Lately, it feels like tech just kind of sucks. Searching on Google means scrolling through junk results and streamers like Amazon Prime have ad breaks now. According to our guest, Cory Doctorow, this platform decay is part and parcel of the “enshittification” cycle, and it’s coming for absolutely everything. So how do we take back the internet?
That creeping feeling that everything online is getting worse has a name: “enshittification,” a term for the slow degradation of our experience on digital platforms. The enshittification cycle is why you now have to wade through slop to find anything useful on Google, and why your charger is different from your BFF’s.
According to Cory Doctorow, the man who coined the memorable moniker, this digital decay isn’t inevitable. It’s a symptom of corporate under-regulation and monopoly – practices being challenged in courts around the world, like the US Department of Justice’s antitrust suit against Google.
Cory Doctorow is a British-Canadian journalist, blogger and author of Chokepoint Capitalism, as well as speculative fiction works like The Lost Cause and the new novella Spill.
This is Lately. Every week, we take a deep dive into the big, defining trends in business and tech that are reshaping our every day.
Our executive producer is Katrina Onstad. This episode is produced by Jay Cockburn and Andrea Varsany. Our sound designer is Cameron McIver.
Subscribe to the Lately newsletter, where we unpack more of the latest in business and technology.
Find the transcript of today’s episode here.
We’d love to hear from you. Send your comments, questions or ideas to lately@globeandmail.com.
Content Warning Hello lately, listeners. Heads up that this week's episode contains some coarse language. Please be advised.
Vass Bednar I'm Vass Bednar and I host this Globe and Mail podcast lately.
Katrina Onstad And I'm Katrina Onstad 'm the show's executive producer.
Vass Bednar Okay. Is it just me or does Google search suck right now?
Katrina Onstad Good question. The answer is yes. But tell me what you're thinking of.
Vass Bednar No. Like any time I'm searching for something, even links I've like, found in the past. So I know this isn't avast clearing her cookies problem. I am spending more time on the site than I wanted to. I'm seeing stuff that's pretty high up. That's garbage or ads like definitely not the quality information I'm looking for and it's getting really frustrating. And I'm also frustrated with myself because even though I don't like it, I haven't switched away. So some of that anger, you know, is totally on me.
Katrina Onstad Right. Self-loathing. I mean, it's it is sloppy out there, but it isn't just you. Back in August, a U.S. judge ruled that Google build an illegal monopoly over the online search and advertising industry. And that's part of what we're feeling, right. One of the findings during the trial was that Google has been paying companies like Apple more than $26 billion in 2021 just to be the default search option in Safari. Right. Which is, you know, their argument is, well, we're not the only engine, but if it's the default, you're not going to dig around for DuckDuckGo, right? You're just going to Google. Google's a verb.
Vass Bednar I mean, they've also disadvantage those companies from growing rights and put our inertia aside. Today, Google has 90% of the online search market, which is pretty bonkers. And they got it the old fashioned way. According to the ruling. Right. They cheated. So that's ultimately what the case found, that the company has been abusing their power in the marketplace at the cost of competition.
Katrina Onstad All right. Well, let's talk about the downstream effects of this monopoly. This is your zone of interest. Please connect the dots for us. Does Monopoly explain why search sucks, why it's so hard to find the information that we want to hang on.
Vass Bednar I'm just trying to find an answer to that online and it's taking me a really long time. Katrina.
Katrina Onstad Are you not enjoying your ads.
Vass Bednar In effect, like Google is holding us a little bit captive? Right. And this isn't about the size of the company being inherently bad. It's about the company, again, abusing that power. So it's a search engine, but it operates through advertising. And if they can charge people more to get their ads higher up and have our eyeballs spend more time on the site, that's actually what's financially better on them. And, you know, it's not just our dependance on Google that I think we're frustrated with. It's the feeling that there's a lack of choice and that this trend is kind of bigger than just one company, which is why I think the 23 word of the year coined by this episode's guest has such resonance.
Katrina Onstad Yes. Our guest today is friend of the pod, Cory Doctorow. A get for us real get for us. He has been described as a post cyberpunk genius, is a Canadian British blogger, journalist and science fiction author. And the word that he coined, the one that describes this feeling... enshittification.
Vass Bednar Cory says We're in the grips of the great in Shinning and contends that actually all major tech companies are going through this increasingly obvious degradation at the same time right now.
Katrina Onstad Well, I'm glad he named it, but I don't know if I actually feel that empowered by it. Right. Like is enshittification, just a catch phrase, like a catch all that's now applied to everything that's making us mad. Like Disney just introduced an anti password sharing policy and online people were ranting that this was instead ification. Right? Like something can just be shitty and not be part of the enshittiification phenomenon canted.
Vass Bednar Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we're still sharing a Disney password, so no complaints there. Yeah, it it's a Venn diagram. It's absolutely a diagram. It's not a bucket for everything that we don't like, but it's very much intertwined with that lack of competition. It's sort of a precondition. And in his McLuhan lecture, Corey said earlier this year that instead ification is the direct result of concentration of a lack of competition and then the absence of regulations, whether they exist or whether they exist and just aren't being enforced. And this is exactly what lawyers are fighting about right now. Right. Last week, Google's lawyers wrapped up their arguments in a major federal antitrust case in the U.S. against the tech giant that alleges Google inflated the prices for their ads and harmed publishers by taking a cut of every ad they sold. So that's not good for advertisers either. And it's not good for us.
Katrina Onstad Yeah, And all of this is what Cory Doctorow has been flagging for us for ages now. So we got to talk to him about how we got to this moment. Cory Doctorow is writing a nonfiction book about platform decay, and his new novella Spill is out.
Vass Bednar Now, let's be honest, he totally spelled with me going beyond the ads spilling all over my Google page. This is lately. Enshittiification was the American Dialect Society's 2023 word of the year. And here's a thumbnail description the process where tech companies progressively degrade their services to maximize profit at the expense of user experience. What did it feel like when you first experienced enshittiification before you were helping us all name it?
Cory Doctorow Can I make a friendly amendment before I answer that question 100%? Because I think a lot of people had noted that services get worse for their end users. I think what caught people's attention about enshittiification when I started talking about it was not just that, you know, Google's got more ads. It's also that these services are really bad to their business customers. I think companies treat you as badly as they can get away with. And so what enshittiification reflects is that monopoly in monopsony. Right. Powerful buyers and powerful sellers go together that, like anyone who starts with our monopsony, which is something we've been broadly tolerant of for a long time, that's a that's a powerful buyer, eventually converts that into a monopoly and becomes a powerful seller and that like everybody gets that in the neck except for their shareholders. Like ask farmers in Canada how much they like Galen Weston as their sole buyer and then ask, you know, Loblaw customers how they like Galen Weston as their sole seller. Right. Like these are not separable issues. And in fact, there's a kind of opportunity for a bit of class solidarity between suppliers and consumers against these intermediaries who gain all this power and usurp the relationship between them.
Vass Bednar You mentioned monopsony as a powerful buyer. Could you to find it a little bit more or should we do that together?
Cory Doctorow Sure. I mean, you're the one who's like actually got econ training. I'm just the dilettante. So I'll say that a powerful buyer would be someone like Uber, right? Where if you want to drive a taxi in a town, Uber has used predatory pricing, just basically selling stuff below cost to drive everyone else out of business. So the cab company in your town probably either doesn't exist or is just like a shell of itself. And so if you want to drive a taxi, there's only one person who's going to buy your labor and it's Uber.
Vass Bednar You've described it through these three phases, right? User enticement, get us all excited, Get us on board. Monetization and optimization kind of squeeze out as much from our pockets and our credit cards as possible and then the exploitation and degradation. Can you talk about it in terms of Facebook?
Cory Doctorow Yeah, Facebook is like a really good poster child here. So people forget this. There's a scholar who's really done good work on this, Dina Sreenivasan on. So Facebook, you know, it was founded by Mark Zuckerberg so that he and his friends could non consensually rate the ability of their fellow Harvard undergraduates, which weirdly was like kind of a high watermark for Facebook. And, you know, in 2006, he'd raised all this capital and he wanted to open to the broader market. And the problem was that everyone who wanted social media, who didn't go to an American college, they already had an account on Myspace. And so he went to them and he said like, Yeah, your friends are on Myspace. But let me tell you what's good about Facebook. Myspace is owned by an evil australian billionaire who's spying on you with every hour that God sends. Facebook is the privacy preserving social network which will never spy on you. All we ask of you is that you come to Facebook and you articulate your social graph. Tell us who else on Facebook matters to you, and every time they post something will show that to you. And that's the only thing we're going to show to you. So we're going to give you this like heavily customized feed that consists of exactly what you ask for in an environment where we won't spy on you. Next we got phase two. And so the first group of business customers they caught are advertisers. And they go, like you remember, we told those rubes that we were going to spy on them. Obviously we're spying on them. Give us a remarkably small sum of money and we will target them with incredible fidelity for ads. They went to the publishers and they said, Hey, do you remember we told these rubes that we were only going to show them things they asked for? All we ask of you is that you put short excerpts of your content along with a link, and we're going to turn that into a free traffic funnel. We're just kind of like non consensually cram it into the eyeballs of people who never asked to see it and they'll come in, click on the links and then you can monetize them on your, you know, perfectly crime Unit website. And then Facebook, you know, employed what I call the first lesson of the Darth Vader MBA, which is I'm altering the deal. I don't alter it further where the advertisers found that the prices went up, ad fidelity went down. And for publishers, they found that they had to put longer and longer excerpts or they wouldn't be shown not just as like a recommendation, but even to their subscribers. And so the content they were uploading to Facebook became more and more substituted of, of their website. So you know that stage two, right? But stage three is the final stage. It's when the thing turns into a polish and tech Rose called this the pivot. If it were you and I, we call it panic. In the case of Facebook, it's like Mark Zuckerberg sitting bolt upright in bed one night. And. Saying, I've had a revelation. I know I told you that your future would consist of, you know, arguing with your racist uncle using that primitive text interface I created to be creepy about my fellow Harvard undergraduates. But actually, the future is that I'm going to convert you and everyone you love into a legless, sexless, low polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon character in a dystopian cyberpunk world I stole from a 25 year old satirical novel.
Vass Bednar I had blacked out the metaverse, actually. Thanks for bringing it back. Yeah, like free.
Cory Doctorow But I think all of this reflects many things, you know, the cupidity of these founders and so on. But what it really reflects is the collapse of any disciplining force on their worst impulses, on the collapse of competition and regulation, their own workers. And then, you know, specific to tech, there's this powerful disciplining force that's quite subtle and important called interoperability.
Vass Bednar I'm going to pop in and define interoperability. So see how I do and then you fix it. Cory. So the ability of one system to speak to another, your text messages from an iPhone to an Android phone are interoperable.
Cory Doctorow Yeah, that's great. I mean, I think that, like, the thing about Interop that is so useful here and the reason it's weird is that Interop is kind of the ground state of most things, right? Like Nike doesn't tell you who shoelaces you have to use. You buy a KitchenAid mixer and you don't have to use KitchenAid flour in it. You know, your car can put anyone's gas in the tank. There are things that don't interoperate like maybe your your KitchenAid mixer can't use attachments from a meal mixer, but that's because they're like a different shape. It's not because it's a felony to go into a machine shop and engineer the little gizmo that goes between them. You don't need to be that master machinist to make Apple iMessage work with Google Chat. You just need the program someone else wrote. And the only reason you can't get it is because that person would go to prison if they sold it in Canada.
Vass Bednar To clarify, you're talking about Bill C 32, which is also known as the Copyright Modernization Act. And one of the things this bill does is it prohibits the manufacturing sale or distribution of devices that are primarily designed to circumvent digital locks. So basically anything that prevents unauthorized access to copyrighted material. So it's been a year since Internet ification was recognized as being this massive part of the Zeit geist. What phase are we in now? Is this kind of our zombie in-between moment? Are we still languishing in the metaverse or are we seeing maybe more disciplining from those forces you just mentioned?
Cory Doctorow No. If anything, it's getting worse because of all of the factors except for regulation continue to degrade. So, you know, there were 100,000 tech layoffs this year to date. That's halfway through the year and 260,000 last year. One of the forces that really kept tech in check was that a lot of tech workers really, like cared about what they made. Like tech bosses had this workforce that were really powerful because there was such a shortage of tech talent. And so they really, like, leaned into a sense of mission, which works great. If you want to get workers who can command, you know, mid six figure salaries to still show up and sleep under their desk and miss their mother's funeral. Right. If you convince them that it's not that they're being worked by government mules, it's that they're like hero warrior monks as part of a mission to bring the world into a better digital age. The problem is that when you then say, all right, now it's time to, you know, stick a bunch of Wendy's ads and Google Maps, They're like, That's not why I missed my mother's funeral. And they refuse and you can't fire them. So now we can fire them right now. There's just like the problem with getting your labor power from scarcity is it only lasts as long as the scarcity losses. Why unions work? Because solidarity like works in good times and bad. And we still have the IP laws that make interoperability effectively a dead letter. Right? Like we're getting some through the back door through regulation in the EU. But like you can't just hack a service and take out the ads like it's a felony to take the ads out of an app. More than half of all web users have an ad blocker, which you have to understand not just as like what docs URLs cause the largest consumer boycott in world history. Users never go back to a search engine and type. How do I start seeing ads again? Right. So once you push them over that cliff, they're gone, right? They never come back as a source of ad revenue. But no user's ever installed an ad blocker for an app because America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Australia U.S. Free Trade Agreement, the successor to NAFTA, the European Union's copyright directive. All of these rules make it illegal to break the copy protection and break the encryption on the app, which is the necessary first step to installing the ad blocker. Jay Freeman very memorably calls this the felony contempt of business model.
Vass Bednar Now you've made this promise, or you've also forecasted that these platforms. Will die after they and shit if I die. But I'll be honest. I mean, I still buy used toys on Facebook marketplace and I still scroll through X, right? Why don't they die?
Cory Doctorow The fact that we stay on Facebook and that we stay on these other services long after it's obvious to us and everyone we love who's there that these are so harmful to us tells you not that these services aren't harmful, but that they've managed to achieve a kind of lock in that allows them to persist long after. In any sane world, they would have gone by the wayside. Right. That they've managed the trick that Myspace never managed, which is to shamble on even after it's clear that there's no reason to use them. And there's some history to be learned from what happened to Myspace, because Facebook's pitch to Myspace users, it wasn't just like, hey, you know, leave Myspace, join Facebook, wait for your dopey friends who can't figure out that Facebook is better. And while you're waiting, just like reread our awesome privacy policy, they gave those users a bot and you gave that bought your login and password. And several times a day it traveled to Myspace and logged in as you and scraped all the messages waiting for you and put them in your Facebook inbox and you could reply to them and it would push them back out to your Myspace outbox, which meant that you didn't have to choose between the people and the rulers. And the reason we're stuck in there, you know, there was just this triumphant piece about how journalists and other key users of Twitter are still using Twitter, despite the fact that Elon Musk has made it so unpleasant, was really sort of actively performatively mean, to that specific class of users. And it just tells you how much the audiences and colleagues matter to people. It doesn't tell you whether Facebook is fit for purpose or Twitter is fit for purpose, or any of these other services are fit for purpose. And what interoperability gets you is a lower cost to leave. You know, I speak to as a Canadian living in my third country, it was a lot less momentous for me to leave Canada and move to the U.K. and then to the U.S. than it was when my Soviet refugee grandmother left Russia and came to Canada and lost touch with her family for the next 15 years and showed up with only the clothes on her back.
Vass Bednar Was there a moment where you realized, okay, this concept of enshittiification is really connecting with people, even though you'd been talking about it for a while?
Cory Doctorow Yeah, I mean, clearly it just it struck a nerve. And I think that it's very hard for users to know when they're being cheated and when they're getting a good deal. And I sometimes liken this to what I call the giant teddy bear problem. So growing up in Toronto, we used to go to the CNE. Every year it opens on my mother's birthday, August 15th. So that would always be our trip first one out and then we would go in the closing day on Labor Day because we'd all marched in the Labor Day parade with my parents union. Right? So, so that was always the bookend to my summer. And if you get to the midway by like ten in the morning, there's some guy walking around with a giant teddy bear. Nominally, you win it by getting five balls in a peach basket. But practically speaking, no one can get five balls in the peach basket. What's happened is the company has picked out a likely looking sucker and they've said, Hey, sir, I like your face. Tell you what, sink one ball and I'll give you a keychain. Urn, two keychains. You can trade it for a giant teddy bear. And the point is that then that person walks around all day lugging around this giant teddy bear, convincing other people that they can get one, too. And, you know, we see this all over digital services, right? Uber is full of Uber influencers, drivers who make like, you know, at one point, New York was boasting that some drivers are making $90,000 a year for Uber in New York and trying to fight with the MTA over this. Definitely this is what Substack did when they did those guaranteed minimums to all those early influencers that they brought onto the platform. And, you know, Ticktalk, it turns out, has this thing called a heating tool that was identified by Forbes reporter called Emily Baker White that just lets them like override the algorithm and just like give someone a giant teddy bear, right? If they don't have enough sports pros on TikTok, they pick out a few sports pros, give them 30 million views. And those people run around and they say like, I'm the Louis Pasteur of sports content on TikTok. Come follow me. Right. You will be a millionaire if you follow me. And they just don't know, right? Because there's just no way externally to distinguish the case in which you're being recommended, a real recommendation or you're getting traffic because you really have hit a chord. And the case where they're just like giving you a giant teddy bear and on the user side, like Amazon does this with pricing and with recommendations. So when you search Amazon, you're really searching into not like its best guess about what matches your search. You're searching into an auction that may. $38 billion a year in which companies bid to be the top match for your query, irrespective of whether they're a good match for your query. On average, the first box on an Amazon search pages 29% more expensive than the best box on that page. You have to go 17 places down to get that best box. Wow. Right. So this is just like but it's just they can change it from moment to moment. So it's really hard to know.
Vass Bednar Yeah. I feel like enshittiification is a very well earned big teddy bear though, and that you've almost been able to kind of crowdsource these examples, right? The term is resonant and people, I see them using it all the time. I'm also wondering what is it that people might get wrong about in certification? Do you see people calling it out on social media and you're kind of like, that's broadly sort of equated with just things that suck. This isn't enshittIfication is just something getting worse and is that annoying for, you know?
Cory Doctorow So that's the thing that I'm completely fine with. I think that just, you know, as a native English speaker, the one thing we can say about this weird mongrel language that we speak is that it has it makes no bones about like linguistic drift and changing things and pilfering words from other languages. It's fine. I love that I'm a writer. I it would be weird if I didn't love that. The thing that I get a little shirty about is people who miss the next stage of the shit ification explanation, which is it's epidemiology. Like why is this happening now? Right? Like, yeah, we've lost services before Myspace went away and AltaVista went away and all these other services went away. But why are all of them going rotten at once? And is that inevitable? Because that's what I hear a lot of, right? This is inevitable. Every service is going to do this. And I think that actually we need to understand this as a material and materially grounded process that the epidemiology of in shit ification, the contagion relates to the collapse of the constraints that historically prevented in ification. When companies had competitors, on balance, they treated you better. And when they didn't, they lost to those competitors. So now you have companies like Apple. You know, Tim Cook's bringing home a new company for a shareholders more often than you bring home a bag of groceries for your family. Right? You have Google. Google is like made one internal successful product. They made a search engine 25 years ago, almost without exception. Everything they've made sense has been a failure. And all of the successes have been companies they bought, which like prior to the neoliberal turn, the Reagan Mulroney era, it would have been illegal for them to make those acquisitions. So they're not constrained by competition. They're not constrained by regulation because once a company or a sector is dominated by just a few companies, they dominate those regulators, too. And so you get this regulatory capture with market concentration. And so, again, it's like A12 punch. And so what is really happen is that people who used to show up for work every day as the CEO and go to the lever on the wall marked enshittiification and pull it as hard as they could, but barely budge it, not because they cared about users or because they were better people or whatever, but because, like competition and regulation, their workforce and interoperability immobilize that lever in large part. Now it just goes all the way down and it's not inevitable, right? It did. Like we made policy choices. No one came down off a mountain with two stone tablets and said, you know, you must make it impossible for Canadians to change the configuration of the devices that they own. Right? That was like a choice. And we didn't have to make that choice. And we could make a different choice. Like, these are things that we can reverse.
Vass Bednar We've taken a very consumer centric view, I think, so far in talking about in certification, what it means for us, what it means for each other. But I have to imagine that as a trend, it's also bad for for other businesses, for smaller companies, entrepreneurs, even non-digital ones. Could you tell us a little bit more about how that manifests? You know, what else are we seeing other than jacking up prices for advertising?
Cory Doctorow Yeah. Well, you know, Amazon is now taking between 45 and $0.51 out of every dollar you spend in junk fees. Yeah, some of that is an advertising fee. Some of it's a stocking fee. Some of it is a prime fee. Amazon will down rank anything that you try to sell that isn't fulfilled by prime. Even if you offer free shipping through a logistics service. That's as good or better than prime. Amazon uses the fact that the majority of households and it's a gigantic majority of households in the United States. I don't know what the number is in Canada, but it's north of 80% in the United States. Have prime to just ensnare people. Now, Apple and Google do this, too, with the app market. They take $0.30 out of every in-app purchase. You know, Facebook and Google take 51% out of every ad dollar together. You know, historically, the intermediaries there were getting 15%.
Vass Bednar So when you mention changing the structure and the balance, you've talked a lot about how the right public policy can change company behavior for the better and kind of push back against this. You've also pointed to the promise of using antitrust legislation and enforcement. What breaking up these companies actually stem the enshittiification process?
Cory Doctorow Well, it's I think it's a necessary but insufficient condition. So here's how ad tech works. When you go to a Web page, the Web page has a whole bunch of demographics for each behavioral information that it's captured through this wide mesh of basically unregulated surveillance conduct. Right? So you have data brokers, you have location data being sucked up, and you have your car riding you out and your credit card company writing you out. You have, you know, the people to fill your prescriptions, writing you. It's just like the whole stack is just like filling this up. And so you land on the web page and the web page fires off a request to a market and says, you know, I have here like an 18 to 34 year old Manchild living in the 905 who owns an Xbox and has been recently searching for information about gonorrhea. Who will pay to advertise to him?
Vass Bednar Sounds like me.
Cory Doctorow I was thinking of you. Yeah, exactly right. So who will pay to advertise to this young fellow? And then you have advertisers who put bids on the right to show you an ad, and those bids are entered into the marketplace and the high bid, or sometimes the second highest bid, depending on the auction design, gets to show you an ad. Now, that is why when you load a certain kind of web page, you can wait like a long time for that web page to render its all those auctions firing off in the background in real time. It's like a surveillance lag. But what I want to talk about here is that Google and Matta each represent that whole stack. So Google in Matter have a demand side platform that represents advertisers, a sales side platform that represents sellers. They have a marketplace. They're also both advertisers and they're also both publishers that display advertising. So this is like you and your partner getting a divorce and realizing that you're both represented by the same lawyer and that that lawyer is also the judge and that they're trying to match with both of you on Tinder during the divorce proceedings. And then when the divorce proceeding ends, rather than you or your partner getting the house, the lawyer gets the house. Right. So breaking up the ad tech stacks will go a long way.
Vass Bednar Well, what else? What's next? What needs to change in the next 10 or 15 years so that we can get out of this zombie phase?
Cory Doctorow Well, if you start with the four constraints that prevent enshittiification, you get a roadmap to the four constraints that will prevent it in the future. So the first is competition. We have to stop companies from buying each other. We have to stop them from using predatory pricing. So, you know, when Amazon.com wanted to buy Diapers.com, Amazon didn't like conquer all the markets that it runs now by being better than everyone else. They just bought all the rivals that had different little verticals and Diapers.com wouldn't sell. So Amazon just like spent $100 million and over the course of a couple of months selling diapers significantly below cost. Diapers.com went under Amazon, bought them for pennies on the dollar and then shut them down. Right. And so if we can restore those traditional US contours, which like frankly, the Biden administration has done a really good job on, and weirdly, it's with the support of a large number of Republicans that I disagree with about everything else. Like there's a bill called the America Act in the Senate right now that will force the tech companies to break up their tech stocks. And its two main co-sponsors are Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz. Right. So there's a lot of support on both sides of the aisle for this. So Canada, you know, we just saw some changes to the Competition Act. We need to restore regulation. Some of that has to do with the transnational nature of. Companies. Tech companies are really good at flying flags of convenience. This is why the European Union had a hard time enforcing its general data protection regulation, the GDPR, its privacy rule, because all the companies just pretended they were Irish and then they let it be known in Ireland that if they wanted to remain a successful tax haven, they also to be a regulatory haven. You know, if you can pretend to be Irish today, you could pretend to be Maltese or Cypriot tomorrow. So, you know, in the US we're maybe going to get a privacy law for the first time since 1988, the last consumer privacy law the US Congress passed bans video store clerks from telling newspapers what VHS cassettes you took home like three things that basically don't exist anymore.
Vass Bednar Still a good principle, though.
Cory Doctorow Yeah. Yeah. But it'd be nice if we could, like, move on from 1988.
Vass Bednar Agreed.
Cory Doctorow And have some more privacy rules about, like whether, you know, your car can report the fact that you have driven across state lines to an abortion clinic, to a data brokerage that sells that information to a bounty hunter. Like maybe we should have that law, too, right?
Vass Bednar Absolutely. It strikes me that you are kind of the caretaker and relentless champion of insured ification, for better or for worse. What is it like to nurture this concept through its zeitgeist From a blog post to a Word of the Year magazine articles, policy actions to a book. And how are you going to be able to make space for other thinking in the future?
Cory Doctorow Well, look, this is like just the latest iteration of something I've been talking about for 20 plus years. And this is a relentless hunt for like, metaphors and analogies and dirty words that are fun to say, that get people to actually pay attention. And, you know, like it's not hard to get people to pay attention to, like things that are really important but esoteric. All you need to do is wait until they erupt into a full blown crisis and it's too late to do anything. And people will really care. Right. Like the complex nexus of factors that are driving rhinoceroses to extinction are hard to get people to care about. You know, while there's a lot of rhinoceroses, but when there's just like one left, it's kind of undeniable. The problem is that, like, the difference between nihilism and denialism is just like one syllable. And we go from like, I don't see what the problem is with the rhinos to, okay, there's only one life. Clearly it's a problem, but why don't we find out what it tastes like? And so a lot of the work of an activist is just like hunting for ways to get people to care before circumstances mean that they can't not care. We lost that one on privacy, to be honest. Like, we're going to be so long repairing the privacy debt that we have. We're seeing this now where we're getting these giga breaches of medical data and other forms of sensitive data from these big services, especially like there are these powerful intermediaries. Now, it's part of the same story where like, you know, one company handles all the title clearance for every car sale in America and another one handles all the prescriptions and another one. Like all of these these, you know, gargantuan intermediaries that have the information security now, sort of like a kindergarten and are just like reaching billions of records. You know, El Salvador just had a hacker break their national ID database, which has the fingerprints, full name and other biometrics of every person, including infants in the country. And when they couldn't get a ransom for it, they started selling it on the darknet for $250. So you can buy a whole country's irrevocable biometric data for $250. Right. So we just really failed to get people to to take this stuff seriously. And now it's like asbestos in the walls. It's going to be making people sick for so long and we're going to be pulling it out of the walls for so long. And like, you know, I'm just not going to stop. Like, we will get a bunch of people interested in this, but we're going to reach a plateau of people for whom the titillation of saying and should vacation will wear thin. And then I'll find something else to call it and another way to talk about it.
Vass Bednar Well, Corey, thank you for helping us chase rhinos and pull this asbestos out of the wall. Thank you for helping us care.
Cory Doctorow Thank you Vass
Vass Bednar You've been listening to lately, a Globe and Mail podcast. Our executive producer is Katrina Onstad. This episode is produced by Jay Cockburn and Andrea Varseny. And our sound designer is Cameron McIvor, and I'm your host, Lasse Bittner. In our shownotes, you can subscribe to the Lately newsletter. That's where we unpack just a little more of the latest in business and technology. A new episode of Lately comes out every Friday wherever you get your podcasts.