Cory Doctorow

when they don't have to worry about competitors or regulators or their workforce or new market entry through interoperability, the same CEOs go to the same giant switch on the wall on the C-suite marked in shitification, and they yank it as hard as they can, as they've done every day that they've shown up for work.

And instead of being gummed up, it has been lubricated by an inshitogenic policy environment that allows it to go from zero to 100 with one pull.

And that's how we end up where we are today.

So Facebook, really, its big bang is 2006.

That's when they opened the platform to anyone, not just people with a .edu address from an American college.

And Mark Zuckerberg needs to attract users.

And his problem is that they're all using a platform called MySpace.

So he pitches those users and he says, look, I know you enjoy hanging out with your friend on MySpace, but nobody should want to use a surveillance-driven social media platform.

Come to Facebook and we'll never spy on you.

We'll just show you the things that you asked to see.

So that's stage one, but part of stage one, remember, is that there's a lock-in.

It's just the collective action problem, right?

You love your friends, but they're a pain in the ass, and if the six people in your group chat can't agree on what bar to go to this Friday, you're never going to agree on when it's time to leave Facebook or where to go next, especially if some of you are there because that's where the people with the same rare diseases you are hanging out are.

And if some of you are there because that's where the people in the country you emigrated from are hanging out, and some of you are there because that's where your customers or your audiences, or just that's how you organize the carpool for the kids of Little League.

And so we are locked in.

And so that ushers in stage two, making things worse for end users to make things better for business customers.

So think about advertisers.

Advertisers are told, you know, do you remember we told these rubes that we weren't going to spy on them?

Obviously that was a lie.

We spy on them from asshole to appetite.