Cory Doctorow

And the question that I try to interrogate in shitification is, what gave rise to it?

What created the enshitocene?

and my conclusion is it wasn't because you shopped wrong right it's not because oh you didn't pay for the product so you became the product uh you know farmers who buy half million dollar tractors are exploited by john deere which won't let their uh repairs go live until they pay a 200 call out fee for a john deere person to come out and type an unlock code into the keyboard now that is not a free ad supported tractor

That's a tractor they paid six large for and it won't work until they pay ransom money.

So it's not because you shopped wrong.

It's also not because these guys are the wrong guys to be running the company.

They are terrible people.

But the reality is that these Zucker Muskian mediocrities that run these companies are not smart enough to be causes, they must be effects, right?

They're responding to an environment created by policy.

And that policy, in the case of Google, is the policy that oversaw for decades Google's serial acquisition of both vertical and horizontal competitors.

so that a company that had only made one really successful consumer-facing product, which they made a millennium ago, their search engine, and that had almost, with that exception, failed to launch anything internally, except for things they bought from other people in anti-competitive acquisitions, to the point where they bought all the shelf space.

Nowhere else a search engine could take root.

They're bribing Apple to the tune of more than $20 billion a year.

not to enter the search market and have a direct competitor that would erode their margins.

So they become too big to care.

And this is really my thesis, right?

That it's as much as Ed is right to be angry at Papagar Raghavan, there are people alive today and not so recently dead who presided over shifts in our policy environment where they were warned at the time that the decisions that they were contemplating would have the absolutely foreseeable effect of rewarding firms that did bad things to us.

who took those decisions anyway and today are like hanging around polishing their fake Nobel prizes in economics and collecting six-figure consulting fees working for blue chips and not being held responsible at all, much less worrying that when they go out abroad amongst us that someone might be sizing them up for a pitchfork.

And so that's the thing that I want to recover in this book.

Yeah, I mean, I think Ed makes a really good point here.