These wreckers are the largely forgotten authors of our misery, and they mingle with impunity in polite society, never fearing that someone might be sizing them up for a pitchfork.

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"Who Broke the Internet?" aims to change that. But the series isn't just about holding these named people accountable for their enshittificatory deeds: it's about understanding the policies that created the enshittocene, so that we can dismantle them and build a new, good internet that is fit for purpose, namely, helping us overcome and survive environmental collapse, oligarchic control, fascism and genocide.

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The crux of enshittification theory is this: tech bosses made their products and services so much worse in order to extract more rents from end-users and business customers. The reason they did this is *because they could*. Over 20+ years, our policymakers created an environment of impunity for enshittifying companies, sitting idly by (or even helping out) as tech companies bought or destroyed their competitors; captured their regulators; neutered tech workers' power.

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Finally, they expanded IP laws to ensure that technology could only ever be used to attack us, but never to defend us.

These four forces - competition, regulation, labor power and interoperability - once acted as constraints, because they punished enshittifying gambits. Make your product worse and users, workers and suppliers would defect to a competitor; or a regulator would fine you or even bring criminal charges.

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Or your irreplaceable workers would down tools and refuse to obey your orders; or another technologist would come up with an alternative client, an ad-blocker, a scraper, or compatible spare parts, plugins or mods that would permanently sever your relationship with whomever you were tormenting.

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As these constraints fell away, the environment became *enshittogenic*: rather than punishing enshittification, it rewarded it. Individual enshittifiers within companies triumphed in their factional struggles with corporate rivals, like the Google revenue czar who vanquished the Search czar, deliberately worsening search results so we'd have to repeatedly search to get the answers we seek, creating more opportunities to show us ads:

wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-ki…

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The Man Who Killed Google Search

Wanna listen to this story instead? Check out this week's Better Offline podcast, "The Man That Destroyed Google Search," available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts.

^{Edward Zitron (Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At)}

An enshittogenic environment meant that individuals within companies who embraced plans to worsen things to juice profits were promoted, displacing workers and managers who felt an ethical or professional obligation to make good and useful things.

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Top tech bosses - the C-suite - went from being surrounded by "adult supervision" who checked their worst impulses with dire warnings about competition, government punishments, or worker revolt to being encysted in a layer of enthusiastic enshittifiers who competed to see who could come up with the most outrageously enshittificatory gambits.

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"Who Broke the Internet?" covers the collapse of all of these constraints, but its main focus is on IP law - specifically, *anticircumvention* law, which bans technologists from reverse-engineering and modifying the technologies we own and use (AKA "interoperability" or "adversarial interoperability").

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Interoperability is at the center of the enshittification story because interop is an unavoidable characteristic of anything built out of computers. Computers are, above all else, *flexible*. Formally speaking, our computers are "Turing-complete universal von Neumann machines," which is to say that every one of our computers is capable of running every valid program.

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That flexibility is why we call computers a "general purpose" technology. The same computer that helps your optometrist analyze your retina can also control your car's anti-lock braking system, and it can also play Doom.

Enshittification runs on that flexibility. It's that flexibility that allows a digital products or service to offer different prices, search rankings, recommendations, and costs to every user, every time they interact with it:

pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twi…

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It's that flexibility that lets tech companies send over-the-air "updates" to your property that takes away functionality you paid for and valued, and then sell it back to you as an "upgrade" or worse, a monthly subscription:

pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit…

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But that flexibility cuts both ways. The fact that every computer can run every valid program means that every enshittificatory app and update, there's a disenshittificatory program you *could* install that would reverse the damage.

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For every program that tells your HP printer to reject third-party ink, forcing you to buy HP's own colored water at $10,000/gallon, there's another program that tells your HP printer to enthusiastically accept third-party ink that costs mere pennies:

eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-…

In other worse, show me a 10-foot enshittifying wall, and I'll show you an 11-foot disenshittifying ladder.

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Ink-Stained Wretches: The Battle for the Soul of Digital Freedom Taking Place Inside Your Printer

Since its founding in the 1930s, Hewlett-Packard has been synonymous with innovation, and many's the engineer who had cause to praise its workhorse oscillators, minicomputers, servers, and PCs.

^{Electronic Frontier Foundation}

Interop has long been tech's most important disenshittifier. Interop harnesses the rapaciousness of tech bros and puts it in service to making things better. Someone who hacks Insta to take out the ads and recommendations and just show you posts from people you follow need not be motivated by the desire to make your life better - they can be motivated by the desire to poach Insta users and build a rival business, and *still* make life better for you:

digitaltrends.com/mobile/the-o…

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Can’t stand using Instagram in 2022? This app fixes everything you hate about it

The OG App is bringing Instagram back to basics by removing all of its worst features and giving users true control over the content they view.

^{Peter Hunt Szpytek (Digital Trends)}

And if they succeed and then recapitulate the sins of Instagram's bosses, turning the screws on users with ads, suggestions and slop? That just invites more disenshittifying interoperators to do unto them as they did unto Zuck.

That's the way it used to work: the 10-foot piles of shit deployed by tech bosses conjured up 11-foot ladders. This is what disruption is, when it is at its best.

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There's nothing wrong with moving fast and breaking things - provided the things you're breaking belong to billionaire enshittifiers. Those things *need* to be broken.

Enter IP law. For the past 25+ years, IP law has been relentlessly expanded in ways that ensure that disruption is always for thee, never me. "IP" has come to mean, "Any law that lets a dominant company reach out and exert control over its critics, competitors and customers":

locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doct…

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Cory Doctorow: IP

You’ve probably heard of “open source software.” If you pay at­tention to the politics of this stuff, you might have heard of “free software” and even know a little ab…

^{Locus Online}

The most pernicious IP law is far and away "anticircumvention." Under anticircumvention, it's illegal to "break a digital lock" that controls access to a copyrighted work, including software (and digital locks *are* software, so any digital lock automatically gets this protection).

This is mind-bending, particularly because it's one of those things that's so unreasonable, so *stupid* that it's easy to think you're misunderstanding, because surely it can't be *that* stupid.

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But oh, it *is*.

One of the best ways to grasp this point is to start with what you might do in a world *without* digital locks. Take your printer: if HP raises the price of ink, you might start to refill your cartridges or buy third-party cartridges. Obviously, this is not a copyright violation. Ink is not a copyrighted work.

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But once HP puts a digital lock on the printer that checks to see if you've done an end-run around the HP ink ripoff, then refilling your cartridge *becomes* illegal, because you have to break that digital lock to get your printer to use the ink you've chosen.

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Or think about cars: taking *your* car to *your* mechanic does not violate anyone's copyright. If your car, you decide who fixes it. But all car makers use digital locks to prevent mechanics from reading out the diagnostic information they need to access to fix your car. If a mechanic wants to know why your check engine light has turned on, they have to buy a tool - spending 5-figure sums every year for every manufacturer - in order to decode that error.

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Now, it's your car, and error messages aren't copyrighted works, but bypassing the lock that prevents independent diagnosis is a crime, thanks to anticircumvention law.

Then there's app stores. You bought your console. You bought your phone. These devices are your property. If I want to sell you some software I've written so you can run it on your device, that's *not* a copyright violations.

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It is the *literal opposite* of a copyright violation: an author selling their copyrighted works to a customer who gets to enjoy those works using their own property. But the digital lock on your iPhone, Xbox, Playstation and Switch all prevent your device from running software unless it is delivered by the manufacturer's app store, which takes 30 cents out of every dollar you spend.

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Installing software without going through the manufacturer's app store requires breaking the device's digital lock, and that's a crime, which means *buying a copyrighted work from its author* becomes a copyright violation!

This is what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model." We created laws - in living memory, thanks to known individuals - that had the foreseeable, explicit intent of making it illegal to disenshittify the products and services you rely on.

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