An audacious plan to halt the internet's enshittification [video] | Hacker News Reader

An audacious plan to halt the internet's enshittification [video]

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163 pointsjrepinc55 comments

This talk is incredibly information dense, and Cory does not skip a beat on talking about this topic passionately. He does an excellent job at introducing the unaware to Big Tech monopolies and how they can just buy out any company that they deem a threat. In his own words, "we can just treat our users like shit because we're the only game in town".

But at the same time, Cory makes a compelling argument that this isn't something that can be resolved just by talking shit about these companies on Twitter. It requires antitrust cases, strong privacy laws, and much stricter involvement from government, where EU seems to be leading the way at least in some areas.

He also talks about manipulation in the digital economy space; fake reviews, ads, forced search results, etc.

I suppose what struck me about this talk the most is that this is how "enshittified" the web is right now and you can't really escape it unless you lock yourself away in your terminal and never again open your browser. That's insane!

And then you have to consider that if you drag any of the Big Tech names to a courthouse, you won't just magically get justice (if you will get it at all) because they will drag you through the mud for years if not decades before a verdict can be reached. That is even more insane!

So it begs the question, if I can't help from a law/regulations perspective (of which there are very few people who can), then what can I do as the average web user who has already shifted himself away from the biggest monopolies? What if I can't contribute software? Do I just wait, as Cory says in the talk, for these companies to make mistakes (cheat) to get the ball rolling?

Hacker News is arguably the best place where something like this can be discussed, so I am open to hearing suggestions how myself or anyone else can contribute to this cause in ways other than those mentioned above. If I feel so strongly about this, then am I missing out on being part of some group/collective where there is work being actively done on this?

> Hacker News is arguably the best place where something like this can be discussed

I'm not sure that's true. Well, maybe the best place, but still not a good place. Even on here, this story doesn't have that much conversation, and it's no longer on the front page.

The folks who read and post comments here are, for the most part, workers for the tech industry. We're paid by the very companies that are the problem. We implement the code that is making things shit. People who frequent this site work for Facebook and Google and are proud of it. I might be too if my salary came from those companies. So I'm not sure how this is the best audience... it's the audience most capable of understanding, but the audience that has something to lose from change.

Anyway, I feel it too. However, perhaps one of the results of all this is that there will be services resilient to the big tech money because a large enough subset is willing to pay for what big tech offered "free", or are community run. I use and pay for Kagi, couldn't imagine doing such a thing 10 years ago. Big, huge, powerful corporations have existed in the past only to become hollowed out and transformed, continuing in name only.

I'm inclined to agree. Articles that are uncomplimentary of the industry ethos are few, and comments the criticize that ethos often see antagonistic replies or downvotes.

There are plenty of people here who have their eyes open and maintain a broad view of tech and the world. But these people seem overwhelmed by those that have completely swallowed the industry koolaid.

It's sad. I remember the fundamental optimism of the early days of IT . That's largely been replaced by smallest-feasible-product and monification.

Hmm, I actually didn't consider your point when I wrote my comment, so thanks for making it. I actually asked for this video to be given a second chance on the front page since it really struck me strongly. I guess it's because Cory has done a great job at doing his homework and he was able to illustrate the problem from its very roots as opposed to things that have only happened recently.

A lot of what he said - I didn't even know that was a thing, even though I have probably left a comment here on Hacker News at some point pretending like I knew the full story. It's good to be humbled like that once in a while.

But yes, your point is very strong, and many of these large companies employ a significant number of the best engineers/developers in the world.

"Most capable of understanding", that does seem what I really meant in this case.

You help by voting for people who will (continue to) throw out the intellectually and morally bankrupt Chicago School ideas of antitrust, and will hold big companies of all kinds accountable.[0]

Because enshittification isn't a big-tech-specific problem. It's a problem in all the industries that are massively overconsolidated.

So vote in every primary and general election, for every office on the ticket down to your local school board, because all of them are part of the system that actively enables enshittification—and can, if we can get enough people into those offices who believe in fixing it, work to oppose enshittification and dismantle the structures that allow it to continue.

[0] Hm, I wonder if one political party is pretty reliably for this sort of change and the other one is pretty reliably for making things even worse...

I'm not from the USA myself, sadly. I suppose I was asking in a more web-friendly context, as in - what can I do as a web user that may have a positive impact on the situation in the future?

As I said, contributing software isn't something I can do, so what else? For example, I really like what Signal's Meredith Whittaker is doing with her voice, but she also has incredible reach, something most people (including myself) don't have.

> what can I do as a web user that may have a positive impact on the situation in the future?

Be discerning when it comes to who and what you're giving your attention and money to on the web. Avoid companies and websites that are working to further destroy things, even if that means giving up services that are convenient.

If you are outside the US, the best thing you can do is vote for people in your local Bloc that will not put up with US's bullshit idea of anti-trust just to gain access to facebook and google.

I dunno. Its seems more like a systemic problem brought on by too many people in that system who have something to loose, you could vote in a bunch of people that have a desire to change this, but Im betting, and i have seen it before, that the people that operate behind the scenes in that system actively operate to undermine those efforts.

I don't see a way to affect change on a political level without replacing all the players at once with people who actually care (not say they care and then use their positions for self-interest motives).

Alas I felt that most of the solutions surrounded around government regulation and government action two things that basically have been fundamentally compromised by Citizens United.

I also am struck by the fact that he talked about how he's 50, how he's been an EFF for 20 plus years. How he remembered a better internet. And how in tech terms that basically doesn't just make him old that practically makes him prehistoric.

I wonder if the internet being associated with freedom is something that's just already dead that all the users of the internet that seem to matter that would be "the youth", already don't remember the internet as a free platform. And in fact it's not even one tech generation separated away.

The internet has a free platform that notion is itself prehistoric.

Because of consolidation of tech, the winners write, and delete , history

It was a fun talk.

> I wonder if the internet being associated with freedom is something that's just already dead that all the users of the internet that seem to matter that would be "the youth", already don't remember the internet as a free platform.

I think this is largely accurate, and it's the greatest tragedy of all when it comes to the internet. This is the reason I think that the internet is dead. The things that made the internet truly great are but a distant memory.

Virtue of entrepreneurs constrained only by money has failed us, so let's rely on the virtue of government officials and bureaucrats instead, that never went south...

Privacy laws do make some sense at least

That's why the system pre rehnquist court was not half bad. Government had a strong hammer in antitrust and much less regulation. The correct solution is regulation very rarely benefits anyone other than the incumbent and instead we need to start recognizing and breaking up monopolies and oligopolies again and cutting back on other regulation. I'm not sure we want to go all the way back to breaking up relatively small gas station chains but we also don't want to be here where amazon/google/walmart/etc. can exist and screw everything up for the rest of us.

Shame this discussion got knocked off the front page as I think it's one of the most interesting on the board today. I just watched the video and the key line of the talk for me is this:

We must set the stage so that Big Tech must either play by the rules of fair competition and be exposed to innovation or risk being;

  "embroiled an unquantifiable guerilla warfare against engineers who
   have the attackers advantage"

Hell, I'd found a dozen companies tomorrow, hell I'd raise an army and work night and day if the objective was, by guile, craft and surprise, to knock chunks out of these lumbering monsters with the law protecting me instead of the enemy.

In other words, Big Tech simply enjoys too much protection of the law. Remove those laws and allow us real hackers to tear them to shreds.

Governments should not be creating new laws to fight Big Tech. It should be repealing and dissolving existing laws that protect them, and let nature do the rest.

If enterprises had their revenues capped at 100M$/year (and anything above that taxed at 100% to enforce it) there would be so much competition we wouldn't have time to think about this.

I like the idea of corporate tax being a function of size (to reduce monopolies) but I suspect a policy like yours would simply result in lots of very ‘friendly’ companies with revenues of 999.99M/year.

That would be perfectly fine, in the end the power to do so would be less concentrated and less centralized as much as it is now.

Thats the guise the government operates with. They have to look like they are doing something. Passing new laws paints that picture. The real problem is removing those protections, the real situation is that people in that system are paid by these companies and the people that have the power will not act against their interests. Its not the public facing politicians that the problem, its the people that work out of the limelight that you have to contend with.

I know enshitiffication is his term and all but keeping Doctorow's name in the title would have been helpful, moreso than defcon31.

I hate the term "enshittification". I cringe everytime I see it and it's kind of disgusting too. Why couldn't it just be " worsening"? ...

Because it has a much more specific meaning than worsening :)

You can use "platform decay" instead.

Decay implies simple neglect, vs deliberate actions that make the platforms or systems worse, sometimes out of incompetence, but often because the companies objectives no longer align with the customers.

I'm only tired that it's so overused. But taken as originally used by one guy one time, it is perfectly fine, and "worsening" is worse. Enshittification, before it became a Flaming Moe, has imagination and life. Worsening has neither. Humans, or at least, I, are not mere data processing devices. Mere dictionary correctness is not enough to convey an idea, and especially not enough for that idea to have any impact. If Cory wrote and spoke that BORING, he would be like all the other perfectly correct and perfectly ignored.

Reading your comment, I do agree. Another thing though is that I cannot really use the word outside of the "Hacker News/Tech" scene. If I want to speak to someone who isn't online as much and not in the loop I have to use "worsening" or something else anyway.

I don't use the term often, but I've used it with normal people (as opposed to tech people), and every time, they've instantly understood what I meant.

encrappification

But sure, there are countless things I too don't say a certain way or even whole topics I don't discuss at all depending on who I'm talking to or in what context.

You can also just blame it on him. You can say it, and say this guy said this instead of just saying it directly. I do that I guess just for the lack of imagination reason. I hate repeating someone else so I haven't actually adopted the word in my own speaking, so if I were to talk about the topic with someone, I'd probably say this guy said it this way and it's perfect... I said it's perfect and yet I distanced myself.

You seem like the type of person who uses the word "inappropriate" a lot.

Not really. I'm a nonnative English speaker, maybe that's why it invokes a gross image in my imagination. Having that said, very inappropriate of you to make assumptions about me ;)

Enshittification is a very special kind of worsening.

Enshittification is the transformation of a platform from serving its users to serving MBAs and middle managers of the owning company.

Cory does use "enshitification" to mean a specific bait-and-switch tactic in which companies offer a free product for years, corner a market, and then abuse their trapped user base.

It's sassy. But specifics are most useful in writing that has durability as well as aesthetic power. People reading in 10 years won't necessarily get what "enshitification" means.

Instead I prefer to talk about:

  Hijack.  It's pretty common for BigTech to take over a company or
  service and hold it hostage.

  Sabotage. The deliberate breaking of standards, dumbing down of
  information, reduction of capabilities. Most often when BigTech
  interacts with an existing system it leaves it much worse of
  functionally.

  Betrayal.  Quite simply BigTech is treacherous. Whatever faith or
  loyalty long-standing users have the company will sell them for a
  dime, break promises, lie and steal whatever data they like.

And we could go on with many timeless names for harms perpetrated by these aggressive and socially derelict companies - but my point is that it pays to pause for a moment and think about the deeper nature of the harms to find the best word for what's really happening.

it's about kind-of watering-down any value and substituting it with something "free"-beer-like (but for which you "pay" giving away your kidneys. or kids)

> and it's kind of disgusting too

That's part of what makes it a good term. It's a disgusting thing, and deserving of a name that reminds us of that.

"Worsening" would be a euphemism, and a mild one at that.

Do you want to end up minimizing in that way, maybe like spy movies saying "sanctioning" instead of "murdering"?

That said, I see your side of the point. I see people calling the police "thugs" and my judgement falls on the people doing the name calling. So, I don't know the answer.

maybe it is to choose a better strong term, like corruption.

He's just coming up with new terms for old concepts. He's just talking about anti-trust law and anti-trust economics. This is all very well trodden territory.

There's nothing wrong with him doing this and in some ways I appreciate how he gets new audiences excited about these rather staid concepts. He's a teacher in that way, and if he can get more people clued into anti-trust thinking in the technology space then good for him.

> He's just talking about anti-trust law and anti-trust economics. This is all very well trodden territory

He seems to be very much arguing for a _comeback_ of something that has been less used in recent decades. He's not hiding that. Does that count as "well-trodden" if it's nearly forgotten in modern times?

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