Cory Doctorow's Brain Is Enshittifying Or Something (and mine is too)
Sorry for this mildly intoxicated mess. Cory Doctorow's been annoying me a bit recently and jwz's blog post directly calling him out on his shit, so I felt like writing some stuff out as well.
To his Mastodon post sharing it, I replied:
Cory's insistence that "it's not venture capital that causes enshittification, it's a platform not having fire exits" is bizarre and honestly a bit startling to witness. Like shit dude, I sure wonder why a platform might refuse to implement interoperability. Maybe because, and I'm just spitballing here, said fire exits would inhibit their ability to please the VCs whose funding they're leaning on to keep going by making it easier for users to leave and no longer contribute to the service's usage and advertising metrics?
Some context: Cory is promoting #FreeOurFeeds, a "definitely not a bullshit astroturf" initiative led by a bunch of executives from sketchy AI startups no one has heard of and the crumbling mess that is Mozilla. It is begging for $30 million of other people's money to funnel into BlueSky development and hosting of one single BlueSky relay. Keep in mind, BlueSky was started by crypto bro Jack Dorsey, who founded Twitter and is a supporter of the nazi hellhole it exists as today, and received funding from VC firms like Skyseed, who suddenly popped into existence from thin air just in time to give the platform a bunch of money. Basically, rich people promise to save you from other rich people and not suddenly turn around and go "actually, we like money very much and we are going to fuck you to get more of it!"
Plenty of other people have pointed out various things that are suspect about BlueSky.
Obviously, a guy being super vocal about opposing the corrupt forces that lead platforms and companies to screw over their own users voicing support for such a suspect initiative would raise lots of eyebrows. In response to people pointing out such a blinding flashing warning light, Cory has taken a break from continuously boosting Mastodon posts that praise him to write some blog posts that feature statements like this:
Critics of zuckermuskian media claim those services are so terrible because they're for-profit entities, capitalist enterprises hitched to the logic of extraction and profit above all else. The problem with this claim is that it doesn't explain the changes to these services. After all, the reason so many of us got on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram is because they used to be a lot of fun. They were useful. They were even great at times.
This is just baffling to read. Can someone please sit Cory down to watch some of his own DEFCON talks to get a clue about the odd tendency for big money funding to lead to a company or platform going to total shit?
A platform's launch being fueled by VC funding can absolutely explain how it's useful and fun at first, before it slowly starts to twiddle knobs once it has a stranglehold on the market.
He argues that companies won't pursue unprofitable actions. His 2024 DEFCON talk features him mentioning Amazon's willingness to light tons of money on fire to undercut diapers.com, a business that refused their buyout offer, until it went out of business because it couldn't compete with Amazon's lower prices.
To me, BlueSky and feigning respect for user freedom and sacrificing short-term gains so that they can eventually start twiddling knobs and exploiting their centralized control over protocol development to trap users who thought everything would be fine back in resembles a story that we've watched unfold many times before.
If you are deadset on saving users from a platform that arose from a hole to capitalist hell, how on earth is a shady initiative ran by other rich people a solution? Can we please stop trusting the rich people who pinky swear that they aren't only in it for themselves to solve problems that they themselves are perpetuating?
To nab a quote from Jeremy Hammond in his 2004 DEFCON talk:
We can't trust politicians and capitalists to solve these problems because politicians and capitalists themselves are the problem.
PS: Also I shouldn't need to say this, but this isn't me condemning people just because they use BlueSky. I would just outright say if that's my view.