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Cory Doctorow

This is an early and important example of #PredatoryInclusion: the monopoly carriers delivered universal service to all of us, but that was a prelude to an ugly. parasitic, rent-seeking way of doing business:

lpeproject.org/blog/predatory-

It wasn't just the phone that came with an unlimited price-tag: everything you did with the phone was also a la carte, like the bananas-high long-distance charges, or even per-minute charges for *local* calls.

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10 Dec 2022 at 15:21 | Open on mamot.fr
34 comments
Cory Doctorow

Features like #CallWaiting were monetized through recurring monthly charges, too.

Remember when #CallerID came in and you had to pay $2.50/month to find out who was calling you before you answered the phone? That's a pure Bellhead play. If we applied this principle to the internet, then you'd have to pay $2.50/month to see the "from" line on an email before you opened it.

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10 Dec 2022 at 15:21 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow

Bellheads believed in "smart" networks. Netheads believed in what @davidisen called #TheStupidNetwork, a #DumbPipe whose only job was to let some people send signals to other people, who asked to get them:

isen.com/papers/Dawnstupid.htm

This is called the #EndToEnd (#E2E) principle: a network is E2E if it lets anyone receive any message from anyone else, without a third party intervening.

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10 Dec 2022 at 15:21 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow

It's a straightforward idea, though the #SpamWars brought in an important modification: the message should be *consensual* (DoS attacks, spam, etc don't count).

The degradation of the internet into "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of text from the other four" (h/t @tveastman) meant the end of end-to-end.

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10 Dec 2022 at 15:22 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow

If you're a Youtuber, Tiktoker, tweeter, or Facebooker, the fact that someone *explicitly subscribed to your feed* does not mean that they will, in fact, see your feed.

The platforms treat your unambiguous request to receive messages from others as mere suggestions, a "signal" to be mixed into other signals in the #ContentModeration algorithm that orders your feed, mixing in items from strangers whose material you never asked to see.

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10 Dec 2022 at 15:22 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow

There's nothing wrong in principal with the idea of a system that recommends items from strangers. Indeed, that's a great way to find people to follow! But "stuff we think you'll like" is not the same category as "stuff you've asked to see."

Why do companies balk at showing you what you've asked to be shown? Sometimes it's because they're trying to be helpful. Maybe their research, or the inferences from their user surveillance, suggests that you actually prefer it that way.

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10 Dec 2022 at 15:22 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

But there's another side to this: a feed composed of things from people is *fungible*. Theoretically, you could uproot that feed from one platform and settle it in another one - if everyone you follow on Twitter set up an account on Mastodon, you could use a tool like #Movetodon to refollow them there and get the same feed:

movetodon.org/

A feed that is controlled by a company using secret algorithms is much harder for a rival to replicate.

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10 Dec 2022 at 15:22 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

That's why #Spotify is so hellbent on getting you to listen to #playlists, not albums. Your favorite albums are the same everywhere, but playlists are integrated into services.

But there's another side to this playlistification of feeds: playlists and other recommendation algorithms are #chokepoints: they are a way to durably interpose a company between a creator and their audience. Where you have chokepoints, you get #ChokepointCapitalism:

chokepointcapitalism.com/

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10 Dec 2022 at 15:23 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

That's when a company captures an audience in a walled garden and then extracts value from creators who want to reach them, even when the audience *requests* a creator's work. With Spotify, that manifests as #payola, where creators have to pay for inclusion on playlists. Spotify uses playlists to manipulate audiences into listening to soundalikes, silently replacing the ambient artists that listeners tune in to hear with work-for-hire musicians who don't get royalties.

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10 Dec 2022 at 15:24 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

Facebook's payola works much the same: when you publish a post on Facebook, you have to pay to boost it if you want it to reach the people who follow you - that is, the people who signed up to see what you post. Facebook may claim that it does this to keep its users' feeds "uncluttered" but that's a very thin pretense. Though you follow friends and family on Facebook, your feed is weighted to accounts willing to cough up the payola to reach you.

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10 Dec 2022 at 15:24 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

The "uncluttering" excuse wears even thinner when you realize that there's no way to tell a platform: "This isn't clutter, show it to me *every* time." Think of how the cartel of giant email providers uses the excuse of spam to block mailing lists and newsletters that their users have *explicitly* signed up for.

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10 Dec 2022 at 15:24 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

Those users can fish those messages out of their spam folders, they can add the senders to their address books, they can write an email rule that says, "If sender is X, then mark message as 'not spam'" and the messages *still* go to spam:

doctorow.medium.com/dead-lette

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10 Dec 2022 at 15:24 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

One sign of just how irredeemably stupid the online free expression debate is that we're arguing over stupid shit like whether *unsolicited* fundraising emails from politicians should be marked as spam, rather than whether *solicited*, double-opt-in newsletters and mailing lists should be:

cbsnews.com/news/republican-co

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10 Dec 2022 at 15:25 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

When it comes to email, the stuff we *don't* argue about is so much more important than the stuff we do. Think of how email list providers blithely advertise that they can tell you the #OpenRate of the messages that you send - which means that they embed surveillance beacons (#TrackingPixels) in every message they send:

wired.com/story/how-email-open

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10 Dec 2022 at 15:25 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

*Sending* emails that spy on users is gross, but the *fucking disgusting* part is that our email clients *don't block spying by default*. Blocking tracking pixels is easy as hell, and almost no one *wants* to be spied on when they read their email! The onboarding process for webmail accounts should have a dialog box that reads, "Would you like me to tell creepy randos which emails you read?" with the default being "Fuck no!" and the alternative being "Hurt me, Daddy!"

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10 Dec 2022 at 15:25 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

If email providers wanted to "declutter" your inbox, they could offer you a dashboard of senders whose messsages you delete unread most of the time and offer to send those messages straight to spam in future. Instead they nonconsensually intervene to block messages and offer no way to override those blocks.

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10 Dec 2022 at 15:25 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

When it comes to recommendations, companies have an unresolvable conflict of interest: *maybe* they're interfering with your communications to make your life better, or *maybe* they're doing it to make money for their shareholders. Sorting one from the other is nigh impossible, because it turns on the company's intent, and it's impossible to read product managers' minds.

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10 Dec 2022 at 15:25 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

This is intrinsic to #PlatformCapitalism. When platforms are new, their imperative is to increase their user-base. To do that, they shift surpluses to their users - think of how Amazon started off by subsidizing products and deliveries.

That lured in businesses, and shifted some of that surplus to sellers - giving fat compensation to Kindle authors and incredible reach to hard goods sellers in Marketplace. More sellers brought in more customers, who brought in more sellers.

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10 Dec 2022 at 15:26 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

Once sellers couldn't afford to leave Amazon because of customers, and customers couldn't afford to leave Amazon because of sellers, the company shifted the surplus to *itself*. It imposed impossible fees on sellers - Amazon's $31b/year "advertising" business is just payola - and when sellers raised prices to cover those fees, Amazon used #MostFavoredNation contracts to force sellers to raise prices everywhere else.

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10 Dec 2022 at 15:26 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

The #enshittification of Amazon - where you search for a specific product and get six screens of ads for different, worse ones - is the natural end-state of chokepoint capitalism:

pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/ens

That same enshittification is on every platform, and "freedom of speech is not freedom of reach" is just a way of saying, "Now that you're stuck here, we're going to enshittify your experience."

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10 Dec 2022 at 15:26 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

Because while it's hard to tell if *recommendations* are fair or not, it's very easy to tell whether blocking end-to-end is unfair. When a person asks for another person to send them messages, and a third party intervenes to block those messages, that is censorship. Even if you call it "freedom of reach," it's still censorship.

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10 Dec 2022 at 15:26 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

For creators, interfering with E2E is also wage-theft. If you're making stuff for Youtube or Tiktok or another platform and that platform's algorithm decides you've broken a rule and therefore your subscribers won't see your video, that means you don't get paid.

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10 Dec 2022 at 15:26 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

It's as if your boss handed you a paycheck with only half your pay in it, and when you asked what happened to the other half, your boss said, "You broke some rules so I docked your pay, but I won't tell you which rules because if I did, you might figure out how to break them without my noticing."

Content moderation is the only part of information security where #SecurityThroughObscurity is considered good practice:

doctorow.medium.com/como-is-in

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10 Dec 2022 at 15:26 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

That's why content moderation algorithms are a #labor issue, and why projects like Tracking Exposed, which reverse-engineer those algorithms to give creative workers and their audiences control over what they see, are fighting for labor rights:

eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/trac

We're at the tail end of a ghastly, 15-year experiment in neo-Bellheadism, with the big platforms treating end-to-end as a relic of a simpler time, rather than as "an elegant weapon from a more civilized age."

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That's why content moderation algorithms are a #labor issue, and why projects like Tracking Exposed, which reverse-engineer those algorithms to give creative workers and their audiences control over what they see, are fighting for labor rights:

eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/trac

10 Dec 2022 at 15:27 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

The post-Twitter platforms like #Mastodon and #Tumblr are E2E platforms, designed around the idea that if someone asks to hear what you have to say, they should hear it. Rather than developing algorithms to override your decisions, these platforms have extensive tooling to let you fine-tune what you see.

pluralistic.net/2022/08/08/loc

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10 Dec 2022 at 15:27 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

This tooling was once the subject of intense development and innovation, but all that research fell by the wayside with the rise of platforms, who are actively hostile to third party mods that gave users more control over their feeds:

techcrunch.com/2022/09/27/og-a

Alas, lawmakers are way behind the curve on this, demanding new "online safety" rules that *require* firms to break E2E *and* block third-party de-enshittification tools:

openrightsgroup.org/blog/onlin

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This tooling was once the subject of intense development and innovation, but all that research fell by the wayside with the rise of platforms, who are actively hostile to third party mods that gave users more control over their feeds:

techcrunch.com/2022/09/27/og-a

10 Dec 2022 at 15:27 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

The online free speech debate is stupid because it has all the wrong focuses:

* Focusing on improving algorithms, not whether you can even *get* a feed of things you asked to see;

* Focusing on whether unsolicited messages are delivered, not whether *solicited* messages reach their readers;

* Focusing on algorithmic transparency rather, not whether you can opt out of the behavioral tracking that produces training data for algorithms;

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10 Dec 2022 at 15:27 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

* Focusing on whether platforms are policing their users well enough, not whether we can leave a platform without losing our important social, professional and personal ties;

* Focusing on whether the limits on our speech violate the First Amendment, rather than whether they are unfair:

doctorow.medium.com/yes-its-ce

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10 Dec 2022 at 15:27 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

The wholly artificial distinction between "freedom of speech" and "freedom of reach" is just more self-serving nonsense and the only reason we're talking about it is that a billionaire dilettante would like to create chokepoints so he can extract payola from his users and meet his debt obligations to the Saudi royal family.

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10 Dec 2022 at 15:28 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

Billionaire dilettantes have their own stupid definitions of all kinds of important words like "freedom" and "discrimination" and "free speech." Remember: these definitions have *nothing* to do with how the world's 7,999,997,332 non-billionaires experience these concepts.

--

Image:
Cryteria (modified)
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil

CC BY 3.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/b

William Shaw Antliff (modified)
macleans.ca/history/this-canad

Public domain
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyrigh

eof/

Billionaire dilettantes have their own stupid definitions of all kinds of important words like "freedom" and "discrimination" and "free speech." Remember: these definitions have *nothing* to do with how the world's 7,999,997,332 non-billionaires experience these concepts.

--

Image:
Cryteria (modified)
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil

10 Dec 2022 at 15:28 | Open on mamot.fr
javitel replied to Cory

@pluralistic is there a tool for this app that puts together a thread that you can then share outside the app? Sort of like threadreaderapp.com did for the bird site?

10 Dec 2022 at 22:18 | Open on mastodon.online
Cory Doctorow replied to javitel

@javitel they're all collected at pluralistic.net

10 Dec 2022 at 23:21 | Open on mamot.fr
Amandine Bourg replied to Cory

@pluralistic thank you so much for this thread.

10 Dec 2022 at 22:51 | Open on mastodon.world
JohnW replied to Cory

@pluralistic

Incredible thread Cory!

Birdshite vs. Mastodon is a good microcosm of it.

I'm watching this information war unfold with a lot of apprehension.

Unfettered, unaltered online conversation has the worlds biggest target on its back right now.

11 Dec 2022 at 2:43 | Open on universeodon.com
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