This week on my #podcast, I read "Let the Platforms Burn," a recent @medium column making the case that we should focus more on making it easier for people to leave platforms, rather than making the platforms less terrible places to be:
https://doctorow.medium.com/let-the-platforms-burn-6fb3e6c0d980
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If 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/2023/07/18/urban-wildlife-interface/#combustible-walled-gardens
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https://doctorow.medium.com/let-the-platforms-burn-6fb3e6c0d980
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If 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/2023/07/18/urban-wildlife-interface/#combustible-walled-gardens
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Let the Platforms Burn - Cory Doctorow - Medium
California needs to burn. For millennia, First Nations people oversaw controlled burns in the forests they lived, played and worked in. These burns cleared out underbrush, saw off sick trees, and…Cory Doctorow (Medium)
Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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What should we do about the rolling crisis of the platforms?
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That's the argument of the column.
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For millennia, the original people of California practiced controlled burns of the forests they lived, hunted, and played in. These burns cleared out sick and dying trees, scoured the forest floor of tinder, and opened spaces in the canopy that gave rise to new growth.
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https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/giant-sequoia-needs-fire-grow/15094/
But this ended centuries ago, when settlers stole the land and declared an end to "cultural burning" by the indigenous people they expropriated, imprisoned, and killed. They established permanent settlements within the fire zone, and embarked on a journey of escalating measures to keep that smouldering fire zone from igniting.
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Yosemite ~ Why the Giant Sequoia Needs Fire to Grow | Nature | PBS
Eric R. Olson (NATURE | PBS)Cory Doctorow
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The thing is, fire suppression doesn't mean no fires - it means *#wildfires*.
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Cory Doctorow
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Eventually, we will have to change tacks: rather than making it safe to stay in the fire zone, we're going to have to make it easy to leave, so that we can return to those controlled burns and pay down those fire-debts.
And that's what we need to do with the platforms.
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Cory Doctorow
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To get to the bottom of this phenomenon, you need to understand two concepts: #NetworkEffects and #SwitchingCosts.
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Cory Doctorow
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Tech has historically enjoyed enormous network effects, which propelled explosive growth.
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https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay
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Adversarial Interoperability: Reviving an Elegant Weapon From a More Civilized Age to Slay Today's Monopolies
Electronic Frontier FoundationCory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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But HP *didn't* fall to Compaq's fate. It survived - as did IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google and Facebook. Somehow, the cycle of "good fire" that kept any company from growing too powerful was interrupted.
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https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040
The answer lies in the fact that tech was born as antitrust was dying.
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https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/6/18531570/apple-company-purchases-startups-tim-cook-buy-rate
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Apple buys companies at the same rate you buy groceries
Sean Hollister (The Verge)Cory Doctorow
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https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/29/21345723/facebook-instagram-documents-emails-mark-zuckerberg-kevin-systrom-hearing
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‘Instagram can hurt us’: Mark Zuckerberg emails outline plan to neutralize competitors
Casey Newton (The Verge)Cory Doctorow
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation
And they colluded to illegally rig the ad-market:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue
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https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/16/compulsive-cheaters/#rigged
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https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
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Cory Doctorow: IP
Locus OnlineCory Doctorow
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So we get rules requiring platforms to spy on their users in the name of preventing harassment, rather than laws requiring platforms to stand up APIs that let users *leave* the platform and seek out a new online home that values their wellbeing:
https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/publication/lawful-awful-control-over-legal-speech-platforms-governments-and-internet-users
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Lawful but Awful? Control over Legal Speech by Platforms, Governments, and
cyber.fsi.stanford.eduCory Doctorow
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https://www.texastribune.org/2022/09/16/texas-social-media-law/
But not laws that require platforms to make it easy to seek out a new server whose moderation policies are more hospitable to your ideas:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/right-or-left-you-should-be-worried-about-big-tech-censorship
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Federal court lifts block on Texas social media “censorship” law
Jesus Vidales (The Texas Tribune)Cory Doctorow
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They're right - but that doesn't mean we should defend them. The problem with the platforms isn't merely that they're bad at defending their users' interests.
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Cory Doctorow
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We don't need a *better* Mark Zuckerberg. We need *no* Mark Zuckerbergs. We don't need to perfect Zuck - we need to #AbolishZuck.
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This month, we got an example of how just easy that migration could be. Meta launched #Threads, a social media platform that used your list of Instagram followers and followees to get you set up.
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https://www.techdirt.com/2023/07/06/meta-launches-threads-and-its-important-for-reasons-that-most-people-wont-care-about/
Meta says it was able to do this because it owns both Insta and Threads. But Meta doesn't own the list of accounts that you trust and value enough to follow, or the people who feel the same way about you. That's *yours*. We could and should force Meta to let you have it.
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https://jogblog.substack.com/p/facebooks-threads-is-so-depressing
When they get tired of "brand-safe vaporposting," they'll have to either give up those relationships, or resign themselves to being trapped inside another walled-garden-cum-prison operated by a mediocre tech warlord:
https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-algorithmic-anti-culture-of-scale
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The algorithmic anti-culture of scale
Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)Cory Doctorow
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https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/platforms-decay-lets-put-users-first
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As Platforms Decay, Let’s Put Users First
Electronic Frontier FoundationCory Doctorow
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https://locusmag.com/2018/07/cory-doctorow-zucks-empire-of-oily-rags/
This is the thing platforms fear the most. Network effects work in both directions: if your service grows quickly because people value one another, then it will shrink quickly when the people your users care about leave.
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Cory Doctorow: Zuck’s Empire of Oily Rags
Locus OnlineCory Doctorow
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http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2022/12/05/what-if-failure-is-the-plan.html
> When I started seeing the disappearance of emotionally sticky nodes, I reached out to members of the MySpace team to share my concerns and they told me that their numbers looked fine. Active uniques were high, the amount of time people spent on the site was continuing to grow, and new accounts were being created at a rate faster than accounts were being closed.
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Cory Doctorow
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Platforms collapse "slowly, then all at once." The only way to prevent #SuddenPlatformCollapseSyndrome is to block interoperability so users can't escape the harms of your walled garden without giving up the benefits they give to each other.
We should stop trying to make the platforms good. We should make them *gone*.
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We should let the platforms *burn*.
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https://craphound.com/news/2023/07/16/let-the-platforms-burn-the-opposite-of-good-fires-is-wildfires/
And here's a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the @internetarchive; they'll host your stuff for free, forever):
https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_446/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_446_-_Let_the_Platforms_Burn.mp3
And here's my podcast feed:
https://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast
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Image:
Cameron Strandberg (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fire-Forest.jpg
CC BY 2.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en
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File:Fire-Forest.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
commons.wikimedia.orga1
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