Pluralistic: Billionaire-proofing the internet; Picks and Shovels Chapter One (Part 5) (14 Jan 2025)


Today's links


A multiton bank vault door set in a red room. Within the vault, we see a 'code waterfall' effect as seen in the credit sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies. In front of the fault is a ghoulish, skull-faced figure in a tailcoat and a red sash, holding a tube that is vomiting out a poorly differentiated stream of rubbish and slop.

Billionaire-proofing the internet (permalink)

During the Napster wars, the record labels seriously pissed off millions of internet users when they sued over 19,000 music fans, mostly kids, but also grannies, old people, and dead people.

It's hard to overstate how badly the labels behaved. Like, there was the Swarthmore student who was the maintainer of a free/open source search engine that indexed files available in public sharepoints on the LAN. The labels sued him for millions and millions (the statutory damages for digital copyright infringement runs to $150,000 per file) and, when he begged for a settlement, said that they would accept his life's savings, but only if he changed majors and stopped studying Computer Science.

No, really.

What's more, none of the money the labels extracted from teenagers, grandparents (and the dead) went to artists. The labels just kept it all, while continuing to insist that they were doing all this because they wanted to "protect artists."

One thing everyone agreed on was how disgusted we all were with the labels. What we didn't agree on was what to do about it. A lot of us wanted to reform copyright – say, by creating a blanket license for internet music so that artists could get paid directly. This was the systemic approach.

Another group – call them the "individualists" – wanted a boycott. Just stop buying and listening to music from the major labels. Every dollar you spend with a label is being used to fund a campaign of legal terror. Merely enjoying popular music makes you part of the problem.

You can probably guess which group I was in. Leaving aside the futility of "voting with your wallet" (a rigged ballot that's always won by the people with the thickest wallet), I just thought this was bad tactics.

Here's what I would say when people told me we should all stop listening to popular music: "If members of your popular movement are not allowed to listen to popular music, your movement won't be very popular."

We weren't going to make political change by creating an impossible purity test ("Ew, you listen to music from a major label? God, what's wrong with you?"). I mean, for one thing, a lot of popular music is legitimately fantastic and makes peoples' lives better. Popular movements should strive to increase their members' joy, not demand their deprivation. Again, not merely because this is a nice thing to do for people, but also because it's good tactics to make participation in the thing you're trying to do as joyous as possible.

Which brings me to social media. The problem with social media is that the people we love and want to interact with are being held prisoner in walled gardens. The mechanism of their imprisonment is the "switching costs" of leaving. Our friends and communities are on bad social media networks because they love each other more than they hate Musk or Zuck. Leaving a social platform can cost you contact with family members in the country you emigrated from, a support group of people who share your rare disease, the customers or audience you rely on for your livelihood, or just the other parents organizing your kid's little league game.

Hypothetically, you could organize all these people to leave at once, go somewhere else, and re-establish all your social connections. Practically, the "collective action problem" of doing so is nearly insurmountable. This is what platform owners depend on – it's why they know they can enshittify their services without losing users. So long as the pain of using the service is lower than the pain of leaving it, the companies can turn the screws on users to make their lives worse in order to extract more profit from them. This is why Musk killed the block button and why Zuck fired all his moderators. Why bear the expense of doing something nice for users if they'll still stick around even if you cut a ton of headcount and/or expensive compute?

There's a way out of this, thankfully. When social media is federated, then you can leave a server without leaving your friends. Think of it as being similar to changing cell-phone companies. When you switch from Verizon to T-Mobile, you keep your number, you keep your address book and you keep your friends, who won't even know you switched networks unless you tell them:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/29/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms/

There's no reason social media couldn't work this way. You should be able to leave Facebook or Twitter for Mastodon, Bluesky, or any other service and still talk with the people you left behind, provided they still want to talk with you:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

That's how the Fediverse – which Mastodon is part of – works already. You can switch from one Mastodon server to another, and all the people you follow and who follow you will just move over to that new server. That means that if the person or company or group running your server goes sour, you aren't stuck making a choice between the people you love who connect to you on that server, and the pain of dealing with whatever bullshit the management is throwing off:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/#free-as-in-puppies

We could make that stronger! Data protection laws like the EU's GDPR and California's CCPA create a legal duty for online services to hand over your data on demand. Arguably, these laws already require your Mastodon server's management to give you the files you need to switch from one server to another, but that could be clarified. Handing these files over to users on demand is really straightforward – even a volunteer running a small server for a few friends will have no trouble living up to this obligation. It's literally just a minute's work for each user.

Another way to make this stronger is through governance. Many of the great services that defined the old, good internet were run by "benevolent dictators for life." This worked well, but failed so badly. Even if the dictator for life stayed benevolent, that didn't make them infallible. The problem of a dictatorship isn't just malice – it's also human frailty. For a service to remain good over long timescales, it needs accountable, responsive governance. That's why all the most successful BDFL services (like Wikipedia) transitioned to community-managed systems:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/10/bdfl/#high-on-your-own-supply

There, too, Mastodon shines. Mastodon's founder Eugen Rochko has just explicitly abjured his role as "ultimate decision-maker" and handed management over to a nonprofit:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/mastodon-becomes-nonprofit-to-make-sure-its-never-ruined-by-billionaire-ceo/

I love using Mastodon and I have a lot of hope for its future. I wish I was as happy with Bluesky, which was founded with the promise of federation, and which uses a clever naming scheme that makes it even harder for server owners to usurp your identity. But while Bluesky has added many, many technically impressive features, they haven't delivered on the long-promised federation:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast

Bluesky sure seems like a lot of fun! They've pulled tens of millions of users over from other systems, and by all accounts, they've all having a great time. The problem is that without federation, all those users are vulnerable to bad decisions by management (perhaps under pressure from the company's investors) or by a change in management (perhaps instigated by investors if the current management refuses to institute extractive measures that are good for the investors but bad for the users). Federation is to social media what fire-exits are to nightclubs: a way for people to escape if the party turns deadly:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes

So what's the answer? Well, around Mastodon, you'll hear a refrain that reminds me a lot of the Napster wars: "People who are enjoying themselves on Bluesky are wrong to do so, because it's not federated and the only server you can use is run by a VC-backed for-profit. They should all leave that great party – there's no fire exits!"

This is the social media version of "To be in our movement, you have to stop listening to popular music." Sure, those people shouldn't be crammed into a nightclub that has no fire exits. But thankfully, there is an alternative to being the kind of scold who demands that people leave a great party, and being the kind of callous person who lets tens of millions of people continue to risk their lives by being stuck in a fire-trap.

We can install our own fire-exits in Bluesky.

Yesterday, an initiative called "Free Our Feeds" launched, with a set of goals for "billionaire-proofing" social media. One of those goals is to add the long-delayed federation to Bluesky. I'm one of the inaugural endorsers for this, because installing fire exits for Bluesky isn't just the right thing to do, it's also good tactics:

https://freeourfeeds.com/

Here's why: if a body independent of the Bluesky corporation implements its federation services, then we ensure that its fire exits are beyond the control of its VCs. That means that if they are ever tempted in future to brick up the fire-exits, they won't be able to. This isn't a hypothetical risk. When businesses start to enshittify their services, they fully commit themselves to blocking anything that makes it easy to leave those services.

That's why Apple went so hard after Beeper Plus, a service that enhanced iMessage's security by making conversations between Apple and Android users as private as chats that were confined to Apple users:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/07/blue-bubbles-for-all/#never-underestimate-the-determination-of-a-kid-who-is-time-rich-and-cash-poor

It's why Elon Musk periodically freaks out and suspends users who list their Mastodon userids in their Twitter bios:

https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/15/elon-musk-suspends-mastodon-twitter-account-over-elonjet-tracking/

And it's why Meta will suspend your account if you link to Pixelfed, a Fediverse-based alternative to Instagram:

https://www.404media.co/meta-is-blocking-links-to-decentralized-instagram-competitor-pixelfed/

Once upon a time, we had a solid way of overcoming the problem of lock-in. We'd reverse-engineer a proprietary system and make a free, open alternative. We've been hacking fire exits into walled gardens since the Usenet days, with the creation of the alt.* hierarchy:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/altinteroperabilityadversarial

When the corporate owners of Unix started getting all weird about source-code access and user-modifiability, we didn't insist that Unix users were bad people for sticking with a corporate OS. We reverse-engineered Unix and set all those users free:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Project

The answer to Microsoft's proprietary SMB network protocol wasn't a campaign to shame people for having SMB running on their LANs. It was reverse-engineering SMB and making SAMBA, which is now in every single device in your home and office, and it's gloriously free as in speech and free as in beer:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/samba-versus-smb-adversarial-interoperability-judo-network-effects

In the years since, a thicket of laws we colloquially call "IP" has grown up around services and products, and people have literally forgotten that there is an alternative to wheedling people to endure the pain of leaving a proprietary system for a free one. IP has put the imaginations of people who dream of a free internet in chains.

We can do better than begging people to leave a party they're enjoying; we can install our own fucking fire exits. Sure, maybe that means that a lot of those users will stay on the proprietary platform, but at least we'll have given them a way to leave if things go horribly wrong.

After all, there's no virtue in software freedom. The only thing worth caring about is human freedom. The only reason to value software freedom is if it sets humans free.

If I had my way, all those people enjoying themselves on Bluesky would come and enjoy themselves in the Fediverse. But I'm not a purist. If there's a way to use Bluesky without locking myself to the platform, I will join the party there in a hot second. And if there's a way to join the Bluesky party from the Fediverse, then goddamn I will party my ass off.


A remix of the cover of the Tor Books edition of 'Picks and Shovels,' depicting a vector art vintage PC, whose blue screen includes a male figure stepping out of the picture to the right. Superimposed on the art is the book's title in a custom, modernist font.

Picks and Shovels Chapter One (Part 5) (permalink)

This month, I'm serializing the first chapter of my next novel, Picks and Shovels, a standalone Martin Hench novel that drops on Feb 17:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels

The book is up for presale on a Kickstarter that features the whole series as print books (with the option of personalized inscriptions), DRM-free ebooks, and a DRM-free audiobook read by Wil Wheaton:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/picks-and-shovels-marty-hench-at-the-dawn-of-enshittification

It's a story of how the first seeds of enshittification were planted in Silicon Valley, just as the first PCs were being born.

Here's part one:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/09/the-reverend-sirs/#fidelity-computing

Part two:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/10/smoke-filled-room-where-it-happens/#computing-freedom

Part three:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-rich/#a-lighter-shade-of-mauve

Part four:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/13/wanting-it-badly/#discovering-e-discovery

And now, onto part five!

“You gentlemen must have customers who do accounting,” I said. “They know your systems. They know accounts. Why not use someone you already have a relationship with? Someone from the family, as you put it?” I loved solving puzzles; it was what made me both a programmer and an accountant. I had flipped into puzzle-solving mode, and was looking for loose ends where I could begin the untangling process.

The three men looked at each other, then away. This wasn’t a question they wanted to answer.

“When it comes to our customers,” the rabbi said, “we want them to feel . . . safe. We don’t want them to think that the business is being distracted by foolish disputes.”

“We don’t want them to be tempted to take sides,” Father Marek said, and I thought he was being a lot more honest than the rabbi. I could imagine that plenty of people would choose three young, pious women over these three old, feuding, rich clerics.

I could tell that the bishop and the rabbi both resented Father Marek’s answer and were barely keeping themselves from telling him so because they both knew it would make the situation even worse. That was okay. I had the lay of the land.

“I think I understand.” They shifted, looked at each other, at me. They were worried. They thought I might say no. They didn’t have a plan B. “It certainly presents a fascinating technical challenge. My only concern is that it sounds very time-consuming and I have a lot of work right now, honestly. Some days, I feel it’s more than I can handle.” I enjoyed watching that land, seeing their incipient panic. These three weren’t so tough. After all, they’d been made fools of by three cloistered, sheltered young women around my age.

“The job is well-compensated,” Bishop Clarke said. He smiled. All those teeth. “After all, the alternative is a costly, drawn-out lawsuit, and even if we win, all it will accomplish is a shutdown of CF. If you can help us bring them into the Fidelity Computing family, we’ll not only save the lawyer bills, we’ll all make more money. We’re prepared to pay to make that happen.”

“I normally bill my freelance work at twenty-five dollars an hour.” It was a breathtaking sum and I’d had to practice saying it into a mirror so I wouldn’t look ashamed when I named it. I watched them freeze up and do some mental math, contemplating how long it would take to review the documents on ten boxes’ worth of floppy disks.

Bishop Clarke’s smile strained wider, looking like it might be hurting his face. “That’s a very reasonable rate, but we had something else in mind—we thought we might align all of our incentives by offering you a share of the bounty of a successful outcome.”

I regretted coming. What a waste of time. I was only twenty-one years old, but I knew better than to sign up for a commission. Who did they think I was, one of the rubes they got to sell printer paper for them in return for a dollar on every box sold? I almost walked out. I didn’t, though. I had to hear this.

“Could you explain how that would work?”

“You get twenty-five percent,” Father Marek said, staring hard at me. “A quarter of their projected annual revenue, based on the figures you pull out of those files.” He nodded minutely at the tower of floppy disks, not taking his eyes off mine. “Our sales are already down a thousand dollars a month. You figure out how much they’re making every month, figure out how much they’re growing every month, multiply it by twelve, and then divide it by four, and send us an invoice.”

“No matter how much it comes to?”

“No matter how much it comes to,” he said. “Like you said, it’s a lot of work.”

I mulled this over. There was a catch. What was it? I got a hunch.

“No matter what the outcome?” I asked.

They looked at each other. “No,” Rabbi Finkel said. “No, the deal is for a portion of a satisfactory outcome. If your work makes us money, then you make money.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

The rabbi smiled. “I’m sure you’ll find the information we’re looking for,” he said. “We know they’ve broken the law and we know the evidence will be in all those files.”

“But if I can’t find it, or if it’s not enough to convince them to settle and sell?”

“You get nothing,” Father Marek snapped. “Nothing. We win, you win. We lose, you lose.”

I decided I liked him the best of the three. He wasn’t trying to hide who he was or what the situation was. He made it clear he didn’t think much of me, but at least he thought enough of me to give it to me straight. I got the impression that Bishop Clarke would knife me in the heart without losing that amazing smile, and that Rabbi Finkel would murmur reassurances as he gave it a twist. Not Father Marek. He’d give me an honest snarl as he did it.

I had been ready to do it a minute before. Now I was ready to walk. My short time in the Bay Area had made it clear that I wasn’t going to get stock options in the next Apple Inc. just because I kept their books, nor was I going to be able to command giant amounts of money just for showing up and creating the foundations of some hot company’s big product, like Art.

But if there’s one thing I’d learned from accounting, it was that companies didn’t pay you if they didn’t have to.

“I’m sorry, gentlemen—Reverend Sirs—but I think this won’t work out. There’s just too many ways this could go wrong. I could do my job perfectly, put hundreds of hours of work into it, and you could fail to accomplish your merger due to factors beyond my control.”

Their faces turned to stone. They glared at me. The rabbi opened his mouth to say something, but Father Marek silenced him with a pointed throat-clearing. Bishop Clarke turned on his smile. Father Marek gathered up his notepad and put his pen in his breast pocket and slowly climbed to his feet. He was taller—far taller than I’d guessed. He had legs like a cricket’s, they just kept unfolding. I had to force myself not to flinch as he shifted toward me.

“Marty,” the bishop said, “I completely understand, really I do. But there’s no need to give up hope. We’re reasonable people. Perhaps you would like to make a counteroffer?”

I nearly left. But for a moment there, I’d felt close to the dream of Silicon Valley—the riches, the fame, the power to change so many lives. “What about . . .” The rabbi and the bishop leaned forward. Father Marek perched on his long legs and folded his arms. “What about my hourly rate, or twenty-five percent of whatever I make for you, whichever is greatest?”

“What about whatever is least?” the bishop fired back. His smile never wavered.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago Candy-ass vice-principal calls the bomb squad over an 11-year-old’s science project, recommends counselling for the student https://web.archive.org/web/20100117141404/http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/jan/15/students-evacuated-school-chollas-view/

#15yrsago Electrosensitives tortured by a radio tower that had been switched off for six weeks https://mybroadband.co.za/news/wireless/11099-massive-revelation-in-iburst-tower-battle.html

#15yrsago US to Costa Rica: you want sugar markets? We want maximal copyright https://web.archive.org/web/20100118132004/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4697/125/

#15yrsago Charities that AT&T donated to support AT&T’s anti-Net-Neutrality position at the FCC https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/01/why-the-kankakee-county-farm-bureau-hates-net-neutrality/

#10yrsago Vox received no threats for supporting Charlie Hedbo, many threats for covering Islamophobia https://vimeo.com/116582567

#10yrsago Pacific Edge, the most uplifting novel in my library https://memex.craphound.com/2015/01/15/pacific-edge-the-most-uplifting-novel-in-my-library/

#5yrsago McMansion Hell awards its annual prize for the best gingerbread McMansion! https://mcmansionhell.com/post/190275299846/announcing-the-winners-of-the-2019-mcgingerbread

#5yrsago Rating the 30 most evil tech companies https://slate.com/technology/2020/01/against-the-cult-of-apple.html

#5yrsago Security expert offers hacking advice to students whose campuses have implemented pervasive wireless surveillance https://gizmodo.com/how-to-hypothetically-hack-your-schools-surveillance-1840680142

#5yrsago Kentucky’s Whitefield Academy expels student for wearing a rainbow shirt in a Facebook photo https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2020/01/15/rainbowcakewhitefieldacademy/

#1yrago Sympathy for the spammer https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Picks and Shovels Chapter One https://craphound.com/overclocked/2025/01/10/picks-and-shovels-chapter-one/

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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