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A company can structure itself as a public benefit corporation and make a binding promise to elevate its stakeholders' interests over its shareholders' - but the CEO can still take a secret $100m bribe from cryptocurrency creeps and try to lure those stakeholders into a shitcoin Ponzi scheme:

https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/03/11/kickstarter-blockchain-a16z-crypto-secret-investment-chris-dixon/

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The untold story of Kickstarter’s crypto Hail Mary—and the secret $100 million a16z-led investment to save its fading brand

Inside the once-hot startup’s struggle to regain relevance despite a massive check from the crypto arm of venture giant Andreessen Horowitz.

^{Leo Schwartz (Fortune)}

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A key resource can be entrusted to a nonprofit with a board of directors who are charged with stewarding it for the benefit of a broad community, but when a private equity fund dangles billions before that board, they can talk themselves into a belief that selling out is the right thing to do:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/how-we-saved-org-2020-review

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How We Saved .ORG: 2020 in Review

If you come at the nonprofit sector, you’d best not miss.Nonprofits and NGOs around the world were stunned last November when the Internet Society (ISOC) announced that it had agreed to sell the Public Interest Registry—the organization that manages …

^{Electronic Frontier Foundation}

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"Indeed, I'm doubly moral here, because I'm volunteering to look like the bad guy, just so I can save this business, which will make the world over for the better":

https://locusmag.com/2024/05/cory-doctorow-no-one-is-the-enshittifier-of-their-own-story/

(En)shit(tification) flows downhill, so tech workers grapple with their own version of this dilemma.

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Cory Doctorow: No One Is the Enshittifier of Their Own Story

No one was more surprised than I was when the American Dialect Society named ‘‘enshittification’’ – my dirty little coinage to describe how everything on the internet is (suddenly, simultaneously) …

^{Locus Online}

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Where regulators fail, technology can step in. The flexibility of digital platforms cuts both ways: when the company enshittifies its products, you can disenshittify it with your own countertwiddling: third-party ink-cartridges, alternative app stores and clients, scrapers, browser automation and other forms of high-tech guerrilla warfare:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

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Adversarial Interoperability

“Interoperability” is the act of making a new product or service work with an existing product or service: modern civilization depends on the standards and practices that allow you to put any dish into a dishwasher or any USB charger into any car’s c…

^{Electronic Frontier Foundation}

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But tech giants' regulatory capture have allowed them to expand "IP rights" to prevent this self-help. By carefully layering overlapping IP rights around their products, they can criminalize the technology that lets you wrestle back the value they've claimed for themselves, creating a new offense of "felony contempt of business model":

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

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Cory Doctorow: IP

You’ve probably heard of “open source software.” If you pay at­tention to the politics of this stuff, you might have heard of “free software” and even know a little ab…

^{Locus Online}

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But these feeds are a profoundly tempting enshittification target. The critique of these algorithms has largely focused on "addictiveness" and the idea that platforms would twiddle the knobs to *increase* the relevance of material in your feed to "hack your engagement":

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/04/has-dopamine-got-us-hooked-on-tech-facebook-apps-addiction

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Has dopamine got us hooked on tech?

Silicon Valley is keen to exploit the brain chemical credited with keeping us tapping on apps and social media

^{Simon Parkin (The Guardian)}

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Users were helpless before this kind of twiddling. On the one hand, they were locked into the platform - not because their dopamine had been hacked by evil tech-bro wizards - but because the loved the friends they had there more than they hated the way the service was run:

https://locusmag.com/2023/01/commentary-cory-doctorow-social-quitting/

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Commentary: Cory Doctorow: Social Quitting

As I type these words, a mass exodus is underway from Twitter and Facebook. After decades of eye-popping growth, these social media sites are contracting at an alarming rate. In some ways, this sho…

^{Locus Online}

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This is a perfect breeding-ground for enshittification: different parts of the business can twiddle the knobs to override the algorithm for their own parochial purposes, shifting the quality:shit ratio by unnoticeable increments, temporarily toggling the quality knob when your engagement drops off:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tiktoks-secret-heating-button-can-make-anyone-go-viral/

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TikTok’s Secret ‘Heating’ Button Can Make Anyone Go Viral

TikTok and ByteDance employees regularly engage in “heating,” a manual push that ensures specific videos “achieve a certain number of video views,” according to six sources and documents reviewed by Forbes.

^{Emily Baker-White (Forbes)}

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Back in 2004, when Mark Zuckerberg was coming to grips with Facebook's success, he boasted to a friend that he was sitting on a trove of emails, pictures and Social Security numbers for his fellow Harvard students, offering this up for his friend's idle snooping. The friend, surprised, asked "What? How'd you manage that one?"

Infamously, Zuck replied, "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me.' Dumb fucks."

https://www.esquire.com/uk/latest-news/a19490586/mark-zuckerberg-called-people-who-handed-over-their-data-dumb-f/

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Mark Zuckerberg Called People Who Handed Over Their Data "Dumb F****"

He might as well have predicted Facebook’s downfall 

^{Laura Raphael (Esquire)}

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When you've got more than a hundred dollars sunk into a video game and an online-only friend-group you raid with, the games company can do a *lot* of enshittification without losing your business, and they know it:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/10/24153809/ea-in-game-ads-redux

Even if they sometimes overreach and have to retreat:

https://www.eurogamer.net/sony-overturns-helldivers-2-psn-requirement-following-backlash

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Sony overturns Helldivers 2 PSN requirement following backlash

Sony has backtracked on its plans to enforce mandatory PSN linking for Helldivers 2 players on Steam, following backlash.

^{Victoria Kennedy (Eurogamer.net)}

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A tech company that seeks your trust for an algorithmic feed *needs* Ulysses pacts, or it will inevitably yield to the temptation to enshittify. From strongest to weakest, these are:

* Not showing you an algorithmic feed at *all*;

https://joinmastodon.org/

* "Composable moderation" that lets multiple parties provide feeds:

https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation

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Mastodon - Decentralized social media

Learn more about Mastodon, the radically different, free and open-source decentralized social media platform.

^{joinmastodon.org}

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Next Tuesday (May 14), I'm on a livecast about AI and enshittification with @timoreilly:

https://www.oreilly.com/live-events/tim-oreilly-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification-and-the-future-of-ai/0642572001651/

Wednesday (May 15), I'm in North Hollywood with Harry Shearer for a screening of Stephanie Kelton's *Finding the Money*:

https://www.laemmle.com/film/finding-money?date=2024-05-15

Friday (May 17), I'm in San Francisco at the @internetarchive to keynote the tenth anniversary of the @AuthorsAlliance:

https://www.authorsalliance.org/2024/03/15/authors-alliance-10th-anniversary-event-authorship-in-an-age-of-monopoly-and-moral-panics/

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Authors Alliance 10th Anniversary Event: Authorship in an Age of Monopoly and Moral Panics

Register here for this IN-PERSON event hosted in San Francisco at the Internet Archive on May 17 Moral panics about technology are nothing new for creators. Copyright, in particular, has been a fav…

^{Authors Alliance}

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