Cory Doctorow

I think a lot of people would echo that, but they would stop there.

They would say, oh, you're not paying for the product, so you're the product.

So this is about luring in users and then getting in business customers will pay for it.

But that's not where it stops because the business customers are also getting screwed because the business customers get locked in and this power that the platforms end up with over their business customers is then expressed in stage three, where they extract from those business customers as well.

They dial down the value left behind in the platform

to the kind of minimum homeopathic residue needed to keep the users locked to the platform, the businesses locked to the users, and everything else is split up among the executives and the shareholders.

And that's when the platform's a pile of shit.

But the more important part, as I say, is why this is happening now.

Broadly, my thesis is that platforms used to face consequences when they did things that were bad for their stakeholders.

And those consequences came in four forms.

They had to worry about competitors, but we let them buy those.

They had to worry about regulators, but when a sector is boiled down to a cartel, they find it very easy to agree on what they're going to do and make their preferences felt because they have a lot of money and because they're not competing with one another and they capture their regulators.

They had to worry about their workers because tech workers were in very scarce supply and they're very valuable.

They often really cared about their users and they could really say, no, I'm not going to un-shitify that thing I missed my mother's funeral to ship on time.

and make it stick because there was no one else to hire if they quit.

And they were bringing a lot of value to the firm.

But of course, tech workers famously thought that they were temporarily embarrassed founders and they didn't unionize.

They didn't think they were workers.

So when the power of scarcity evaporated, they had not replaced it with the power of solidarity.

And so now you have 500,000 tech layoffs in three years and tech workers can't hold the line.