I will be speaking with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen at the Toronto Metro Reference Library on Monday, November 27.
My book, The Lost Cause, a solarpunk story of danger and hope that Rebecca Solnit deemed “completely delightful,” will be available at NYC’s Strand Books on November 29.
This week, I wrote on how the mechanisms that punish corporate malfeasance, rather than the moral decay of tech business leadership, caused the Great Enshittening, in which all the digital services we depend on turn into extractive piles of shit.
A few businesses were able to buy out their competitors, offer items below cost until their competitors failed, or pay crucial supply chain participants to prevent competitors from participating due to the lack of enforcement of competition laws:
As a result of the tech sector’s concentration, the remaining companies were extraordinarily wealthy and had enough clout to agree on a shared legislative agenda. Because of this regulatory capture, internet businesses have been able to break labor, privacy, and consumer protection laws by claiming that using an app to break the law is not considered a violation of the law.
However, the regulatory capture movement aims to enact laws that forbid reverse engineering, scraping, and other forms of modification, hacking, or reconfiguration of already-existing services in order to recover the value that has been taken from consumers and business clients. This gives birth to the aptly termed “felony contempt of business-model” doctrine of Jay Freeman, according to which it is unlawful for you to utilize your own property in a way that would enrage the shareholders of the firm that sold it to you:
Companies can enshittify their products without fear of competition, regulation, or unilateral user alteration. However, how does that appear in real life? I contend that a lost argument is always the catalyst for enshittification.
It all begins with a proposal to do something that benefits the firm but is detrimental to users made over a boardroom table. The employees who find this course of action repulsive can argue, “I think doing this would be gross, and what’s more, it’s going to make the company poorer,” and win the argument if the organization is subject to competition, regulation, or self-help measures.
The argument becomes, however, “Don’t do this because it would make me ashamed to work here, even though it will make the company richer,” when that discipline is removed. Bullshit walks money talks. Start the process of enshittification!
But why do employees even give a damn? That’s the point at which expressions like “don’t be evil” become relevant. Tech workers were involved in one of the tightest labor markets in history until very recently, as many firms with enormous war chests bid on their labor. Recruiters would frequently phone even low-level employees, offering them greater pay and stock grants in exchange for defecting to a competitor company.
Employers constructed “campuses” with opulent amenities like daycare centers, massage therapy, sports facilities, and fine dining restaurants. The company provided significant benefit packages to its employees, which included unique health advantages like freezing your eggs to postpone conception and mitigate the risks that come with getting pregnant later in life.
All of this, however, was a clear deception: the business rationale for free lunches, fitness centers, dry cleaning, catering, and massages was to have employees spend 10, 12, or even 16 hours a day in front of laptops. The purpose of the egg-freezing benefit was to tip the scales in favor of working through your whole 20s and 30s without taking any time off for parental leave, not to assist employees in planning their families.
Put differently, IT companies saw their workers as a tool to achieve a goal: they wanted to hire the brightest nerds and use them as government spies. Benefits and compensation resulted from the discipline of labor competition rather than from labor and management camaraderie.
Naturally, this wasn’t exactly a secret. Employees at Big Tech are divided into two groups: contractors and blue badge holders (who get salaries). A job or skill is changed from a blue badge to a green badge whenever there is a gap in the labor market. Massages, kombucha, and food are not available to those with green badges. They receive neither daycare nor stock. They fail to understand should put their eggs in the freezer. Although they put in a lot of overtime, their motivation comes from a dread of going without.
Tech companies took considerable measures to prevent blue badge holders from coming into contact with green badge holders; on some Google campuses, these workers even entered via separate doors and worked in different buildings or on different floors. Occasionally, the hours of work for those with green badges would be adjusted to avoid a line-up of disheveled clickworkers as their more sophisticated colleagues stepped off the opulent bus and into their spacious adult kindergartens.
