a thing that the manufacturer is design in a way that doesn't suit you, probably in a way that, like, harms you with the manufacturer's benefit. Like, say, a printer that can only take ink from the manufacturer, and you modify it, right? So that's. Make it so that it can use other people's ink. And so making it use other people's ink, that's interoperability. Doing so against the wishes the manufacturer, that's adversarial. And, like, you know, it's a kind of a bedrock that, like, if you own a thing, you should decide how it works, even if that upsets the shareholders of the company that made it. You know, if they're, like, so emotionally fragile that they can't bear to think that the people who buy their products will use them in ways that benefit them at the expense of the shareholders, then maybe they're in the wrong line of business, because it is yours and you should have the final say over it.
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A
So let's flesh out this idea of insertification which you explore in your book. And you're telling insertification doesn't happen immediately. It is a process. So if you could briefly walk us through this process of how something becomes insidified, I'm still getting used to saying.
- [06:50]
C
That, yes, it's got disinfitification and shittification, inshidificatory, you know, and shitogenic, disinfectatory and so on and so on. So insidification has got kind of got three parts right. One is like a description of how platforms go bad. One is a theory about why they're going bad, and one is a proposal for how to make them better. So the first part, this description of how platforms go bad, it's a three stage process. And in stage one, platforms are good to their end users, but they're also trying to find a way to lock those end users in. And then once the users are locked in, they make things worse for those end users. In stage two. And because the users are locked in, they know that they can turn the screw without risking those users immediate departure. And so they make things worse for those end users in order to take something from them and give it to business customers who get lured in. That's stage two. In stage three, those business customers who've been locked in as well because they're now dependent on those end users, they have all the value withdrawn from them as well. The platform harvests all the value from users, all the value from its business customers. It leaves behind the barest homeopathic residue of value needed to keep users locked to the platform, businesses locked to the users, and delivers all that value to themselves, to the shareholders.
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B
And the executives put it into concrete terms. For someone who is just new to this term, you have a lot of case studies in your book. Walk us through step by step. That happening at a big tech company.
- [08:19]
C
Yeah, let's talk about Facebook. So 2006, Facebook goes beyond American college kids with a dot edu address. They try to lure in people from the general public. Anyone who wants social media at that point already has an account on a rival service called MySpace. So Mark Zuckerberg makes a pitch to those users. Look, I know you love your friends that you hang out with on MySpace, but I don't know if you realize this. MySpace is owned by an evil crapulin senescent immortal vent empire billionaire named Rupert Murdoch. And he's spying on you with every hour that God sends. And like, no one should want to use social media that's owned by a billionaire. And you should especially not want to use social media that spies on you. So come use Facebook. I understand this is quite ironic in hindsight, but we pile into Facebook and we get locked in and not through some of the more exotic tactics that other platforms use. Like Uber for example. They had this guy Masayoshi Son, who's a venture capitalist, runs a firm called SoftBank. Funnel $31 billion in Saudi royal money to Uber so that they could lose $0.41 cents on every dollar they brought in. For 13 years until all the other cab companies had gone in business. We'd start public transit investment and they could just double the price of a fare. So that's like a very difficult high stakes lock in strategy with Facebook. We just lock ourselves in and we lock ourselves in through a thing economists call the collective action problem that you probably know as you love your friends, but they're a pain in the ass. You got six people in your group chat, they're your best mates, but you can't even agree on what bar you're going to go to on Friday, much less when all they and all the people that they are on Facebook for are all going to leave Facebook. So now that he knows that he can inflict some pain on you because you love your friends more than you hate him, he makes things worse for you. And we get to stage two where he brings in business customers. So one example would be advertisers. He goes to the advertisers and he says, do you remember we told these rubes we weren't going to spy on them? Obviously that's a lie. We spy on them with every hour that God sends. And you give us small amounts of money we'll target as with incredible fidelity. And we're such dedicated craftspeople that we're going to fund a whole building full of anti fraud engineers and they're going to do nothing except try and block ad fraud. So when you give us a dollar to show an ad to a kind of user, we're going to find that user and stuff the ad in their face. So advertisers pile in, publishers pile in. They're told, you know, remember we told these suckers we weren't going to show them things they hadn't asked to see. We will show them your stuff if you put it on Facebook. Just put up an excerpt and a link and we'll cram it into their eyeballs. And so they pile in and they get locked in too. It's very hard to leave. Once that user base is a significant part of your business, they become structurally important. And so now Facebook starts to turn the screws on them and publishers find that they have to put longer and longer excerpts on the platform. Eventually it's just the whole article. If you want to get shown to your own subscribers, much less recommended to a user hasn't subscribed to you yet. And if you put a link back to your own website, they won't show it to anyone because that might be a, quote, malicious link. Advertisers see prices go way up. They see ad targeting fidelity go through the floor. Ad fraud explodes. When Procter and Gamble in 2017 zeroed out its surveillance advertising budget with the platforms called Programmatic Advertising, they saw a 0% drop in sales because all $200 million was just disappearing down the fraud hole. So the publishers and advertisers are getting a bad beat, but so are we. The amount of stuff in our feed that we've asked to see has dwindled to almost nothing. And what's being filled in that void is stuff that people are being charged billions of dollars for that they're getting ripped off on. Now you get to like this stage that they've been shooting for, right? This equilibrium where all the available value has been harvested, but it's very brittle, this equilibrium, because you get one livestream mass shooting or Cambridge Analytica scandal. People bowl for the exits. Shareholders pound the company stock and the founders and the executives, they panic. Although being technical people, they have a technical term. They call it pivoting. And so Mark Zuckerberg arises from his sarcophagus one morning and says, hearken unto me, brothers and sisters, for I've had a vision. I know that I told you that your future would consist of arguing with with your most racist uncle using this primitive text interface that I created to non consensual rate the fuckability of Harvard undergraduates. However, in this vision, I have realized that the true future is one in which I transform you and everyone you love into a legless, sexless, low polygon, heavily surreal cartoon character so that I can imprison you in a virtual world. I stole from a 25 year old dystopian cyberpunk satirical novel that I call the Metaverse. And that's the final stage of Machine Vacation. The platform is now a giant pile of shit.
- [12:43]
A
Is in shit ification quantified, viable. Like, do you have some sort of empirical metric or is it just an instinctual sense that this has gotten worse? Like, is there a way if I just log into a random website and I look around and I do, I have this epiphany. I were like, oh yeah, this is definitely insertified because I see X, Y or Z.
- [13:03]
C
So now you're getting into the, the theory part of right? Not the description, descriptive part, because obviously we didn't invent greed in the middle of the last decade. So something changed that caused these companies to start doing this extraction. And my theory is that what changed is that we have this, as I say in shinogenic policy environment, that our policymakers took decisions in living memory after being warned about the consequences that had the outcome of making it. So that when companies mistreat you or mistreat their suppliers or their business customers, that rather than losing in the market by having their profits decline, their workers depart, their customers jump ship, that they gain in the market, they do better. And so insidification is not just when a platform goes bad, it's when a platform goes bad and does well. And so you could see two platforms, both of which were doing bad things to you. But I would argue that it's not really initiative unless they thrive as a consequence, Right. If they fail as a consequence, well that's just how the market works, right. I'm not the world's biggest believer in markets. I think markets are a useful tool, but I don't think they're the best way of organizing everything. But you know, I do understand that in the theory of markets the idea is that when companies do bad, they, they do bad financially. And you know, this is a bedrock Adam Smith and Wealth of Nations. He says, you know, it's not through the, the, the beneficence of the baker that we get our bread, it's through his self regard, right. The, the baker is motivated to give you a good loaf of bread because he knows that if he gives you a bad one you'll buy your bread somewhere else and he'll go out of business. And so when you have that being short circuited because of policies and, and I want to stress here, these are not like nebulous, you know, like a bad, a bad idea. These are very specific policies that had this very foreseeable outcome. When companies can take advantage of those policies to mistreat you and do well, then I'd say that that's inside. So it's not really about which of these symptoms they're showing, it's about what's happening when they exhibit these symptoms.
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B
We'll be back with more Corey right after this. Neil, how can a brand inspire enough loyalty in their customers that they won't switch to something new?
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A
Well, my suggestion of including clips of my beautiful singing voice before it every podcast got rejected.
- [15:19]
B
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- [15:37]
A
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- [15:49]
B
To learn more, visit advertising.Amazon.com that's advertising.Amazon.com.
- [15:58]
A
When the holidays start to feel a.
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C
Bit repetitive, reach for a Sprite Winter.
- [16:03]
A
Spiced Cranberry and put your twist on tradition. A bold cranberry and winter spice Flavor.
- [16:10]
C
Fusion Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry is a refreshing way to shake things up. This sip and season, and only for a limited time. Sprite obey your thirst.
- [16:22]
B
It's very interesting because I was finding it difficult to wrap my head around insertification because I was thinking in terms of like a restaurant owner who says, I'm going to start cutting costs by buying cheaper ingredients. How is that in the best interest? Yes, he will save money in the short term, but over the long term, you destroy your relationship with your customer. Hence that's bad for the business. So how are companies sitting there thinking that this is the right move to do is to provide a worse experience? That just doesn't seem like square the circle for me there. Why are they even doing this?
- [16:56]
C
Well, so there are four things that discipline companies. This is the term economists use. Discipline is like when something bad happens to you because you've done something bad. And there are four forces that discipline companies historically, and we can see how they've all been eroded. So the first one, as you mentioned, is conflict, competition. Right. It's, it's not. It doesn't matter if you're the only restaurant in town and you serve a bad meal. If there's nowhere else to go, it kind of doesn't matter. People are still going to show up and eat there. I mean, we've all had this experience on the other side of the TSA checkpoint where you really do have effectively the only restaurant in town. Right. And, and, and they know that you have nowhere else to go. This is, this is that bit Lily Tomlin used to do on Saturday Night Live where she'd pretend to be a bell operator, an AT&T operator. She'd do an ad for the Bell system and she would end it with, we don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company. Right. So you understand how that would happen. Now, what happened to competition? It's not a mystery. So these economists that, we would call them neoliberal economists, they were the economists sort of associated with Reagan, but they really held sway for like, 40 years they had this radical theory of competition and monopoly, what in America we call antitrust, which is the law that tries to prevent monopolies and break them up when they occur. They said monopolies are actually good. That when you see a monopoly in the world, when everyone's buying something from one company, what you should infer is that that company is really good at its job. And wouldn't it be perverse to punish that company for being so good that we all love it by attacking it using public resources? And so they said, just leave the monopolies be. And then to I guess no one's surprise, unless you've had that specific neurological injury you can only get by doing an econ degree, we got monopolies, right? And like these guys, they insist that the two are not related, right? When we observe monopolies in the wild that are quite abusive, you know, whether that's like the automotive sector or intermodal or sea freight shipping, or whether it's like the sterile bags full of saline or hospital beds or coffins, one company makes both. All the hospital beds and all the coffins. How's that for a strange little combine? Or whether it's the five publishers, four studios, three labels, two ad tech companies and one ebook company that dominate media. And we say to them, like, look at these harmful monopolies. Look at professional wrestling or cheerleading. And they say, well, how is that our fault, right? It's like we used to not have a rat problem because we've been using rat poison. And these guys were like, stop putting down rat poison. And now rats are eating our faces off. And we go back to them and they say, that's not our fault. Like it's sunspots that have ushered in the time of the rat. A moment in which rats are more fecund than at any time in human history. And I will stipulate the rats did buy all the poison factories and shut them down. But look, if we're not using rat poison, that's just economically rational, right? So they say, oh, it's the iron laws of economics, it's returns to scale, it's the great forces of history. So it got rid of competition, so they don't really worry about competitors. Mark Zuckerberg was able to buy Instagram. Google was able to buy everything, right? Take away Google's acquisitions. Like, this is a company that can't make a product in house. Everything they make, make in house dies. They've had one really successful consumer facing product. It was in the previous millennium. It's a thing called search. Everything else they've made has basically tanked. And what they do is they bought a mobile stack, an ad tech stack, a maps and navigation stack, document and documents and collaboration, server management, you name it, right? They bought it from someone else and operationalized it. They're not Willy Wonka's idea factory. They're just like big rich uncle penny bags, right? They're just buying other people's ideas.
- [20:26]
B
Yeah. Is big inherently bad though? Because I'm sit who as someone who uses Gmail, who uses Chrome, who uses Maps, all of it ostensibly for free, and there's billions of people out there like me. So is it the fact that Google owns it and is big that that makes it bad? Or if a, if a bunch of smaller companies did the same thing, would that be better?
- [20:50]
C
So you're going straight into my next point. Thank you. So there's another force that disciplines companies, which is regulation. So you can think of competition as the discipline of the market, regulation as the discipline of the state. They're really kind of the same thing. Because if you allow companies to merge and merge and merge, and you create a cartel, the cartel does something called regulatory capture. And that's where the companies get the regulators to work for them instead of working for the public. And that's something that's only possible if you can solve. You remember the collective action problem? You and your friends can't agree on when to leave Facebook. Well, well, 200 companies can't agree on what they want their regulator to do, but five companies can. And these companies, they're so inbred, they've got Habsburg jaws. You have the same executives hopping from C Suite to C Suite to C Suite. They're all godparents to each other's children. They're executors of each other's estates, they're in the same polycules and they just show up at regulatory fora with exactly the same story. And they have so much capital because they don't compete. Again, when you have a cartel, they can divide up the world like the Pope dividing up the the new world, right? So you know Apple gets a 20 billion plus dollar per year bribe every year from Google not to enter the search market, right? So they don't have to worry about eroding one another's margins by directly competing. So they have lots of money to spend on policy adventures, so we don't have to. So what that means is that if the companies use the power they have in the market to abuse you, we no longer have competitors who are acting as a check on their behavior. But we also don't have regulators. The regulators don't step in either. And so you get this combination where you could have a system that was integrated and worked from top to bottom and was quite seamless. Right. And it's not necessary for firms to all be under one roof to do that, although it sometimes helps. But like, you know, all the light bulbs in your house work, even though the light sockets and the light bulbs are all made by different people. Like standards are a thing and we can do standards that allow stuff to work. You know, it's very weird when you think about social media that like which network you're on matters as to who you can talk to. That is the Most like Prodigy, CompuServe ass technology thing to arrive at that you can imagine. Like, imagine if this is were were like phones where you'd have to care whose sim was in someone's phone before you could give them a call. That is a, like a legitimately weird and primitive thing that we've arrived at here.
- [23:14]
A
On the topic of Google paying Apple $20 billion a year to be the default search engine, there was this recent antitrust trial and remedy verdict that was passed down on Google search, which was deemed a monopoly. But the judge this past summer declined to wield heavy penalties against Google. It said, you can still pay Apple and we're not going to hive off any of your business. And the judge cited specifically the rise of AI and chat bots and anthropic and chat GPT as true competitors to Google. So they ruled that this was actually, now it looked like a much more competitive landscape than four or five years ago when Google, when this trial began. So do you think that the rise of AI has led to a more competitive landscape in search?
- [24:01]
C
Well, let me, let me just refine that question in two ways. So first is Google didn't just lose one antitrust case last year, they lost three. So they were, they were convicted three times of having a monopoly. The other thing is that, that when the judge talked about Apple specifically, it wasn't because of AI, it was even weirder. He said Google bribes Apple with $20 billion a year every year. Where will Apple get the free cash flow to come up with cool iPhone features if I stop them from soliciting bribes from their most direct competitor? Right. That is like, that is like not a good judicial decision. And you know, it's not surprising. We have 40 years of bad jurisprudence. And so when the judges look to the jurisprudence, when they look to the. The kind of. The attitude of their, you know, their cohort. They don't see this kind of muscular action. And it's going to take a while. It took, like, after the passage of the Sherman act, which is the first antitrust act, in 1890, it took till 1912 to break up John D. Rockefeller, Standard Oil. So it'd be amazing if we could just, like, reverse that 40 years overnight. I don't think AI is a real competitor on search. I think that this is the kind of thinking that has dominated bad antitrust decisions over the last four decades. And we just saw it again in the Facebook case, where the judge dismissed the case against Facebook by saying that they had all these competitors in the form of TikTok and whatever other things that you could use your attention for. And, you know, as David Dyne wrote in the American Prospect, this is like saying, well, ultimately, because you can sleep sometimes, there's always a competitor for your attention. Right? And it's just wrong. It's just wrong on its face. So if the judge felt that the law was so constrained, and I don't think that's a good interpretation, but if the judge felt the law was so constrained that a company that was as obviously a monopolist as Google could not be convicted under the law, then that militates for legislative reform. But it still means that, you know, it's what we got to do. Like all the best Americans, I'm Canadian, and in Newfoundland, there's this joke whose punchline is, if you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here. I think that is very much where we are right now. This is not the place we want to start from, but it is where we are.
- [26:08]
B
Well, you have me getting a little bit nervous and thinking inwardly a little bit, because, you know, we have a product that we deliver or to consumers, what words of warning would you give us as a show to avoid insidifying ourselves?
- [26:25]
A
Or is it too late already?
- [26:26]
C
Well, no, I don't think it's too late. I think the. The first thing to understand is that if. If you think that the reason that the method by which you will prevent and ification is your own kind of moral core, which is important, but not. Not sufficient, then you're quite dangerous, right? Then you are going to end up getting. Because no one woke up in the morning and said, how can I make things worse? Right? They rationalized their way into it. They made all kinds of stepwise decisions where they then judged their next decision based on where they were now. And not where they started. So they're like, well, I've already done 10 bad things. Doing the 11th is just a small change from where I am now. But they don't say, well, it's 11 in total, right? And so if you want to prevent yourself from compromising, you have to make compromise harder for yourself in the future. So in behavioral economics, we have this idea called the Ulysses Pact. So if you're familiar with the story of Ulysses, right, he wants to hear the song of the sirens. And anyone who hears the song jumps in the sea and is drowned by them. And his sailors have a protocol. They fill their ears with wax. But he's like, no, I want to hear the song. He's a hacker, right? He wants to eat his cake and have it too. So he wants to hear the song. So what he does is he ties himself to the mast so he can hear the song but not act on its compulsion. And a Ulysses pact is anytime you take some course of action off the table now, while you're strong in anticipation of your future weakness. So that might mean, for example, a distribution system that's open to all players. So not locking yourself into YouTube, having an RSS feed, not being behind Spotify's paywall or behind one of these other services, paywall, which means that you're vulnerable to Spotify applying pressure to you. It might mean unionizing your workers. Because if you're the kind of person who can rationalize your way into saying, as I've seen so many people do, right, your VC shows up and says, you've got to make things bad for the business or bad for your users. And if you don't, I'm going to pull the plug and you're going to have to fire your workers. And you're like, well, I convinced all these people to come work for me. They're like betting their kids college fund and their mortgage on it. You know, I am a uniquely good guy, and so I can save all those jobs. Jobs and live to fight another day. Well, if your workers are unionized, they can say, we're not going to do this bad thing to our users. You can structure as a B corp, you can structure as a worker co op. You can use open licenses for your material that are irrevocable. So even if you're a venture capitalist or you in the future decide to do something bad, you can't affect that retrospectively on your content archives. Those are all your possibilities, right? And you know, I'm not, I'm not saying that they're Easy, but they are simple. Right. And, and in the same way that like you, you can't trust anyone who says, well, I'll just not make mistakes. And that's how I'm going to, you know, drive you home safely or run this business safely or run this country safely. I think you can't trust yourself if your only plan is, I'm not going to make any mistakes. Speaking as someone who's made a lot of terrible mistakes in his life, that is not a plan. Plan.
- [29:40]
B
You can tie me to a poll anytime, it's fine.
- [29:45]
A
And I have, I was curious, you know, insertification and certification is a, is a broad term. Right. And, but you use it in the context of social, social media companies and Internet companies. Do you find that it applies to other industries as well as some sort of, you know, relevant way of understanding what happens to other companies? Companies like has, has McDonald's and shit, Ified itself. The NFL, yeah.
- [30:11]
C
So, you know, in the, in the other parts of the discipline story, there are parts that are distinct to tech, like the fact that we have this interoperability we talked about before, where you can kind of fix things that have shipped from the factory broken just by changing how they work. That's much easier in a digital platform than it is in analog because, like, if I write the software that disinfectifies your printer, I can just like, send you a copy. You don't have to do it. Whereas, like, if your KitchenAid mixer only takes KitchenAid accessor and they're charging a fortune for them, you know, I can't like, machine a thing that allows you to put a Miela accessory in your KitchenAid and then like, email you the file. Right. I've got to like, I've got to like, ship you a physical thing at a bare minimum. Right. Or you've got to find a machine shop or something. So software has got this, like, uniquely disenchantificatory aspect. It also had a workforce that was quite powerful and often really cared about users because they were scarce and very valuable. And so it was really hard for, for companies to disregard their input. But of course, now we have lost that power. And they didn't unionize the supplies caught up with demand. They've lost that power. In the same way that interoperability has gone away because IP laws expanded to basically ban most of that reverse engineering. So those are distinct to technology. Right. Those are not characteristics of the NFL. They're not characteristics of McDonald's. But I am on the one hand totally fine with people using the word colloquially. I do have a kind of weird cohort of people that follow me around on the Internet and scold people in my mentions who use insidification loosely on my behalf. And I'm like, at great pains to say, please stop doing that. You know, the only way to maintain, like, a rigorous technical definition of this word would be to confine its use to a group of irrelevant insiders. I'd much rather 10 million normies use it loosely and then, you know, 1 million of them go read my book than have it just be, like, 10,000 people who agree with me entirely already. And the other thing that I would say, though, is that digitization is turning other sectors into tech sectors. So, like, nurses. Hospitals really like to hire them as contractors because they can do union avoidance when they hire contracted nurses. They used to contract them through staffing agencies, and there'd be a few in every big town. Now there's four national apps, and they all call themselves in their marketing materials, Uber for nursing. And because of regulatory capture, we haven't had a new consumer privacy law to Congress since 1988, when Ronald Reagan made it illegal for video store clerks to disclose your VHS rentals. Every other form of consumer privacy violation is legal federally. And so when the app offers the nurse the shift, there are data brokers who will sell the app the nurse's credit card history, and nurses who have more credit card debt and whose debt is more delinquent are paid a lower wage. It's a desperation premium. Think about that the next time you're having your catheter changed. Right? And these nurses, they're not working in the tech sector, but they're working in a sector that has been digitized. You know, like the coal bosses in old Tennessee. Ernie Ford songs would have happily done this to their coal miners. But, like, hiring all the Pinkertons to follow the miners around and figure out who's willing to accept a lower wage, and then hiring the guys in green eyeshades to, like, change the ledger to mark down their pay packet was just not practical. So the digitization of nursing has made it possible to inshidify nursing. Not in the loose colloquial sense of things getting worse because of greed and a lack of market discipline and regulation, but in the specific technical sense of taking advantage of the technical characteristics of platformization to victimize nurses by eroding their wages.
- [33:50]
B
Okay, we're coming up on time here, so I want you to kind of finish the process for us. What is the solution for insidification? What is the Cure, as you put it in your book.
- [34:03]
C
Yeah. So the thing that's going to disappoint you when I say this is that it's not a thing you can do as a person. Right. You can't just, like, shop your way out of the monopoly. It's like trying to recycle your way out of a wildfire. Right. These are not individual decisions. The reasons billionaires want you to vote with your wallet is their wallets are thicker than yours and they're not very numerous as individuals. So the only kind of election they can win is the one where you vote with dollars instead of people. And so you're not going to like, like, make your consumption choices change this by all means. Like, make consumption choices that make you happy. Patronize your local bookstore instead of Amazon. Or like, get off Twitter and onto Mastodon or Blue sky if that's what you prefer. But don't think that it's going to make a systemic change. If you want to make a systemic change, you have to be part of a movement that changes the policy environment, because it is the policy environment that gives rise to this. You know, Elon Musk is not smart enough to be the cause. He's the effect. Right. If Elon Musk overdoses on ketamine tonight, there'll be a succession battle of 12 horrible big balls. And whoever emerges victorious will be indistinguishable from Elon Musk. So we need to change the policy environment. And the way you do that is by getting involved with groups that work as a polity. So as I said, I work for the Electronic Frontier foundation, eff.org, you can visit that website and find out how to get involved with EFF's causes. But in your state, you will have local political organizations, mutual aid groups, labor groups, groups that are fighting concentrated corporate power and the corruption that creates the inside of genic policy environment. That's where you've got to start. Start. And I know it's a big lift, but you're going to like it because being part of a group is amazing. It means that instead of just like watching TikTok on a Saturday, you got a picnic to go to or a thing where you're feeding the hungry people in your neighborhood or just a party down at the union hall. And so it sounds like a big lift because we kind of. We had a lobotomy 40 years ago when we were convinced that we were just individuals and not part of groups. But it feels so good to be part of a group. And you'll discover that too.
- [35:59]
A
Now, someone who's hearing you talk for the first time or reading your book might get the impression that you are a Luddite. Very anti technology. And so I am curious, what is your relationship with technology? I mean, you've been a blogger for a very long time, early adopter of the Internet, working in the digital space for longer than we've been, we've been alive. So I'm just curious at a personal level, like what is your, what is your view of technology?
- [36:23]
C
Well, you know, I was raised by a computer science teacher. I have an honorary doctorate in computer science. I worked as a programmer. I have a computer tattooed on my right bicep from when I was 18. And I stick my face in my computer every moment I can and I love it. And it's like how I made my most important social connections and how I made my most important romantic and familial relations. I live very far from my family. It's how I stay in touch with them. So I'm not anti technology. So the other thing that I do in my life, and actually the thing I'm arguably better known for than this is I write science fiction novels. I'm a multi best selling science fiction novelist. And the thing about science fiction writers is that people think that we're prophets, right? That we're trying to think up new gadgets and describe what they do. But there is no such thing as prophecy. The world is contingent enough for grabs. What we do matters. We can change the future. What science fiction writers do is not predict the future, but try and imagine a different set of social relations for the technologies around us. Now, using futuristic parables, we're not so much interested in what the gadget does, but who it does it for and who it does it to. And I'm of the opinion that we could have friends on the Internet without Mark Zuckerberg listening in on our conversations. And that we could have phones that worked without Tim Cook deciding which apps we can use and charging, charging everyone who makes an app that we love 30 cents out of every dollar we spend. And then we could search the web without Satya Nadella or Sundar Pinchai knowing what color underwear we're wearing, right? That we can like, cleave off the parts that we don't like. We can take this disgusting pre feast menu that's got 18 courses that even a dog wouldn't eat and we can throw them away and make an a la carte offer where we just take the two things that we like and get Rid of all the crap that tech bosses want us to, to like.
- [38:17]
A
So as a science fiction, science fiction writer, there might be a lot of people who read science fiction. This guy next to me is a big sci fi guy. What in your opinion, you know, what is your favorite or what is the best fictional work about the impact of the Internet can be a TV show.
- [38:31]
C
So I got to say, and anyone who's got like a 1 favorite, it's, it's a little, it's always a little sketchy. Usually the one favorite book is like the Bible or Atlas Shrugged or Mein Kampf. So I'm, I'm not like a one book guy. You can see behind me, I made many thousands of, of books guys. But if you want a very prescient book about the way we're relating to technology today, there's a wonderful old novel from I believe the early 90s by Bruce Sterling called Distraction about high tech networked politics in the age of kind of crazy performative politicians. And Bruce is just an incredible writer later but in, he is in, in this book like on fire. So Distraction by Bruce Sterling. And it's Sterling like sterling silver. S T E R L I N G. It's a great guy.
- [39:25]
B
Pretty productive morning for us, Neil. I got a reading list. I got a lot to think about. So. Corey, thank you.
- [39:31]
C
Gotta restructure as an S Corp. Creative workers co op or B corp, rather creative workers.
- [39:36]
A
Hit the picket line.
- [39:37]
C
We have all your workforce. Hit the the picket line. Yeah. Join eff. Join EFF is the thing you should do first.
- [39:44]
B
Read the Odyssey. Join eff.
- [39:46]
A
Tie yourself to a pool.
- [39:47]
C
Tie yourself. Get your friend to tie you up again. Exactly, exactly.
- [39:51]
B
Join a group. Well, Corey, this was super fun. Thank you so much for coming by. Thank you everyone. Go check out his book. Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and what to do About It. This was fun, Corey. Thank you.
- [40:05]
C
Thank you.
- [40:05]
A
Have a good one.
- [40:08]
C
You know, the, the dirty secret is I, I work in my hammock when I'm not on camera. So I am supine for much of the day.
- [40:15]
A
A little recharging action going back and forth.
- [40:17]
B
Hammocks in the office.
- [40:18]
C
I have a bad back and it's nice and comfortable. I can kind of anteriorize my pelvis. It's good.
- [40:24]
A
Nice Limu emu.
- [40:27]
C
And Doug, here we have the limu imu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us Cut the camera they see us. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings vary unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates Excludes Massachusetts.