The internet is a mixed bag. While it has been an exceptional vehicle for increased communication and information access, it has also spawned a whole host of problems such as enabling the rapid spreading of misinformation and hate, and as big tech monopolies have used it grow their profits at the expense of the user experience.
Brooke Gladstone, the host of the radio program On The Media had an excellent conversation with Cory Doctorow, special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, on what happened to the internet and what can be done about it. It took place over three weeks. You can listen to the podcasts and also read transcripts of each episode by clicking on the links but be warned that the transcripts are done by machine and these tend to be fraught with poor punctuation, homophone mistakes, are other errors that require listening to the podcast to correct.
In Part 1 (20 minutes) they discuss why every platform goes bad and why going online feels evermore more repellent—or as he calls it, the “enshittification” of online platforms.
He gives the example of Amazon’a business model.
So step one, buyers or end users are lured in with a good offer, but they’re also locked in with subtle things that keep them from leaving if the offer gets worse. And then things are made worse for the buyers to make things better for the sellers and bring in lots of sellers. But they too are locked in. And once you have buyers and sellers who are locked in and can’t leave, all of the good stuff is taken away from both of them. Life is made worse for them and life s made infinitely better for the shareholders who own the platform, in this case, Jeff Bezos and his pals.
One such offer is the so-called ‘free shipping’ of Amazon Prime which really means that you have prepaid for shipping. Once you have signed on, you tend to keep buying from that same source even as it gets worse because you do not want to waste that free shipping, which was never free. As long as it does not get too infuriating, you tend to remain.
Big companies have used such tactics for ages but the internet has made this practice much easier to implement, with just a few clicks of a mouse.
Part 2 lasts 25 minutes.
This week, we bring you the second part of that conversation, which is dedicated to understanding the political attitudes and technical mechanisms that made such a decline possible and opened the door for companies to squeeze both users and business partners for big payouts. Doctorow explains Uber’s ants and pickers, how the anti-trust practices of the early 1900s went awry, and what exactly he means by twiddling.
Part 3 lasts 24 minutes:
This week, we bring you the third and final part of that conversation, dedicated to solutions for our tech platform woes. Among them: better enforcement of privacy laws, interoperability, and the ever elusive “right-to-exit.” Plus, hear about the one industry that so far has been mostly immune to the forces of “enshittification.”
I do not use Amazon, Facebook, Tik-Tok, etc. and frankly do not feel any need for them. Life goes on smoothly without them.