Twenty years ago Cory Doctorow saw how the technology we use daily was purposely being broken, it was only when he started cursing the process that we finally started listening.
Thanks to our listeners! It's great fun to produce and to have these conversations. We want to do more with you all in the new year, so please continue to email and share. Best, d
...Cory is phenomenal, I think I've read chokepoint capitalism like four times... Really appreciate him and his good work and you guys too by the way. I keep pausing his talk and writing this stuff down in my notes, such a good articulator of these confusing concepts.
Unfortunately Cory has mis-diagnosed the core of the issue, yes government policy choices are a big part of the root cause, but the policy choices are different then the ones Cory cites.
Cory, and by extension the EFF, have spent the last three decades convincing us to let tech run amok with no restraints, except one, the web has to be anonymous.
The problem for the anonymity crowd is they are either purposefully or blissfully unaware that you cannot build an anonymous electronic system (without trust), at some point you need to reach out to an endpoint across an un-trusted network which can track all traffic (as well as intercept and inspect it). The reality of everyday is that it is way easier than that between cookies, browser fingerprinting, and the myriad of other ways we have to de-anonymize traffic, there is simply no such thing as anonymity on the web to, at least not to the entities that operate it and profit from it.
Therin lies the problem, the people you want to be anonymous from (corporations, the government, aka organizations with power) know who you are whenever they want, but when it comes time to hold anonymous bad actors accountable we are powerless to because the truly bad actors can become really anonymous, using cutouts, hacked devices, faked headers and user agents and trusted vpn networks that obfuscate sources.
This is just the first part of the problem, the push back against regulating tech allowed them to violate property rights, we allow companies to copyright and trademark their brand names etc, in the early days of tech, that was deemed to hard, it didn't scale etc. This has resulted in the destruction of the value of brand across the world and most specifically in the american brand itself as we pushed our predatory web on everyone else.
The LACK of regulation (both regulating identity on the web, and enforcing property rights) created a situation where these tech companies could fund themselves via ad-word extortion, this simple fact results in the winner-take-all model of tech we see today, the more searches, the more ads, the more clicks, the more revenue you get.
When you monetize content as the ad-networks masquerading as services do, the only thing you accomplish is the encouragement of the abuse of anonymity on the web, 50% of all ad clicks are fraud, Spotify just acknowledged as much this week when they talked about their recent addition of monetization to their new videos feature, views doubled, not because humans love ads, but because bots that look like humans view content created by other bots that look like humans and click on ad's in those videos to generate revenue for the owner of the bots that created that content.
Digital ads are a $700B industry, $300B of it goes to adversarial bot networks, it's likely there are bot networks making in the tens of billions of dollars a year, all just a tax on the productive output of Americans.
Where that money goes no one knows, but how we are spending the clean money generated from advertising is absurd (ai agents, delux datacenters costing tens of billions b/c they are just cap ex dumps), one can only imagine where the rest goes.
There are other anti-competitive things they do to grow and maintain their monopolies (selling at looses for competitive reasons, predatory pricing etc), none of this has to do with DRM or other things the enshitification process is actually just the process of transitioning the full cost of operating the service to those how are paying for it, these systems need more ads because they are too expensive to operate, all the tech companies are tens of billions of dollars in debt as they push the cost of operating their platforms into capital expenses and borrow money to cover the balance.
Which again brings the other regulatory structures we used to have in place to ensure our markets (stock and debt) were not being defrauded, we threw it all out to move fast, and we really broke things, badly.
It's everywhere, I did a city council presentation on this phenomena with the Oklahoma City Thunder organization and the broadcasting.... Same kind of madness I saw at Costco only a lot sadder
This has like 100,000 views on tiktok and the comments are incredible people are so sick of this stuff
Thanks to our listeners! It's great fun to produce and to have these conversations. We want to do more with you all in the new year, so please continue to email and share. Best, d
Thank you for this and all the podcasts Organized Money has produced this year.
...Cory is phenomenal, I think I've read chokepoint capitalism like four times... Really appreciate him and his good work and you guys too by the way. I keep pausing his talk and writing this stuff down in my notes, such a good articulator of these confusing concepts.
Unfortunately Cory has mis-diagnosed the core of the issue, yes government policy choices are a big part of the root cause, but the policy choices are different then the ones Cory cites.
Cory, and by extension the EFF, have spent the last three decades convincing us to let tech run amok with no restraints, except one, the web has to be anonymous.
The problem for the anonymity crowd is they are either purposefully or blissfully unaware that you cannot build an anonymous electronic system (without trust), at some point you need to reach out to an endpoint across an un-trusted network which can track all traffic (as well as intercept and inspect it). The reality of everyday is that it is way easier than that between cookies, browser fingerprinting, and the myriad of other ways we have to de-anonymize traffic, there is simply no such thing as anonymity on the web to, at least not to the entities that operate it and profit from it.
Therin lies the problem, the people you want to be anonymous from (corporations, the government, aka organizations with power) know who you are whenever they want, but when it comes time to hold anonymous bad actors accountable we are powerless to because the truly bad actors can become really anonymous, using cutouts, hacked devices, faked headers and user agents and trusted vpn networks that obfuscate sources.
This is just the first part of the problem, the push back against regulating tech allowed them to violate property rights, we allow companies to copyright and trademark their brand names etc, in the early days of tech, that was deemed to hard, it didn't scale etc. This has resulted in the destruction of the value of brand across the world and most specifically in the american brand itself as we pushed our predatory web on everyone else.
The LACK of regulation (both regulating identity on the web, and enforcing property rights) created a situation where these tech companies could fund themselves via ad-word extortion, this simple fact results in the winner-take-all model of tech we see today, the more searches, the more ads, the more clicks, the more revenue you get.
When you monetize content as the ad-networks masquerading as services do, the only thing you accomplish is the encouragement of the abuse of anonymity on the web, 50% of all ad clicks are fraud, Spotify just acknowledged as much this week when they talked about their recent addition of monetization to their new videos feature, views doubled, not because humans love ads, but because bots that look like humans view content created by other bots that look like humans and click on ad's in those videos to generate revenue for the owner of the bots that created that content.
Digital ads are a $700B industry, $300B of it goes to adversarial bot networks, it's likely there are bot networks making in the tens of billions of dollars a year, all just a tax on the productive output of Americans.
Where that money goes no one knows, but how we are spending the clean money generated from advertising is absurd (ai agents, delux datacenters costing tens of billions b/c they are just cap ex dumps), one can only imagine where the rest goes.
There are other anti-competitive things they do to grow and maintain their monopolies (selling at looses for competitive reasons, predatory pricing etc), none of this has to do with DRM or other things the enshitification process is actually just the process of transitioning the full cost of operating the service to those how are paying for it, these systems need more ads because they are too expensive to operate, all the tech companies are tens of billions of dollars in debt as they push the cost of operating their platforms into capital expenses and borrow money to cover the balance.
Which again brings the other regulatory structures we used to have in place to ensure our markets (stock and debt) were not being defrauded, we threw it all out to move fast, and we really broke things, badly.
Here is a conversation among three wonderful writes: Cory, David, and Matt.
Changing the narratives, adding to our knowledge. and it so much fun!
What a great year for Organized Money.
And TAP.
And BIG.
And Enshittification.
"writers"
It's everywhere, I did a city council presentation on this phenomena with the Oklahoma City Thunder organization and the broadcasting.... Same kind of madness I saw at Costco only a lot sadder
This has like 100,000 views on tiktok and the comments are incredible people are so sick of this stuff
https://youtu.be/_zlUcxX5V48?si=LFFS-yc-Pn-dEOJn