Gregory's ServerIf you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men
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15 comments
 Twiddling is the key to enshittification: rapidly adjusting prices, conditions and offers. As with any shell game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye. Tech monopolists aren't smarter than the Gilded Age sociopaths who monopolized rail or coal - they use the same tricks as those monsters of history, but they do them faster and with computers: https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6 4/ If Rockefeller wanted to crush a freight company, he couldn't just click a mouse and lay down a pipeline that ran on the same route, and then click another mouse to make it go away when he was done. When Bezos wants to bankrupt Diapers.com - a company that refused to sell itself to #Amazon - he just moved a slider so that diapers on Amazon were being sold below cost. 5/ Amazon lost $100m over three months, diapers.com went bankrupt, and every investor learned that competing with Amazon was a losing bet: That's the power of twiddling - but twiddling cuts both ways. The same flexibility that digital businesses enjoy is hypothetically available to *workers* and *users*. 6/ The airlines pioneered twiddling ticket prices, and that naturally gave rise to #countertwiddling, in the form of comparison shopping sites that scraped the airlines' sites to predict when tickets would be cheapest: https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/27/knob-jockeys/#bros-be-twiddlin The airlines - like all abusive businesses - refused to tolerate this. *They* were allowed to touch their knobs as much as they wanted - indeed, they couldn't *stop* touching those knobs. 7/ But when *we* tried to twiddle back, that was "#FelonyContemptOfBusinessModel," and the airlines sued: https://www.cnbc.com/2014/12/30/airline-sues-man-for-founding-a-cheap-flights-website.html And sued: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/business/southwest-airlines-lawsuit-prices.html Platforms don't just hate it when end-users twiddle back - if anything they are even more aggressive when their business-users dare to twiddle. 8/ Take Para, an app that #Doordash drivers used to get a peek at the wages offered for jobs before they accepted them - something that Doordash hid from its workers. Doordash ruthlessly attacked Para, saying that by letting drivers know how much they'd earn before they did the work, Para was violating the law: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/tech-rights-are-workers-rights-doordash-edition 9/ Which law? Well, take your pick. The modern meaning of "#IP" is "any law that lets me use the law to control my competitors, competition or customers." Platforms use a mix of #anticircumvention law, #patent, #copyright, #contract, #cybersecurity and other legal systems to weave together a thicket of rules that allow them to shut down rivals for their Felony Contempt of Business Model: https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/ 10/ Enshittification relies on *unlimited* twiddling (by platforms), and a general *prohibition* on countertwiddling (by platform users). Enshittification is a form of fishing, in which bait is dangled before different groups of users and then nimbly withdrawn when they lunge for it. Twiddling puts the suppleness into the enshittifier's fishing-rod, and a ban on countertwiddling weighs down platform users so they're always a bit too slow to catch the bait. 11/ Nowhere do we see twiddling's impact more than the "#GigEconomy," where workers are misclassified as contractors and put to work for an app that scripts their every move to the finest degree. When an app is your boss, you work for an employer who docks your pay for violating rules that you aren't allowed to know - and where your attempts to learn those rules are constantly frustrated by the endless back-end twiddling that changes the rules faster than you can learn them. 12/ As with every question of technology, the issue isn't twiddling *per se* - it's who does the twiddling and who gets twiddled. A worker armed with digital tools can play gig work employers off each other and force them to bid up the price of their labor; they can form co-ops with other workers that auto-refuse jobs that don't pay enough, and use digital tools to organize to shift power from bosses to workers: https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/02/not-what-it-does/#who-it-does-it-to 13/ Take #ReverseCentaurs. In AI research, a #centaur is a human assisted by a machine that does more than either could do on their own. For example, a chess master and a chess program can play a better game together than either could play separately. A *reverse* centaur is a *machine assisted by a human*, where the machine is in charge and the human is a meat-puppet. 14/ Reverse centaurism is the 21st Century's answer to #Taylorism, the pseudoscience that saw white-coated "experts" subject workers to humiliating choreography down to the smallest movement of your fingertip: https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust While reverse centaurism was born in warehouses and other company-owned facilities, gig work let it make the leap into workers' homes and cars. 16/ The 21st century has seen a return to the #CottageIndustry - a form of production that once saw workers labor far from their bosses and thus beyond their control - but shriven of the autonomy and dignity that working from home once afforded: https://doctorow.medium.com/gig-work-is-the-opposite-of-steampunk-463e2730ef0d The rise and rise of #bossware - which allows for remote surveillance of workers in their homes and cars - has turned "#WorkFromHome" into "#LiveAtWork." 17/ |
Enshittification isn't synonomous with "fraud," "price gouging" or "wage theft." Enshittification is intrinsically digital, because moving all those goodies around requires the flexibility that comes with a *digital* businesses. #JeffBezos, grocer, can't rapidly change the price of eggs at #WholeFoods without an army of kids with pricing guns on roller-skates. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can change the price of eggs on #AmazonFresh just by #twiddling a knob on the service's back-end.
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