← Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
Threads’ margin is the Eurostack’s opportunity
This week on my podcast, I read “Threads’ margin is the Eurostack’s opportunity,” a recent post from my Pluralistic.net blog, about the tactics that digital sovereignty advocates can deploy to counter Meta’s (further) enshittification of Threads. The funny thing is, the OG App creators were just following the Facebook playbook. When Facebook opened up to... more
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:12]
A
Well, hello and welcome back to the Cory Doctorow Podcast. I'm just back from Toronto and Ottawa where I did a string of very good events. Thank you to everyone who came out and said hello and it was especially nice to see so many old friends there from so school and other places. I have more travel coming up. You can catch me in Salt Lake City at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in an event for the Tanner Humanities center at the University of Utah on February 18th. If you're going to Fetty MTL in Montreal on February 24th, I'm going to be coming in remotely to give the opening keynote. If you're in Victoria BC, you can catch me from March 3rd to 5th. I'm going to be keynoting the 28th annual Victoria International Privacy and Security Summit. I'll also be doing a bookstore event while I'm in town in Berkeley. I'll be at the Bioneers Conference to give a keynote on March 27th and I'm also keynoting Berlin's Republica May 18th through 20th. While I'm in Berlin on May 19th I'm doing an event with Other Land Books in Kreuzberg, but we won't be at the bookstore, we'll be nearby. They had originally ticketed it for the bookstore but it sold out very very quick and so they have booked out a larger venue nearby. So if you already have your tickets, go and check the event details again because you might end up in the wrong place. And I'll be at Hay on Wye on the English Welsh border for the how the Light gets in festival May 22nd through 25th. So I got back from Toronto yesterday. It was a long day. I was staying at my parents place. My parents were actually staying at my place in LA and I was staying at their place in Toronto. Strange circumstance to begin with. And then to get my flight I had to leave their place at 3:45 in the morning and it was quite a rude journey to the airport. They are experiencing extremely, extremely low temperatures in Toronto and I had been wearing many, many thick heavy layers which I did not want to travel in yesterday because I was changing planes. So I packed all my coats and everything in my suitcase, called the cab and then rushed across the street to jump in the cab when it arrived and managed to just freeze myself solid in the seconds it took to dash inside. It's that cold. But then when I got to the airport it turned out that my initial flight to Dallas, which was supposed to then connect me to Burbank where I Live. That was canceled. They rebooked me to Charlotte. That was also cancelled. Finally, I got on a flight to Philly. That flight did go. And then I had a connection in Philly. My seatmate was quite a character. He drank six vodkas in the first hour at 9 in the morning. And then I flew to LAX and took a cab home and immediately jumped out of the cab, dropped off a few things at the dry cleaners because I'm leaving again tomorrow, and then raced to our local anti Trump, anti ice protest. And the vibes were impeccable. If you're not going to your local protests, you should. Ryan Broderick on Garbage Day made a pretty good case this week on his podcast that maybe going to these isn't going to change Trump's mind. Of course it won't. It's not going to change maga's mind. But it will take our spineless, supine Democrats and tell them where their base is sitting right now and push them into a much more radical posture that rises to meet the moment. And then for your own wellbeing, just knowing that you're not crazy, that other people around you feel the same way as you, that was great. It was such a great protest. So, as I said, I just got back into town and I'm just about to leave town. Someone should write a book with that title. I am heading to Santa Cruz tomorrow where my daughter's going to university. That's why my parents are here. It's my daughter Posey's 18th birthday this week, so we're going up tomorrow to celebrate it with her. And I can't wait. I haven't seen her since the new year. It'll be really lovely to get to hang out with her again. And from there I'm flying to London because as if you listen regularly, you'll know. My wife's moved back to London to take a job at the BBC and so I'm going to be spending March there, apart from my trip to Salt Lake City. And so I am really looking forward to that. I have giant bags of stuff I'm gonna fly over to leave in our flat there. You know, depending on how things go, that might be where we relocate in a year when her contract is up, if they renew it and if it makes sense for everyone. And so I'm schlepping a bunch of stuff over. And in the meantime, I'm continuing work on a new book, the Post American Internet. This is a book that elucidates my theory of the new political space that has opened up because of Trump. Trump has inadvertently created the conditions for ignoring America's preferences and for the world to strike its own path to a better technology future. And that is also the theme of today's reading. Today's reading is from my pluralistic newsletter. I published it on the 30th of January and it's called Threads Margin is the Eurostax opportunity. OG app is the coolest app you've never heard of back in 2022, two teenagers unilaterally disin shittified Instagram by making an alt client that restored all the parts of Insta that made it a success and blocked all the anti features that Meta crammed down users throats after they had them locked in. Here's how ogapp worked. First it popped up a browser window and loaded the Instagram login screen. Then after you'd logged into Insta, it stole the session key. That's the cryptographic proof that you are logged into your account. That let it impersonate you to Insta servers and slurp down the whole feed that Insta had queued up for you. After grabbing your feed, OG App deleted all of the ads, all the slop, all the boosted content, all the months old clickbait that the algorithm TM had surfaced. What was left was pristine. The post from the people you followed in reverse chronological order to make this all even sweeter, OG apps sent no data back to Meta as you used it, except for the likes and comments you intended to transmit to the company. All the other data that Meta's apps gather got blocked. Everything from your location to which posts you slowed down you're scrolling on to accelerometer readouts that revealed minute changes in how you hold your phone from second to second. Boy, did people like this. By the end of the day, OG app was in the top 10 charts for both Google and Apple's app stores. By the next morning, it was gone. Meta sent a takedown notice to the app store duopoly and they killed OG app on its behalf. Because there is honor among thieves. The funny thing is, the OG app creators were just following the Facebook playbook. When Facebook opened up to the General Public in 2006, it had the problem that everyone who wanted social media already had an account on MySpace. And all of Facebook's improvements on MySpace, like Zuck making a promise never to spy on his users, didn't matter because MySpace had something Facebook could not match. MySpace had all your friends. Facebook came up with an ingenious solution to this problem. They offered MySpace users a bot. You gave the bot your MySpace login credentials just as OG app did with your Insta credentials and the bot impersonated you to MySpace just as OG app did with Insta. And it grabbed everything queued up for you on MySpace just as OGAPP did with Insta, and then flowed those messages into your Facebook feed feed just as OG app did with Insta. This was very successful. Users didn't have to choose between their friends on MySpace and the superior design and privacy policies of Facebook. They got to eat their cake and have it too. This is actually a very old and important pattern in tech. It's what move fast and break things looks like when it's actually disrupting sclerotic and decaying companies that lock us in, take us for granted and treat us like like shit. It's what Apple did when they cloned the Microsoft Office file formats and released iWork, whose pages, numbers and keynote let Microsoft users escape from the prison of Windows and bring their documents with them. But like all pirates, the tech companies dreamed of being admirals once they attained the admiralty. They announced that when they did this stuff it was progress. But if anyone does it to them, well, that would be piracy. What's more, they were able to take advantage of a metastasizing blob of IP laws that the US trade representatives spread around the world with threats of tariffs for non compliance. Soon nearly every country had enacted laws that made it a literal crime for their entrepreneurs and technologists to fix America's defective tech exports by adding privacy tools, bridging old services into new ones, or reading and writing America's ubiquitous proprietary file formats. For decades this system was immovable. The world couldn't afford tariffs on its exports to the usa and it was able to maintain the pretense that America's platforms were trustworthy neutral parties that would not be weaponized against their own national interest at the behest of the American state. Obviously that is dead now. Donald Trump, debilitated by white matter disease and his endemic incontinent belligerence, has flipped the table over in a poker that was rigged in his favor because he resented having to play trademark November Kelly. EU member states are minting new digital sovereignty ministries as fast as they can print up new business cards. The EU itself has just appointed its first tech sovereignty. Security and democracies are they're building the Eurostack, a fleet of EU based data centers that will host free, open, auditable, trustworthy equivalents to the US tech giant's offerings. But Eurostac is about to run into a wall. Article 6 of the EU's own copyright directive, which prohibits reverse engineering and modification of tech products. It's a law that the U.S. trade rep lobbied hard for winning the day by promising tariff free access to the US for Europe's exports, a promise Trump has now broken. So long as Europe continues to hold up its end of this one sided bargain, it will not be able to create the reverse engineering based tools that let EU companies, governments and households get their data out of US tech silos, let alone let them build and enjoy successors to the OG app, which will make it easy for them to leave US social media without sacrificing contact with the people who matter to them. Which brings me to Threads, Meta's latest social media network. Threads is built on Activity Pub and Mastodon, these being free, open, auditable and trustworthy protocols designed to support federated social media. That's social media that runs on servers managed by lots of different entities whose users can all connect to one another no matter which server they use. Meta was clearly excited by the prospect of enclosing and conquering this open upstart, but also nervous at the prospect that its users would find in Federation an easy path to escape from Meta's clutches. After all, if you can leave Threads and join a non meta Mastodon server without losing contact with the people you followed and were followed by on threads, then why wouldn't you leave? Mark Zuckerberg's users don't like him, they just hate him less than they love the people they are in community with on on Zuckerberg's platforms. So Threads never really join the Fediverse, you can't quite follow and be followed by Mastodon users, and you can't quite migrate your account off Meta's servers and onto a better one. Zuck and his lieutenants are keenly attuned to any design that drives high switching costs for leaving their services, and they exploit these switching costs to figure out just how much pain they can inflict on users without risking their departure. So now they've started to turn the screws on Threads users. They just announced a global program of threads and shit ification with a promise to cram ads into the eyeballs of every Threads account holder. This represents a hell of an opportunity for the EU and Eurostac. Meta's ads are wildly illegal in the eu, violating Europe's landmark privacy law, the gdpr. The only reason Meta gets away with its flagrant lawbreaking is that it has captured the Irish state and uses legal tricks to force all GDPR enforcement into Irish jurisdiction. But people hate ads. More than half of all web users have installed an ad blocker which also protects their privacy. It is the largest consumer boycott in human history. But no one has ever installed an ad blocker for an app because reverse engineering apps and mobile platforms they run on is illegal under laws like Article 6 of the Copyright Directive. As a result, tech companies, especially US giants who can violate EU law with impunity, love to inshitify their apps because they know that no one can do unto them as they did unto their own rivals like MySpace. Meta's new ad strategy for Threads is the perfect cue for a European repeal of Article 6 of the Copyright Directive. Procedurally, this is a great moment for it, as the EU is finalizing the Digital Fairness act, which could include an exemption to EUCD6 for privacy enhancing technologies. Giving Europeans an effective way to push back against Meta's wholesale violation of their rights is a way that the eurostac can score popular support right now, not in five years when the new data centers come online. It's a way of improving the lives of Europeans in immediate, concrete ways, rather than asking them to be grateful that some ministry has changed cloud providers. That's an important change, sure, but one that has no real impact on Europeans daily lives. What's more, legalizing jailbreaking for the purpose of making threads alt clients wouldn't just give Europeans a better social media experience, it could boost bootstrap European social media services. Remember, Threads was able to achieve instant scale by moving Instagram users onto Threads wholesale, maintaining their Insta follows and followers when they created their threads accounts. Europe, like everywhere else, is full of entrepreneurs who are trying to get national independent social media platforms off the ground, hoping to woo users by promising them a more privacy respecting alternative. They've got the same problem Zuck had when he tried to compete with MySpace. Users love their friends more than they hate being spied on, so merely offering a better service is insufficient. To get users off the old platforms, you have to lower their switching costs. You have to let them bring their friends to the new network, even if their friends are stuck on the old network. Legalize jailbreaking in the EU and you'll make it possible to do on device bridging. That's where a new social media app is able to break open the data storage of the Threads app on the same device and move that data into its own feeds. And because the EU has the gdpr, they have the privacy framework needed to police the privacy violations that breaking into other apps. Data storage can lead to Meta will squawk. They'll say Europe is legalizing the violation of its corporate rights. But Meta violates Europeans rights at scale. And the rights I'm talking about taking away from Meta are rights EU gave it in the first place in exchange for a broken promise of tariff free access to the usa. Ad blocking isn't stealing. Ad blocking is bargaining. Without ad blocking, the companies don't sell us service in exchange for our privacy. They plunder all the private data they can get and dribble out services at what, whatever level they think we deserve. If ad supported media was a restaurant, it'd be one where you get thrown up against a wall, relieved of your wallet, fed a handful of gruel, and then get kicked in the ass and sent on your way. Every time Donald Trump threatens the eu, he makes the case for the Eurostack. But still, he can't help himself. Likewise, every time Zuckerberg and shitifies his services, he makes the case for repealing Article 6 of the Copyright Direct. And he can't help himself either. Thread's inexorable inshittification is an opportunity. An opportunity to make the case for the Eurostack, an opportunity to improve the lives of millions of Europeans, and an opportunity to break through the walled gardens that keep the people we love stuck on legacy social media platforms. When they did it to us, that wasn't progress. When we do it to them, it's not piracy. All right then. Well, that is my last podcast in LA for a while. I am bringing my mic and stuff to London so maybe you'll hear from me once I am there in my spare bedroom in our old flat in East London. And whether or not I manage to record one of these while I'm overseas, thank you for listening and I hope to see you at one of my upcoming events and you know, go to a protest. It's great and we can't let the people around us think that they're alone. All right, talk to you later. That was the Cory Doctorow podcast Licensed Creative Commons Attribution Non commercial share alike 4.0 or as woody Guthrie put it in another context, this song is copyrighted in the US under seal of copyright 154085 for a period of 28 years. And anyone caught singing it without our permission will be a mighty good friend of ours. Cause we don't give a dern. Publish it, write it, sing it, swing to it, yodel it. We wrote it and that's all we wanted to do. Many thanks to John Taylor Williams of Rynek Studio. That's W R Y N E C K for engineering and mastering. John Taylor Williams is a broadcast technology specialist, an audio engineer and a musician. In his spare time, he likes to carve useful objects out of wood, antler and steel.