Sam Cedar, Emma Vigland on the Majority Report. It is a pleasure to welcome to the program Corey Dro, author of Inshitification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. Uh Corey, welcome back to the program. Oh, it's a pleasure to be back on. Thank you so much for having me and congrats on uh the new book. It is um I I had an advanced copy and uh it is it is awesome. And I have to say like the the concept of inchification you've been writing about for a long time. Uh and it is or it feels like it maybe I have no sense of time anymore and it feels like people really understand this almost like um inherently or at least they they're aware of the experience. But walk us through sort of the process of inshitification and this I mean uh walk us through this but you can see this in in in not just online stuff it feels like but this is where it's sort of really almost art form. Yeah sure. So uh you know as you may recall I've I've spent most of my adult life 24 years now working for the Electronic Frontier Foundation on what you might broadly call digital human rights and and getting people to understand those issues. It's kind of an uphill battle. It's very abstract. So I coined this term in shitification and it turns out that giving people like a minor license to be slightly profane is what it takes to get people to care about these very complicated technical issues. So initification proposes uh a kind of theory of platform decay. What it looks like when they go bad, why they're going bad at once now and and why it's so hard for us to leave them even after they turn bad and and then finally what we can do about it. And yeah, sorry. Go ahead. No, no. Well, you know, like uh I I I know that this happens sometimes with restaurants, like you know, the people don't come in, they start to cut back on uh quality of stuff and it starts the demise. But in this instance, this is almost like this is the plan as opposed to like a restaurant, you know, sort of like that's when they're struggling. This is the plan of of the essentially this is the business plan. Well, I would say it's not so much the plan as the playbook because I I actually reject the idea that um these guys had the executive function or forethought to lay and wait for us so long leaving a platform that was good for a while. Maybe I should say, you know, the the characteristic pattern of inshitification is you have platforms that are good to their end users, find a way to lock those users in, then uh make things better for their business customers, find a way to lock the business customers in, make things worse for them, and then turn into a pile of That's the initification thesis. And I don't think they had the I don't think they have the long-term forethought. I think they're like too ketamine adult and and ADHD to do this. I think what happened was we used to have constraints where when these people got a bad idea about how to make things worse for us, to make things better for them. They either realized or someone else convinced them that if they did it, they'd get punished that competitors would swoop in or that hard toreplace employees would leave or that regulators would clobber them or that new technology would be developed says something that made a you know 11ft ladder to go over the 10ft pile of they just thought of. Uh and what happened was over decades as we got rid of all those constraints, the punishments that these completely mediocre terrible people used to worry about or that used to stay their hand or that used to punish them if they didn't worry about it enough and they went ahead with it. Then what happened was that these guys were able to yield to their worst impulses and things just got better for them and worse for us. Does does it have to do with the structure of big tech and the move fast break things period where there was so much investment money there was an attempt to grow the economy through the tech sector and these tools whether it be social media or what have you weren't straightforward in how they were going to make money for for these guys. So they created and like created these tools, raised a a ton of money, and then they have to work backwards from that. Like that's what it it feels like more than anything. It's a failure of our government to catch up to these new technologies. But even more so, it's a function of speculative capitalism. See, I actually completely disagree. I think it's the regulatory environment. So, you know, look at Google. Google wasn't like not making money, right? It wasn't like Google was like getting an investor subsidy like OpenAI is now and then just had to figure out how to turn the screws to make money. Google was the most profitable company in the history of the world and then they made things worse. Uh and so it it wasn't because of an overinvestment trying to catch up. It's because policymakers far from failing to keep up with technology took decisions right like we decided to stop enforcing antitrust laws. You have Google, which is a company that had one good idea in the previous millennium when they made a really good search engine and has had no good ideas since. Everything they've done successfully since then was a company they bought in defiance of antitrust law through forbearance for predatory acquisitions. Uh and you know, their internal uh uh um their internal measures are all things that failed. Uh and we also let these companies invade our privacy. Again, that's not Congress failing to anticipate this. This is Congress just not acting. The last time Congress gave us a new federal privacy consumer law was in 1988 when Reagan banned video store clerks from telling uh the newspapers which VHS cassettes you have. That's why Google spies on us. It's not because they failed to catch up. It's because we let them merge to monopoly. We let the internet turn into five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four. When you have a cartel or a monopoly or duopoly, they capture their regulators. their workers were too short-sighted to unionize when they had a ton of power. And so to the extent that they were able to hold the line by saying, "No, I'm not going to inshitify that thing. I missed my mother's funeral to ship on time for you, and the guy across the street will give me a job if if uh you you fire me and and try and make me do it." That, you know, went away as soon as supply caught up with demand. We've had half a million tech layoffs in the last 3 years. And we saw the monotonic expansion of IP law that makes reverse engineering ad blocking, interoperable clients, alt clients, things that you know would allow uh technologists uh whether working for startups or co-ops or individuals to check those bad impulses. We saw them go away. So I if if I can give one little example here uh in in 1989 uh Bill Clinton signed the digital millennium copyright act. It's a law that bans reverse engineering. It carries a 5-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. And uh what that means is that if you just design your product so that it doesn't have an open way to alter its behaviors, so that you have to reverse engineer it to change how it works, then it just becomes illegal to change how it works. This is how we ended up with like printer ink where you can't just install generic ink. It's not that it's hard to overcome the thing that checks for generic ink. It's just a crime, right? So, imagine like we're in a product planning meeting for our website and uh the guy running the meeting, he says, "I got an idea. We're going to make the ads 20% more obnoxious and invasive. We'll get a 2% increase in topline ad revenue. That's our big KPI. Everyone's going to get rich." Someone who doesn't care about user welfare is going to stick their hand up and say, "You know, Elon, I love how you think, but has it occurred to you? We make the ads 20% more obnoxious. 40% of our users are going to install an ad blocker because you don't need to reverse engineer an ad a web browser to put in an ad blocker. 51% of web users have installed an ad blocker. It's the biggest boycott in human history. Meanwhile, it's illegal to do that for an app because you have to reverse engineer the app to do it. So, when we say, "Okay, well, how obnoxious are we going to make the ads in the in the ad blocker in the app rather?" That same person's going to say, "Oh, no, you should make them like 100% more obnoxious. Get a 10% increase in revenue." And it's not like we didn't warn that this would happen when it when this law was passed. The guy who was responsible for this law, Bruce Layman, Bill Clinton's IPR, he was laughed out of Al Gore's uh information superighhighway hearings. He was chased to Geneva where he made it a wipo treaty at the UN and then Congress was warned when they passed it. These are like totally foreseeable outcomes. It's not that these guys are so smart they're running circles around Congress. It's that Congress created the initienic environment and then we got in a scene. And in that environment, is that created simply because of the sort of like move away from the um uh prior existing antitrust sort of perspective. I mean, which we saw a return brief as it were was during the Biden administration. That's when a lot of these cases, some of the cases were actually started during the Trump years, but a lot of these cases in terms of Google in particular. Um, and you know, we I suppose we could debate as to whether or not the judges understand the political environment they're in. We just saw the remedy part of one of the Google cases was a joke. Uh, I mean, just an absolute farce. Um uh so what and and I know you write about this obviously in the book but the this impulse is just simply always to like water flowing downhill in terms of a pursuit of whatever small profit increase there can be. And if there's no dam there essentially or obstacle, they're just going to go. Yeah, that's right. I mean these guys they get up every morning and they go grab the giant lever yanked in shitification in the seauite and it used to be that stuff used to stop the lever right they had to worry about competitors and regulators and workers and other technologies and they don't have to worry about it so the lever has been sort of lubricated and it moves really freely you know you you mentioned that the judge uh failed in in the Google case and boy did that judge judge Amit meta ever fail but you know it's not like the judges got a mind virus or something Like we even know how the judges lost track of how antitrust law works. So, you know, there was this like fringe guy, Robert Bourke, who was a, you know, arch conservative Nixonite criminal, failed to be appointed to the Supreme Court. And he had this idea that he was borked. He was bored. That's where the term borked comes from. And one of the ways he got borked, by the way, was that his video rental history was leaked, which is why Ronald Reagan signed the last privacy law we ever got. Turned out the best thing you could say about Robert Bor is he had pretty good taste in movies, but I think Congress were like, "Oh no, when they leak my video rental history, it's going to be bad." So they they moved to ban it. So you know, you had this fringe this fringe guy, Robert Bourke, and he had these bad ideas that antitrust was um you know, a fool's errand that when you saw monopoly, it was because like companies were good, right? If 90% of the world uses Google search, it's because it's the best search. and it would be really perverse to punish Google for making a product we all love. And so, uh, you know, they put a lot of money behind that project. Um, they convinced Jimmy Carter to start with the agenda. Reagan really picked it up. But here's the thing. They played an inside outside game cuz judges have to go for continuing education courses just like any other professional. And they funded this thing called the man seminars, mn. They're these luxury junkets in Florida. All expenses paid. 40% of the federal judiciary graduated from it and it was just a session where you would learn about how antitrust was bad and monopolies were efficient. There's good uh empirical work from Princeton researchers showing that judges who attended the man seminars went on to rule differently to rule in favor of monopolies and it wasn't just those judges that were affected because they created an edifice of precedent right so this was just like concentrated wealth right like again it's it's tempting to think of this as like the great forces of history or an intrinsic function of capitalism or the iron laws of economics these were just like a bunch of guys whose names we know who did stuff that would have this predictable outcome and many of whom are like still alive and walking around today and not worrying that someone's going to size them up for a pitchfork and we let kind of let them off the hook when we say oh well Congress couldn't keep up or you know it's because of VCs VCs want as much profit as they can get but they don't want to do things that aren't profitable like when I used to run a a website with some friends called Boing Boing still around I'm not involved in it anymore and in the early days of the web pop-up ads were everywhere and not these like wussy pop-up ads you get now that are like a box inside your browser. It was a whole other browser window. It was one pixel square. It autoplayed music. It ran away from your cursor. And we would try to tell our advertisers, you know, like, "Everyone hates these. We don't want to put them in our website." And they'd be like, "Well, then we don't want to pay for ads on your website." But as soon as ad blocking was turned on by default in the major browsers, we just went to them and said, "Here's our log files. 90% of our users never see a pop-up ad." And all of a sudden, this thing that they were absolutely demanding with no exceptions possible became a thing they didn't give a damn about. VCs only want the things that will make money for them. And the policy environment determines what the rest of us do when they inshitify the products we like. You know, when Mark Zuckerberg was tempting people off of MySpace, he didn't rely on them leaving MySpace, going to Facebook, and then waiting for their dumb friends to join them. He knew that they like their friends more than they hated Rupert Murdoch. So he gave them a bot. It had a login and a password field. You'd go to it would go to MySpace several times a day. It would grab everything waiting for them there. Put them in their Facebook inbox and you could reply to Facebook, push it back out to MySpace. And um he just bled off their users. But you know the expansion of IP law over 20 years means that if you do that to Mark Zuckerberg, he will nuke you till you glow. And so like again, we told the people who made these policies that this was going to happen. They were like, "Oh, you're being hysterical." And here we are, the world's most mediocre billionaire is in charge of four billion people's social media lives. Once that original sin is committed, right, where they think like, oh, you be you're exaggerating. We need to let this to be a fertile ground for for growth, blah, blah, blah. It be is it that much harder to get it back? I mean, a lot of what you talk about in the book is like, you know, the the mass movements that we need to uh reverse things, but the but it's that much harder now, too. I mean on on some level, right? Because Zuckerberg's spending a lot of money to he no longer has to convince people as much. And incidentally, I got to say that man thing I did had no idea about that professional like I know that world in terms of lawyers, but that makes total sense. Uh somebody's funding that thing. It's like it's like what happened with Oxycontton. Uh it is exactly what happened with Oxycottton. It's just marketed to the the the taste makers essentially. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I that's exactly what happened. So I mean I think that that uh sorry I I lost I lost the question because I was let me rephrase it. Let me rephrase it. No no just just refresh me. Well it was it was it was like you know the the obstacles that were faced in reversing it are far greater than maybe in the first place. Okay. I remember now. Let me just add to that in that the environment we're going to be dealing with if we get to a postTrump era like is going to have to be much more radical change like there's no returning back to where we were. That's right. That's right. So I mean talk about like Sure. So yeah, it look the the people who created our antitrust laws, right? The the first one was like Senator John Sherman, brother of Tecumpsa Sherman, you know, the guy who burned Atlanta, you know, they said if we wouldn't allow a king to rule the country, you shouldn't allow an autocrat of trade. And they understood that that, you know, people like John D. Rockefeller were more powerful than most state governments and arguably more powerful than the US government. It was a real uphill slog. And one of the things that laws like the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act take aim at is something called incipiency. So it's not like a merger that will create enough power to take over the government, but a merger that will create enough power to create another merger to create another merger to take over the government. This idea that you want to stop these rollups like we see with like private equity where they buy one funeral home at a time, but eventually all the funeral homes in your neighborhood are owned by one private equity fund and when you die you're you're going to pay rent to them. So, um, the decision not to enforce antitrust law created these monopolies that were very hard to budge. Uh, in 1970, the DOJ sued IBM, and that lawsuit went on until 1982, 12 consecutive years. They called it, uh, Antitrusts Vietnam. IBM spent more on lawyers to fight the DOJ antitrust division than all the lawyers in the DOJ antitrust division cost the US government. They outspent the US government for more than a decade. they ran out the clock. Reagan got elected and he um he halted the the case and so they won. And so you can see why it's like much better to prevent monopolies while they're forming than it is to wait for them to become mature, to become bigger than governments. And I tell this to libertarian friends. I'm like, "Guys, you think that the only role for a government is enforcing contracts? All right, then. Well, the referee's certainly going to have to be more powerful than the players on the field. the smallest government you can have has to be uh bigger than the largest corporation you're willing to tolerate. Otherwise, they're not going to do the job you think that they should be doing. And um with all that said, and it is very dispiriting and um like all the best Americans, I'm Canadian and I'm reminded at times like this of this Canadian apherism from down east that if you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here. And with all that said, something I think that's like quietly miraculous has happened since the late 2010s that a lot of progressives and leftists have not noticed, which is that all over the world, we've seen this surge of antitrust action, right? Yeah. In Europe, I was about to ask you about that, Corey, they're the kind of leading the charge on antitrust with big tech, if you don't mind expanding on that. They sure are. Yeah. The the the Digital Markets Act, the Digital Services Act. I'll give you an idea of how muscular and farreaching the Digital Markets Act is. Apple has just threatened to stop selling iPhones in Europe, right? Which is like not gonna happen, right? You know, like that we we we fetch about how shareholders are short-term, but like this is one place where it works in our favor. You know, Tim Cook going to his shareholders and saying, "Sure, we're not going to sell phones to 500 million affluent consumers right now, but eventually the EU will capitulate and they'll be like, "No, no, no, no, no. We want money in the next quarter. Forget that." Right? So, um it's not just Europe though. So, Canada has had a very weak competition regulator through most of its history. Um, our our competition bureau in its history challenged three mergers and was successful zero times. But in 2024, a guy who's kind of a corporate lick spittle Justin Trudeau led a threeline whip for his uh um MPs and passed the most muscular big aggressive antitrust law in Canadian history. Now, the Competition Bureau is one of the most powerful in the world. We've seen antitrust action in the UK under a series of like extremely shambolic far-right terrible prime ministers. Uh and not only that, but tech antitrust where the digital markets unit was the largest technical antitrust unit in the world. 70 full-time engineers on HMG's payroll. But we saw it in Australia and and we saw it in China. The Chinese uh um cyerspace directive bans Chinese tech companies, the big ones from blocking little ones from competing with them. because I think Xihinping really believes that these companies are not an arm of uh Chinese soft power abroad that they're a competitor for Chinese state power at home and so even he's you know reached the end of his rope with these guys and you know um political science there's there's like uh big studies of you know the Princeton study of thousands of of political outcomes that concluded that the preferences of the public are effectively irrelevant you know if if billionaires want something it happens if billionaires don't wants something, it doesn't it doesn't matter how popular or unpopular it is with the public. This is like defying all political logic. This is water flowing uphill, right? The law of gravity has been repealed all over the world. No one really knows why. And I was just going to ask you like what do you why why do you think that's the case? And I know you have a heart out. Is it it's at 12:55? Yes. Uh yeah, that's probably in 8 minutes. I got to go to my next call. Um but um why do you think that is? or is it just like an awareness of is it just that it's become so like excessive and obvious? I mean, in this country, it's quite clear that we can't even to the extent that we're going to be getting economic numbers anymore out of this administration, the economic numbers that have ostensibly told the story in the past are no longer actually telling the story they purport to because we have such a concentration of wealth that it's almost like a small far more smaller group of people can change what the economy looks like from 30,000 ft. When you get closer to the ground, it's a very different story. Yeah. The consumption numbers just tell you what billionaires are spending and everyone else is like, you know, sitting on a mountain of credit card debt and stuck in place. So, I think, you know, there's a lot of different um factors coming together here. So, you know, Stein's law out of the finance sector says anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. And I think that's sort of what you were just describing that people have really reached the end of their tether. But there's also this idea that like political change is downstream of coalition formation, right? You know, the reason the Trump coalition is so powerful is because a bunch of people who hate each other have agreed to work together, right? When you have like Christian dominionists and uh like Hindu nationalists and uh you know isolationists and imperialists all under the same umbrella, right? That's that's very weird, right? It's a it's like it's um and you see that it's very powerful when it happens. My friend James Bole, he talks about this in the context of the environmental movement. He says that before the term ecology entered our lexicon in the 70s, people didn't know they were on the same side. You know, you care about owls, I care about the ozone layer. It's like what's what's charismatic nocturnal nocturnal avens have to do with the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere? we're not really on the same team, but you can weld a team together by by creating this conceptual framework for it. And I think there's this sense that concentrated wealth is the source of so many of our problems. And while people are like not super offay with uh with antitrust law cuz it's been in a coma for 50 years um there is this uh I think like in COA understanding that anti- monopoly is anti-wealth concentration like literally that's just what it means and you know maybe like generations and playing a terrible board game in our living rooms have taught us what a monopoly is at least right and so when you say we're going to fight monopolies people may not have a a sharp connection between that and the problems that they're facing. But they do know that like this wealth concentration stuff is what's poisoning everything else. And I think that's true on the right. I think that's why you get populist right-wing figures like uh Matt Gates of all people who call themselves a conservative for Lena Khan. You know, it's there's there's like I think those people are waiting to be picked off by us, frankly. uh you know because the the conservatives are not going to deliver on their anti- monopoly promises. You know, Trump is just going to use monopoly law to extract settlement payments from and and concessions from companies. You know, they're to to make companies uh you know, give him all kinds of favorable media attention in exchange for letting Larry Ellison buy every media outlet in America. You know, right? It's an umbrella for essentially for bribes. Uh but um but there still has to be at least some um pretend I think sort of like um support of the broad concept. Yeah. And lip service. Yes. And I guess you know ultimately maybe that lip service ultimately can be ex exploited. Um what can people do? Is it even wor like is there any value in the short term of like particular habits at this point to to push back or is it ultimately we we need political movements to get real change? Well, I don't think it'll surprise you to hear that I'm skeptical of of changing your consumption habits as a way of changing the world. I don't think that you're going to like shop hard enough to make monopolies go away in the same way that it doesn't matter how many buckets you sort your recycling into. It's not going to end the climate emergency, right? But but um you know, that's not to say that um there aren't good reasons, personal reasons to to change what you do. If if like Twitter is ruining your mental health and you think Blue Sky will be better, by all means, join Blue Sky or Mastadon. Not because like it's going to hurt Elon Musk, but because it might help you. And you know, if there's like a a vendor you like or like a artist or a performer and you support them, that's great. you know, by all means, it's like helping someone put groceries on their table and a roof over their head to do something that makes you happy. Sure. Right. But it's not change. Change comes from, as you say, political movements. It's a systemic problem. I, as as I mentioned, I've worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation for going on 25 years now. Um, we have a national network of community and regional uh activist groups called the Electronic Frontier Alliance, efa.eff.org, O RG, Electronic Frontier Alliance from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And um they work on local stuff uh things like uh facial recognition ordinances, limits on landlords colluding to raise rent using uh price sharing platforms, um state laws on right to repair, all kinds of issues that are uh really striking at the way that monopolies uh uh insert themselves into your life personally, right? And uh there's a lot of room at the state level and at the local level to do this stuff. One of the um interesting factors about today's tech monopolies that makes them different from say John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil is that they do the same bad thing to everyone everywhere in the world. You know, John D. Rockefeller had a bunch of monopolies over like oil wells and pipelines and refineries in America and over ports in Germany. And when uh Trustbusters in Germany and Trustbusters in America talked to each other, they had nothing really to say except they didn't like this Rockefeller guy, but it wasn't like they could help each other with their case. Whereas now we get British uh tech regulators writing reports on abuses in the mobile payments market. You have European regulators turning those into laws and court cases. And you have those court cases being copied, translated, and pasted into successful cases in South Korea and Japan. And what we're doing in America with the electronic frontier alliance is we are replicating the successes against flock against real page against predictive policing companies uh across different territories within the US because it's the same scam everywhere right and so the thing that works in one place works somewhere else. We we will put a link to that. And it's also, I imagine, a great place to go and build a larger movement because you're bringing people in there from multiple ideologies. Cory, where can people find inshitification? I mean, the book. Yeah. Yeah. Any bookstore will have it. Uh, it's published by McMillan by their for our stress and jiru imprint. And, uh, they're one of the big five, so they're distributed nationally. You can go to bookshop.org if you don't want to buy Jeff Bezos, another penis shaped rocket. Uh, and you know, the the one tricky part of my uh of my um uh sales channel is that uh Amazon won't carry my audiobooks uh because they're not locked to Amazon's platform. I refuse to do that. So, you can't get them on Amazon, you can't get them on Audible, and you can't get them on audiobooks.com. You can get them everywhere else, though. Libro.fm carries them. Downpour, even Google Play, cuz they don't have this lockin stuff for audiobooks. They have lock in for other stuff. Uh, and you can get my ebooks and audiobooks from me, too. I I have an ebook and audiobook store, uh, craphound.com/shop. And it is the only place I know of in the world where you can buy an ebook from a major publisher that is a sale and not a license. You own it. You can sell it to someone else. You can give it away. You can lend it out. If you and your partner divorce, you can divide it up in the estate. You can leave it to your kids. So, uh, crapound.com/shop. All right. We'll put a link to that as well. Uh Corey, uh really appreciate your work always and thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate having me on. We'll have we'll have to do this again. We have more time. I got to get on my next call. All right. Lovely chatting with you guys. Thanks, Emma. Thanks, Sam. Thanks, Cory. Byebye. Bye. Hey folks, don't forget to hit the subscribe button and check out our daily show. We do it every day at 12:00 p.m. Eastern for about 2 and a half hours. We even take phone calls. You should check that out.