#euthanizing rentiers

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Thankful for class consciousness

On November 27, I'm appearing at the Toronto Metro Reference Library with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.

On November 29, I'm at NYC's Strand Books with my novel The Lost Cause, a solarpunk tale of hope and danger that Rebecca Solnit called "completely delightful."

Before the term "ecology" came along, people didn't know they were on the same side. You care about owls, I care about the ozone layer – what does the destiny of charismatic nocturnal avians have to do with the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere?

But as James Boyle has written, the term "ecology" welded together a thousand issues into a single movement. When we talk about "looking at our world through a lens," this is what we mean – apply the right analytical lens and a motley assortment of disparate causes becomes a unified, coherent project:

https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1013&context=dlj

Unfettered, planet-destroying, worker immiserating corporate power is only possible in the absence of such a lens. Before neoliberalism can destroy our lives, it must first convince us that we are all disconnected. "There is no such thing as society," isn't just an empty slogan: it's a weapon for dismantling the democratically accountable structures that can stand against industrial tyrants.

That's why neoliberalism is so viciously opposed to all kinds of solidarity, why corporate apologists insist that the only elections that matter are the ones where you "vote with your wallet." It's no surprise that the side with the thickest wallets wants to replace ballots with dollars!

Today, at long last, after generations of deadly corporate power-grabs, we are living through an ecology moment where all kind of fights are coalescing into one big fight: the fight to save democracy from oligarchy.

There are many tributaries flowing into this mighty river, but two of the largest are antitrust and labor. Antitrust seeks to ensure that our world is regulated by democratically accountable lawmakers who deliberate in public, rather than shareholder-accountable monopolists who deliberate in smoke-filled rooms. Labor seeks to ensure that contests between profit for the few and prosperity for the many are decided in favor of people, not profit.

This coalition is so powerful that the ruling class has never stopped attacking it. Indeed, the history of US antitrust law can be viewed as a succession of ever-more-insistent laws enacted solely to make it clear to deliberately obtuse judges that competition law is aimed at corporations, not unions:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/14/aiming-at-dollars/#not-men

Rising corporate power and declining worker power is bad for all of us. The failure of successive US administrations to block airline mergers led to sky-high prices and a proliferation of "junk fees" that can double the price of a ticket. The monopoly carriers stand to make $118b this year from these fees:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90981005/airlines-fees-118-billion-dark-patterns

The consolidation of the agricultural sector led to cartels that conspired to rig the prices of our food. These Les Mis LARPers rigged the price of bread!

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-bread-price-fixing-1.6883783

Remember eggflation? Nearly all the eggs in US grocery stores come from a single company, Cal-Maine, which owns dozens of brands, including "Farmhouse Eggs, Sunups, Sunny Meadow, Egg-Land’s Best and Land O’ Lakes eggs":

https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/13/business/egg-prices-cal-maine-foods/index.html

With all our eggs in one basket, it was easy for a single company to rig the egg market, blaming everything from bird flu to Russian invasion of Ukraine for doubling egg prices while their profits shot up by 65%:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/23/cant-make-an-omelet/#keep-calm-and-crack-on

Antitrust isn't just about monopoly – it's also about oligopoly. The American meat cartel pretends that it's not rigging markets by outsourcing its price-fixing to a "clearinghouse" called Agri Stats:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

Agri-Stats gets data from all the Big Meat companies, "anonymizes" it, and publishes it back to its subscribers, who use the service to coordinate across-the-board price-hikes that have cost the public billions in price gouging (meanwhile, Big Meat was able to secure $50b in public subsidies).

For forty years, governments have ceded power to "autocrats of trade" who usurped control "over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

But that era is coming to an end. In the past year, American regulators have blocked airline mergers and promulgated rules banning junk fees. They've dragged price-fixing clearinghouses into court:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-turkey-eggs-and-air-travel-just

They're getting results, too: for the second year in a row, turkey prices are down. Cranberries, too (18%). Same for whipping cream (25%). Pie crusts are down. So are russet potatoes. Airfares are down 13.2%.

The egg cartel just lost a long-running court case over the last egg price-fixing campaign, which gouged Americans from 1990-2008:

https://www.pymnts.com/cpi_posts/kellogg-kraft-secure-victory-in-price-fixing-lawsuit-against-egg-producers

The same fact-pattern that was revealed in that court case is repeated in this year's eggflation scandal:

https://farmaction.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Farm-Action-Letter-to-FTC-Chair-Lina-Khan.pdf

That's terrific ammo for the FTC, and will doubtless benefit the Democrats running against would-be Indiana senator John Rust, whose family owns convicted egg cartel member Rose Acre Farms and whose wife just stepped down as chair of the board.

One underappreciated aspect of the global war on corporate power is that the same corporations commit the same crimes in countries all over the world, which means that whenever any government establishes evidence of those crimes, they are of use to all the other governments. Competition enforcers from the UK, EU, USA, Singapore, South Korea and elsewhere are coordinating to target the Big Tech cartel. Maybe Google and Facebook and Apple are bigger enough to resist any one of those governments – but all of them?

https://cmadataconference.co.uk/

One notable absence from the anti-monopoly coalition is Canada. While other countries merely stopped enforcing their competition laws in the neoliberal era, Canada never had a good competition law to enforce. Canada's official tolerance for monopolies has allowed a handful of companies to seize control over the economy of Canada and the lives of Canadians:

https://www.canadaland.com/shows/commons-monopoly/

These monopolies are largely controlled by powerful families, Canada's de facto aristocracy, whose wealth and power make them above the law and subordinate the country's democratic institutions to billionaires' whims:

https://www.canadaland.com/tag/dynasties/

At long last, Canada has called time on oligarchy. Last week's Fall Economic Statement included an announcement of a muscular new competition law, including new merger guidelines, a new "abuse of dominance" standard, and Right to Repair rules:

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7132855021548769282/

The law also includes interoperability mandates for Canada's highly concentrated – and deeply corrupt – banking sector. These measures are strikingly similar to new measures just introduced in the US by the CFPB:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/let-my-dollars-go/#personal-financial-data-rights

The arrival of Canada's first fit-for-purpose competition rule coincides with all kinds of solidaristic movements in Canada that are fighting corporate power from the bottom up. Even Ontario, led by one of the most corrupt premiers in provincial history, can't break its teachers' union:

https://globalnews.ca/news/10105600/ontario-elementary-teachers-reach-contract-deal/

It's not just workers who benefit from solidarity: Tenants' unions have formed across the province in response to corporate takeovers of scarce rental stock. These finance-sector landlords have armies of lawyers who've figured out how to bypass rent-control rules and evict tenants who balk. Rather than rolling over, tenants' unions are organizing waves of rent-strikes:

https://macleans.ca/longforms/rent-strikes-canada/

As with Big Tech, the illegal tactics of the rental sector aren't confined to a single nation. In America, Wall Street landlords have dramatically increased the price of housing and kicked off an eviction epidemic the likes of which the country has never seen:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/16/mortgages-are-rent-control/#housing-is-a-human-right-not-an-asset

And as with Big Meat, landlords use arm's-length clearing houses to rig rental markets, coordinating across-the-board rent hikes:

https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent

In other words: to fix the housing market, tenants all over the world need to learn the tactics of labor unions. Housing regulators have to learn from agricultural regulators. Americans tenants have to learn from Canadians. These aren't 1,000 different fights – they're one big fight, and the coalition for dismantling corporate power is vast and powerful.

The most powerful weapons our bosses have is convincing us that we are weak and they are strong – so strong that we shouldn't even try to fight them. But solidarity is absurdly powerful, which is why they go to such great lengths to discredit it. In Sweden, the solidarity strikes against Tesla – who refuses to recognize its maintenance workers' union – have spread to nine unions.

Tesla can't get its cars offloaded at the ports. It can't get its showrooms cleaned. No one will deliver its mail. No one will fix its chargers. The strike is spreading to Germany, and workers at its giant Berlin factory is set to walk out:

https://www.metafilter.com/201514/Swedish-Tesla-workers-go-on-strike

There's something delicious about how palpably frustrated Elon Musk is by all this, as he realizes that neither his billions nor his bully pulpit are a match for workers in solidarity:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-23/elon-musk-calls-swedish-tesla-strikes-insane-as-impact-spreads

It's a reminder of just how fragile and weak billionaires are, when we stop believing in them and deferring to them. Rebecca Solnit's latest Guardian column adds up the ways that allowing billionaires to run the show puts us all in danger:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/20/billionaires-great-carbon-divide-planet-climate-crisis

They are the unelected "autocrats of trade" who control "the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life." They are the force that this new ecology movement is coalescing to fight: across borders, across sectors, across identities. No matter whether you are a worker, a tenant, a voter, a shopper or a citizen, your enemy is the billionaire class.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/24/coalescence/#solidarnosc

[racefortheironthrone]

What did Keynes mean by Socialization of investment? What sort of policies does that entail?

When Keynes uses the term socialization, what he's talking about is the transformation of an industry or other economic process from a laissez-faire free market to something close to nationalization in a socialist revolution, although he believed the same results could be achieved without formal nationalization and government ownership of the means of production - if you established the right public policies that would promote a mixed economy.

So of all the economic processes to socialize, why investment? Keynes was pretty critical of the private market, especially the stock market, when it came to investment. He felt that there was chronic under-investment in new capital equipment and R&D, and that far too much capital was effectively wasted in gambling on stocks and bonds and then ultimately even more abstract and unproductive financial assets (think derivatives, bitcoin, NFTs). He referred to the stock market as an irrational casino - and since he had been a professional investor and investment manager who had won and lost and won several large fortunes on the stock market, he knew what he was talking about. So Keynes felt that instead of relying on the free market to provide the investment that Europe and the United States would need to rebuild after World War II, that the state had to step up and provide some direction. Again, he didn't want to formally nationalize the banking sector, but he did want the central bank to adopt the right kind of monetary policy (if necessary, he was willing to "euthanize the rentiers" by lowering interest rates to the point where no one could make money by investing it), the government to pursue dirigiste spending and lending policies, a corporatist system of cooperation between business and government (similar to what emerged in Germany and Scandinavia), and of course Keynes' characteristic counter-cyclical fiscal policy.

[berniesrevolution]

JACOBIN MAGAZINE

Last week’s stock market turbulence was a wake-up call for investors after years of steady returns and low volatility. Jacobin’s Seth Ackerman spoke with economist J. W. Mason about what lies behind the turmoil, the dilemma now facing central bankers, and how rentiers stubbornly refuse to be euthanized.

Seth Ackerman:

After a year of tranquility, the stock market suddenly became volatile over the past week. Why?

J.W. Mason:

The central fact about the stock market is that you can’t explain short-term movements on the basis of any kind of objective factors, because prices are fundamentally self-referential. The short term return on stocks is dominated by capital gains, which means that when you’re deciding what a good price is today you’re just trying to guess what prices will be tomorrow.

Now, if you’re looking at longer-term changes, then at some point other factors come into play. With stocks, there are two broad considerations. One is the flow of profits that are ultimately going to accrue to the owners of those stocks, and the other is liquidity and credit conditions — when it’s difficult to get loans or to sell on short notice, you’re going to put a lower value on risky assets like stocks.

So if the expected flow of profit income going to stockholders declines, the value of stocks will decline. There are many reasons why these profit flows — and even more, people’s beliefs about them — may change. But one reason is if there’s a change in the share of output going to profits versus the share going to wages. You probably saw the headlines the other day about how concern over rising wages is leading some people to think the bull market is coming to an end. And that’s where you get into a more political story.

Walking a Tightrope

Seth Ackerman:

How much reality was there behind the concern over wages?

J.W. Mason:

There is no question that there has been an uptick in wage growth in the past couple of years. I think over the most recent year average wages are up 2.6%, which by historical standards is pretty mediocre, but it’s significantly faster than we’ve seen for a number of years — really since before the Great Recession. Furthermore, this acceleration of wages is happening without even a hiccup of inflation and without any noticeable improvement in productivity. Which means it’s coming straight out of profits.

There’s a bit of a tightrope we have to walk in thinking about this. It’s important to emphasize that, even close to a decade after the official end of the last recession, this is not a full recovery in many ways, especially for people who work for a living. But it’s also true that the relative position of working people is noticeably better than it was a couple of years ago. If you look at the share of value-added going to labor in the corporate sector, it’s up to 59 percent today compared with 57 percent in 2010 to 2014. Now, two percentage points doesn’t sound huge, but that’s actually a significant shift of the pie from business owners to workers. It’s most of the way back from where we were before the financial crisis. It’s the biggest sustained rise in the labor share since the late 1990s.

So if you’re somebody whose income comes from the part of output that does not go to workers — which you are by definition, if you’re a shareholder — then you are not crazy to be concerned. There’s an important strand of Marxist economics on what’s called the cyclical profit squeeze. This argues that historically in the United States — and at least to some extent in other advanced capitalist countries — you’ll find that every recession is preceded by a period of declining profits, and that those declines are normally caused by exactly this: a shift in the share of output from capital to labor.

Some people have formalized this as a “Goodwin cycle.” This is a repeated process where you start from strong growth, low unemployment, a relatively favorable bargaining position for workers. That drives up wages at the expense of profits, until eventually at some point businesses refuse to invest because profits fall too far. The falling profit interrupts the reproduction of the system and you get a crisis where unemployment goes back up, and then that creates the conditions for restored profitability and renewed growth. Obviously the real world is not so cut and dried — the link from profits to investment is one questionable piece — but it’s a useful tool for thinking about our current situation.

On the other hand, there is absolutely no reason to expect an uptick in inflation. I think it’s clear that, at this point, talking about inflation as the reason to be concerned about wage increases is just a cover story. There is no evidence that wage growth passes through to inflation at all. Faster growth in wages, if it’s sustained long enough, may lead to faster productivity growth, which would allow profits to be maintained. Otherwise, we should expect a simple one-for-one tradeoff between wages and profits.

(Continue Reading)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Big Tech’s “attention rents”

Tomorrow (Nov 4), I'm keynoting the Hackaday Supercon in Pasadena, CA.

The thing is, any feed or search result is "algorithmic." "Just show me the things posted by people I follow in reverse-chronological order" is an algorithm. "Just show me products that have this SKU" is an algorithm. "Alphabetical sort" is an algorithm. "Random sort" is an algorithm.

Any process that involves more information than you can take in at a glance or digest in a moment needs some kind of sense-making. It needs to be put in some kind of order. There's always gonna be an algorithm.

But that's not what we mean by "the algorithm" (TM). When we talk about "the algorithm," we mean a system for ordering information that uses complex criteria that are not precisely known to us, and than can't be easily divined through an examination of the ordering.

There's an idea that a "good" algorithm is one that does not seek to deceive or harm us. When you search for a specific part number, you want exact matches for that search at the top of the results. It's fine if those results include third-party parts that are compatible with the part you're searching for, so long as they're clearly labeled. There's room for argument about how to order those results – do highly rated third-party parts go above the OEM part? How should the algorithm trade off price and quality?

It's hard to come up with an objective standard to resolve these fine-grained differences, but search technologists have tried. Think of Google: they have a patent on "long clicks." A "long click" is when you search for something and then don't search for it again for quite some time, the implication being that you've found what you were looking for. Google Search ads operate a "pay per click" model, and there's an argument that this aligns Google's ad division's interests with search quality: if the ad division only gets paid when you click a link, they will militate for placing ads that users want to click on.

Platforms are inextricably bound up in this algorithmic information sorting business. Platforms have emerged as the endemic form of internet-based business, which is ironic, because a platform is just an intermediary – a company that connects different groups to each other. The internet's great promise was "disintermediation" – getting rid of intermediaries. We did that, and then we got a whole bunch of new intermediaries.

Usually, those groups can be sorted into two buckets: "business customers" (drivers, merchants, advertisers, publishers, creative workers, etc) and "end users" (riders, shoppers, consumers, audiences, etc). Platforms also sometimes connect end users to each other: think of dating sites, or interest-based forums on Reddit. Either way, a platform's job is to make these connections, and that means platforms are always in the algorithm business.

Whether that's matching a driver and a rider, or an advertiser and a consumer, or a reader and a mix of content from social feeds they're subscribed to and other sources of information on the service, the platform has to make a call as to what you're going to see or do.

These choices are enormously consequential. In the theory of Surveillance Capitalism, these choices take on an almost supernatural quality, where "Big Data" can be used to guess your response to all the different ways of pitching an idea or product to you, in order to select the optimal pitch that bypasses your critical faculties and actually controls your actions, robbing you of "the right to a future tense."

I don't think much of this hypothesis. Every claim to mind control – from Rasputin to MK Ultra to neurolinguistic programming to pick-up artists – has turned out to be bullshit. Besides, you don't need to believe in mind control to explain the ways that algorithms shape our beliefs and actions. When a single company dominates the information landscape – say, when Google controls 90% of your searches – then Google's sorting can deprive you of access to information without you knowing it.

If every "locksmith" listed on Google Maps is a fake referral business, you might conclude that there are no more reputable storefront locksmiths in existence. What's more, this belief is a form of self-fulfilling prophecy: if Google Maps never shows anyone a real locksmith, all the real locksmiths will eventually go bust.

If you never see a social media update from a news source you follow, you might forget that the source exists, or assume they've gone under. If you see a flood of viral videos of smash-and-grab shoplifter gangs and never see a news story about wage theft, you might assume that the former is common and the latter is rare (in reality, shoplifting hasn't risen appreciably, while wage-theft is off the charts).

In the theory of Surveillance Capitalism, the algorithm was invented to make advertisers richer, and then went on to pervert the news (by incentivizing "clickbait") and finally destroyed our politics when its persuasive powers were hijacked by Steve Bannon, Cambridge Analytica, and QAnon grifters to turn millions of vulnerable people into swivel-eyed loons, racists and conspiratorialists.

As I've written, I think this theory gives the ad-tech sector both too much and too little credit, and draws an artificial line between ad-tech and other platform businesses that obscures the connection between all forms of platform decay, from Uber to HBO to Google Search to Twitter to Apple and beyond:

https://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism

As a counter to Surveillance Capitalism, I've proposed a theory of platform decay called enshittification, which identifies how the market power of monopoly platforms, combined with the flexibility of digital tools, combined with regulatory capture, allows platforms to abuse both business-customers and end-users, by depriving them of alternatives, then "twiddling" the knobs that determine the rules of the platform without fearing sanction under privacy, labor or consumer protection law, and finally, blocking digital self-help measures like ad-blockers, alternative clients, scrapers, reverse engineering, jailbreaking, and other tech guerrilla warfare tactics:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

One important distinction between Surveillance Capitalism and enshittification is that enshittification posits that the platform is bad for everyone. Surveillance Capitalism starts from the assumption that surveillance advertising is devastatingly effective (which explains how your racist Facebook uncles got turned into Jan 6 QAnons), and concludes that advertisers must be well-served by the surveillance system.

But advertisers – and other business customers – are very poorly served by platforms. Procter and Gamble reduced its annual surveillance advertising budget from $100m//year to $0/year and saw a 0% reduction in sales. The supposed laser-focused targeting and superhuman message refinement just don't work very well – first, because the tech companies are run by bullshitters whose marketing copy is nonsense, and second because these companies are monopolies who can abuse their customers without losing money.

The point of enshittification is to lock end-users to the platform, then use those locked-in users as bait for business customers, who will also become locked to the platform. Once everyone is holding everyone else hostage, the platform uses the flexibility of digital services to play a variety of algorithmic games to shift value from everyone to the business's shareholders. This flexibility is supercharged by the failure of regulators to enforce privacy, labor and consumer protection standards against the companies, and by these companies' ability to insist that regulators punish end-users, competitors, tinkerers and other third parties to mod, reverse, hack or jailbreak their products and services to block their abuse.

Enshittification needs The Algorithm. When Uber wants to steal from its drivers, it can just do an old-fashioned wage theft, but eventually it will face the music for that kind of scam:

https://apnews.com/article/uber-lyft-new-york-city-wage-theft-9ae3f629cf32d3f2fb6c39b8ffcc6cc6

The best way to steal from drivers is with algorithmic wage discrimination. That's when Uber offers occassional, selective drivers higher rates than it gives to drivers who are fully locked to its platform and take every ride the app offers. The less selective a driver becomes, the lower the premium the app offers goes, but if a driver starts refusing rides, the wage offer climbs again. This isn't the mind-control of Surveillance Capitalism, it's just fraud, shaving fractional pennies off your paycheck in the hopes that you won't notice. The goal is to get drivers to abandon the other side-hustles that allow them to be so choosy about when they drive Uber, and then, once the driver is fully committed, to crank the wage-dial down to the lowest possible setting:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

This is the same game that Facebook played with publishers on the way to its enshittification: when Facebook began aggressively courting publishers, any short snippet republished from the publisher's website to a Facebook feed was likely to be recommended to large numbers of readers. Facebook offered publishers a vast traffic funnel that drove millions of readers to their sites.

But as publishers became more dependent on that traffic, Facebook's algorithm started downranking short excerpts in favor of medium-length ones, building slowly to fulltext Facebook posts that were fully substitutive for the publisher's own web offerings. Like Uber's wage algorithm, Facebook's recommendation engine played its targets like fish on a line.

When publishers responded to declining reach for short excerpts by stepping back from Facebook, Facebook goosed the traffic for their existing posts, sending fresh floods of readers to the publisher's site. When the publisher returned to Facebook, the algorithm once again set to coaxing the publishers into posting ever-larger fractions of their work to Facebook, until, finally, the publisher was totally locked into Facebook. Facebook then started charging publishers for "boosting" – not just to be included in algorithmic recommendations, but to reach their own subscribers.

Enshittification is modern, high-tech enabled, monopolistic form of rent seeking. Rent-seeking is a subtle and important idea from economics, one that is increasingly relevant to our modern economy. For economists, a "rent" is income you get from owning a "factor of production" – something that someone else needs to make or do something.

Rents are not "profits." Profit is income you get from making or doing something. Rent is income you get from owning something needed to make a profit. People who earn their income from rents are called rentiers. If you make your income from profits, you're a "capitalist."

Capitalists and rentiers are in irreconcilable combat with each other. A capitalist wants access to their factors of production at the lowest possible price, whereas rentiers want those prices to be as high as possible. A phone manufacturer wants to be able to make phones as cheaply as possible, while a patent-troll wants to own a patent that the phone manufacturer needs to license in order to make phones. The manufacturer is a capitalism, the troll is a rentier.

The troll might even decide that the best strategy for maximizing their rents is to exclusively license their patents to a single manufacturer and try to eliminate all other phones from the market. This will allow the chosen manufacturer to charge more and also allow the troll to get higher rents. Every capitalist except the chosen manufacturer loses. So do people who want to buy phones. Eventually, even the chosen manufacturer will lose, because the rentier can demand an ever-greater share of their profits in rent.

Digital technology enables all kinds of rent extraction. The more digitized an industry is, the more rent-seeking it becomes. Think of cars, which harvest your data, block third-party repair and parts, and force you to buy everything from acceleration to seat-heaters as a monthly subscription:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

The cloud is especially prone to rent-seeking, as Yanis Varoufakis writes in his new book, Technofeudalism, where he explains how "cloudalists" have found ways to lock all kinds of productive enterprise into using cloud-based resources from which ever-increasing rents can be extracted:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

The endless malleability of digitization makes for endless variety in rent-seeking, and cataloging all the different forms of digital rent-extraction is a major project in this Age of Enshittification. "Algorithmic Attention Rents: A theory of digital platform market power," a new UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose paper by Tim O'Reilly, Ilan Strauss and Mariana Mazzucato, pins down one of these forms:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/publications/2023/nov/algorithmic-attention-rents-theory-digital-platform-market-power

The "attention rents" referenced in the paper's title are bait-and-switch scams in which a platform deliberately enshittifies its recommendations, search results or feeds to show you things that are not the thing you asked to see, expect to see, or want to see. They don't do this out of sadism! The point is to extract rent – from you (wasted time, suboptimal outcomes) and from business customers (extracting rents for "boosting," jumbling good results in among scammy or low-quality results).

The authors cite several examples of these attention rents. Much of the paper is given over to Amazon's so-called "advertising" product, a $31b/year program that charges sellers to have their products placed above the items that Amazon's own search engine predicts you will want to buy:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is a form of gladiatorial combat that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to surrender an ever-larger share of their profits in rent to Amazon for pride of place. Amazon uses a variety of deceptive labels ("Highly Rated – Sponsored") to get you to click on these products, but most of all, they rely two factors. First, Amazon has a long history of surfacing good results in response to queries, which makes buying whatever's at the top of a list a good bet. Second, there's just so many possible results that it takes a lot of work to sift through the probably-adequate stuff at the top of the listings and get to the actually-good stuff down below.

Amazon spent decades subsidizing its sellers' goods – an illegal practice known as "predatory pricing" that enforcers have increasingly turned a blind eye to since the Reagan administration. This has left it with few competitors:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/19/fake-it-till-you-make-it/#millennial-lifestyle-subsidy

The lack of competing retail outlets lets Amazon impose other rent-seeking conditions on its sellers. For example, Amazon has a "most favored nation" requirement that forces companies that raise their prices on Amazon to raise their prices everywhere else, which makes everything you buy more expensive, whether that's a Walmart, Target, a mom-and-pop store, or direct from the manufacturer:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

But everyone loses in this "two-sided market." Amazon used "junk ads" to juice its ad-revenue: these are ads that are objectively bad matches for your search, like showing you a Seattle Seahawks jersey in response to a search for LA Lakers merch:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-02/amazon-boosted-junk-ads-hid-messages-with-signal-ftc-says

The more of these junk ads Amazon showed, the more revenue it got from sellers – and the more the person selling a Lakers jersey had to pay to show up at the top of your search, and the more they had to charge you to cover those ad expenses, and the more they had to charge for it everywhere else, too.

The authors describe this process as a transformation between "attention rents" (misdirecting your attention) to "pecuniary rents" (making money). That's important: despite decades of rhetoric about the "attention economy," attention isn't money. As I wrote in my enshittification essay:

You can't use attention as a medium of exchange. You can't use it as a store of value. You can't use it as a unit of account. Attention is like cryptocurrency: a worthless token that is only valuable to the extent that you can trick or coerce someone into parting with "fiat" currency in exchange for it. You have to "monetize" it – that is, you have to exchange the fake money for real money.

The authors come up with some clever techniques for quantifying the ways that this scam harms users. For example, they count the number of places that an advertised product rises in search results, relative to where it would show up in an "organic" search. These quantifications are instructive, but they're also a kind of subtweet at the judiciary.

In 2018, SCOTUS's ruling in American Express v Ohio changed antitrust law for two-sided markets by insisting that so long as one side of a two-sided market was better off as the result of anticompetitive actions, there was no antitrust violation:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3346776

For platforms, that means that it's OK to screw over sellers, advertisers, performers and other business customers, so long as the end-users are better off: "Go ahead, cheat the Uber drivers, so long as you split the booty with Uber riders."

But in the absence of competition, regulation or self-help measures, platforms cheat everyone – that's the point of enshittification. The attention rents that Amazon's payola scheme extract from shoppers translate into higher prices, worse goods, and lower profits for platform sellers. In other words, Amazon's conduct is so sleazy that it even threads the infinitesimal needle that the Supremes created in American Express.

Here's another algorithmic pecuniary rent: Amazon figured out which of its major rivals used an automated price-matching algorithm, and then cataloged which products they had in common with those sellers. Then, under a program called Project Nessie, Amazon jacked up the prices of those products, knowing that as soon as they raised the prices on Amazon, the prices would go up everywhere else, so Amazon wouldn't lose customers to cheaper alternatives. That scam made Amazon at least a billion dollars:

https://gizmodo.com/ftc-alleges-amazon-used-price-gouging-algorithm-1850986303

This is a great example of how enshittification – rent-seeking on digital platforms – is different from analog rent-seeking. The speed and flexibility with which Amazon and its rivals altered their prices requires digitization. Digitization also let Amazon crank the price-gouging dial to zero whenever they worried that regulators were investigating the program.

So what do we do about it? After years of being made to look like fumblers and clowns by Big Tech, regulators and enforcers – and even lawmakers – have decided to get serious.

The neoliberal narrative of government helplessness and incompetence would have you believe that this will go nowhere. Governments aren't as powerful as giant corporations, and regulators aren't as smart as the supergeniuses of Big Tech. They don't stand a chance.

But that's a counsel of despair and a cheap trick. Weaker US governments have taken on stronger oligarchies and won – think of the defeat of JD Rockefeller and the breakup of Standard Oil in 1911. The people who pulled that off weren't wizards. They were just determined public servants, with political will behind them. There is a growing, forceful public will to end the rein of Big Tech, and there are some determined public servants surfing that will.

In this paper, the authors try to give those enforcers ammo to bring to court and to the public. For example, Amazon claims that its algorithm surfaces the products that make the public happy, without the need for competitive pressure to keep it sharp. But as the paper points out, the only successful new rival ecommerce platform – Tiktok – has found an audience for an entirely new category of goods: dupes, "lower-cost products that have the same or better features than higher cost branded products."

The authors also identify "dark patterns" that platforms use to trick users into consuming feeds that have a higher volume of things that the company profits from, and a lower volume of things that users want to see. For example, platforms routinely switch users from a "following" feed – consisting of things posted by people the user asked to hear from – with an algorithmic "For You" feed, filled with the things the company's shareholders wish the users had asked to see.

Calling this a "dark pattern" reveals just how hollow and self-aggrandizing that term is. "Dark pattern" usually means "fraud." If I ask to see posts from people I like, and you show me posts from people who'll pay you for my attention instead, that's not a sophisticated sleight of hand – it's just a scam. It's the social media equivalent of the eBay seller who sends you an iPhone box with a bunch of gravel inside it instead of an iPhone. Tech bros came up with "dark pattern" as a way of flattering themselves by draping themselves in the mantle of dopamine-hacking wizards, rather than unimaginative con-artists who use a computer to rip people off.

These For You algorithmic feeds aren't just a way to increase the load of sponsored posts in a feed – they're also part of the multi-sided ripoff of enshittified platforms. A For You feed allows platforms to trick publishers and performers into thinking that they are "good at the platform," which both convinces to optimize their production for that platform, and also turns them into Judas Goats who conspicuously brag about how great the platform is for people like them, which brings their peers in, too.

In Veena Dubal's essential paper on algorithmic wage discrimination, she describes how Uber drivers whom the algorithm has favored with (temporary) high per-ride rates brag on driver forums about their skill with the app, bringing in other drivers who blame their lower wages on their failure to "use the app right":

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4331080

As I wrote in my enshittification essay:

If you go down to the midway at your county fair, you'll spot some poor sucker walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that they won by throwing three balls in a peach basket.

The peach-basket is a rigged game. The carny can use a hidden switch to force the balls to bounce out of the basket. No one wins a giant teddy bear unless the carny wants them to win it. Why did the carny let the sucker win the giant teddy bear? So that he'd carry it around all day, convincing other suckers to put down five bucks for their chance to win one:

https://boingboing.net/2006/08/27/rigged-carny-game.html

The carny allocated a giant teddy bear to that poor sucker the way that platforms allocate surpluses to key performers – as a convincer in a "Big Store" con, a way to rope in other suckers who'll make content for the platform, anchoring themselves and their audiences to it.

Platform can't run the giant teddy-bear con unless there's a For You feed. Some platforms – like Tiktok – tempt users into a For You feed by making it as useful as possible, then salting it with doses of enshittification:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tiktoks-secret-heating-button-can-make-anyone-go-viral/

Other platforms use the (ugh) "dark pattern" of simply flipping your preference from a "following" feed to a "For You" feed. Either way, the platform can't let anyone keep the giant teddy-bear. Once you've tempted, say, sports bros into piling into the platform with the promise of millions of free eyeballs, you need to withdraw the algorithm's favor for their content so you can give it to, say, astrologers. Of course, the more locked-in the users are, the more shit you can pile into that feed without worrying about them going elsewhere, and the more giant teddy-bears you can give away to more business users so you can lock them in and start extracting rent.

For regulators, the possibility of a "good" algorithmic feed presents a serious challenge: when a feed is bad, how can a regulator tell if its low quality is due to the platform's incompetence at blocking spammers or guessing what users want, or whether it's because the platform is extracting rents?

The paper includes a suite of recommendations, including one that I really liked:

Regulators, working with cooperative industry players, would define reportable metrics based on those that are actually used by the platforms themselves to manage search, social media, e-commerce, and other algorithmic relevancy and recommendation engines.

In other words: find out how the companies themselves measure their performance. Find out what KPIs executives have to hit in order to earn their annual bonuses and use those to figure out what the company's performance is – ad load, ratio of organic clicks to ad clicks, average click-through on the first organic result, etc.

They also recommend some hard rules, like reserving a portion of the top of the screen for "organic" search results, and requiring exact matches to show up as the top result.

I've proposed something similar, applicable across multiple kinds of digital businesses: an end-to-end principle for online services. The end-to-end principle is as old as the internet, and it decrees that the role of an intermediary should be to deliver data from willing senders to willing receivers as quickly and reliably as possible. When we apply this principle to your ISP, we call it Net Neutrality. For services, E2E would mean that if I subscribed to your feed, the service would have a duty to deliver it to me. If I hoisted your email out of my spam folder, none of your future emails should land there. If I search for your product and there's an exact match, that should be the top result:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/platforms-decay-lets-put-users-first

One interesting wrinkle to framing platform degradation as a failure to connect willing senders and receivers is that it places a whole host of conduct within the regulatory remit of the FTC. Section 5 of the FTC Act contains a broad prohibition against "unfair and deceptive" practices:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

That means that the FTC doesn't need any further authorization from Congress to enforce an end to end rule: they can simply propose and pass that rule, on the grounds that telling someone that you'll show them the feeds that they ask for and then not doing so is "unfair and deceptive."

Some of the other proposals in the paper also fit neatly into Section 5 powers, like a "sticky" feed preference. If I tell a service to show me a feed of the people I follow and they switch it to a For You feed, that's plainly unfair and deceptive.

All of this raises the question of what a post-Big-Tech feed would look like. In "How To Break Up Amazon" for The Sling, Peter Carstensen and Darren Bush sketch out some visions for this:

https://www.thesling.org/how-to-break-up-amazon/

They imagine a "condo" model for Amazon, where the sellers collectively own the Amazon storefront, a model similar to capacity rights on natural gas pipelines, or to patent pools. They see two different ways that search-result order could be determined in such a system:

"specific premium placement could go to those vendors that value the placement the most [with revenue] shared among the owners of the condo"

or

"leave it to owners themselves to create joint ventures to promote products"

Note that both of these proposals are compatible with an end-to-end rule and the other regulatory proposals in the paper. Indeed, all these policies are easier to enforce against weaker companies that can't afford to maintain the pretense that they are headquartered in some distant regulatory haven, or pay massive salaries to ex-regulators to work the refs on their behalf:

https://www.thesling.org/in-public-discourse-and-congress-revolvers-defend-amazons-monopoly/

The re-emergence of intermediaries on the internet after its initial rush of disintermediation tells us something important about how we relate to one another. Some authors might be up for directly selling books to their audiences, and some drivers might be up for creating their own taxi service, and some merchants might want to run their own storefronts, but there's plenty of people with something they want to offer us who don't have the will or skill to do it all. Not everyone wants to be a sysadmin, a security auditor, a payment processor, a software engineer, a CFO, a tax-preparer and everything else that goes into running a business. Some people just want to sell you a book. Or find a date. Or teach an online class.

Intermediation isn't intrinsically wicked. Intermediaries fall into pits of enshitffication and other forms of rent-seeking when they aren't disciplined by competitors, by regulators, or by their own users' ability to block their bad conduct (with ad-blockers, say, or other self-help measures). We need intermediaries, and intermediaries don't have to turn into rent-seeking feudal warlords. That only happens if we let it happen.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/03/subprime-attention-rent-crisis/#euthanize-rentiers

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”

20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:

https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/is_drm_evil.html

I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity – it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wired-editor-on-drm/

I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:

WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.

Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.

But I was right. The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations. Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in. A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony. Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.

This is the root of all the right to repair shenanigans. Sure, companies withhold access to diagnostic codes and parts, but codes can be extracted and parts can be cloned. The real teeth in blocking repair comes from the law, not the tech. The company that makes McDonald's wildly unreliable McFlurry machines makes a fortune charging franchisees to fix these eternally broken appliances. When a third party threatened this racket by reverse-engineering the DRM that blocked independent repair, they got buried in legal threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Everybody loves this racket. In Poland, a team of security researchers at the OhMyHack conference just presented their teardown of the anti-repair features in NEWAG Impuls locomotives. NEWAG boobytrapped their trains to try and detect if they've been independently serviced, and to respond to any unauthorized repairs by bricking themselves:

https://mamot.fr/@q3k@hackerspace.pl/111528162905209453

Poland is part of the EU, meaning that they are required to uphold the provisions of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive, including Article 6, which bans this kind of reverse-engineering. The researchers are planning to present their work again at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg this month – Germany is also a party to the EUCD. The threat to researchers from presenting this work is real – but so is the threat to conferences that host them:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/researchers-face-legal-threats-over-sdmi-hack/

20 years ago, Chris Anderson told me that it was unrealistic to expect tech companies to refuse demands for DRM from the entertainment companies whose media they hoped to play. My argument – then and now – was that any tech company that sells you a gadget that can have its features revoked is defrauding you. You're paying for x, y and z – and if they are contractually required to remove x and y on demand, they are selling you something that you can't rely on, without making that clear to you.

But it's worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remotely, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

But even if everyone at that table is a swell egg who wouldn't dream of enshittifying the product, the existence of a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature makes the product vulnerable to external actors who will demand that it be used. Back in 2022, Adobe informed its customers that it had lost its deal to include Pantone colors in Photoshop, Illustrator and other "software as a service" packages. As a result, users would now have to start paying a monthly fee to see their own, completed images. Fail to pay the fee and all the Pantone-coded pixels in your artwork would just show up as black:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

Adobe blamed this on Pantone, and there was lots of speculation about what had happened. Had Pantone jacked up its price to Adobe, so Adobe passed the price on to its users in the hopes of embarrassing Pantone? Who knows? Who can know? That's the point: you invested in Photoshop, you spent money and time creating images with it, but you have no way to know whether or how you'll be able to access those images in the future. Those terms can change at any time, and if you don't like it, you can go fuck yourself.

These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further." Adobe chose to design its software so it would be vulnerable to this kind of demand, and then its customers paid for that choice. Sure, Pantone are dicks, but this is Adobe's fault. They stuck a KICK ME sign to your back, and Pantone obliged.

This keeps happening and it's gonna keep happening. Last week, Playstation owners who'd bought (or "bought") Warner TV shows got messages telling them that Warner had walked away from its deal to sell videos through the Playstation store, and so all the videos they'd paid for were going to be deleted forever. They wouldn't even get refunds (to be clear, refunds would also be bullshit – when I was a bookseller, I didn't get to break into your house and steal the books I'd sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table).

Sure, Warner is an unbelievably shitty company run by the single most guillotineable executive in all of Southern California, the loathsome David Zaslav, who oversaw the merger of Warner with Discovery. Zaslav is the creep who figured out that he could make more money cancelling completed movies and TV shows and taking a tax writeoff than he stood to make by releasing them:

https://aftermath.site/there-is-no-piracy-without-ownership

Imagine putting years of your life into making a program – showing up on set at 5AM and leaving your kids to get their own breakfast, performing stunts that could maim or kill you, working 16-hour days during the acute phase of the covid pandemic and driving home in the night, only to have this absolute turd of a man delete the program before anyone could see it, forever, to get a minor tax advantage. Talk about moral injury!

But without Sony's complicity in designing a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature into the Playstation, Zaslav's war on art and creative workers would be limited to material that hadn't been released yet. Thanks to Sony's awful choices, David Zaslav can break into your house, steal your movies – and he doesn't even have to leave a twenty on your kitchen table.

The point here – the point I made 20 years ago to Chris Anderson – is that this is the foreseeable, inevitable result of designing devices for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades. Anyone who was paying attention should have figured that out in the GW Bush administration. Anyone who does this today? Absolute flaming garbage.

Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over an anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit knew what they were doing and they did it anyway. Fuck them. Sideways. With a brick.

Meanwhile, the studios keep making the case for stealing movies rather than paying for them. As Tyler James Hill wrote: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing":

https://bsky.app/profile/tylerjameshill.bsky.social/post/3kflw2lvam42n

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill

Image: Alan Levine (modified) https://pxhere.com/en/photo/218986

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[mostlysignssomeportents]

They're handing out patents for "inventions" that don't exist

Today (Oct 16) I'm in Minneapolis, keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. Thursday (Oct 19), I'm in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. And on Friday (Oct 20), I'm at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

Patent trolls produce nothing except lawsuits. Unlike real capitalist enterprises, a patent troll does not “practice” the art in its patent portfolio — it seeks out productive enterprises that are making things that real people use, and then uses legal threats to extract rents from them.

One of the most prolific patent trolls of the twenty-first century is Landmark Technology, whose U.S. Patent №7,010,508 nominally covers virtually anything you might do in the course of operating an online business: having a homepage, letting a customer login to your site, or having pages where customers can view and order products.

Landmark shook down more than a thousand productive businesses for $65,000 license-fees it demanded on threat of a patent lawsuit.

But that reign of terror is almost certainly over. When Landmark tried to get $65,000 out of Binders.com, the victim’s owner, NAPCO, went to court to invalidate Landmark’s patent, which never should have issued.

A North Carolina court agreed, and killed Landmark’s patent. Landmark faces further punishments in Washington State, where the attorney general has sued the company for violating state consumer protection laws in a case that has been removed to federal court.

Landmark’s patent contains “means-plus-function” claims. These a rentier’s superweapon, in which a patent can lay a claim over an invention without inventing or describing it. These claims are almost entirely used in software patents, something that has been blessed by the Federal Circuit, America’s most authoritative patent court.

A means-plus-function patent lets an “inventor” patent something they don’t know how to do. If these patents applied to pharma, a company could get a patent on “an arrangement of atoms that cure cancer,” without specifying that arrangement of atoms. Anyone who actually did cure cancer would have to pay rent to the patent-holder.

-A Major Defeat For Technofeudalism: We euthanized some rentiers.

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Unity's feudal gambit as class struggle between rentiers and capitalists

Today (Oct 16) I'm in Minneapolis, keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. Thursday (Oct 19), I'm in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. And on Friday (Oct 20), I'm at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

The outcome of this struggle is what determines whether the digital society is capitalist or feudalistic. Think of the recent grab by games toolsmith Unity, who have long extracted rents from the capitalists who used their tools to make games. Unity is “software as a service,” which means that you have to buy again it every month, for so long as your capitalist enterprise is in business.

The capitalists who rent Unity’s tools had resigned themselves to this, but then Unity went one step further, and demanded a royalty (a word with decidedly feudal origins!) every time a game made with Unity’s tools was distributed. The outcry was ferocious, and Unity eventually backed down, but even as they did, company executives insisted that they would continue to pursue a “sustainable system” for “shared success.”

“Shared success” is a pure expression of feudalism. Unity was not proposing a joint venture, where they would supply the capital to produce games and share the risk of that capital being competed away by a better games-maker.

Instead, Unity wants a rentier’s bargain: if the capitalist it rents do does well, so does Unity. But if the capitalist does badly — if a games-maker loses out to a competitor who is also a tenant of Unity’s IP — then unity also does well. Heads capitalists lose, tails the rentier wins.

When Unity speaks of this system being “sustainable,” they mean that they will seek to maximize the total amount of profits made by capitalists who rent its tools. Because the higher the total profits are, the more rent it can extract.

Profits are highest where competition is lowest. It’s in Unity’s interest for a single company — or a cartel of companies — to control entire genres or modes of games, and to be protected from innovators who might enter the market with better offers. Unity wants to pick some winners and bind them to its fields.

-A Major Defeat For Technofeudalism: We euthanized some rentiers.

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Capitalists hate capitalism

Today (Oct 16) I'm in Minneapolis, keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. Thursday (Oct 19), I'm in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. And on Friday (Oct 20), I'm at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

When we think of class struggle, we rightly focus on the struggle between workers and bosses. Class struggle is held back by “false consciousness.” We’re told that American workers are allergic to socialism because they view themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” who throw their lot in with their bosses because they want to join their ranks.

In reality, America has virtually no upward social mobility; an American who changes class is generally a middle class person who becomes poor, or a poor person who becomes homeless.

But there’s another important class struggle, within the ruling class. That’s the struggle between capitalists and rentiers. Capitalists want to own the means of production and utilize it without paying rentiers, both so they can enrich themselves and so they can invest in superior production.

Rentiers want to own the things capitalists must use so they can cream off the profits without doing anything to produce them.

The struggle between capitalists and rentiers is rife with false consciousness. Capitalists hate capitalism. Not every worker sees themself as a temporarily embarrassed millionaire, but every capitalist sees themself as a temporarily embarrassed rentier.

Capitalists loathe competition. That’s why Peter Thiel says “competition is for losers” and Warren Buffet continuously salivates over investment in firms with “moats and walls” that prevent competitors from entering the market.

The landlord who owns a building with a coffee shop does well even if that coffee shop goes out of business when a competing shop takes away all their business. Indeed, the landlord benefits from this situation: having a vacant storefront to rent just as a neighborhood is blowing up thanks to a hot new coffee shop is an opportunity to raise the rent. “Passive income” is income that is protected from competition.

-A Major Defeat For Technofeudalism: We euthanized some rentiers.

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

A Major Defeat For Technofeudalism: We euthanized some rentiers

Today (Oct 16) I'm in Minneapolis, keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. Thursday (Oct 19), I'm in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. And on Friday (Oct 20), I'm at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

Rent is income you get from owning something, rather than utilizing it. Under feudalism and manorialism, a hereditary lord owned land. Owning land provided a steady stream of income, in the form of rents.

Like profits, rents came from workers. Peasants were bound by law to the lord’s land. By default, a peasant born on a lord’s estate couldn’t move elsewhere without permission, and neither could that peasant’s descendants.

Peasants owned the capital used in their work. A peasant might own livestock, agricultural instruments and other tools and factors that went into making the land productive.

Feudal lords didn’t have to worry about competition in the form of superior peasant production on neighboring estates. If your neighbor’s peasants invented a better way to make the land productive, you could have your peasants copy it.

What’s more, feudal lords didn’t think much of peasants. They didn’t re-invest some of the rents their peasants paid by buying them better tools, or by offering stipends to peasant workers to go off and experiment with better production methods.

When it came to production, feudalism was stable, or, less charitably, stagnant. There were fallow years and fair ones, but there was no goad that drove a feudal system’s powerful people towards investment and improvement.

A feudal land grew richer by conquering another land, not by inventing new ways of producing. Feudal invention is focused on conquest, not increasing capacity.

-A Major Defeat For Technofeudalism: We euthanized some rentiers.

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Peter Thiel's evil, but he's not an "evil genius"

Peter Thiel: “I’d rather be seen as evil than incompetent.” It’s the far-right billionaire’s most telling phrase. Thiel wants us to think he’s an evil genius, because he wants us to think he’s a genius. So much of Thiel’s activity is devoted to self-mythologizing, like when he made us all think he was infusing the blood of teenagers in a bid to become immortal:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/peter-thiel-wants-to-inject-himself-with-young-peoples-blood

But as Ben Burgis writes for Jacobin, Thiel isn’t an evil genius, “he’s just a rich guy”:

https://jacobin.com/2022/07/peter-thiel-superrich-wealth-inequality-political-influence/

Burgis cites Max Chafkin’s 2021 Thiel biography, The Contrarian, which shines a glaring light on the distance between Thiel’s stated commitment to high-minded ideals of “liberty” and his self-serving defense of mass surveillance and human rights abuses:

https://bookshop.org/books/the-contrarian-peter-thiel-and-silicon-valley-s-pursuit-of-power/9781984878533

If you think Thiel is an evil genius, then maybe these contradictions are the result of your puny brain lacking the subtlety to understand how, on a higher plane of reasoning, they can be resolved. If you understand that Theil is an ordinary mediocrity, no better than you or me, sickened by pathological greed, then there’s a much simpler explanation: it’s all bullshit, and the only thing Thiel really cares about is becoming richer and more powerful.

That explanation goes a long way to explain why a “libertarian” would defend Apartheid, express regret that women are allowed to vote, state that “freedom and democracy” are incompatible, and secretly fund a lawsuit to destroy a media organization that embarrassed him:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdrange/2019/12/23/best-stories-of-the-decade-behind-peter-thiels-plan-to-destroy-gawker/

Thiel’s self-mythologizing provides a cover for all of this, while making him far richer: for example, his campaign to make us think that Palantir played a role in killing Osama bin Laden was an obvious gambit to increase the share-price of Palantir.

Burgis cites Nathan Robinson’s Current Affairs article, “Two Ways Of Responding To Conservatives,” which used the example of Jordan Peterson as a template for critiquing self-mythologizing far-right figures without helping them by calling them evil geniuses:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/05/two-ways-of-responding-to-conservatives

Robinson proposes a test: “Does it reinforce the person’s self-conception or undermine it?” Burgis applies this test to Thiel, urging us not to dwell on the drinking blood, taking votes away from women, or funding “neoreactionaries” like Curtis Yarvin.

Rather, Burgis says, we should focus on how Thiel spends his political money, backing “populists” like JD Vance, who say they’re fighting for working people, but who oppose universal healthcare, universal childcare, and against raising the minimum wage.

Burgis: “Thiel is dangerous — not because he’s an evil mastermind, but because he’s a billionaire who enjoys playing with our politics and he couldn’t care less about the people who get hurt in the process.”

Burgis’s critique ties nicely into Lee Vinsel’s idea of “criti-hype” — criticism that starts by accepting it’s subject’s own self-mythologizing, then damns them for it. Think of critics who accept Google’s claims that its “AI”-driven ads can sell anything to anyone, then criticize it for having built a mind-control ray:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/02/euthanize-rentiers/#dont-believe-the-hype

Like Thiel, Google would rather be seen as evil than as incompetent. When Google’s critics run around accusing the company of having perfected machine learning mind-control, they help Google sell ads, because the advertisers Google is pitching aren’t upset that Google has a mind-control ray, provided Google will rent it out to them.

A smart synthesis of criti-hype comes from Maria Farrell, whose “Prodigal Techbro” is a great way to understand the problems with allowing ourselves to be lured into “evil genius” talk:

https://conversationalist.org/2020/03/05/the-prodigal-techbro/

Farrell’s prodigal techbro is an ex-Big-Tech geek turned anti-Big-Tech crusader, whose anti-Big-Tech position starts with the proposition that they and their former colleagues were all evil geniuses who hijacked our brains’ reward-centers with junk-science psych ideas like “Big Five Personality Types” and “Sentiment Analysis” (conveniently omitting the fact that these have been seriously undermined by the replication crisis):

https://replicationindex.com/category/big-five/

Focusing on what Big Tech says it does isn’t just a problem because it perpetuates the companies’ self-mythologizing, but also because it distracts from what we know Big Tech actually does. If we repeat the lie that Big Tech’s ad billions are the result of its mind-control ray, then we omit the fact that Facebook and Google entered into an illegal conspiracy to rig the ad market:

https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/11/google-meta-jedi-blue-eu-uk-antitrust-probes/

“Just a rich guy” is the perfect epithet for Theil, who, after all, is not an ideologue or an 11-dimensional chess master. He’s just another thin-skinned, greedy bastard who uses his money and power to accumulate more money and power. The rest is just window-dressing.

Image: Dan Taylor for www.heisenbergmedia.com (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/heisenbergmedia/13887527438/

CC BY 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Austin Powers, New Line Cinema (modified) https://www.warnerbros.com/company/divisions/motion-pictures

Fair use https://www.eff.org/issues/intellectual-property

[Image ID: A still of Michael Meyers as 'Dr Evil' from the Austin Powers movies. He is holding one pinky finger to his lips. His face has been replaced by Peter Thiel's.]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Don't believe Obama's Big Tech criti-hype

Obama’s Stanford University speech this Thursday (correctly) raised the alarm about conspiratorial thinking, and (correctly) identified that Big Tech was at the center of that rise — and then (wildly incorrectly) blamed “the algorithm” for it.

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/3382803-obama-points-finger-at-tech-companies-for-disinformation-in-major-speech/

Obama was committing the sin of criti-hype, Lee Vinsel’s incredibly useful term for criticism that repeat the self-serving myths of the subject of the critique. Every time we say that Big Tech is using machine learning to brainwash people, we give Big Tech a giant boost:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/02/euthanize-rentiers/#dont-believe-the-hype

You may have heard that the core of Big Tech’s dysfunction comes from the ad-supported business model: “If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.” This is a little oversimplified (any company that practices lock-in and gouges on repair, software and parts treats its customer as the product, irrespective of whether they’re paying — c.f. Apple and John Deere), but there’s an important truth to it.

The hundred of billions that Google and Facebook (or Meta, lol) rake in every year do indeed come from ads. That’s not merely because they have a duopoly that has cornered the ad market — it’s also because they charge a huge premium to advertise on their platforms:

https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/online-platforms-and-digital-advertising-market-study

Why do advertisers pay extra to place ads with Googbook? Because Googbook swears that their ads work really well. They say that they can use machine learning and junk-science popular psychology (“Big 5 Personality Types,” “sentiment analysis,” etc) to bypass a user’s critical faculties and control their actions directly. It boils down to this: “Our competition asks consumers to buy your product, we order them to.”

This is a pretty compelling pitch, and of course, ad buyers have always been far more susceptible to the ad industry than actual consumers. Think of John Wanamker’s famous quote, “Half my advertising spend is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” How wild is it that Wanamaker was convinced he was only wasting half his ad spending?!

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the evidence for the efficacy of surveillance advertising is pretty thin. When Procter and Gamble decided to stop spending $100,000,000 per year in online advertising, they saw no drop in their sales:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#wannamakers-ghost

Every time someone tries to get an accounting of the online ad market, they discover that it’s a cesspit of accounting fraud — Googbook lie about how many ads they show, and to whom, and how much money changes hands as a result:

https://doctorow.medium.com/big-tech-isnt-stealing-news-publishers-content-a97306884a6b

This is where criti-hype does Big Tech’s job for it. It’s genuinely weird to look at Big Tech’s compulsive lying about every aspect of its ad business and conclude that the only time these companies are telling the truth is when they assert that their products work really, really well and you should pay extra to use them.

After all, everyone who’s ever claimed to have invented a system of mind-control was either bullshitting us, or themselves, or both. From Rasputin to Mesmer, from MK Ultra to pick-up artists, the entire history of mind-control is an unbroken chain of charlatans and kooks.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/11/rhodium-at-2900-per-oz/#hypernormal

It’s entirely possible that Big Tech believes they have a mind control ray. Think of Facebook’s hilarious voter turnout experiment. The company nonconsensually enrolled 61m users in a psychological experiment to see if they could be manipulated into voting in a US election rather than staying home.

The experiment worked! 280,000 people whom the experimenters predicted would not vote actually voted! 280,000 people is a lot of people, right?

Well, yes and no. 280,000 votes cast in a single precinct or even a single state would have been enough to change the results of many high-salience elections over the past couple of decades (US politics are generally balanced on a knife-edge and tip one way or another based on voter turnout). But Facebook didn’t convince 280,000 stay-homers in one state to vote: they convinced 280k people out of 61m to vote. The total effect size: 0.39%.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11401

US elections are often close run, but they aren’t decided by 0.39% margins! The average US precinct has 1,100 voters in it. In the most optimistic projection, Facebook showed that they could get 4.29 extra voters per precinct to turn out for an election by nonconsensually exposing them to psychological stimulus.

Now, it’s possible that Facebook could improve this technique over time — but that’s not how effects in psych experiments usually work. Far more common is for the effectiveness of a novel stimulus to wear away with repetition — to “regress to the mean” as we adapt to it.

https://locusmag.com/2018/01/cory-doctorow-persuasion-adaptation-and-the-arms-race-for-your-attention/

Remember how interesting Upworthy headlines were when they arrived? Remember how quickly they turned into a punchline? Remember that the first banner ad had a 44% click-through rate!

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-first-ever-banner-ad-on-the-web/523728/

So Facebook performed a nonconsenusal psych experiment on 61m people and learned that they could improve voter turnout by 4 votes per precinct, with an intervention whose effectiveness will likely wane over time. What does that say about Facebook?

Well, on the one hand, it says that they’re a deeply unethical company that shouldn’t be trusted to run a lemonade stand, much less the social lives of 4 billion people. On the other hand, it shows that they’re not very good at this mind-control business.

That’s where Obama’s Stanford speech comes in. When Obama blames “the algorithm” for “radicalizing” people, he does Googbook’s work for them. If Mark Zuckerberg invented a mind-control ray to sell your nephew fidget-spinners, then Robert Mercer stole it and used it to make your uncle into a Qanon, then Zuck must have a really amazing advertising platform!

But like I said, Obama’s correct to observe that we’re in the midst of a conspiratorialism crisis, and Big Tech has a lot to do with it. But Obama — and other criti-hypers — have drastically misunderstood what that relationship is, and their own contribution to it.

Let’s start with the ontology of conspiracy — that is, what kind of belief is a conspiratorial belief? At its root, conspiracy is a rejection of the establishment systems for determining the truth. Rather than believing that scientists are telling us the truth about vaccine safety and efficacy, a conspiracist says that scientists and regulators are conspiring to trick us.

We live in an transcendentally technical world. You cannot possibly personally resolve all the technical questions you absolutely need to answer to be safe. To survive until tomorrow, you need to know whether the food safety standards for your dinner are up to the job. You need to know whether the building code that certified the joists holding up the roof over your head were adequate.

You need to know whether you can trust your doctor’s prescription advice. You need to know whether your kid’s teachers are good at their jobs. You need to know whether the firmware for the antilock brakes on your car is well-made. You need to know whether vaccines are safe, whether masks are safe, and when and how they’re safe. You need to know whether cryptocurrencies are a safe bet or a rampant scam.

If you get on a Southwest flight, you need to know whether Boeing’s new software for the 737 Max corrects the lethal errors from its initial, self-certified, grossly defective version (I live under the approach path for a SWA hub and some fifty 737 Maxes fly over my roof every day, so this really matters to me!).

You can’t possibly resolve all these questions. No one can. If you spent 50 years earning five PhDs in five unrelated disciplines, you might be able to answer three of these questions for yourself, leaving hundreds more unanswered.

The establishment method for resolving these questions is to hold truth-seeking exercises, which we call “regulation.” In these exercises, you have a neutral adjudicator (if they have a conflict of interest, they recuse themselves). They hear competing claims from interested parties — experts, the public, employees and executives of commercial firms. They sort through these claims, come to a conclusion and publish their reasoning. They also have a process to re-open the procedure when new evidence comes to light.

In 99% of these exercises, we can’t follow the actual cut-and-thrust of the process, but we can evaluate the process itself. Honest regulation is a black box (because most of us can’t understand the technical matters at issue), but the box itself can be understood. We can check to see whether it is sturdy, honest and well-made.

The box isn’t well made.

The regulatory process has been thoroughly captured, and is now more auction than truth-seeking exercise. Regulators themselves are drawn from the executive ranks of the companies they are regulating. How could it be otherwise? 40 years of antitrust malpractice has led to incredible concentration in nearly every industry:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

When five (or four, or two) companies control an industry, the only people who truly understand that industry are the executives at those companies. What’s more, all of those executives are awfully cozy with one another, even if they’re notionally bitter competitors. An industry with just a few companies is one in which most executives have worked at most of those companies at some point in their careers. They are godparents to each other’s children; they’re executors of each others’ estates. Hell, they’re married to each other.

https://locusmag.com/2021/07/cory-doctorow-tech-monopolies-and-the-insufficient-necessity-of-interoperability/

This coziness — between competing companies, and between industries and regulators — makes regulation incredibly susceptible to capture. And since the administrative agencies (not Congress) have the most immediate and profound effect on your quality of life, this matters.

How did the Sackler family start the opioid epidemic that has killed 800,000 Americans (and counting) and walk away with billions? Their regulator slept on their transparently bullshit claims that their blockbuster drug Oxycontin was effective and non-addictive.

When someone tells you they won’t trust vaccines because Big Pharma is full of profit-maddened murderers who don’t care who they kill to make a buck, and their regulators are in on the scam — they’re not wrong.

From aerospace to pharma, agriculture to transportation, labor to the environment, privacy to broadband, the administrative branch has failed us again and again — and every time, the process itself is grossly, obviously rigged.

In Anna Merlan’s excellent Republic of Lies, she illuminates the relationship of trauma to conspiratorialism. When you are injured — especially by a corrupt process — you are no longer able to trust the process. But you still need some way of resolving complex questions you yourself aren’t qualified to answer:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/21/republic-of-lies-the-rise-of-conspiratorial-thinking-and-the-actual-conspiracies-that-fuel-it/

This produces a condition of epistemological chaos: you no longer trust the process, but you don’t have anything to fill it. Into this void rushes conspiratorialism, communities of people who attempt to answer the brutal logic of “caveat emptor” by “doing the research” themselves.

Obama presided over eight years of extremely consequential regulatory failings, starting with his decision to continue bailing out the banks instead of borrowers. That led to the foreclosure crisis, financial consolidation and the finance sector’s bid to corner the market on housing.

Obama’s FDA failed to stem the opioid crisis. Obama’s DoJ and FTC permitted waves of mergers and acquisitions, from Facebook/Instagram to Dow/Dupont to United/Raytheon to Heinz/Kraft.

Big Tech’s mergers and misdeeds during the Obama years were especially grave, and Obama himself was extremely deferential to Big Tech’s claims to be benign, efficient, and (especially) brilliant. When Obama accuses Big Tech of fueling conspiratorialism through algorithmic radicalization, he’s merely restating his belief in their genius.

But they’re not geniuses. As I explained in my 2020 book, “How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism,” the role that surveillance plays in conspiratorialism is in finding people, not convincing people.

https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

That is the actual mechanic of Googbook’s advertising efficacy: by spying on us all the time, Big Tech is able to target ads. So if you want to sell cheerleading uniforms, Big Tech can show your ads to cheerleaders. That is a big change in advertising, but it’s not mind control.

The internet is a system that allows people to find each other — for better and for worse. If you hold a socially disfavored view (“gender is a spectrum,” “Black lives matter”), tech will help you locate others who share that view, without requiring you to go public with it and risk social sanction. Unfortunately, this also lets people who hold odious views (“Jews will not replace us”) do the same thing.

What’s more, the ad-tech parts of the system help grifters locate and target vulnerable people. If you want to sell anti-vax (which has its own line of products, from fake vaccine cards to quack remedies), ad-tech will put your message in front of people who participate in conspiratorial communities.

And yes, Big Tech makes people vulnerable to conspiratorial thinking — but not by bypassing their cognitive faculties to put outlandish ideas in their heads. Rather, Big Tech — like all monopolies — creates the conditions for epistemological chaos, by demonstrating, day after day, that our regulatory process is an auction, not a truth-seeking exercise. Every day that goes by without the US having a federal privacy law with a private right of action is a day that wins converts for conspiratorialism.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/04/stop-forced-arbitration-data-privacy-legislation

Upton Sinclair said that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Obama would prefer to believe that Big Tech has a mind control ray because the alternative is recognizing that deference to corporate power has plunged the world into political chaos.

This is where the centrist/liberal world overlaps with the far right. Recall that when England erupted with a racial uprising in 2011, Prime Minister David Cameron — a far right ideologue — insisted that the whole thing was down to “criminality, plain and simple.”

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/05/ideomotor-response/#qonspiracy

This is effectively mysticism. “Criminality” in this view, is some kind of defect that naturally occurs. It has no causal relationship to the outside world. It can’t be measured (though maybe if it could, we could precrime all the people who have it and put them in jail?). As a political philosophy, the idea that problems arise from “criminality, pure and simple” is about as useful as blaming problems on demonic possession.

Likewise Obama’s thesis, that Qanons are the result of Big Tech mind-control, and not material circumstances. It poses Big Tech’s leaders not as mediocre, sociopathic monopolists, but as evil sorcerers who must be tamed. It forecloses on weakening the companies by denying them their illegitimate market power, and it deflects any inquiry into why people are vulnerable to conspiratorialism.

All of this is to Big Tech’s advantage. If you’re Google, Obama’s condemnation of your powers of mind control is something you can add to your sales literature: “We have a data-advantage that makes our ads unstoppable — even Obama says so!”

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/11/halflife/#minatory-legend

Image: Shira Inbar https://shira-inbar.com/

Onezero https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Biden's Right to Repair will include electronics, too

The Biden administration teased a sweeping antimonopoly executive order last week, including a Right to Repair provision that was to be aimed at agricultural equipment — a direct assault on the corporate power of repair archnemesis John Deere.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/07/instrumentalism/#r2r

But it turns out that the executive order goes far beyond tractors and other agricultural equipment — it also applies to consumer electronics, including mobile phones, and this is a huge fucking deal.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3d5yb/bidens-right-to-repair-executive-order-covers-electronics-not-just-tractors

The Right to Repair fight reached US state legislatures in 2018, when dozens of R2R bills were introduced, and then killed, by an unholy alliance of Apple and other tech companies fighting alongside Big Ag and home electronics monopolists like Wahl.

But the R2R side had its own coalition — farmers, tinkerers, small repair shop owners, auto mechanics and more. If the Biden order had stopped with an agricultural right to repair, that would have weakened the R2R coalition.

Divide-and-rule has long been part of the anti-repair playbook. In 2018, farmers got suckered into backing a California R2R bill that applied to agricultural equipment, only to see the bill gutted, denying them the right to fix their tractors.

https://www.wired.com/story/john-deere-farmers-right-to-repair/

The reason Right to Repair has stayed on the agenda even after brutal legislative losses — the Apple-led coalition killed every single R2R bill in 2018 — has been its support coalition.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/02/euthanize-rentiers/#r2r

That’s why the early news that Biden was giving farmers their right to repair was bittersweet — breaking the coalition might snuff out the hope that we’d get right to repair for our phones, cars and appliances. It’s why the news that the EO covers electronics is so exciting.

It’s a hopeful moment, following other triumphs, like the automotive R2R 2020 ballot initiative that passed in Massachusetts with an overwhelming majority despite Big Car’s scare ads showed women literally being murdered by stalkers as a consequence.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/13/said-no-one-ever/#r2r

Right to Repair got a massive boost this week when Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak made a public endorsement of the movement and described its principles as fundamental to the technological breakthroughs that led to Apple’s founding.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57763037

Seen in that light, all of Apple’s paternalistic arguments about blocking independent repair in the name of defending its customers’ safety are exposed as having a different motivation — blocking the path Apple took for future innovators, so that it can cement its dominance.

And repair is just one element of the antimonopoly executive order, which is broad indeed, as Zephyr Teachout wrote for The Nation. All in all, there are 72 directives in the EO.

https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/biden-monopoly-executive-order/

They encompass “corporate monopolies in agriculture, defense, pharma, banking, and tech,” ban non-compete agreements, and direct the FTC to go to war against the meat-processing monopolies that have crushed farmers and ranchers.

And further: they direct the FCC to reinstate Net Neutrality, the CFPB to force banks to let us take our financial data with us when we switch to a rival, and open up the flow of cheaper drugs from Canada, where the government has stood up to Big Pharma.

Teachout points out that some of this is symbolic in that the agency heads don’t have to do what the president says, though in practice they tend to do so, and FTC chair/superhero Lina Khan has publicly announced her support for the agenda:

https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/biden-monopoly-executive-order/

Teachout calls this an historic moment. She’s right. The Biden admin is refusing to treat agricultural repair as somehow different from automotive, electronic or appliance repair. More importantly, it’s refusing to treat tech monopolies as separate from all monopolies.

This is crucial, because the same kind of diverse coalition that kept R2R alive is potentially a massive force for driving an antimonopoly agenda in general, because monopolies have destroys lives and value in sectors from athletic shoes to finance, eyeglasses to beer.

The potential coalition is massive, but it needs a name. It’s not enough to be antimonopoly. It has to stand for something.

As James Boyle has written, the term “ecology” changed the balance of power in environmental causes.

Prior to “ecology,” there was no obvious connection between the fight for owl survival and the fight against ozone depletion. It’s not obvious that my concern for charismatic nocturnal birds connects to your concern for the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere.

“Ecology” turned 1,000 issues into a single movement with 1,000 constituencies all working in coalition. The antimonopoly movement is on the brink of a similar phase-change, but again, it needs to stand for something.

That something can’t be “competition.” Competition on its own is perfectly capable of being terrible. Think of ad-tech companies who say privacy measures are “anticompetitive.” We don’t want competition for the most efficient human rights abuses.

https://doctorow.medium.com/illegitimate-greatness-674353e7cdf9

A far better goal is “self-determination” — the right for individuals and communities to make up their own minds about how they work and live, based on democratic principles rather than corporate fiat.

https://locusmag.com/2021/07/cory-doctorow-tech-monopolies-and-the-insufficient-necessity-of-interoperability/

That would be a fine position indeed for the Democratic Party to stake out. As Teachout writes, “[Democrats once] stood for workers and the people who produced things, and against the middlemen who sought to steal value and control industry. They understood that anti-monopoly laws were partly about keeping prices down — but also about preserving equality and dignity, and making sure that everyone who contributed to the production of goods and services got a fair cut.”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Agricultural right to repair law is a no-brainer

John Deere is the poster-child for the horrors of finance capitalism. The company was once a great American success story, beloved by the workers who enjoyed good wages and job security, and by farmers, who co-innovated all kinds of new agricultural techniques and technologies.

Today, the company is rotten to the core. Despite skyrocketing profits, the company has continued to grind down its workers, sparking a strike by all 10,000 of its workers. That’s just the tangible manifestation of a hollow company plagued by runaway “just in time” manufacturing, and technologically micromanaged workers who are expected to produce on farcically short timetables even as staffing is reduced:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/18/labor-shortage-discourse-time/#deere-dash

The company has also become synonymous with the war on repair. They told the US Copyright Office that the tractors its sells to farmers for six figures are not actually the farmers’ property — rather, they are mere licensors of the software that animates those tractors.

So much for “If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.” John Deere uses its lock on tractor software to force farmers who fix their own tractors to pay for a service technician to come to their farms and type an unlock code into the tractor’s console.

Deere insists this is necessary to maintain the information security of tractors and suggests that if it isn’t allowed to extract vast sums from farmers through this scam, their tractors will be hijacked by foreign spies, threatening American food sovereignty. That would be a lot more credible if the tractors themselves weren’t such infosec dumpster-fires:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#deere-john

All this and more has put Deere on the receiving end of multiple antitrust suits:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210527/07453546882/obnoxious-repair-monopolies-keep-turning-farmers-into-activists.shtml

The idea that farmers should be able to fix their own stuff is a total no-brainer. There’s a reason every farm has had a forge since Roman times: when you’re at the end of a lonely road and the storm is coming, you need to get the crops in, and you can’t wait for a service call.

Unsurprisingly, there is broad bipartisan support for agricultural right to repair. Nevertheless, previous attempts to pass agricultural R2R laws have been scuttled after the farmers’ own lobbyists switched sides and sold out to Deere.

https://www.wired.com/story/john-deere-farmers-right-to-repair/

Now, there’s new federal agricultural Right to Repair bill, courtesy of Montana Senator Jon Tester, which will require Big Ag to supply manuals, spare parts and software access codes:

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21194562/tester-bill.pdf

The legislation is very similar to the Massachusetts automotive Right to Repair ballot initiative that passed with a huge margin in 2020:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

Both initiatives try to break the otherwise indomitable coalition of anti-repair companies, led by Apple, which destroyed dozens of R2R initiatives at the state level in 2018:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/02/euthanize-rentiers/#r2r

It’s a bet that there is more solidarity among tinkerers, fixers, makers and users of gadgets than there is among the different industries who depend on repair price-gouging. That is, it’s a bet that drivers will back farmers’ right to repair and vice-versa, but that Big Car won’t defend Big Ag.

The opposing side in the repair wars is on the ropes. Their position is getting harder and harder to maintain with a straight face. It helps that the Biden administration is incredibly hostile to that position:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/07/instrumentalism/#r2r

It’s no coincidence that this legislation dropped the same week as Aaron Perzanowski’s outstanding book “The Right to Repair” — R2R is an idea whose time has come to pass.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/29/planned-obsolescence/#r2r

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

Monopolists are winning the repair wars

In 2018, dozens of states introduced Right to Repair bills. These bills are wildly popular among voters, but wildly unpopular among monopolists ranging from Apple to Microsoft to Google to GM to John Deere to Wahl. Every one of these bills was defeated.

Repair advocates regrouped for 2021. 27 R2R bills have been introduced at the state level. Every single one that came up for a vote was defeated, thanks to aggressive lobbying by an unholy alliance of the country’s largest, most profitable, least taxpaying corporations.

In 2014, a pair of American political scientists published a groundbreaking peer-reviewed paper analyzing 30 years’ worth of US policy-making that compared policy outcomes to public polling results.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B#authors-details

They concluded that general public sentiment had almost no impact on US policy making — but the political preferences of wealthy people and large corporations were hugely predictive of what laws and regulations we’d get.

Or, in poli-sci jargon, “Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

The Right to Repair fight is a hell of a proof of this principle. It’s really hard to overstate the popularity of the idea that you should be able to fix your own stuff, or choose where you get your stuff fixed.

Take auto-repair. As auto-manufacturing has grown more concentrated, car makers have squeezed independent mechanics — as close to a folk-hero as the American imagination can produce! — to the margins.

After all, forcing car owners to use official service depots has huge advantages: manufacturers can gouge on service prices, they can force drivers to buy expensive original parts, and they get to unilaterally decide when a car is beyond repair and force you to buy a new one.

Drivers have a good intuitive sense that this is going on. That’s why, when Bay Staters voted on Massachusetts Question 1 (an automotive R2R ballot initiative) in 2012, it passed with an 86% majority!

Mass Question 1 is a really good example of how monopolists can arm-twist politicians into frustrating the will of the people. Immediately after the 2012 initiative, auto-makers set about retooling their cars to escape the new right to repair rule.

The 2012 rule forced automakers to give mechanics access to diagnostic info from cars’ wired internal networks, so Big Car moved all the useful diagnostic data to their cars’ wireless networks. Hence the 2020 Massachusetts R2R ballot initiative, which closed this loophole.

The 2020 fight over the Mass. R2R ballot initiative was fuckin’ wild. The car-makers ran some seriously freaky scare-ads, in which the ability of auto mechanics to read wireless diagnostic data led directly to women being stalked and murdered.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

I’m not making this up. The underlying premise was, “We turned your car into a hyper-aggressive mobile surveillance platform that incidentally gets you places. If we let other people see the data we’re nonconsensually extracting from you, it will put you in terrible danger.”

Thankfully, Bay Staters saw through this bullshit and passed 2020’s Question 1 with a 75% majority.

The thing is, people completely understand that they should be in charge of deciding who fixes their stuff.

They understand that the risk of poor repairs should be addressed through consumer protection laws (which also bind monopolists’ own authorized repair depots), not by having the repair market privately regulated by monopolists who have vast conflicts of interest.

This understanding has only deepened through the pandemic year, as authorized repair depots shuttered and vital equipment languished thanks to anti-repair laws and technological countermeasures.

For example, Medtronic’s workhorse PB840 ventilators couldn’t be refurbed without using a grey-market activation dongle that a single Polish med-tech homebrewed, encasing them in cases harvested from busted clock-radios and guitar pedals.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/10/flintstone-delano-roosevelt/#medtronic-again

Medtronic — a med-tech monopolist that effected the largest corporate inversion in history to escape US taxes — argues that letting independent med-techs fix its products puts patients at risk, but this argument is every bit as flimsy as the auto-makers’ Mass. scare-ads.

It ignores three important facts:

I. Med-techs have always done this kind of repair. The change isn’t that med-techs are demanding the right to do something new — it’s that Medtronic leveraged its monopoly to foreclose on the industry-standard practice

II. Medtronic’s own security track-record is comically terrible. This is the company that makes pacemakers that can be wirelessly hacked from across a room to kill its user, whose software update system doesn’t even use cryptographic signatures.

If Medtronic is an expert on any aspect of patient safety, that expertise is certainly hard-won, derived from its long history of lethal patient endangerment.

III. If there is a problem with indie technicians struggling to fix Medtronic products, the obvious answer is to provide service manuals, parts and diagnostic codes.

The case for Right to Repair is incredibly strong. Not only does R2R protect consumers from ripoffs, it also provides local jobs — 1–4% of US GDP comes from the independent repair sector, almost entirely in independent small/medium businesses.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/02/euthanize-rentiers/#r2r

Repair is an important environmental, labor and human rights story. As leaked internal memos demonstrate, Apple’s aggressively landfilling of devices (so customers buy more) is environmentally devastating and creates demand for conflict minerals.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/31/hall-of-famer/#e-waste-apple

The average American family loses $330/year because of the lack of access to independent repair, a $40b annual drag on the economy thanks to monopoly rents collected by monopoly firms.

To say nothing of the impact on jobs: landfilling a kiloton of ewaste creates <1 job; recycling that waste creates 15 jobs, while repairing it creates 200 good, local jobs that can’t be offshored (you don’t send a phone overseas for repair).

https://www.ifixit.com/Right-to-Repair/Jobs-Revolution

Then there’s the food security story: John Deere is an agribusiness monopolist that outraged farmers by claiming that they didn’t own the tractors they paid six figures for, merely “licensed” them on terms that forbade them from fixing their own machines.

Deere leads Big Ag’s anti-repair, forcing farmers to use official parts, preventing modifications that would allow third-party attachments, and collecting outrageous service call fees for a technician whose job is to unlock the tractor after the farmer replaces a part.

This policy means that farmers who fix  their own tractors still can’t use them even if there’s a hail-storm coming and they need to bring in the crop. Farmers — who’ve been fixing their own gear since the first farmer built a forge next to their farmhouse — are desperate.

Some farmers download anonymously maintained Ukrainian firmware and overwrite the Deere software, creating unknowable risk of remote attack. Others have to maintain “backup tractors” they use for weeks while waiting for Deere to fix their equipment.

https://www.npr.org/2021/05/26/1000400896/standoff-between-farmers-and-tractor-makers-intensifies-over-repair-issues

Just like Medtronic and GM, Deere claims that allowing independent service creates infosec risk — but just like its anti-repair comrades, Deere’s own infosec is a dumpster-fire, with tractors across America at risk of mass-scale cyber-attacks:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#deere-john

The common thread joining these firms is monopoly: a lack of competition that allows them to extract billions from the public, and a cozy cohort of business leaders who can mobilize that loot to ensure that politicians and regulators don’t give the public what it demands.

American industry is experiencing a wave of monopolism not seen since the Gilded Age, and it affects every sector. Take hair-clippers — a category that exploded during the lockdown thanks to the newly created need for home haircuts.

The clipper market is monopolized by a single firm, Wahl. As I discovered — the hard way — Wahl has designed its newest clippers so they disintegrate if you try to take them apart to sharpen them.

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1380554358824136706

Instead of sharpening these devices, you’re expected to buy a new $40 blade (for a shaver that costs $60 all in!), and throw out the old one — or, less realistically, you can mail them your razor for factory sharpening.

You won’t be surprised to learn that Wahl is part of the war on repair, sending letters to state legislators warning that letting people sharpen their own clipper blades could lead to fatal housefires.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4446374-Wahl-Opposition-Illinois.html

Two years ago, the FTC convened an inquiry on independent repair called “Nixing the Fix.” The Nixing the Fix report was released earlier this month, and it affirms everything that repair advocates have said all along.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/07/pro-act-class-war/#we-fixit

The FTC calls bullshit on manufacturers’ claims about cyber-risk, housefires, and whether getting your car fixed by your family’s beloved mechanic will lead to your murder. It broadly and firmly endorses Right to Repair.

Which brings me back to 2021, were every one of the 27 R2R bills that has been brought before a state legislature for a vote has been defeated, thanks to heavy corporate lobbying by monopolists.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-20/microsoft-and-apple-wage-war-on-gadget-right-to-repair-laws

These bills were voted down after heartbreaking testimony from ed-tech repair specialists who described the devastating impact that a broken laptop has on poor families whose kids are doing remote learning.

They were voted down despite the record, the public support, the climate questions, the food security issue, the human rights issues — voted down to preserve the monopoly profits of a tiny number of firms whose claim to being “American” is tenuous at best.

These tax-dodging, offshoring companies view the American public as an all-you-can-eat buffet, and disclaim any responsibility to the country — while still expecting its lawmakers to defend their interests, at the expense of the voters.

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

Eviction is over (if we want it)

Now that the illegitimate, undemocratic Supremes have voided the CDC eviction ban, and now that the cowardly Dems who control House, Senate and Oval Office have declined to pass an eviction ban bill, millions of Americans teeter on the brink of homelessness.

As we look at this looming crisis, which will increase the spread of covid, kill more Americans, and put a generations-long stamp of trauma on the people who lose their homes, we’re asked to side with either renters or landlords.

But that’s a false dichotomy. Americans owe $12–14b to their landlords, and Congress has authorized $46.5b in rental assistance that could make all of those landlords whole several times over. But the states have only distributed 11% of the money!

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/04/eighty-sixed/#helicopter-not-foundhttps://pluralistic.net/2021/08/04/eighty-sixed/#helicopter-not-found

Why are the states having so much trouble handing out money? Bureaucracy. You know, the thing whose supposed absence was cited as the source of America’s moral and economic superiority to the USSR.

What’s the source of this bureaucracy? Means-testing. The endless red-tape, so beloved of conservatives, that is meant to ensure that the “undeserving poor” don’t get any of the money earmarked for “hardworking poor people.”

(The irony, of course, is that conservatives are completely unconcerned with trillions in no-bid contracts for the beltway bandits who were supposed to be nation-building in Afghanistan)

https://defensesystems.com/articles/2021/08/19/afghanistan-sigar-contracts-pullout.aspx

(Nor do they care about Trump’s billions for crooks who were supposed to supply PPE at the start of the lockdown, but simply placed orders from China, got in line, and marked up the shipments to Uncle Sucker)

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/12/postal-petard/#prolongz

When it comes to delivering aid to the wealthy, conservatives hate red-tape. When it comes to preventing working people from starving or becoming homeless, conservatives put on a paperwork parade that outshine the pettiest Soviet commissar.

This contradiction arises from a cornerstone of conservative ideology — the idea of “learned helplessness.” Learned helplessness is a real thing that psychologists can induce in lab animals, discouraging them to the point of fatal listlessness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

But that’s not what conservatives mean by learned helplessness. For them, learned helplessness is the evidence-free conviction that if you give a person a “handout,” they will lose interest in “hard work.”

Think of all the fast-food “entrepreneurs” whose signage proclaims “no one wants to work anymore” because of “government handouts,” conspicuously failing to mention sub-starvation wages, irregular shifts, and abusive working conditions.

In conservativism, wealth is providential. Markets reward virtue, so the wealthy are inherently virtuous. They know the value of “hard work” and aren’t at risk of “learned helplessness” so they can get “bailouts” (not “handouts”) without risk of “perverse incentives.”

But conservativism contains a contradiction: because capital — by definition — earns its returns from someone else’s labor, any bailout is also a potential handout. If you save a locked down “heroic small business” with payroll support, you also “pay workers to stay home.”

And if you bail out landlords by making up their tenants’ missed rental payments, you also let the tenants “live for free” (ignoring for the moment that landlords whose mortgages and living expenses derive from tenant payments are literally “living for free”).

So here we are, about to endure a gaping, generations-long self-inflicted wound. We’re about to cost millions of renters their homes and potentially put their landlords in default because evicting a tenant doesn’t get you a nickel in back-rent.

You couldn’t ask for a neater demonstration of the extent to which “conservative business acumen” is a LARP — a set of culture-war performances rather than any kind of meaningful attention to profit and loss.

Because saving millions of your fellow Americans from destitution and homelessness isn’t merely the right (and, you know, Christian) thing to do — it’s also the smart business move. Homelessness is infinitely more expensive than rental assistance.

State conservatives are refusing to hand out $41.3b in order to create a decades-long cycle of public liabilities that will easily cost a hundred times that amount, and they’re not just hurting poor people — they’re euthanizing a whole shit-ton of rentiers!

As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, it’s the kind of thing you’d expect from a party with “two primary core talents: selling quack supplements and lowering taxes.”

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/americas-acute-governance-problem/

After all, if you campaign on eliminating government due to its incompetence, then governing incompetently is a feature, not a bug. But for the nation (and the world) which needs its government to manage climate, pandemic, etc, this is a serious bug.

Meanwhile, Dayen has a great suggestion for how to dispense with all the red tape and save landlords and tenants.

Just station a federal official with a “big bag of money” in every eviction court. Every time a judge hears evidence that a tenant is behind in the rent, the official makes them whole out of the big bag of money, and the eviction is cancelled.

This is literally the worst way of doing it, a monumental waste of court resources and an inhumane way to treat tenants (and landlords, too). The only thing worse would be to allow that wave of looming evictions to wash millions of our neighbors onto the streets.

Oh, and note the Repubs aren’t the only ones who have a problem with learned helplessness. The Dems have the House, Senate and Oval Office and they can’t even pass the For the People Act, which will force all those red states to stop thumbing the scales for GOP candidates.

Because the Dems can’t figure out how to whip Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema, they can’t nuke the filibuster and pass a wildly popular law that will stop the GOP from rigging every election to come with voter suppression and gerrymandering.

When the party with the triple-lock on power watches as Texas passes a law that disenfranchises Black and brown people as well as people in major cities, guaranteeing the midterms, the 2024 Congress and eternal rule, what is it but learned helplessness?

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

Google's short-lived data-advantage

There's a lot of ways to think about the movement to tame Big Tech, but one of the more useful divisions to explore is the "Night of the Comet" people versus the "Don't Believe the Criti-Hype" people.

This is a division over the value of the data that Google, Facebook and other large tech firms have amassed over the years - data on their users, sure, but also data on the advertisers and publishers they serve with their ad-tech platforms.

Big Tech companies and their investors are really bullish on the value of this commercial data-advantage: they say that spying on us - the users - lets them manipulate our opinions and activities so that we buy or believe the things their advertisers pay them to push.

More quietly, their investors believe that the data-advantage extends to publishers and advertisers, a deep storehouse of data that makes it effectively impossible for anyone else to do the precision targeted that Big Tech manages, which is why they have such fat margins.

Night of the Comet tech criticism accepts these claims at face value: Big Tech's advantage, they claim, comes from having amassed this insurmountable data-advantage that allows it to both predict and shape what we - and therefore advertisers and publishers - will do.

The implication of this is that traditional antitrust remedies - breakups, say - won't be merely ineffective; they'll be terrifyingly harmful.

If Googbook invented a mind-control ray to sell your nephew fidget-spinners, then breaking them up will only make it easier for Robert Mercer to hijack that mind-control ray to turn your uncle into a Qanon racist.

Googbook's data-advantage, in other words, is like a planet-killing comet heading towards the Earth. If we break that comet up, it will turn into a killing rain of meteors that shower onto every part of the globe - we can't break up the comet, we have to *steer* it.

In this version of tech criticism, the answer is to leave Big Tech intact, but turn it into a utility, or some other highly regulated entity, bound by rules that limit its use of that mind-control system.

Bringing Big Tech to heel by deputizing it to serve as an arm of the state (and perhaps a national champion in the new Cold War with China), like the Bell System prior to the AT&T breakup in '82.

On the other side, you have the Don't Believe the Criti-Hype school. Lee Vinsel coined the term "Criti-Hype" to describe a kind of criticism that actually hypes its subject - say, by repeating Big Tech's self-serving claims.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/02/euthanize-rentiers/#dont-believe-the-hype

These claims aren't just self-serving, they're also highly dubious. Everyone who's ever claimed to be able to read - or control - our minds was lying (to themselves, or to everyone else, or both).

The "psychometrics" that all this behavior-modification depends on is - to quote *Nature* - a "scant science." From Big Five Personality Types to microexpression/sentiment analysis, we're deep into the realm of irreproducible results and junk science.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03880-4

The Criti-Hype school posits that the supernormal returns to capital for Big Tech aren't driven by awesome ad-tech capabilities, but rather, by monopoly (buying or crushing all competitors) and the fraud it enables (the industry has nowhere else to go).

That is, Big Tech makes money the same way hedge-fund managers make their own stunning returns: by cheating so they get paid whether or not they're any good at their jobs. The mere existence of a profitable industry is not proof that the industry is run by competent people.

And to be clear, there is a *lot* of fraud in ad-tech. Tim Hwang calls it a "Subprime Attention Crisis," where the ads are fake, the clicks are fake, the publishers' inventory is fake, the whole thing *riddled* with fraud.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#wannamakers-ghost

As Aram Zucker-Scharff wrote, "The numbers are fake, the metrics are bullshit, the agencies responsible for enforcing good practices are knowing bullshitters profiting off the fake numbers and none of the models make sense at scale of actual human users."

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#adfraud

It's a "bezzle" - a con whose mark hasn't twigged to the ruse...yet.

And while the Night of the Comet side relies on the irreproducible claims of self-proclaimed Svengalis, the Criti-Hype side has an increasingly corpus of cold, hard facts about the bezzle's operation.

Take last November's "Why Google Dominates Advertising Markets," Dina Srinivasan's  superb and detailed dissection of Google's crooked ad-markets, in which they steal from advertisers and publishers by rigging the bids on both sides of the exchange.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sovkitsch/#adtech

Srinivasan proves you don't need mind-control rays to explain how Big G makes fantastic returns from the ad-tech market. That prospect is further explored in the UK Competition and Markets Authority's 437-page report on "Online platforms and digital advertising" (Jul '20):

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5fa557668fa8f5788db46efc/Final_report_Digital_ALT_TEXT.pdf

Here's where it starts to get *really* interesting. In May 2020, Yale's Fiona Scott Morton and Omidyar's  David Dinielli used preliminary CMA data to publish their "Roadmap for a Digital Advertising Monopolization Case Against Google."

https://omidyar.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Roadmap-for-a-Case-Against-Google.pdf

Morton and Dinelli zero in on the actual mechanism of Google's data-advantage, the thing it commands a lion's share of, which advertisers genuinely prize: location data. If I know you're around the corner from my cafe, I might spend a *lot* to show you an ad for my pasties.

This location data advantage is undeniable, but man, it has a short half-life. Thing is, I might spend a lot of money to show you an ad for my coffee shop when you're around the corner, but once you've moved on, you can go to hell as far as I'm concerned. You're dead to me.

This short half-life tells us that we're not living the Night of the Comet nightmare scenario. Break up Google, starve it of location data, and within *hours* most of its location targeting advantage is gone...forever.

As the antitrust cases against Google proceed, more and more of these technical exposes of rigged markets emerge, showing us how monopoly and fraud are at the heart of the data-advantage, and how contingent, time-bound and fragile that advantage really is.

The latest is the bizarrely named "Project Bernanke," a formerly secret ripoff that was exposed when Google forgot to redact a document it filed in its Texas antitrust case:

https://twitter.com/KhushitaVasant/status/1379955848118726659

Google used data from recent ad-auctions to help advertisers shade their bids for ad-placements, exploiting the information asymmetry so the ads it brokered won the auctions, ensuring that rivals ad-brokerages were frozen out.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/googles-secretive-project-bernanke-reportedly-093732134.html

Though Google insists that this was just an industry practice, the leaked document reveals that Google kept this a secret from publishers. Its internal presentations claim that they made $230m in 2013 alone from this practice.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-secret-project-bernanke-revealed-in-texas-antitrust-case-11618097760

All together, this constitutes a highly specific account of how a data-advantage worked - and what its weak-point is. Project Bernanke was not grounded in longitudinal market data from ad-sales - it exploited *recent* data to deliver a $230m+/year advantage.

The multisided market - a multisided bezzle - exploits the monopolist's data advantage to harm readers, publishers and advertisers, not by predicting and shaping their behavior by bypassing their critical faculties with spooky, advanced psychometrics.

The bezzle requires fresh data - it's a flywheel that uses the monopolist's god's-eye-view to freeze out competitors and entrap publishers and advertisers to get more data to rig the market to entrap the publishers and the advertisers.

It's not a comet. It's a monopoly. It's not terrifying supergeniuses using machine learning to turn us into clicking zombies: it's garden-variety monopolists using anticompetitive, underhanded, dishonest and (probably) illegal tactics to maintain their monopoly.

Bust the trust, ban the conduct, and the data-advantage evaporates with the half-life of that extremely time-bound data. The criti-hype that says that the data-advantage is a deadly, unstoppable comet is just Google's own sales-patter, flipped on its head.

Don't believe the criti-hype.