Anyone who says "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product" has been suckered in by Big Tech, whose cargo-cult version of markets and the discipline they impose on companies.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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Questa voce è stata modificata (1 anno fa)
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Cory Doctorow
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Here's the way that story goes: companies that fear losing your business will treat you better, because treating you worse will cost them money. Since ad-supported media gets paid by advertisers, they are fine with abusing you to make advertisers happy, because the advertiser is the customer, and you are the product..
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This represents a profound misunderstanding of how even capitalism's champions describe its workings. The purported virtue of capitalism is that it transforms the capitalist's greed into something of broad public value, by appealing to the capitalist's *fear*. A successful capitalist isn't merely someone figures out how to please their customers - they're also someone who figures out how to please their *suppliers*.
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Cory Doctorow
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That's why tech platforms were - until recently - *very* good to (some of) their workforce. Technical labor was scarce and so platforms built whimsical "campuses" for tech workers, with amenities ranging from stock options to gourmet cafeterias to egg-freezing services for those workers planning to stay at their desks through their fertile years. Those workers weren't the "customer" - but they were treated better than any advertiser or user.
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Cory Doctorow
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But when it came to easily replaced labor - testers, cleaning crew, the staff in those fancy cafeterias - the situation was much worse. Those workers were hired through cut-out shell companies, denied benefits, even made to enter via separate entrances on shifts that were scheduled to minimize the chance that they would ever interact with one of the highly paid tech workers at the firm.
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Cory Doctorow
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Likewise, advertisers may be the tech companies' "customers" but that doesn't mean the platforms treat them well. Advertisers get ripped off just like the rest of us. The platforms gouge them on price, lie to them about advertising reach, and collude with one another to fix prices and defraud advertisers:
pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/flo…
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Pluralistic: 05 Oct 2020 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Now, it's true that the advertisers *used to* get a good deal from the platforms, and that it came at the expense of the users. Facebook lured in users by falsely promising never to spy on them. Then, once the users were locked in, Facebook flipped a switch, started spying on users from asshole to appetite, and then offered rock-bottom-priced, fine-grained, highly reliable ad-targeting to advertisers:
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
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The Antitrust Case Against Facebook
papers.ssrn.comCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But once those advertisers were locked in, Facebook turned on *them*, too. Of course they did. The point of monopoly power isn't just getting too big to fail and too big to jail - it's getting too big to *care*:
pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/tea…
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Pluralistic: Too big to care (04 Apr 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This is the thing that "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product" fails to comprehend. "If you're not paying for the product" is grounded in a cartoonish vision of markets in which "the customer is king" and successful businesses are those who cater to their customers - even at the expense of their workers and suppliers - will succeed.
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Cory Doctorow
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In this frame, the advertiser is the platforms' customer, the customer is king, the platform inflicts unlimited harm upon all other stakeholders in service to those advertisers, the advertisers are *so* pleased with this white-glove service that they willingly pay a handsome premium to use the platform, and so the platform grows unimaginably wealthy.
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Cory Doctorow
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But if the platforms inflict unlimited harms upon users, users will depart, and then no amount of obsequious catering to advertisers will convince them to spend money on ads that no one sees. In cargo-cult platform capitalism, the platforms are able to solve this problem by "hacking our dopamine loops" - depriving us of our free will with "addictive" technologies that keep us locked to their platforms even when they grow so terrible that we all hate using them.
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Cory Doctorow
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This means that we can divide the platform economy into "capitalists" who sell you things, and "surveillance capitalists" who use surveillance data to control your mind, then sell your compulsive use of their products to their cherished customers, the advertisers.
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Cory Doctorow
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Surveillance capitalists like Google are thus said to have only been shamming when they offered us a high-quality product. That was just a means to an end: the good service Google offered in its golden age was just bait to trick us into handing over enough surveillance data that they could tune their mind-control technology, strip us of our free will, and then sell us to their beloved advertisers, for whom nothing is too good.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Meanwhile, the traditional capitalists - the companies that sell you things - are the good capitalists. Apple and Microsoft are disciplined by market dynamics. They won't spy on you because you're their customer, and so they have to keep you happy.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
All this leads to an inexorable conclusion: unless we pay for things with money, we are doomed. Any attempt to pay with attention will end in a free-for-all where the platforms use their Big Data mind-control rays to drain us of *all* our attention. It is only when we pay with money that we can dicker over price and arrive at a fair and freely chosen offer.
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Cory Doctorow
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This theory is great for tech companies: it elevates giving them money to a democracy-preserving virtue. It reframes handing your cash over to a multi-trillion dollar tech monopolist as good civics. It's easy to see why those tech giants would like that story, but boy, are you a sap if you buy it.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Because *all* capitalists are surveillance capitalists...when they can get away with it. Sure, Apple blocked Facebook from spying on Ios users...and then started illegally, secretly spying on those users and lying about it, in order to target ads to those users:
pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/lux…
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Pluralistic: 14 Nov 2022 Even if you’re paying for the product, you’re still the product – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
And Microsoft spies on every Office 365 user and rats them out to their bosses ("Marge, this analytics dashboard says you're the division's eleventh-worst speller and twelfth-worst typist. Shape up or ship out!"). But the joke's on your boss: Microsoft *also* spies on your whole company and sells the data about it to your competitors:
pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the…
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Pluralistic: 25 Nov 2020 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The platforms screw anyone they *can*. Sure, they lured in advertisers with good treatment, but once those advertisers were locked in, they fucked them over just as surely as they fucked over their users.
The surveillance capitalism hypothesis depends on the existence of a hypothetical - and wildly improbably - Big Data mind-control technology that keeps users locked to platforms even when the platform decays.
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Cory Doctorow
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Mind-control rays are an extraordinary claim supported by the thinnest of evidence (marketing materials from the companies as they seek to justify charging a premium to advertisers, combined with the self-serving humblebrags of millionaire Prodigal Tech Bros who claim to have awakened to the evil of using their dopamine-hacking sorcerous powers on behalf of their billionaire employers).
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
There is a *much* simpler explanation for why users stay on platforms even as they decline in quality: they are enmeshed in a social service that encompasses their friends, loved ones, customers, and communities. Even if everyone in this sprawling set of interlocking communities agrees that the platform is terrible, they will struggle to agree on what to do about it: where to go next and when to leave.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This is the economists' "collective action problem" - a phenomenon with a much better evidentiary basis than the hypothetical, far-fetched "dopamine loop" theory.
To understand whom a platform treats well and whom it abuses, look not to who pays it and who doesn't. Instead, ask yourself: who has the platform managed to lock in?
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The more *any* platform's stakeholder stands to lose by leaving, the worse the platform can treat them without risking their departure. Thus the beneficent face that tech turn to its most cherished tech workers, and the hierarchy of progressively more-abusive conditions for others - worse for those whose work-visas are tied to their employment, and the very worst treatment for contractors testing the code, writing the documentation, labelling the data or cleaning the toilets.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
If you care about how people are treated by platforms, you can't just tell them to pay for services instead of using ad-supported media. The *most* important factor in getting decent treatment out of a tech company isn't whether you pay with cash instead of attention - it's whether you're locked in, and thus a flight risk whom the platform must cater to.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
It's perfectly possible for market dynamics to play out in a system in which we pay with our attention by watching ads. More than 50% of all web users have installed an ad-blocker, the largest boycott in the history of civilization:
doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-…
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How is the world’s biggest boycott doing?
Doc Searls WeblogCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Ad-supported companies make an offer: How about in exchange for looking at this content, you let us spy on you in ways that would make Orwell blush and then cram a torrent of targeted ads into your eyeballs?" Ad-blockers let you make a counter-offer: "How about 'nah'?"
eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adbl…
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Adblocking: How About Nah?
Electronic Frontier FoundationCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But ad-blocking is only possible on an open platform. A closed, locked-down platform that is illegal to modify isn't a walled garden, a fortress that keeps out the bad guys - it's a walled prison that locks you *in*, a prisoner of the worst impulses of the tech giant that built it. Apple can defend you from other companies' spying ways, but when Apple decides to spy on you, it's a felony to jailbreak your Iphone and block Apple's surveillance:
pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/bat…
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Pluralistic: When Facebook came for your battery, feudal security failed (05 Feb 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I am no true believer in markets - but the people who say that paying for products will "align incentives" and make tech better claim to believe in the power of markets to make everyone better off. But real markets aren't just places where companies sell things - they're also places where companies *buy* things. Monopolies short-circuit the power of customer choice to force companies to do better.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But *monoposonies* - markets dominated by powerful *buyers* - are just as poisonous to the claimed benefits of markets.
Even if you are "the product" - that is, even if you're selling your attention to a platform to package up and sell to an advertiser - that in no way precludes your getting decent treatment from the platform.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
A world where we can avail ourselves of blockers, where interoperablity eases our exodus from abusive platforms, where privacy law sets a floor below which we cannot bargain is a world where *it doesn't matter* if you're "the product" or "the customer" - you can still get a square deal.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The platforms used to treat us well and now treat us badly. That's not because they were setting a patient trap, luring us in with good treatment in the expectation of locking us in and turning on us. Tech bosses do *not* have the executive function to lie in wait for years and years.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Rather, as tech platforms eliminated competition, captured their regulators and expanded their IP rights so that interoperability was no longer a threat, they became too big to care whether any of their stakeholders were happy. First they came for the users, sure, but then they turned on the publishers, the advertisers, and finally, even their once-pampered tech workers:
pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the…
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The proletarianization of tech workers – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
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MLK said that "the law can't make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me." It's *impossible* to get tech bosses to believe you deserve care and decency, but you *can* stop them from abusing you. The way to do that is by making them fear you - by abolishing the laws that create lock-in, by legally enshrining a right to privacy, by protecting competition.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
It's not by giving them money. Paying for a service does not make a company fear you, and anyone who thinks they can buy a platform's loyalty by paying for a service is a simp. A corporation is an immortal, transhuman colony organism that uses us as inconvenient gut-flora: no matter how much you love it, it will *never* love you back. It *can't* experience love - only fear.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel *The Bezzle*! Catch me in THIS SATURDAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!
pluralistic.net/2024/02/16/nar…
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Pluralistic: Come see me on tour; How America’s oligarchs lull us the be-your-own-boss fairy tale (16 Feb 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netnick
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Tom Ritchford
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economic system with only one buyer from many possible sellers; contrasted with monopoly
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Aaron
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Lock-in also explains why employers treat employees like trash and underpay them. They are taking advantage of the fact that you *need* a job, not just to have nice things, but to survive. They don't need you as bad, because they can get someone else to replace you, and this power imbalance is where the rot comes from.
This is one of the biggest reasons to support a UBI. If your basic survival needs aren't dependent on employment, only your ability to have nice things, then the power balance is restored and employers can't get away with abusive practices.
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LeBonk
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Shrikant Joshi
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
> The point of monopoly power isn't just getting too big to fail and too big to jail – it's getting too big to care.
This line is just pure... 👨🍳😘
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Cory Doctorow
Unknown parent • • •Henning Deters
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Dave T-W
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Erlend Sogge Heggen
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •I still think it’s a useful truism. Why do you think your new favorite search engine, Kagi, works so well? Aligned incentives play a big part there.
Bigness and consequent monopolization being the larger overarching cause of enshittification doesn’t preclude paid products from being fundamentally more user-aligned than ads-driven ones with obfuscated profit incentives.
You’re not NOT the product if you pay for it either, but it’s a more transparent exchange, which matters.
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Erlend Sogge Heggen • • •@erlend "Aligned incentives" doesn't mean "I pay you."
"Aligned incentives" means "If you piss me off, bad things happen to you."
"I stop paying you" is a bad thing.
So is:
* Your employees quit and you can't replace them (tech worker scarcity)
* Your employees say no, and you can't fire them (tech worker unions)
* Your regulator fines you more than you make by screwing me (ending regulatory capture)
* You lose my business to a rival (reinstating competition law, banning mergers, etc)
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •@erlend
Also:
* I install an ad-blocker, switch to an alternative client, jailbreak my device, or start using third-party consumables, parts or service (and never come back) (restoring interoperability)
The only way paying "aligns incentives" is if "not paying" is an option. But monopolies/oligopolies don't have to worry about that. Paying the airline doesn't make them treat you well.
Cailean Babcock
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cailean Babcock • • •Cailean Babcock
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cailean Babcock • • •Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •@osaka_animator
'Call me Ishmael.'
'Why? I'm confused. Is that your name? What is this book about? Why did you open with that line? Explain this to me. No, I don't want to read the book that has the answers. I just want to ask you questions that are almost certainly answered in the text right here that I am choosing not to read.'
Cailean Babcock
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •You’re comparing chatting on social media to Melville?
I already took the L and outed my own mistake. And accomplished writers can still bury the lede. You’re comparing a compelling teaser to a preface that managed to semantically contradict the material it’s meant to represent.
Cailean Babcock
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Putting random words into my mouth isn’t a counter argument.
I read the entire book in physical form. The part where Ishmael and Quequeg smoked in bed on a cold morning, while Ishmael explained to the reader why being partially cold made being mostly warm very meaningful, has stuck with me ever since.
I believe I mentioned that I also read your complete piece from start to finish, and apologized for the oversight.
So 3-1 in my favor, by my count.
Cailean Babcock
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow
Unknown parent • • •Fazal Majid
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •