#Twiddler Week 2023 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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Podcasting "Twiddler"

This week on my podcast, I read “Twiddler,” a recent Medium column in which I delve more deeply into enshittification, and how it is a pathology of digital platforms, distinct from the rent-seeking of the analog world that preceded it:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/27/knob-jockeys/#bros-be-twiddlin

Enshittification, you’ll recall, is the lifecycle of the online platform: first, the platform allocates surpluses to end-users; then, once users are locked in, those surpluses are taken away and given to business-customers. Once the advertisers, publishers, sellers, creators and performers are locked in, the surplus is clawed away from them and taken by the platforms.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Facebook is the poster-child for enshittification. When FB welcomed the general public in 2006, it sold itself as the privacy-respecting alternative to Myspace, promising users it would never harvest their data. The FB feed consisted of the posts that the people you’d followed — the people you cared about — published.

FB experienced explosive growth, thanks to two factors: “network effects” (every new user was a draw for other users who wanted to converse with them), and “switching costs” (it was practically impossible to convince all the people you wanted to hear from to leave FB, much less agree on what platform to go to next). In other words, every new user who joined FB both attracted more users, and made it harder for those users to leave.

FB attained end-user lockin and was now able to transfer users’ surpluses to business customers. First, it started aggressively spying on users and offered precision targeting at rock-bottom prices to advertisers. Second, it offered media companies “algorithmic” boosting into the feeds of users who hadn’t asked to see their posts.

Media companies that posted brief excerpts to FB, along with links to their sites on the real internet were rewarded with floods of traffic, as their posts were jammed into the eyeballs of millions of FB users who never asked to see them. Media companies and advertisers went all-in for FB, integrating FB surveillance beacons in their presence on the real internet, hiring social media specialists who’d do Platform Kremlinology in order to advise them on the best way to please The Algorithm.

Once those business customers — creators, media companies, advertisers — were locked into FB, the company harvested their surplus, too. On the ad side, FB raised rates and decreased expensive anti-fraud measures, meaning that advertisers had to pay more, even as an increasing proportion of their ads were either never served, or never seen.

With media companies and creators, FB not only stopped jamming their content in front of people who never asked to see it, they actively suppressed the spread of business users’ posts even to their own subscribers. FB required media companies to transition from excerpts to fulltext feeds, and downranked or simply blocked posts that linked back to a business user’s own site, be it a newspaper’s web presence or a creator’s crowdfunding service. Business users who wanted to reach the people who had explicitly directed FB to incorporate their media in users’ feeds had to pay to “boost” their materials.

This is the (nearly) complete enshittification cycle: having harvested the surplus from users and business customers, FB is now (badly) attempting to surf the line where nearly all the value in the service lands in its shareholders’ pockets, with just enough surplus left behind to keep end-users and business-users locked in (see also: Twitter).

There have been lots of other abusive “platform” businesses in the past — famously, 19th century railroads and their robber-baron owners were so obnoxiously abusive that they spawned the trustbusting movement, the Sherman Act, and modern competition law. Did the rail barons do enshittification, too?

Well, yes — and no. I have no doubt that robber barons would have engaged in zuckerbergian shenanigans if they could have — but here we run up against the stubborn inertness of atoms and the slippery liveliness of bits. Changing a railroad schedule to make direct connections with cities where you want to destroy a rival ferry business (or hell, laying track to those cities) is a slow proposition. Changing the content recommendation system at Facebook is something you do with a few mouse-clicks.

Which brings me to the thesis of “Twiddler”: enshittification doesn’t arise from the special genius or the unique wickedness of tech barons — rather, it’s the product of the ability to twiddle. Our discourse has focused (rightly) on the extent to which platforms are “instrumented” — that is, the degree to which they spy on and analyze their users’ conduct.

But the discussion of what the platforms do with that data — the ways they “react” to it — has echoed the platforms’ own boasts of transcendental “behavior modification” prowess (c.f. “Surveillance Capitalism”) while giving short shrift to the extremely mundane, straightforward ways that the ability to change the business-logic of a platform lets it allocate and withdraw surpluses from different kinds of users to get them on the hook, reel them in, and then skin and devour them.

The Twiddler thesis, in other words, is a counter to the narrative of Maria Farrell’s Prodigal Tech Bros, who claim that they were once evil sorcerers, but, having seen the error of their ways, vow to be good sorcerers from now on, forswearing “hacking our dopamine loops” like vampires swearing off blood:

https://conversationalist.org/2020/03/05/the-prodigal-techbro/

People who repeat the claims of Prodigal Tech Bros are engaging in criti-hype, Lee Vinsel’s term for criticism that repeats tech’s own mystical narratives of their own superhuman prowess, rather than grappling with the mundanity of doing old conjurer’s tricks very quickly, with computers:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

That’s what twiddling is — doing the same things that grocery store monopolists and rail monopolists and music label monopolists have always done, but very quickly, with computers. Whether it’s Amazon rooking sellers and authors, or Apple and Google’s App Stores rooking app creators, or Tiktok and Youtube rooking performers, or Uber rooking drivers, the underlying pattern of surplus-harvesting is the same, and so is the method. They do the same thing as their predecessors, but very quickly, with computers.

A grocer who wants to price-gouge on eggs needs to dispatch an army of low-waged employees with pricing guns. AmazonFresh does the same thing in an eyeblink, by typing a new number into a field on a web-form and clicking submit. As is so often the case when a magic trick is laid bare, the actual mechanic is very, very boring: the way to make a nickel appear to vanish is to spend hundreds of hours practicing before a mirror while you shift so it is clenched between your fingers, and protrudes from behind your hand (sorry, spoiler alert).

The trick can be baffling and marvellous when you see it, but once you know how it’s done, it’s pretty obvious — the difference is that most sleight-of-hand artists don’t think they’re sorcerers, while plenty of tech bros believe their own press.

There’s a profound irony in twiddling’s role in enshittification: early internet scholarship rightly hailed the power of twiddling for internet users. Theorists like Aram Sinnreich described this as configurability — the ability of end-users (aided by tinkerers, small businesses, and co-ops) to modify the services they used to suit their own needs:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vk8c2

Arguably the most successful configurability story is ad-blocking, which Doc Searls calls “the biggest boycott in human history.” Billions of end-users of the web have twiddled their browsers so that they aren’t tracked by ad-tech and don’t see ads:

https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2015/09/28/beyond-ad-blocking-the-biggest-boycott-in-human-history/

Configurability was at the heart of early hopes for mass disintermediation, because audiences and performers (or sellers and producers) could go direct to one another, assembling a customized, un-capturable conduit composed of an a-la-carte selection of payment processors, webstores, mail and web hosts, etc. Whenever one of these utilities tried to capture that relationship and harvest an unfair share of the surplus, both ends of the transaction could foil them by blocking, reverse-engineering, modding, or mashing them up, wriggling off the hook before it could set its barbs.

But — as we can all see — a funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century. The platforms seized the internet, turning it into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”:

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

Three factors let them do this:

1. They were able to buy or merge with every major competitor, and where that failed them, they were able to use predatory pricing to drive competitors out of the market:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

2. They were able to twiddle their services, setting them a-bristle with surveillance beacons and digital actuators that could rearrange the virtual furniture every time some knob-jockey touched their dial:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

3. They were able to hoard the twiddling, using laws like the DMCA, CFAA, noncompetes, trade secrecy, and other “IP” laws to control the conduct of their competitors, critics and customers:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

That last point is very important: it’s not just that big corporations twiddle us to death — it’s that they have made it illegal for us to twiddle back. Adblocking is possible on the open web, but to ad-block your Iphone, you must first jailbreak it, which is a crime. Yes, Apple will block Facebook from spying on you — but even if you opt out of tracking, Apple still spies on you in exactly the same way Facebook did, to power their own ad-targeting business:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

This is what Jay Freeman calls “felony contempt of business-model” — the literal criminalization of configuration. When Netflix wants to decide who is and isn’t a member of your family, they just twiddle their back-end to block the child that moves back and forth between your home and your ex’s, thanks to your joint custody arrangement:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/02/nonbinary-families/#red-envelopes

But woe betide the parent who twiddles back to restore their child’s service, by jailbreaking an app or the W3C’s official, in-browser DRM, EME — trafficking in a tool to bypass EME and reconfigure your browser to suit your needs, rather than Netflix’s, is a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine, under Section 1201 of the DMCA:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-director-ceo-team-and-membership

This is the supreme irony of twiddling: Big Tech companies love to twiddle you, but if you touch your own knob, they call it a crime. Just as Big Tech firms turned “free software” into “open source” and then took all the software freedom for themselves, configurability is now the exclusive purview of corporations — those transhuman, immortal colony paperclip maximizers that treat humans as inconvenient gut-flora:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=vBknF2yUZZ8

If we are to take the net back, we’ll need to seize the means of computation. There are three steps to that process:

1. Traditional antitrust: Merger scrutiny, breakups, and bans on predatory pricing and other anticompetitive practices:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/01/federal-trade-commission-justice-department-seek-strengthen-enforcement-against-illegal-mergers

2. Anti-twiddling laws for businesses: A federal privacy law with a private right of action, labor protections, and other rules that take knobs away from tech platforms:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/you-should-have-right-sue-companies-violate-your-privacy

3. Pro-twiddling laws for users: Interoperability (both mandatory and adversarial — AKA “Competitive Compatibility” or “comcom”):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/05/time-for-some-game-theory/#massholes

Monopolists and their handmaidens — witting and unwitting — want you to believe that their dominance is inevitable (shades of Thatcher’s “there is no alternative”), because the great forces of history, the technical characteristics of digital technology, and the sorcerous mind-control of dopamine-hackers.

But the reality is much more mundane. Digital freedom was never a mirage. Indeed, it is a prize of enormous value — that’s why the platforms are so intent on hoarding it all for themselves.

Here’s this week’s podcast episode:

https://craphound.com/news/2023/02/27/twiddler/

And here’s a direct link to download the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the Internet Archive ; they’ll host your media for free, forever):

Here’s the direct feed to subscribe to my podcast:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

And here’s the original “Twiddler” article on Medium:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

Image: Stephen Drake (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Analog_Test_Array_modular_synth_by_sduck409.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

This Thu (Mar 2) I’ll be in Brussels for Antitrust, Regulation and the Political Economy, along with a who’s-who of European and US trustbusters. It’s livestreamed, and both in-person and virtual attendance are free. On Fri (Mar 3), I’ll be in Graz for the Elevate Festival.

[Image ID: A mandala made from a knob and button-covered control panel.]

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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Pluralistic is three

Though I didn’t know it at the time, Jan 29, 2020 was my last day at Boing Boing; as it happens, that was nearly exactly 19 years after my first day at Boing Boing. Though it was a tough decision, it was the right one, and while I’m no longer helping to write the site, I’m still an ardent reader, a co-owner, and a well-wisher.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/drei-drei-drei/#now-we-are-three

I started writing Boing Boing at the age of 30. When I stopped, I was 49. That’s a lot of living. Web-writing had come a long way since then, and so had the web, and the world — and so had I. While the way I blogged had evolved substantially over my years at Boing Boing, all those changes had been evolutionary — a series of incremental shifts.

After I left Boing Boing, I spent three weeks thinking about how — or whether — I would continue to write the web. In a world where platforms have interposed themselves between creative workers and their audiences, manically twiddling the knobs that determine whether the people who ask to hear from you ever get to, starting a new publication was a daunting proposition.

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

It felt like my two choices were to pick one or a few platforms and devote my efforts to platform kremlinology, trying to figure out what words, subjects or formats would cause The Algorithm to block the people who’d subscribed to my feed from seeing it; or to start a standalone website, which no one would ever see, but which I would control.

Both of these are bad choices, so I chose neither — or, depending on how you look at it, both. POSSE stands for “Post Own Site, Share Everywhere,” and it’s an idea that comes out of the Indieweb movement. Under POSSE, you post your work to a site you control, but syndicate to all the platforms and silos, with a link back to the original:

https://indieweb.org/POSSE

Though the platforms might punish you for this — think of Instagram and Facebook hiding posts with links to the public web, or Twitter’s short-lived policy of suspending the accounts of users whose bios included their Mastodon address — any attention that did slip past their stingy, tight-pinched sphincters would at least have a chance of connecting users directly to your own site and its feeds.

Three weeks after I quit Boing Boing, I launched Pluralistic, my POSSE project, which sees me publishing one or more essays, five or more days per week, homed on my own non-surveilling, non-tracking, ad-free Wordpress site, a fulltext RSS feed, and a plaintext newsletter, and mirrored to Tumblr, Mastodon, Twitter and Medium:

https://pluralistic.net/

Today, Pluralistic is three years old. Even with the global pandemic that followed shortly on its founding, I still find myself marvelling at how quickly the time has flown by — and, thinking back over the past three years, I’m also profoundly satisfied with how it has shaped up.

Even though Pluralistic isn’t a group blog — a Metafilter wag commented on the irony of calling a solo project “pluralistic” and they weren’t wrong! — I couldn’t have done this without help. First, and most importantly, I must thank the incredible Ken Snider, who has hosted my servers for decades, and who is one of the most thoughtful, diligent, and skilled network administrators I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing. I can’t thank Ken enough — without his help, I’d be hamstrung.

Early in Pluralistic’s history, the pioneering cryptographer Loren Kohnfelder noticed that I was making the formatting errors characteristic of someone who is trying to do a lot of fiddly work manually. Loren wrote to me out of the blue and volunteered to write some python scripts to make my production more streamlined and — crucially — less error-prone. If you are interested in the minutiae of how these scripts work, here’s a process post I published in 2021, on the 20th anniversary of my first blog post:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#hfbd

Even Loren’s excellent automation tools can’t fix my own errors. I am a bottomless font of typos and other PEBCAK-type errors, and many readers write to point these out, but none are so diligent, regular and thoughtful as Gregory Charlin, who has helped me fix more typos in my work than anyone except my mother, who is the world’s greatest proofreader (Gregory is a close second).

Pluralistic has a (far too) irregular podcast component. I started podcasting in 2005, when Mark Pesce, John Perry Barlow and I got on the subject at a speaker’s dinner at a conference in Montreal and Mark demanded to know why I wasn’t doing one. I blamed it on my travel schedule, saying that I wouldn’t be able to sit down in a quiet room with a good mic on a regular basis. Mark insisted that I was being too precious and that I could just record with my laptop mic from wherever I happened to be — a hotel room, a taxi-cab, whatever. The result was a lot of fun, but very rough:

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_01

In 2009, I was at a club in London when a guy came up to me and introduced himself. That was John Taylor Williams, a sound engineer in DC who loved my work and hated the sound quality of my podcast. He graciously volunteered to master it for me and while he promised that he wouldn’t insist that I upgrade my recording situation, he did offer multiple useful suggestions. He’s still mastering today (and is the engineer on all my audiobook projects) and under his patient tutelage, I’ve bought some decent gear and learned how to use it — and my podcast sounds great today. Thank you, John!

https://craphound.com/podcast/

A year ago, when Pluralistic turned two, I reflected on the way the site had changed over the 550 posts I’d published thus far (today, it’s 767), focusing on the fact that I have no metrics for any of the channels I manage — not even a humble page-counter:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/19/now-we-are-two/#two-much-posse

Rather than using analytics and usage statistics to guide my work on Pluralistic, I focus solely on qualitative elements — feedback from readers (and critics). Mostly, that’s feedback on substance. I call my blogging process “The Memex Method” — a way of iteratively improving my own ideas by presenting them to other people, rather than working through, say, a private commonplace book:

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-memex-method-238c71f2fb46

I’m generally less interested in people who want me to write about something other than the things I’m interested in. From the start, the beauty of being an independent web-writer is being freed from the tyranny of trying to identify and please an audience, and instead using my work to attract the audience that shares my interests (even if they disagree with my views):

https://doctorow.medium.com/so-youve-decided-to-unfollow-me-7452c96b4772

One kind of non-substantive disagreement/suggestion I do pay attention to is readability suggestions; the point of Pluralistic is to discover and engage people who share my interests. Over the past year, reader feedback has led to improvements in my headline style and other formatting elements.

However, there are elements of the Pluralistic project that are more important than readability. For example, many Mastodon readers have asked why I don’t switch to a server with a 5,000 character limit. The answer is that the server I use, mamot.fr, is run by the digital rights group La Quadrature Du Net, an organization with a long history of standing up to censorship demands. Censorship-resistance is simply more important than character limits. Ken is working on standing up a new Masto server for my use, but it turns out to require some new hardware, and that process takes a while, especially if you care about getting the hardware right.

Another example: I post bare links in all my syndicated posts, rather than using anchor text. One reader wrote to ask if I could stop to make things easier for the text-to-speech tool he uses to listen to my posts while on the move.

I had to disappoint him: the bare links are there for a reason. In an age where platforms routinely rewrite links so that they pass through an analytics filter, it’s possible to select a bare link, copy it, and paste it into your location bar, bypassing surveillance.

The reader suggested that bare links would pose a problem to visually disabled users, who would have to endure listening to URLs, but I’ve never heard this from a visually disabled person directly, and the one blind friend I asked about it said that he had become so accustomed to skipping over URLs and other machine-readable passages that he didn’t even notice them.

One place where I pay a lot of attention to accessibility is in the alt text for my images. I am not a visual person by nature, and I don’t have a subscription to any of the stock art sites (and most stock images are incredibly bland). Instead, I make weird, phantasmagoric, often barely competent (but enormously satisfying) collages out of public domain and Creative Commons materials:

https://doctorow.medium.com/a-year-in-illustration-ba89d31f5d68

These are often so abstract as to be barely comprehensible (as befits someone working on the weird and abstract issues that are my life’s work) and adding alt text doesn’t just make these more accessible, it also helps me spot areas where I could be clearer.

Three years is an eyeblink — and it’s an eternity. In the three years since I started publishing my work on Pluralistic, under a Creative Commons Attribution-only license, I’ve moved into much longer-form, considered, synthetic pieces, a process that has only accelerated over the past year. Magazines and other commercial publishers have begun to syndicate these pieces, sometimes picking them up for free under the CC license, sometimes paying me to edit or adapt them for their pages. Both are fine with me. I’ve got a lot on my plate — seven books in production! — and I am happy to have my work syndicated for free if it means I don’t have to do more work.

Like Woody Guthrie once said:

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.

[Image ID: William Blake's watercolor of Cerebrus, the three-headed hell-hound.]

#pluralistic #posse #process posts #web writing #anniversaries

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