Cory Doctorow

And Tim used the word power when he responded to that.

And I think that, you know, if you ask the neoclassicals, they'll say, well, we like models.

And it's hard to model qualitative aspects like power.

So we just leave them out of the model and hope that it's not an important factor.

And this is how you get these incredibly bizarre conclusions, like if you sell your kidney to make the rent, you have a revealed preference for having one kidney.

But what we actually know when we give people choices, when the state intervenes or when there's countervailing power, is that often you get a different revealed preference.

You know, when Apple gave...

Facebook users the power to tick a box and opt out of Facebook spying, 96% of Apple users tick that box.

So the argument that Facebook users don't mind being spied on, I think is blown out of the water when you actually give them a way to express preferences.

And I assume the other 4% were like either drunk or Facebook employees or drunk Facebook employees, which makes sense because I would be drunk all the time if I worked at Facebook.

But I think it's hard to deny that people really don't want to be spied on if they can avoid being spied on.

I think that's a good setup to in shitification.

Yeah.

In shitification, it's really a label I hung on both an observation about a characteristic pattern of how platforms go bad, but I think much more importantly, why they're going bad now, because we didn't invent greed in the middle of the last decade.

So something has changed.

My thesis is that some exogenous factors have changed.

So the pattern of platform decay is that platforms are first good to their end users while locking them in.

That's stage one.

And once they know that the users have a hard time departing when they face a collective action problem or when they have high switching costs, you can make things worse for the end users, safe in the knowledge that they are unlikely to depart, in order to lure in business customers by offering them a good deal.

And so far, so good.