Cory Doctorow

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.

So now that he knows that...

He can inflict some pain on you because you love your friends more than you hate him.

He makes things worse for you.

And we get to stage two where he brings in business customers.

So one example would be advertisers.

He goes to the advertisers and he says, do you remember we told these rubes we weren't going to spy on them?

Obviously, that's a lie.

We spy on them with every hour that God sends, and you give us small amounts of money.

We'll target ads with incredible fidelity.