Big tech ‘turned to shit’, but lives off lobbying, says writer – 01/21/2024 – Tech

“Bostification” is the concept coined by Canadian writer Cory Doctorow to refer to the current state of big tech, the giant technology companies — Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google) and Meta (Facebook).

Doctorow took the neologism —”enshittification”, in English— from a tweet and created a definition: before referring to the recurring worsening of technology-based services, the word refers to how big techs have taken their consumers hostage, in a relationship unequal situation guided by the game of influence over governments.

“Regulation, as it stands, prohibits people from defending themselves”, says the formulator.

A journalist by training and researcher at the renowned internet rights entity Electronic Frontier Foundation, Doctorow states that the current economic and institutional arrangement is lenient towards monopolies, as laws against anti-competitive practices no longer work.

On the one hand, this arbitrariness in the digital economy is made even worse by the technical disparity between companies and their employees and consumers. On the other hand, technology itself can disrupt monopolies through what he calls “interoperability” —the ability to not only transport photos, texts and friends but also interact between platforms, like an email service.

From the Canadian city of Victoria, he spoke to the Sheet from the Signal app, a less popular competitor to WhatsApp, known by technology enthusiasts for its security against leaks and respect for user data. A supporter of the proprietary Linux operating system, it does not use Microsoft’s intellectual property programs, such as Teams, for video conferencing.

The expression “enshittification” [bostificação em tradução livre] was born on Twitter, but Mr. changed the meaning of that concept when he conceived it. Can you explain in more depth what this bostification is?
The idea of ​​bostification is that there is a unique way in which technology platforms deteriorate, under our current economic conditions. This begins when the internet starts to house its most widespread form of business: the platform.

A Uber, for example, has drivers and passengers, Amazon has buyers and sellers and Google has search engines and advertisers. It is a business that sits between end users and business customers.

We’ve become very brokered because around the world, but especially in the United States, we had a 40-year period where we were increasingly tolerant of monopolies.

There are laws in the United States that prohibit companies from buying small competitors to prevent them from becoming big. There are also strict laws that prevent very large companies from merging. There are laws that prohibit a range of anti-competitive tactics. We simply stopped enforcing these laws.

This is not unique to technology. All sectors became very concentrated because of this. Two companies control most of the world’s beer. Three companies do most of the world’s shipping. There are five major publishers, and so on.

How do companies benefit from this?
Monopolies can capture their regulators because when industries are diverse, it is difficult for them to agree on certain topics. Even if they can reach an agreement, when industries are diverse, they compete with each other. Each company has less profits. This means they have less money to spend lobbying the government.

What is unique about technology is the flexibility possible with the digital logic of computers. This means that the way an Uber driver’s service is delivered varies from minute to minute.

Thus, Uber offers higher salaries for more demanding drivers, and lower salaries for those who accept any offer. Because the industry has captured its regulators, it can use that flexibility to do things that would otherwise be illegal: it can violate labor law, it can violate privacy law, and it can violate consumer laws that protect us from being duped.

This is where bostification is different. Because it is digital, the technology company can steal from its workers, steal from its customers and do harm to the world, much faster than any other sector. As everything is concentrated, no one stops this from happening.

It seems like a dead end.
On the other hand, technology is also different because, hypothetically, all of these technical features could work for people who are abused by technology companies.

Workers could have a counter-algorithm that tries to guess when their pay will drop at Uber and refuse rides to prevent the algorithm from treating them as unimportant and cutting their pay.

We could have ad blockers in apps that prevent us from being spied on by platforms. We could have interoperability tools that allow us to take our media libraries from one platform to another or leave a social media platform like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or TikTok.

Even when we go to a place that values ​​privacy more, we would still be able to read all the feeds we used to read, we would still be able to respond to all the people we used to respond to, and we would be part of the communities that matter to us. We wouldn’t need to leave behind all the good things about these platforms to escape the bad things.

The fact that technology is concentrated and can capture its regulators has made it possible for entrepreneurs to make all these acts of resistance illegal. It’s not that we don’t have technology regulation, but the only technology regulation we have is the regulation that prohibits users from defending themselves with technology.

In this sense, wouldn’t antitrust regulations and processes like we are seeing now be enough?
Antitrust lawsuits are very important because they send a message to the industry that if these companies engage in anticompetitive practices, they could end up in a long, expensive and traumatic lawsuit.

Camus wrote that sometimes it is necessary to execute an admiral to encourage others. By dragging big tech companies through this traumatic experience, let’s send a message to everyone. But making these technology companies better, reversing these decades of neglect that we’ve had will require other remedies.

All of these technology companies work with the financial model of seed capital, public offerings, distribution of dividends to their shareholders, etc. Does this financial model move the gears of botification?
I’m not saying that companies shouldn’t make money. They will have to compete.

For example, before the AT&T split, there were many American nationalists who said, “We can’t split AT&T. They are keeping America strong against this belligerent Asian country that steals all our intellectual property, is authoritarian and plagiarizing.” That country was Japan and now it is China, the rhetoric is the same.

This is what Nick Clegg, who gets paid millions every year to speak on Facebook’s behalf, says about his company: Facebook defends Europe from China. We will not have European cyberspace without Facebook’s defense.

But what we discovered when we broke up AT&T in 1992 was that the purpose of this monopoly was to prevent American technology companies from creating network services that used modems, because this equipment took control of the network out of AT&T’s hands.

For example, caller ID used to cost $2.99 ​​a month because AT&T decided that was the price. Now, it is impossible to charge for caller ID with the popularization of the internet.

Isn’t it more difficult to divide companies this way today?
America is a much stronger and more powerful nation than it was in the days of AT&T. Much of this has to do with how the internet has become a way for the US to project its power over companies around the world.

Therefore, the argument that we need to allow monopolists to structure the economy, in a kind of market communism where, instead of the central committee deciding how the economy will be structured, there is the monopoly deciding how the economy will be structured, is wrong. without pretending to be concerned about the public interest. This is how we keep the market chained to these big companies.

Furthermore, because these companies are so large, regulators have difficulty regulating them. This means we have to make regulators much bigger and more powerful to give them the ability to regulate these companies.

These big tech companies are global companies. Do people from the so-called Global South, non-rich countries, end up more vulnerable to abuse from these platforms because they cannot pressure in the same way as Americans?
Clearly, these companies would like to influence Brazilians. But remember, for example, the case of Sérgio Amadeu, former general coordinator of the Electronic Government of São Paulo City Hall during the Marta Suplicy administration, who denied free Windows licenses.

Microsoft then went to the press and said: “We offered billions of dollars in free software to Brazilians and this bureaucrat said no.”

Sérgio Amadeu responded: “The reason I said no is that Microsoft has the business model of a drug dealer. They only give the first dose for free. Once you’re hooked, they charge a fortune.”

Brazil has public officials capable of resisting lobbying. But this does not mean that they are always guaranteed power. This just means that Brazilians must pay attention to the type of public service they have and demand public officials and legislators who resist technological-imperialist bullying and insist on locally appropriate technological solutions. Even though we don’t have the ability to divide Google, like the United States has.

In your articles, advertising appears as an important part of the recent deterioration of the internet. However, Google and Meta say that the public prefers to have free services and ads instead of paying fees and subscriptions. Does this consumer attitude drive bostification?
Most people, in fact, prefer free things to having to pay for them. But the argument that the only advertising model we can have is one built under this maximum surveillance and the monopolization that comes with it is false.

When we compare surveillance advertising to what is called contextual advertising, where the ad is placed based on the content on the page, we see that surveillance improves performance by only about 5%.

But contextual ads are much cheaper to serve than targeted ads. Furthermore, more competitors can provide this service. Google, for example, makes money from scale.

In one of his essays, Mr. criticized the so-called attention economy [a disputa pelo tempo escasso das pessoas em busca de lucros]. Can you explain the reason for this criticism?
The attention economy is one of those buzzwords that don’t mean anything. When people talk about the attention economy, they are referring to the currency of things they can buy, sell, trade.

It is necessary to ask where this currency circulates? What is the sale of this currency? How is supply regulated? What are people looking for?

The idea of ​​attention as currency is very similar to cryptocurrency, which is to say, it’s worthless. It is impossible to buy or sell using attention. The first step is to convert this into cash.

So, in fact, there is no attention economy. There is a saving of money. Sometimes you convert attention into money, but not always.

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Cory Doctorow, 52
He is a writer, journalist and hackactivist. Author of more than 20 books, the most recent being the manifesto against big tech “Internet Con: How To Seize The Mans Of Computation”. He coined the concept of “enshittification”: technology companies’ recurring behavior of offering an innovation that generates social well-being, and then worsening services with the aim of making a profit, before, finally, ending due to their own weakness.