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Episode 507: ‘Enshittification’ Author Cory Doctorow Believes in a New, Good Internet
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"Practically speaking, mostly what I'm doing is I'm writing in a hotel room and then writing in the taxi, and then if the TSA queue is long, I might whip my laptop out and balance it on the stanchion and do some more writing, and then get on the other side and write in the lounge and then write on the plane, and whether that means that the laptop's nearly vertical because I'm on a discount airline with with terrible seat pitch, just writing. And so that's it, right? What my real practice is ... I just goddamn write," says Cory Doctorow, author of Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.
This is exciting. We’ve got Cory Doctorow on the podcast today for Ep. 507. Cory is the author of more than 30 books of nonfiction and fiction, his latest being Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About it. It’s published by MCD, an imprint of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Ever wonder why Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, and Apple suck ass? This book will explain why they do and how they got there and maybe, just maybe, how we can get out of this mess. Did you know that Apple factories in China installed suicide nets so workers couldn’t kill themselves? Think about that the next time you upgrade your phone. I’m ready for a new computer and it will likely be a Mac, even though they’ve gotten shitty over the years. Point is we all have blood on our hands.
Cory is prolific, his blog posts epic, his books prescient and important. You can learn more about him at craphound.com or read his blog at pluralistic.net. He is a science fiction author, activist, and journalist. In 2020 he was inducted into the Candadian Science Fiction Hall of Fame and he is a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foudnation (eff.org), a nonprofit group that defnds freedom in tech law, policy, standards and treaties. You could spend a year or two reading nothing but Cory Doctorow books and, I might add, you’d be better for it.
He’s one of the good guys, man, and he’s out to help us understand the internet. So in this episode we talk about:
- Internet literacy
- His ongoing relationship with his audience
- Getting a book done in six weeks
- Platform decay
- What exactly enshittification is and how Substack is slouching toward it
- And the influence of the writer Judith Merril
Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsor
00:00:00
Speaker
Oh, hey, CNFers. This podcast is sponsored by this house ad for Pitch Club, the monthly sub stack where you read cold pitches and hear the authors ah you annotate their thinking behind how they sold and crafted their pitches that landed publication in so many dollar bills. There are lots of different writers. There's ah what happens when you broke up with your agent. There's an essay pitch. There's a couple of Atavis writers and some feature stuff. ah There's one that got rejected, was was accepted, then rejected. ed Running the gamut. Issue 8 just dropped, featuring one of mine.
00:00:37
Speaker
ha, ha, ha, ha. ah
00:00:44
Speaker
Welcome to pitchclub.substack.com.
Theme: Time Loops and Anecdote
00:00:47
Speaker
You know, tonight's show is about time loops. I remember we invented time loops at a spaghetti potluck dinner at the Futurian house in 1948. I'll never forget because Isaac Asimov was there and he wouldn't stop grabbing CM Kornbluth's girlfriend's ass.
00:01:09
Speaker
Oh yes, that's right. CNFers, it's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast. I just ate too much rice with bombahini. Now what's bombahini? It's my own creation, okay? It's my mixture of tahini and Trader Joe's bomba sauce. It's delicious.
00:01:24
Speaker
But it's not what I needed today. It's very high in calories, and I'm not someone who can afford to eat high-calorie stuff. This is the podcast where I speak to tellers of true tales about the true tales they tell, the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Meara, the voice of a generation. This is exciting.
00:01:42
Speaker
We've got Cory Doctorow on the podcast today for episode 507. Cory is the author of more than 30 books. That's right, 30 books of nonfiction and fiction. His latest being in Shittification.
00:01:54
Speaker
Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. It's published by MCD, an imprint of Farrar, Strauss, and Gurub. Ever wonder why Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, and Apple, by and large, suck ass? This book will explain why they do and how they got there. And maybe, just maybe, how we can get out of this
Guest Introduction: Cory Doctorow
00:02:18
Speaker
mess.
00:02:18
Speaker
Did you know that Apple factories, or at least one, and probably multiple, in China installed suicide nets so workers couldn't like kill themselves? I learned that in this book.
00:02:30
Speaker
Think about that the next time you upgrade your your iPhone. I'm ready for a new computer, and it will likely be a Mac because I've used them for years, even though they've gotten like super shitty.
00:02:41
Speaker
But point is, we all have blood on our hands. Show notes of this episode and more BrendanO'Mara.com, where you can read blog posts and sign up for my two very important monthly newsletters, The Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter and Pitch Club.
00:02:57
Speaker
Both are first of the month. No spam, so far as I can tell you can't beat them. The show can also be found on Instagram at Creative Nonfiction Podcast. If you want to help the show, you can sign up to be a patron at patreon.com slash cnfpod. Thank you to Amy Brooks for upgrading your subscription. That's awesome. And thanks to Jane Hammons for coming on board. Any paid tier gets access to the Flash 52 sessions. If you don't know what those are, check it out on Patreon.
00:03:23
Speaker
If you don't want to part with your beer money, Leaving kind reviews for the podcast on Apple Podcasts or the Front Runner on Amazon and Goodreads cost you nothing but a few minutes of your time. They are all a little vote in favor of what it is I do.
00:03:41
Speaker
And what do I do? Beats me, but you can support whatever. All of this is. So Corey is prolific. His blog posts epic. His books prescient and important.
00:03:54
Speaker
You can learn more about him at craphound.com or read his blog at pluralistic.net. He is a science fiction author, activist, and journalist. And in 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
00:04:08
Speaker
And he is a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, EFF.org, a nonprofit group that defends freedom in tech law, policy standards, and treaties.
00:04:21
Speaker
You could spend a year or two reading nothing but Cory Doctorow books. And I might add, you'd be better for it. He's one of the good guys, man. And he's out there trying to help us understand the internet, how it's built, how it functions.
00:04:39
Speaker
So in this episode, we talk about internet literacy, his ongoing relationship with his audience, getting a book done in six weeks, platform decay, what exactly inshittification is and how Substack is slouching towards it, and the influence of the writer Judith
Cory's Upcoming Books & AI Politics
00:04:55
Speaker
Merrill. Great stuff from his brain to your headphones, parting shot on the uneven playing ground. So let's not stand on ceremony here, Mr. Wayne Riff.
00:05:15
Speaker
Sort of a for better or for worse thing, I tend to be a very heavy editor. the psychopath ripping from your book is a compliment. That was the lightning bolt. You're not crazy. Right? what Like, my real practice is I just goddamn right. is This is gonna have to interest somebody somewhere other than me.
00:05:40
Speaker
Very well. We're in the seventh printing now. Oh, amazing. And I've got loads of other books on the horizon. So I'm i'm writing. i have one that's coming out in June and another one I'm writing for next winter. Amazing.
00:05:53
Speaker
Fantastic. That's great news. And I think I think I had seen that at least one of those is nonfiction. They're both nonfiction. They're both nonfiction. OK, cool. Yeah, what are the topics? So one is called the Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After And it's about the political economy of AI and specifically about being a good AI critic. And the other is called the Post-American Internet.
00:06:21
Speaker
And it's sort of what it says on the tin. it's It's what the rest of the world can do now that America has stopped giving it reasons to give a shit about what it wants because of you know tariffs and other measures that have just made the America's desires less important to the rest of the world. For example, you know the ongoing ah class warfare on behalf of bill collectors and landlords and price gougers means that Americans just don't buy that much anymore because the only people with money buy like one Lambo and one, you know, ah um whatever they call deep freeze fridges a year. And then there's just not no other real consumption. And with Snap being destroyed, there's not even like the government buying things on behalf of people. The US has made it very clear that you can't trust the American cloud when when the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu over genocide. Microsoft, on Trump's orders, shut down the International Criminal Court. They just lost all their online accounts, all their documents and email and everything. So you can't trust the American cloud anymore. So you don't need to care about the American tariffs anymore. They have nothing to offer you.
00:07:28
Speaker
As a country, the country has nothing to offer the rest of the world. It's already imposing tariffs. you know the the You don't have to worry about America cutting your aid because they've done that. You don't have to worry. Like all the sources of soft power have just been demolished. And so now the rest of the world gets to decide what kind of Internet they want instead of listening to what America says.
00:07:51
Speaker
And even if you're worried that, you know, maybe they'll roll tanks through Brussels or something, you know, the, the U S just, uh, the Congress just took their provisions out of the, um, military appropriation act that, uh, would have required right to repair. So America is going to continue its proud tradition of not being able to fight wars because it has to send the generators back to America to get fixed by the manufacturers, because you're not allowed to teach a Marine how to fix a generator
Internet Literacy & Blogging Approach
00:08:16
Speaker
anymore. So given that America is destroying its military capability, destroying the world's dependence on it from aid, destroying its consumption capacity, ah imposing tariffs, and so they're no longer a viable threat, everyone else gets to figure out what they want to do in a post-American century, and that includes a post-American internet.
00:08:36
Speaker
Wow. yeah that's ah Yeah, that's dense topics for sure. And ah yeah yeah and what made me think of that it may is kind of as ah maybe a soft landing into just a you know conversation about writing and shitification and stuff of that nature. A lot of what you said, it it tracks and makes sense, but it's definitely like over my head.
00:08:56
Speaker
And i would just wonder for like for people who need to have maybe an experience Maybe an not an advanced degree, but maybe maybe maybe start taking some upper-level classes in the Internet literacy. You know, what are some resources that we can, you know us your blog included, ah but among other things that we can, yeah, get a bit more up to speed about these things you're talking about because ah it seems all the more important.
00:09:19
Speaker
Well, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that I write books and they're about this subject. yeah And so i've I've written more than 30 of them. The most recent one is In Shitification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, and available where books are sold. Uh, I work for a nonprofit called the Electronic Frontier Foundation, EFF.org. Um, have a very good, uh, tech news and policy blog where it's written for a mainstream audience, uh, that covers all of these subjects.
00:09:53
Speaker
Uh, and you know, we also, um, ah to re rely on members to support us. And so I would urge you, if you're if these are issues that matter to you, to consider supporting us. We've been at this for more than 35 years. I've been there for going on 25 years. And I dare say we're the most effective group doing this work in the world. There's also, as you say, I have a blog at pluralistic.net where I kind of work out the first draft of these ideas as I'm as i'm working through them and link to the speeches I give and so on. So that's probably a good place to start, a good primer. Yeah. And and with ah with respect to pluralistic in the these yeah really brilliantly detailed blog posts, you often um you employ like the sort of the naked link thing. And I wanted to I was always curious as to why you why you do that. I think I might know, but I'd love to hear you articulate why you you don't ah embed it in text instead of you just paste it in.
00:10:47
Speaker
Yeah, well, there's a couple of reasons. So one is that I just want the whole thing to be readily pastable. So if you copy the text, and paste it into any form, the links will work because the links are just sitting there on the screen. They're not ah they're not anchors ah that have been you know embedded in text, as you say. The the other reason is that ah most platforms now rewrite links with a surveillance loop. So when you click on a link, for example, on Twitter, that you don't go to the page that's on the link. You go to t.co slash unique code and then are redirected. And that's so Twitter can know that you clicked on the link so it can spy on you. And that's true of Medium. It's true of ah google Google Calendar. you know when i When I click the calendar link for this meeting, I didn't get taken to Zencaster. I got taken to a Google page that says you know, did you mean to go to Zencaster? So I want people to be able to, at least like, I think this is a obnoxious thing to do. And I don't think anyone should do it. But I want people to be at least able to choose not to be
Book Promotion Strategy
00:11:53
Speaker
surveilled. And if you have naked links in there, then at the very least, you can give people ah the option to copy and paste the link into a browser. I'll stipulate that most people don't do that.
00:12:05
Speaker
ah But i I think that, you know, having the the possibility of doing it is worth doing. What was your theory about why? ah Just transparency. be like, oh this is you know, you can see where everything, you know, where this is actually going. You're not going to be hoodwinked or trapped by There's something to that yeah as well, and indeed. And just exposing what we would say in computer science terms, the semantics of the link. So, you know, what it what it where it's going and so on. I i put jokes in my yeah URLs. So all of my yeah URLs have funny little jokes.
00:12:40
Speaker
You know, I i ah like to expose those because they're i I'm quite indecently proud of them. Yeah. Excellent. Oh, that's cool. That's very illuminating. ah And, we you know, with um with having written, you know, 30 some odd books and, ah you know, and you do um ah a lot of media, a lot of podcasts, a lot of a lot of speaking. I just wanted to get a sense of just how you approach book promotion and, you know, what you find to be effective and even enjoyable in the process.
00:13:10
Speaker
Well, it's really changed over the years. um You know, I think that a lot of it is not um doing book promotion. It's ah it's the doing the long work that comes before book book promotion of having a an ongoing relationship with an audience. ah You know, i I have this newsletter that I write every day almost. And ah before that, I edited a weblog called Boing Boing for 20 years where I wrote every day. And so I have this...
00:13:38
Speaker
ongoing relationship. There's a lot of people who who will come to the place where I post news about my work every day, because not because they want to know what's going on with my work, but because they want to read the things that I'm i'm publishing that day. And so that means that I've got a ah big built-in way of talking to those people. and i And I hasten to add that this is not a It was not a kind of devious plan to build an audience or anything. I genuinely enjoy working through my thoughts in public. I think it makes them more rigorous, right? To have to to have to expose your ideas to the public rather than putting them in your own notebook. And that has the kind of added benefit
00:14:21
Speaker
that it it makes people come and and read what you have to say every day. It turns them into a public or an audience that is useful to have. I use social media as well. And ah I, um you know, have a lot of the work that I've written in the last couple of years is about the changes to how social media works for the worse.
00:14:42
Speaker
and and how social media has not become, is no longer a ah reliable way to reach people who follow you. That the social media platforms, in just the same way that they rewrite the links ah and intermediate between the person who's publishing the work and the person who's reading it, they also intermediate by by suppressing your material, right? Just because someone follows me, it doesn't mean that they'll ever see it.
00:15:05
Speaker
That means that I don't think we can trust social media and I and i don't think it's a sustainable way to ah ah you know build that audience or or to reach that audience. But the reality is that it's already where a lot of my audience is. i have accounts on a few social media services where I have large numbers of followers and I rely on them to you know buy the book and spread the word and so on. And so I've adopted a strategy.
00:15:33
Speaker
i believe it was coined, the term was coined by Kevin Marks. It's posse, post-owned site syndicate everywhere, ah which is to say that I publish everything on my newsletter and then I manually reformat it with an enormous amount of very finicky manual labor every day to turn it into Twitter threads and Mastodon threads, Medium posts and Tumblr posts. an an email list, an RSS feed and so on. And almost all of that work is almost entirely manual. A lot of times people ask me like what automation I use and the automation I use is painstakingly going through and rewriting every paragraph to make it ah fit into a tweet. It's a lot of goddamn work. But it means that um they are good tweets, yeah right? Like anything else that you do, if you just if you just ah do it as like a automated tool that tries to break it up or whatever, they're shitty
Writing Process & Discipline
00:16:27
Speaker
tweets. No one's going to read them. And and every one of those those threads or or reposts or syndications very prominently features links back to my own website and highlights the advantage of subscribing on my website instead of
00:16:42
Speaker
reading me via social media, the fact that I don't spy on you, the fact that I don't show you any ads, I don't have any analytics turned on for any of my own platforms. um So I don't know who reads my website.
00:16:55
Speaker
I don't know how often they read it. I don't know how many people come. I have no way to know anything about my readership except for the direct feedback I get. So people leave me comments, they send me emails, I get invited to give speeches, I hear from people who quote me, or who say that they've been inspired by me.
00:17:15
Speaker
ah That is the way that most writers interacted with their audiences through most of history. I was president at the birth of blogging. I watched the um rise of a new wave interacting with audiences where you use analytics to judge how your work is performing with an audience and to try and improve its its performance. And my conclusion, having done that for 20 years on one of the most successful weblogs in history is that it's a very bad way to do things. It makes your writing worse, it makes your thinking worse and it makes your life worse. So when I left Boeing Boeing in 2020 and started my own project, which would be pluralistic.net. I just threw away all that stuff because it was mine. i didn't, I'm not making a living from it, except in the attenuated way that it's like a way that I sell books.
00:18:00
Speaker
ah And so there's no reason for me to default into these, I think, just like, frankly, disgusting ways of interacting with an audience. Yeah. And when you were looking to get into you know writing, be it novels or nonfiction, you who were some of the the writers that inspired you to to traffic kind traffic in that kind of storytelling? Yeah.
00:18:24
Speaker
Well, I was obviously inspired by a lot of writers that I was reading, but the writers who inspired me that I knew in person, it's a much smaller list. um i'm not ah I'm not a big fan of like top 10 books or top five books or what's your favorite book. yeah Generally, if someone has a favorite book, it's like either Atlas Shrugged or Mein Kampf or the Bible, right? So it's it's not that's not my thing.
00:18:46
Speaker
There was a writer in Toronto where I grew up, like all the best Americans, I'm Canadian. And and and her name was Judith Merrill. And she was like a one woman if genre effectively. So she was she was a ah critic and writer and editor who'd been very significant in science fiction ah and had been married to another major writer, editor and critic, Frederick Pohl. And in 1968, two things happened. Their marriage broke up and there were the police riots and in Chicago where they were living. And she decided she didn't want to raise her children in America.
00:19:21
Speaker
And so she went into voluntary exile in Canada and and your loss was our gain. ah And among the things she did was she brought their books and she donated them to the Toronto Public Library system where they became the nucleus of what's now the largest science fiction reference collection in the world.
00:19:39
Speaker
It's called the Merrill collection. She was also very involved in politics, as you might imagine. I grew up in a very political household. and so ah When my mom was going to teacher's college and my dad was home with me and my baby brother, we would watch eat dinner on the sofa and watch um Doctor Who on public television. And Judy would come on every week and introduce Doctor Who and talk about the tropes in Doctor Who and about where they came from in you know the history of of science fiction.
00:20:10
Speaker
And and she was like ah she was like a tough old broad, right? She was this gray haired New Yorker with a squint who had chain smoked all her life and had a gravelly voice. And if you remember Slappy Squirrel from Animaniacs, she was basically Slappy Squirrel. So she'd come on every week and she'd be like, um you know, tonight's show is about time loops. I remember we invented time loops at a spaghetti potluck dinner at the Futurian house in 1948. I'll never forget because Isaac Asimov was there and he wouldn't stop grabbing CM Kornblut's girlfriend's ass. That night we wrote 13 stories about time loops and in the morning I took the first a train to Rockefeller Center and I threw them over John W. Campbell's Transubmitters at Amazing Stories and he published them over the next two years and that is where time loops come from. And as I say that, I realized John W. Campbell didn't write, didn't edit amazing. He edited astounding. Don't, don't at me. And, and when I was about nine or 10 years old, we took a trip to her library school trip. and I recognized her. I knew she, I knew she was a friend of my dad's and she was like, Hey kids, I'm the writer in residence at this library. Like my job is to help writers get better. If you write anything,
00:21:23
Speaker
bring it to me and I'll help you make it better. ah So this is like this towering figure in the field offering elementary schools, students, the the chance to have their writing improved. So I did, i took her up on that at a subway pass. I used to go down to her library and she had this practice where she would take writers who are promising and she put them together in in peer workshops and show them how to do critiquing circles. So I ended up in a workshop at her library. She would give us space there. and She'd say like, you've got Tuesday nights, bring in your manuscript by Sunday, everyone pick it up by Monday. Here's how you prepare it for critique. Here's how you run the critique. Come on Tuesdays, you've got the back room, right? And so I ended up in a group called the Cecil Street Irregulars with some of the great figures in in science fiction and in Canada. Ultimately, we were all beginners when we started. She also started a movable feast for science fiction professionals called Hydra, modeled on a a thing that used to happen in New York where every six weeks you get together at another professional's household and you bring a couple of bucks for beers. And every writer, editor, critic, illustrator, filmmaker, TV maker, and so on the
00:22:30
Speaker
like the region would descend on it just for a kind of gab fest. And so we all get to know each other. i ended up working at the oldest science fiction bookstore in the world, a bookstore called Baca. And it turns out that Baca was founded when Judy bullied a local fan into starting a science fiction bookstore.
00:22:47
Speaker
My first story was published in a magazine from the prairies from Alberta called On Spec. which just published its final issue. They published my first story when I was 17. They ah were founded when Judy bullied a couple of fans out West into starting a magazine. The first anthology I ever edited was part of the Tesseract series, which is a series that Judy founded. ah And so, ah you know,
00:23:10
Speaker
like Judy basically created a thing that it is as close to the formal apprenticeship for a science fiction writer as has ever existed anywhere before. Since even the high school I went to, i went to a groovy alternative high school and I stayed there for seven years to get a four year diploma in part because the writing workshop was so good, I didn't want to leave it. And I found out years later that a decade before I got to the school, Judy had founded that workshop through a writer in the schools grant and it was still going. god when I got there. And ah to this day, I'm in touch with many of the writers I knew then and other writers who graduated from it are people like Ephraim Menek, who's the front man and lyricist for Godspeed, you black emperor who would submit poetry and so on. So really quite quite a force of nature. And so when you ask, well, which writers are most influential, it wouldn't be the writers I read, although obviously they were very influential in my work, it would be this one writer,
00:24:01
Speaker
Judith Merrill. That's amazing. And yeah you brought up the the you know the word practice was in there too. And that's always something I love digging into, given how prolific you are in book writing and blogging and and all the manual labor that you put into making sure it's digestible across multiple platforms. you know What's the the practice by which that you ah get your writing done on a daily basis?
00:24:25
Speaker
Well, I, um you know, I have a kind of platonic ideal, which is that I get up at like five, I feed the cats. And then depending on the weather, I put on a survival suit. Otherwise, I just stay in my pajamas and literally have a survival suit, wrap myself in two electric slankets and climb into the hammock outside with a pair of writer's gloves, which can have capacitive fingertips that that allow you to use a trackpad through it. And I write in the hammock until, you know, my first call of the day. That's the platonic ideal. There are many days where I just can't, right? Where I'm i'm busy or I'm traveling. I travel probably 100 days a year. You know, I sold my first novel while I was ah helping run a startup that i kept that I helped found.
00:25:08
Speaker
And then when my second novel was due, i by that point was... um the European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. and in both capacities, I traveled continuously. When I was doing the startup, I was on the road all the time, raising money and speaking at conferences and talking to reporters and so on. And then when I was EFF's European director, I was on the road 28 days a month, 31 countries in three years. And I got to the point where I just couldn't ah reserve my writing for days when things were perfect. And I had a key realization, which is that no matter how I feel about the work, and there are days when it feels great, and there's days when it feels terrible,
00:25:49
Speaker
It's not correlated with the quality of the work. There's work that's good and there's work that's bad. Some of it needs to be rewritten, sometimes substantially or just scrapped altogether. But that's not correlated with how I feel about it in the moment. The way I feel about it in the moment is correlated with things like, am I hung over? Did I have a fight with my then girlfriend, now wife? ah you know Am I getting my ass kicked at the United Nations by major corporations trying to push a treaty that I'm trying to stop? ah ah you know Have I not eaten? right like Am I jet lagged? right Those were the correlates of feeling terrible about my work.
00:26:23
Speaker
When I had that key realization, I realized that even though there were days when it just felt like I shouldn't even try, that I just needed to write. and And I don't know how else to say it, but I just needed to write. And I i learned how to write on bad days.
00:26:39
Speaker
And that was hugely
Jealousy in Publishing
00:26:40
Speaker
important. And so while broadly, i would love to be in my hammock listening to music, um Having had some delicious coffee that i you know fresh ground and made for myself and brought out and and sipped out while I worked and then you know go inside and change and go to the pool across the street and have a swim and listen to an audio book in the pool on my underwater MP3 player and do all the things that I love doing and have a perfect day.
00:27:05
Speaker
Practically speaking, mostly what I'm doing is I'm like writing in a hotel room and then writing in the taxi. And then if the TSA queue is long, I might whip my laptop out and balance it on the stanchion and do some more writing and then ah get on the other side and write in the lounge and and and then write on the plane. Right. And and whether that means that the laptop is to be nearly vertical because I'm on a discount airline with with terrible seat pitch, just writing.
00:27:29
Speaker
And so that's it. Right. What like my real practice is I just goddamn write. That's so it's so great to hear that, you know because i think a lot of people they're looking for that that hammock moment. And like that's the the Instagrammable kind of ideal of it. Like you have these I hate the performative photographs of people writing in these all like retreats and cabins and all that. but like that is so not it. It is what you're saying. It's it's writing a little bit in the queue. It's just stealing a little bit of time here and there, because if it's that important to you, you find a way to get it done.
00:28:03
Speaker
Sure, sure. And you know, the habits are things you get for free. And so once you do it long enough, it just happens. And when I'm working on fiction, well, actually, even when I'm working on a book, so even fiction or nonfiction, as opposed to working on a blog, I have a word target every day.
00:28:21
Speaker
Uh, so the next book I'm going to write this post-American internet book, I'm probably going to write at 1500 words a day, uh, and try and get it done in six weeks. And, uh, I, uh, well, because most of it has been rehearsed in blogs and I'm currently writing a major speech, I'm going to give Christmas week in Germany and, um, I'm giving another speech in January and so on. And I have other stuff I need to get done. And so I've got to get this book out the door. The faster I write it, the faster i can get through edits and I can do whatever rewriting needs to be done and so on. And so I just hit those 1500 words come hell or high water. you know It helps that I have written, well, 50,000 blog posts, but but dozens about this subject and and many thousands about the subjects that gave rise to this subject. and so And then I've given multiple speeches about it. And so I know what lines land and what lines don't. And when I say something and people just look at me like a dog that's been shown a physics equation and and would that I need to unpack them more, what lines make people laugh and which line which jokes fall flat. So you know I have all this kind of rehearsal, this iteration.
00:29:26
Speaker
And so the drafts tend to be pretty clean. Like the edits are a couple of days work. Once my editor gets through with them, usually it's never more than like three or four days because the edits have come through a process of iteration.
00:29:39
Speaker
And that's another important thing is I've stopped worrying about repeating myself. The fact that I've got a phrase that I've used in another paper that I use here, it's not self-plagiarism, it's practice. It's like ah a standup working through material, you know?
00:29:52
Speaker
Oh, yeah. And I'm someone over the years, and I think I've gotten better about it, is that I've sometimes been like toxically competitive and even, you know, jealous of people over the years. And I just found that it's a fuel that doesn't burn clean. But I always love getting a sense of how other other writers wrestle with those feelings over the years. I want you just for you, li how have you wrestled with those kind of, ah yeah, the the ugly, the dirty fuel, if you will? Well, comparison is the thief of joy, obviously.
00:30:21
Speaker
Everyone lives their own blooper reel and everyone else's highlight reel. And so if you are being smart and kind to yourself, you um don't fall into the trap of this, but not everyone is smart and kind to themselves. And they sometimes, it's hard not to feel jealous sometimes.
00:30:43
Speaker
i I try to, in the same way that I try to keep in mind that even though I feel like the work is terrible, i should just write it and the feeling is not true. Even if I'm really feeling it, it's not, ah it doesn't relate to a truth in the universe, that the jealousy isn't real either.
00:30:58
Speaker
That it's, it you know, the feeling that I am doing badly ah and and even worse that I'm doing badly at someone else's expense is not a true feeling. It's ah it's a false friend.
00:31:10
Speaker
You know, that's that's all I can do with it, you know, and obviously it's better when your work is doing well. ah It's easier not to feel jealous when when you're feeling happy and secure about your own work. But you know we don't really have the luxury of of only ah checking with our feelings when things are good. And of course, things are not always going to be good. And of course, the time when your feelings are most manifest is when things aren't good. So you just have to be able to sort of have the maturity to keep that in mind, feel your feelings, not not let them get the best of you.
00:31:46
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. it's And it's so hard when things are so maybe, a you know, ah anomalously going well to even like to recognize it, because when things go crummy, they just that negativity bias. My God, it sticks in it sticks in your brain. Sure. Of course it does. Of course it does. Yeah.
00:32:06
Speaker
Yeah. And and, you know, like the I'm I'm on a book tour where things are going really well. And i have had a string of successes and failures since 2019. There were major changes at my publisher and books that did well in other territories just did not do well in the territory my publisher controlled in the US, which is the most important one for my work. And it was very hard not to take that personally, right? if That feels personal for obvious reasons. And when your friends are doing well and you're doing poorly, it's hard not to to feel like um that is a reflection on you, especially if your friends have the same publisher as you. Right. Like if your publisher can make other people's books bestsellers and can't get anyone out for your own book tour or ah even get a review in the outside of the trades, then you know that does feel like a you problem. But it's it's not.
Understanding 'In Shittification'
00:33:03
Speaker
it's ah
00:33:04
Speaker
It's it's a I wouldn't even say it's a publisher problem. it's just a fit problem. It's like something changed in the way that they market ah books and it was not suited to me. And I'm now with a different imprint at the same publisher at Macmillan. And I've got a book that's been out for 10 weeks and has just gone into a seventh printing.
00:33:21
Speaker
So, you know. It just, it wasn't that they're a bad publisher. It's just that we were no longer a good fit for each other. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah speaking of this book that's in its seventh printing, InShittification, and that's a word that I've i've ah heard you use for a while on pluralistic and everything. So it was great to see it manifest in in book form and so much more fleshed out and accessible in that regard. Just so you know for for people who might not be abreast about what that is, just like what is InShittification? Sure.
00:33:53
Speaker
Well, so like I say, I work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I've been there, as I said, for a very long time, going on 25 years. And you know as ah when you're trying to get people to care about tech policy, it's hard because the issues are very abstract and they're very technical and they're very far off in the future. And so to raise the salience of them, to to get people to care about them before it's too late, right? People will eventually care about tech issues when you know, things are really bad. But ideally, you'd like people to care about it before things get bad and lots of people get horribly injured by bad technology. ah And the way you do that is by coming up with similes and metaphors and, you know, framing devices and the the occasional dirty word, right? And I coined the term in shitification a blog post.
00:34:42
Speaker
i No, actually in a tweet where I was just complaining about TripAdvisor. i was on a vacation and TripAdvisor was failing me horribly because I couldn't get any of their tabs to load because they load like 48 trackers before they load any of their content. And and and like it was timing out on the 30th one. And so I just couldn't get the the thing to load. And I tweeted, TripAdvisor must be the most inshittified website I've ever used. Has anyone at TripAdvisor ever been on a trip?
00:35:11
Speaker
which was kind of like the people did exactly what you're doing i got a i got a ah a little polite chuckle and then a couple of years later when i was working on a series of but posts about a theory of platform decay like why platforms go bad i needed a word and i was like well and shitification did some numbers i'll use that so this is that kind of working out in public this is the advantage of working out in public as you get this kind of you know this kind of feedback and and and it's very, very good for you. And shitification is a way of describing how platforms go wrong. It's a theory that comes in three parts.
00:35:49
Speaker
The first part is a descriptive aspect that describes the way that platforms decay. The second one is a theoretical component that hypothesizes why platforms are decaying. and The third part is a prescriptive one. It's about the policy remedies that will stop them from decaying and reverse that decay. and so the The first part, the descriptive part, is quite straightforward. Platforms decay in three stages. First, they're good to their end users while finding a way to lock those users in.
00:36:17
Speaker
Having locked the users in, we move on to stage two, which is making things worse for those users. And because they're locked in, you know they're not going to leave, even if it gets worse. And you do so in order to make things better for business customers who pile in and they get locked in too, dependent on those end users. And then once they're locked in, you go to stage three, which is making things worse for the business customers as well, draining all the value off and leaving behind Minji residue and all the other value is divided among shareholders and executives at the firm. um
00:36:49
Speaker
The question of why it's happening really relates to ah historical change in the external environment. It's not like we invented greed in the middle of the last decade, right? Something changed to make these platforms worse. And my theory is that we got rid of all the things that kept them from going worse, because after all, the ideal form of a business from an investor investor's perspective is one that pays nothing for its inputs and charges infinity for its outputs. And you know apart from academic publishers, everyone else has to take compromise on those principles. Academic publishers really do get to pay nothing and charge infinity. And and so ah that means that you have to worry about competitors and you have to worry about regulators.
00:37:33
Speaker
If you're tech, you have to worry about your workers because tech workers were very powerful. They were very scarce and very valuable to these companies, hard to replace. And a lot of them really cared about their users' well-being. And also in tech, you have to care about something called interoperability, which is making one thing work with something else. And and digital technology,
00:37:50
Speaker
is very flexible and it is by its nature interoperable. Like you can use anyone's shoelaces in your shoes, but if you have like a kitchen mixer and you want to use a different mixer's attachments with it, unless you've got a machine shop, you can't do that. But if you've got a phone and you want to use someone else's app store, someone just has to write a program that loads that app store.
00:38:10
Speaker
and then you can use it and they can give you the program over the Internet. and so In theory, anytime someone puts a 10-foot pile of shit in a program that you like, someone can give you another program that that goes over an 11-foot ladder that goes over it.
00:38:24
Speaker
What's happened over the last 40 years and the last 20 years especially, is we dismantled antitrust law. so We allowed companies to form monopolies. Once they form monopolies, they were able to capture their regulators so they don't have to worry about getting punished by their regulators for cheating. They were able to grow to the point where they could tame their workforce. you know When tech workers were powerful, they didn't even see themselves as workers. They saw themselves as temporarily embarrassed founders. And so they didn't consolidate the power that they had through scarcity by unionizing. And so when the scarcity went away, the power went away too.
00:38:57
Speaker
with it. And we've had half a million tech layoffs in the last three years. And so tech workers no longer can say, no boss, I refuse to incentivize that thing. I miss my mother's funeral to ship on time. And if you don't like it, you can go pound sand because there's someone else will give me a job because no one's going to give them a job. And there's 10 people will take their job if they quit.
00:39:14
Speaker
And then finally, we've expanded IP law over 25 years to the point where the kind of reverse engineering that is required to modify technology has been effectively prohibited. And so the government will come in and destroy anyone who tries to fix a thing you own if the manufacturer breaks it.
00:39:31
Speaker
And that's true whether we're talking literally about repair, so you can't get your car repaired by an independent mechanic. Farmers can't fix their tractors. But it's also true if there's a a deliberately introduced defect, like your printer won't print with third-party ink, or your phone or your console won't use a third-party app store. Those are defects in the product, right? But if someone corrects that defect, if someone effectively makes the little machine tool that connects someone else's kitchen mixer attachments to your mixer, the government will, on behalf of the manufacturer, destroy you and them under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, just one of the laws that prohibits this stuff. It's a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine to modify a digital product without the creator's permission. And so that's that's how we ended up here, right? and And as to the remedies, right, what we should do about it, the the prescriptive part, we need a politics that understands that all of this stuff did not arise as a result of the great forces of history or ah you know the power of you know economic necessity. that these are all arising out of what we could call ah an enchantogenic policy environment. right The decision not to enforce antitrust law, the expansion of IP law, the weakening of labor law, the regulatory capture that follows from monopolization,
00:40:52
Speaker
and And that the only way we can fix this is by intervening in policy, by becoming part of a political movement. That's why my work at EFF is so important. And again, I'll remind listeners, EFF.org is where you can get involved there. But other options are available. There's political parties, there's mutual aid groups, there's labor unions and so on. And that it's only by pushing back the power of concentrated corporate corporate wealth and the individual wealth that it gives rise to, that we can hope to have a policy environment that is on the side of people and not on the side of you know this immortal colony organism we call the limited liability company and that treats humans as a kind of inconvenient gut flora.
00:41:34
Speaker
ah yeah Who were the like the pioneering policymakers that are the maybe the grand screwed it up they yeah the grandparents of the Yeah.
00:41:44
Speaker
Yeah. So in the US, one of the, well, there's two, I think, that are notable in the US. So one is a guy called Robert Bork, who was a jurist, a judge. He is best known as being the reason we say that things that are really screwed up are borked. When Ronald Reagan tried to put him on the Supreme Court, he blew his confirmation hearing so badly that now we call everything that's gone terribly awry borked.
00:42:08
Speaker
But Robert Bork had this radical theory that he developed at the University of Chicago's Economics Department. This is the same place that gave us Milton Friedman and what we call neoliberal ah economics. And it was a theory of monopolies. And it was the theory that monopolies were efficient and that it was perverse and counterproductive to try and stop monopolization. That if you encounter monopoly in the wild, if 90% of us consume a product or service from one company, that the assumption you should start with is this is a company that is making everyone really happy. And wouldn't it be perverse to punish that company for being so good we're all consuming its products and services. And so therefore we shouldn't fight monopolies. And if a monopoly abuses its power, its pricing power, its power of equality, if it corrupts our political process, well, competitors will rush into the market and they will correct its its misdeeds. And so if you see a monopoly and it hasn't been disrupted by competitors, you should assume that it's a good monopoly. So it's kind of circular reasoning. All monopolies are good because bad monopolies wouldn't exist.
Historical Tech Policy Changes
00:43:14
Speaker
And so after 40 years of basically not enforcing the antitrust laws that are meant to prevent corporate concentration, not just stop concentration when it's um emerged, but prevent it from emerging because it's very hard.
00:43:28
Speaker
to control the conduct of a company when it's as big as your government. right The referee has to be more powerful than the player. So there's always been this assumption baked into antitrust law that you just don't want companies to get too powerful, even if they seem to be using their power wisely, because if they stop using it wisely, you are out of luck.
00:43:45
Speaker
ah you know To give you an example of that, IBM was one of the companies that we kind of gave a ride to on antitrust because they were so um but embedded with the Department of Defense. They're really critical to ah the American military apparatus. and And the military would go to bat for them every time we tried to do something about their abuses in the market. And they were basically strangling the American tech market. No one could get a foothold.
00:44:08
Speaker
And so eventually in 1970, the Department of Justice decided was going to do something about IBM's power. And they brought an antitrust lawsuit against IBM. And for the next 12 consecutive years, IBM spent more on lawyers to fight the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division than the wage bill for all of the lawyers at the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division combined, fighting every case in America. So IBM was able to outspend the US government for 12 consecutive years. They called it antitrust Vietnam. And in the end, they ran out the clock. Ronald Reagan was elected and dropped the case against them in 82, and they never got broken up. So this is why we had this antitrust idea. So Bork killed this idea. And now we have monopolies all over the place.
00:44:50
Speaker
And the economists who were his disciples insist that all of the harmful effects of monopoly are not to be blamed on the people who thought monopolies would be good. It's as though we used to not have a rat problem because we were using rat poison. And these guys insisted that the rat poison wasn't needed. And now rats are eating our faces off.
00:45:09
Speaker
And when we complain about it, they say, like, how do you know this is our fault? Like, why would you blame this on our pro rat policies? Maybe we're living through the time of the rat. right Maybe sunspots have made rats more fecund than at any time in human history. and And sure, as you observe, the rats did buy the rat poison factories and shut them all down. But look, if we're not using rat poison, shutting down the rat poison factories, that's just economically rational. And so he is one of the great villains, Robert Bork, as are his neoliberal economic disciples. who were associated with both the Republican and the Democratic Party over many consecutive presidential administrations, starting with Carter. Another great culprit here is one of the operatics in Bill Clinton's government. His IP czar, a guy called Bruce Lehman. Bruce Lehman was a corporate IP lawyer.
00:45:59
Speaker
who Clinton brought in to modernize IP law under his administration. And this was happening in parallel parallel with ah an effort to demilitarize the internet and open it up for civilian use. This was something Al Gore was running.
00:46:13
Speaker
they They called it the National Information Infrastructure Hearings, but colloquially it was called the information superhighway. You'll remember this term. So Bruce Lehman went to Al Gore and he said, we should make it illegal to modify digital products without permission, even if you're doing so for a lawful purpose. If your printer is locked, it should be illegal to unlock it to take third party ink.
00:46:32
Speaker
And Al Gore, to his everlasting credit, told Bruce Lehman that this was a terrible idea. And so Al Gore, or rather Bruce Lehman, crossed the ocean. He went to Geneva, to the World Intellectual Property Organization, where he conned them into passing two treaties, the WIPO Copyright Treaty and the WIPO Phonograms and Performers Treaty. Collectively, they're called the Internet Treaties.
00:46:53
Speaker
And then he went back and he got Congress to enact these treaties in law, which included this anti-circumvention law that bans reverse engineering and modifying digital products.
00:47:04
Speaker
And you know in subsequent presentations in public, he has described this as doing an end run around Congress. right So we have this profoundly undemocratic actor who created an environment where if a corporation...
00:47:21
Speaker
demands that you arrange your affairs to the benefit of their shareholders and to your own detriment, the U.S. government will step in and punish you if you don't follow orders, right? This is like felony contempt of business model.
00:47:35
Speaker
And he was warned at the time that this would be the outcome, as ah was Bork, warned at the time that a pro-monopoly policy would lead to monopolies. It's amazing that you have to warn someone that a pro-monopoly policy would lead to monopolies, but you did. And they were warned. They they were told this would be the outcome. They did it anyway. And you know Lehman's still alive. He's a wealthy, respected IP lawyer.
00:47:58
Speaker
No one has ever held them to account for this.
Challenges for Platforms like Substack
00:48:01
Speaker
And a part of what I ah what i loved about the book, especially in the early parts where these case studies that you do where you look at a lot of the very popular platforms out there, um one that's not in there that I suspect is, I can already see it slouching towards in shitification, is Substack. And a lot of writers a lot of writers listen to this show, obviously, and have Substacks. I have a little Substack, too, that does its own little thing. um But just from your vantage point, using Substack as ah as a case study, ah how would you just ah describe its ongoing ah slouching towards insurification?
00:48:36
Speaker
Well, I should say that I don't use Substack, so I'm not as familiar with all of its contours. But I know that when Substack started, they made a lot of promises about how easy it would be to leave, how they wouldn't impose switching costs on the... ah um business customers, right the writers who are providing the value to the service. And you know you can take your list with you and so on. But they have, to my understanding, monotonically built out a set of features that cannot be ported to another service. These recommendation systems, the short messaging, you know sort of Twitter alike that they've built in and so on.
00:49:14
Speaker
ah So they've made it much harder to leave. And as they've made it harder to leave, they have also made it more expensive to use. So the transaction costs have gone way up, is my understanding, and and are nowhere near competitive with something like, say, Ghost, which I think is their major competitor. I'm basing most of my understanding on this of by of this by post by Molly White, who edits the Citation Needed newsletter, which she self-hosts on Ghost. Molly is... a very pungent critic of of ah cryptocurrency ah and an incredible researcher. She's a Wikipedian as well.
00:49:49
Speaker
And fun fact, she is the great granddaughter of E.B. White and she's his literary executor, which is great. and And she wrote a very good piece about why she left Substack, leaving us, which included their moderation decisions and their decisions to welcome ah people who call for eugenics and and and genocide on the platform. but also the cold hard cash that she makes less money when she uses Substack than when she uses Ghost because Substack takes more of the money. And I'm told now that Substack, even if you subscribe to Substack by email, that these days Substack will not deliver the whole post by email that they require users to click through, be subjected to surveillance, create an account, all these things that were not in the bargain when they started. I sometimes call this the Darth Vader MBA, right? I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it further.
00:50:43
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, as for sure. I like what, what raised my hackles a couple years ago is when they started the notes thing for their baby Twitter. I'm like, Oh no, this is the social media company masquerading as a newsletter service. sure And it was, that struck me as like, Oh, there it's only a matter of time before they start showing or prioritizing people with bigger paid audiences and then hiding everyone else. And then who knows when the ads are going to start coming in, but you know, that's coming. And so Well, and end up charges, right? You know, charging for for premium carriage, for boosting. I mean, all the things that are available to the industry as a whole are are are there for them to use. Yeah. Yeah.
00:51:24
Speaker
Oh, for sure. And it's like, ah you know, as you ah you know write later in the books, it's um there was something about like, ah you know, how do we make platforms less important rather than making them less terrible? And like, that was like, but you know, a line in the book. And I wonder, like, how do we... Yeah. yeah Make them less important, you know, to your point, less in, you know, rather than making them less terrible.
00:51:46
Speaker
Well, making it easier for people to leave, I think is the most important thing, right? Um, if you recall the calculus is that, uh, if it's hard for you to leave, they can make things worse for you when you're locked in, they can make things worse for you. So blocking interoperability is a big one. You know, if, if, um,
00:52:03
Speaker
If it were possible, for example, to legally scrape Substack, yeah and then a competitor could say to you, you know we will put your um we will offer you a better deal than Substack and we will scrape all this peripheral material that shows up on Substack and surround your ah your core posts with it.
00:52:28
Speaker
as it would be on Substack so that Substack readers who leave the platform can continue to get access to all of that material. Now, if you did that to Substack today, they would sue you for tortious interference with contract and for ah Computer Fraud and Abuse Act violations, their terms of service and so on. But if we can make that legal, right, so that you know with the writer's consent,
00:52:49
Speaker
you can move all the contextual material over, that would be a big piece of it. We could also mandate that they allow ah people to leave, right? We could mandate that they support APIs that allow people on other platforms to continue to read it. There is something very odd about our current social media world where you have to care which network someone is on before you can talk to them, right? This is a thing we've done away with everywhere else. You don't have to care about whose SIM is on someone's phone, right? It's the most...
00:53:18
Speaker
AOL prodigy CompuServe ass way of running an internet to say, oh, you can't read Substack unless you're using Substack. That's it's frankly absurd. right it's It's primitive and it exists solely to the benefit of a platform to allow a platform to transform itself from being a helper to being a gatekeeper.
Vision for a Better Internet
00:53:38
Speaker
Yeah, it would be like, ah you know, I have, you know, Google Fi cell phone plan, but I couldn't talk to anyone else who had maybe T-Mobile or Verizon. T-Mobile or whatever. Yes, exactly. And if you switched, you couldn't take your phone number with you. Right.
00:53:52
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And also like towards the end, you know, you write like a new good Internet is a well-regulated one. And to be well-regulated, needs rules that curb corporate power rather than cementing it. And those rules need to be administratable so that they can be enforced. Right. So how do you just define an old good internet and how do we rebuild it and get back to what was good and what can be ultimately better?
00:54:15
Speaker
So the most important characteristic of the old good internet was something that we can think of as technological self-determination. It's the ability to decide for yourself how the technology you're using works. And that might sound very abstract and you might think, well, I'm never going to be a programmer.
00:54:32
Speaker
who can change how the service I'm using works. I can't write the plugin that blocks the ads or does something else that makes the service better for me. And it's true. You probably can't, but someone can.
00:54:44
Speaker
Right. And, you know, one of the things about the old good internet is that it was filled with both helpful people and self-interested people. And, they were If they were helpful, they wanted to reform the service in order to ah you know just make it better for people out of a public spirited ah way of thinking about the world. and If they were self-interested, well, they wanted to do it because they thought they could sell you the plugin. But either way, um you know, that's ah that's a ah good world to live in.
00:55:13
Speaker
The problem with that world, its major defect was not that it had self-determination. It was that it was hard to use. It was complicated. And that meant that our normie friends who are interesting people that we want to have in our social spaces just found it too complicated to work with. And a lot of them were excluded from the service. And so on a new good internet is one that has the ease of use that we got with Web 2.0, but combines it with the self-determination of the old good internet. And the people who run this, the in ShitterNet, the people who are who are making money from locking us in, they'll tell us that this is impossible, right? They say, well, you know, this is like asking for water that's not wet. There is no way you could have friends without Mark Zuckerberg listening in on your conversations. Right. That's just that's just stupid and and unreasonable and childish. And I think it's absolutely possible because we all had friends on the Internet before Mark Zuckerberg started listening in. And when Facebook started, it had the most rigorous um privacy policy of any of the social media networks on online. And it wasn't mining our conversations. So we know that Facebook can do it because Facebook used to do it. And that was the best version of Facebook we ever had.
00:56:20
Speaker
And so to get us to a place where we can arm twist Facebook into being good instead of being bad or leave Facebook, if it refuses to do that, um we need to make it easy for people to leave Facebook so that Facebook is incentivized to treat us well. If if we can't leave, there's no reason for them to give us a reason to stay. right The reason to stay is that we can't leave. We love our friends more than we hate Mark Zuckerberg, so we're just glued to the platform. And so you could imagine, for example, a thing where if you change social media platforms, all the messages for you on the old platform would be forwarded to you on the new platform.
00:56:58
Speaker
And so you would you would, just like if you change carriers, when someone calls your old number, they reach the new number, that would be the way that it worked. And it'd be quite administrable, right? So unlike other rules that we've tried to come up with, to make Facebook better, right? Where we like, for example, um tried to force Mark Zuckerberg to be a better moderator. Those have all failed.
00:57:20
Speaker
And despite the fact that they failed, people stay on Mark Zuckerberg's platform. And the people who are subjected to the most abuse on his platform continue to stay there. And those tend to be people who are members of isolated, marginalized groups.
00:57:36
Speaker
And the reason they stay there is that the only thing worse than being member of this disfavored group is to be a member of this disfavored group, to be subjected to these showers of abuse and these erosions of your rights, and also...
00:57:47
Speaker
to be alone. Right. And so if we make it easy for people to leave, Mark Zuckerberg might decide that their wellbeing matters to him. And if he doesn't, they can go. Yeah. and And it's easy to see in through this conversation and reading the book that they're just, we flush with bad actors of which we are. But like who is doing it well right now?
00:58:10
Speaker
Well, I mean, there are lots of ah um services that are doing well because they haven't gotten worse. And then there are some services that are, I think, well armored against their own cupidity, against their own bad decisions. ah So that would be Wikipedia, right? Wikipedia is structured as a nonprofit. Jimmy Wales, who founded it and is a friend of mine, but who I don't always agree with, took the extraordinarily brave step of, you know,
00:58:37
Speaker
taking himself off the throne. right He was what they call a benevolent dictator for life. That's like an actual thing that a lot of internet projects have is this idea of a benevolent dictator for life, where the person who founded it is the unique flame keeper of it and and and has the final say in how it works. And he transferred that final say to a committee of the platform's users And that committee is run separate from the nonprofit that maintains Wikipedia. It is an independent body. And that and the nonprofit cannot remove that committee. And that committee really is a group of flame keepers for Wikipedia's virtue. And when when Jimmy gets it wrong, and he does sometimes, they tell him no.
00:59:19
Speaker
So you know he wanted to put AI in um in the Wikipedia entry creation. And he made a case for it. He said it's too hard to master the rules. There's lots of people we'd like to create entries who can't figure it out because it's so abstract. And he's not wrong that it's too hard, but his his you know users, the the people who control the service, were quite adamant that even if it's too hard, that this wouldn't solve it. This would create more problems than it would solve. I think they were right. And they told him off. They told him no.
00:59:49
Speaker
Same goes with the entry about the genocide in Gaza, which Jimmy has said is not even handed. I've read that entry. I think it is even handed. He's called for Wikipedia to change it and they're not.
01:00:01
Speaker
They re-evaluated it. They double checked it. They concluded it was fine. ah And so um he doesn't get his way. And I think that's great. I think that's how we want these things to work. I think we want things to fail well and and not just work
Final Thoughts & Recommendations
01:00:16
Speaker
well.
01:00:16
Speaker
well Excellent. And, well, Corey, as I bring these conversations down for a landing, I always love asking the guests, you in this case, just for like a fun recommendation for the listeners out there. If there's something that you're excited about that you're you're like eager, something you can't stop talking about that you like to maybe share with the listeners out there.
01:00:32
Speaker
Hmm, what have I encountered lately that I'm really excited about? Well, there's a podcast I love. It's called No Gods, No Mayors. And it's a spinoff from a really good kind of political comedy tech criticism podcast called Trash Future. Two of the Trash Future hosts, Riley Quinn and November Kelly, and a third, Maddie Lubchansky, who's a graphic novelist and cartoonist in New York. They get together every week and they run down the biography of a mayor.
01:00:59
Speaker
And their thesis is that mayor is the highest office to which an oaf can aspire. And that if you if you examine the lives of mayors writ large, you will find some of the most comedically oafish behavior the world has ever seen. And they're right. I find it so funny and charming and wonderful. It's the thing I look forward to in my podcatcher every week more than anything else. oh Fantastic. Well, Corey, this is so great to get to talk to you and hear your thinking about this ah really ah you know very prescient, impressing concern with the social internet and everything. Well, thank you. Yeah, well, thank you so much for the work and for carving out time to talk shop and talking shitification.
01:01:38
Speaker
Well, I appreciate that.
01:01:46
Speaker
Yes. Thanks to Corey for coming on the show to talk to a low life commoner like your boy. Thanks to you for listening. And if you really want to help me in the show out, you don't have to part with that coffee money. You know, you can, but you could just as well leave kind reviews and ratings on Apple podcasts for the podcast or reviews and ratings for the front runner on Amazon and Goodread.
01:02:11
Speaker
All of that helps. It really does. So I've had the gram off the phone for more than a week. I took it off the phone, I believe, on Christmas Eve. on have Christmas Eve. New Year's Eve.
01:02:24
Speaker
And it's been nice. I do check it on the old computer. I still check Patreon and Substack and YouTube. I can't delete that one on my phone. So, you know, I can't. It's not like I've 100% scrubbed off the addictive apps. And it's not like i yeah I'm cured. I'm still seeking the hit in some capacity.
01:02:45
Speaker
But what I found and find for my mental health, for lack of better term, I just feel so shitty. Even if I'm on Instagram for 90 seconds, it really fires up my comparative hackles. and I don't begrudge anyone their successes and the attentions they get. I really don't.
01:03:05
Speaker
Good on you. But when you're getting bombarded by your peers getting on this year-end list or getting reviewed over here or they're getting sent screenshots or images of people like reading their book and all this stuff or being like a most anticipated read over over here, and like I'm not jealous so much as I am frustrated that the playing field isn't level.
01:03:34
Speaker
Publishers make decisions about what books they're going to put their might behind, you know what connections they're going to flex. And it's a real drag when you don't make the cut. It's especially annoying when people from your own imprint get access to Better Pub.
01:03:49
Speaker
So suddenly you realize you're not that important. And what we like to believe is that we're at least all valued, but we all know that there are people who are valued and there are people who are valued.
01:04:02
Speaker
Fact is, there's so much out there and so few outlets that actually celebrate books. And if you don't have an audience built from fame or some other source, you're kind of fucked. And when your book doesn't get hyped or featured or reviewed, it seems like a failure on your part that it didn't get the attention you had dreamed of or the attention that your publisher might have dreamed of. And then that gets held against you in some way.
01:04:29
Speaker
Now, I understand in a sense that even in my little world, I have a leg up on others as this podcast has a little bit of reach, probably more than the average writer. Also, depending on the time of year, you know, I get pitched 20 to 40 books a month for people who want to come on this little podcast. And I can't acknowledge all of them, let alone read them.
01:04:49
Speaker
And it's not because they don't have merit. Even I have to make choices and curate based on my taste and based on who I choose to platform. and you know, from the headliners to writers of marginalized communities to my friends who I have great chemistry with to writers who have been on the show in the past and they have a book coming out again.
01:05:11
Speaker
When I pop into Instagram to post audiograms and quote cards and other promotional shit, I get slapped in the face with stuff that just makes me feel so shitty.
01:05:23
Speaker
Like, damn, that like that person got featured on yet another you know major podcast or TV show or year-end list. And, oh, wait, they won that award? Like, well wait, was I supposed to submit my book to the award? Because I think we're in the same category. Wait, I was?
01:05:38
Speaker
i thought that was your job. Well, when I stay out of the inshittified machine, I tend to feel better. Ignorance being bliss and all. You know, I'm okay knowing what's going on, but not seeing it.
01:05:53
Speaker
You know what I mean? like Just like, oh, I know that's happening back there, but as long as it's not in my face, I'm all right with it. It's when it gets smashed in my face like a damn pie. you know, for my headspace, it's best I steer clear as best I can.
01:06:09
Speaker
You know, nothing saps my energy and my goodwill and my mood more than this comparative shit. And I guess that's more on me. you know, perhaps a more mature person wouldn't be even be bothered. But sadly, I'm not that guy.
01:06:23
Speaker
i know I need it to some extent. Like, I know i have to have a social media footprint, even if it's bad for my health. I know it's how I find about, now i don't know, various other book projects. projects And, oh if i yeah I can't find somebody's yeah email address, say a writer who wrote a cool profile, like odds are they're on Instagram and I can DM them. and We can start going back and forth like that.
01:06:48
Speaker
you know So I'm not going to quit it. Though I did scrub 99% of my personal Instagram account. I left one square there. so It was kind of sad deleting all my... I mean, I backed everything up, but it was pretty sad deleting all the photos of my old... Smarty and Jackie are two other dogs and a few other things.
01:07:09
Speaker
Anyway. Yeah, that's how. to stay Take that, Meta. Scrub my whole thing. Anyway, I wish... yeah You know, we didn't have to, like, white knuckle through everything, you know?
01:07:21
Speaker
In any case, it'll it'll always be a battle. You I'm happy for people's successes. I really am. And one day, I'm sure I'll get a disproportionate amount of it, and it'll make me sound like a fucking hypocrite when I have to, like, promote it and put it out there. Like, oh, yeah I gotta share this thing of a thing I did or a thing someone did for me.
01:07:39
Speaker
And who knows, maybe some people already feel like I already do have a disproportionate amount of goodwill and attention off the back of the front runner. Doesn't feel like that from my point of view, but from someone else's, it might.
01:07:51
Speaker
And I've not received nothing on the back of the front runner. I think it'll allow me to keep doing this kind of thing, this kind of writing. And what's enough? And this is really the crux of it. Enough for me. And this is kind of how we can define success.
01:08:08
Speaker
ah Sometimes that's sometimes it's a fun thread to pull on on the podcast and how our definitions of success change over time. But enough for me is the permission to keep going, to stay on the field of play. You know, that's really all I've ever wanted, to be allowed to do it again and again and make a happy buck from it.
01:08:30
Speaker
I'm not looking for generational wealth here. Can we keep our house overhead and our bellies full and our dogs happy and healthy to the end of their days? It may be an electric guitar. Diddy, diddy. Stay wild, CNFers, and if you can't do interviews, see ya.