Cory Doctorow

It leaves behind kind of the barest kind of homeopathic residue of value needed to keep users locked to the platform, businesses locked to the users, and delivers all that value to themselves, to the shareholders and the executives.

Yeah, let's talk about Facebook.

So 2006, Facebook goes beyond American College Kids with a .edu address.

They try to lure in people from the general public.

Anyone who wants social media at that point already has an account on a rival service called MySpace.

So Mark Zuckerberg makes a pitch to those users.

Look, I know you love your friends that you hang out with on the MySpace, but I don't know if you realize this.

MySpace is owned by an evil, crapulent, senescent, immortal vampire billionaire named Rupert Murdoch.

And he's spying on you with every hour that God sends.

And like, no one should want to use social media that's owned by a billionaire.

And you should especially not want to use social media that spies on you.

So come use Facebook.

I understand this is quite ironic in hindsight, but we pile into Facebook and we get locked in and not through some of the more exotic tactics that other platforms use, like Uber, for example.

They had this guy, Masayoshi Son, who's a venture capitalist, runs a firm called SoftBank, funnel $31 billion in Saudi royal money.

to Uber so that they could lose 41 cents on every dollar they brought in for 13 years until all the other cab companies had gone in business.

We'd start public transit investment and they could just like double the price of a fare.

So that's like a very difficult, high stakes lock-in strategy.

With Facebook, we just lock ourselves in

And we lock ourselves in through a thing economists call the collective action problem, but you probably know as, you know, you love your friends, but they're a pain in the ass.

So, you know, you got six people in your group chat, they're your best mates, but you can't even agree on like what bar you're going to go to on Friday, much less like when they and all the people that they are on Facebook for are all going to leave Facebook.