Cory Doctorow

And what's being filled in that void is stuff that people are being charged billions of dollars for that they're getting ripped off on too.

Now you get to this stage that they've been shooting for, this equilibrium where all the available value has been harvested.

But it's very brittle, this equilibrium, because you get one live stream mass shooting or Cambridge Analytica scandal, people bolt for the exits, shareholders pound the company's stock, and the founders and the executives, they panic.

Although being technical people, they have a technical term, they call it pivoting.

And so Mark Zuckerberg arises from his sarcophagus one morning and says, you know, hearken unto me, brothers and sisters, for I've had a vision.

I know that I told you that your future would consist of arguing with your most racist uncle using this primitive text interface that I created to non-consensually rate the fuckability of Harvard undergraduates.

However, in this vision, I have realized that the true future is one in which I transform you and everyone you love into a legless, sexless, low polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon character so that I can imprison you in a virtual world I stole from a 25-year-old dystopian, cyberpunk, satirical novel that I call the metaverse.

And that's the final stage of machinerication.

The platform is now a giant pile of shit.

So now you're getting into the theory part of it, right?

Not the descriptive part.

Because obviously we didn't invent greed in the middle of the last decade.

So something changed that caused these companies to start doing this extraction.

And my theory is that what changed is that...

We have this, as I say, in shitogenic policy environment, that our policymakers took decisions in living memory after being warned about the consequences that had the outcome of making it so that when companies mistreat you or mistreat their suppliers or their business customers, that rather than losing in the market by having their profits decline, their workers depart, their customers jump ship, that they gain in the market, they do better.

And so in shitification is not just when a platform goes bad, it's when a platform goes bad and does well.

And so you could see two platforms, both of which were doing bad things to you.

But I would argue that it's not really in shitifying unless they thrive as a consequence, right?

If they fail as a consequence, well, that's just how the market works, right?

I'm not the world's biggest believer in markets.