Commentary by Cory Doctorow: Don’t Be Evil

It’s tempting to think of the Great Enshittening – in which all the inter­net services we enjoyed and came to rely upon became suddenly and irreversibly terrible – as the result of moral decay. That is, it’s tempting to think that the people who gave us the old, good internet did so because they were good people, and the people who enshittified it did so because they are shitty people.

But the services that defined the old, good internet weren’t designed or maintained by individuals; they were created by institutions – mostly for-profit companies, but also non-profits, government and military agencies and academic and research facilities. Institutions are made up of individuals, of course, but the thing that makes an institution institutional is that no one person can direct it. The actions of an institution are the result of its many individual constituent parts, both acting in concert, and acting against one another.

In other words: institutional action is the result of its individuals resolving their conflicts. Institutional action is the net results of wheedling, horse-trading, solidarity, skullduggery, power-moves, trickery, coercion, rational argument, love, spite, ferocity, and indifference among the institution’s members.

But of course, not all members of the institution are created equal. The CEO’s personal assistant might be able to change the location of a key meeting in an online calendar and send a hapless exec to the wrong room at a key juncture in an institutional crisis, thus facilitating a palace coup; but the CEO can just fire the personal assistant.

Tech has always included people who wanted to make a better internet – one where users enjoyed the technological self-determination to choose from among a wide variety of services, to start their own rival service, or to use plug-ins and mods to alter how a service works. Many’s the mid-2000s blogger who used an ad blocker and expected their readers to have one as well, even as their bosses stamped their feet in frustration at the “lost revenue” these users represented.

Tech has also always included people who wanted to enshittify the internet – to transfer value from the internet’s users to themselves. The wide-open internet, defined by open standards and open protocols, confounded those people. Any gains they stood to make from making a service you loved worse had to be offset against the losses they’d suffer when users went elsewhere.

It follows, then, that as it got harder for users to leave these services, it got easier to abuse users.

Every institutional action can be thought of as a victory lap for the winner of an internal struggle. The enshittification of the services we once loved and still rely on represents a series of victories for the forces of evil over the forces of good – a victory for the people who want to use the internet to trap us, over the people who want to use the internet to set us free.

As it got harder for users to leave online services, it got easier to abuse users.

How do you make it harder for users to leave online services?

Well, for starters, you can reduce the number of services that exist, pe­riod. Facebook bought Instagram and Whatsapp with the explicit intent of reducing options for disaffected Facebook users. As Mark Zuckerberg (in)famously quipped: “It is better to buy than to compete.”

You can also reduce the likelihood that users will discover alternative services. As I write this in September 2023, Google is in court defending itself against antitrust charges brought by the Department of Justice, who accuse the company of spending tens of billions of dollars every year so that Google Search is the default on platforms and services like Safari, Firefox and Samsung. Google lights a whole-ass Twitter’s worth of money on fire every year to make sure you never try another search engine.

Or you can make leaving a service more expensive. Amazon locks every audiobook you buy to its Audible platform forever, forcing publishers to accept its Digital Rights Management wrappers, which can’t be removed under penalty of law, and which limit Audible playback to players Amazon has approved (and block playback on competing platforms).

Users who can’t leave a platform might try to make things a little better. For example, they might install an ad blocker. One in four web users has installed a blocker, making it (in the words of Doc Searls) the largest con­sumer boycott in history.

This means that companies that lock their users in still have to contend with the possibility that their trapped users will take some action to make their lives better – use an alternative client, a tracker-blocker, or some other mod that claws back value that enshittifiers have taken away.

And so enshittifiers sought out ways to ban this conduct. Using a mix of copyright, patent, trademark, trade secrecy and other “IP,” the tech platforms made it illegal to push back against the encroaching walls. There’s a longstanding debate within tech policy circles about what “IP” means, and whether it means anything at all.

But in the context of enshittification, “IP” has a single, crisp meaning: “Any policy that lets me reach beyond the walls of my business and exert control over the conduct of my competitors, critics and customers.”

Add it all together: the lack of competitors, the barriers to discovering which competitors exist, the deliberately imposed pain on leaving a service and the criminaliza­tion of self-help measures, and it comes to this: as it got harder for users to leave online services, it got easier to abuse users.

And this: an institution’s actions are victory laps for the winners of in­ternal struggles.

Once and still, there were and are people at Google who thought that the internet should be a force for liberation, not extraction. People who treated “don’t be evil” was a polestar, not an empty slogan.

What changed? Not those people. What changed was the force of their argument.

“It’s wrong to enshittify our product” was never going to consistently keep a company from turning to the bad. Sure, it works from time to time – like when Google founder – and Soviet refugee – Sergey Brin unilaterally pulled the company out of China after he was confronted with the fact that the Chinese intelligence services were hacking Chinese Gmail users to figure out who to round up and stick in a gulag.

But it doesn’t work consistently. Brin and his cofounder, Larry Page, intro­duced their new search engine to the world in 1998, with a paper called “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, in which they wrote: “We believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.”

Long before “Don’t be evil,” Page and Brin were writing that advertising-supported search would always degrade.

And when the company went public in 2004, Page and Brin published “‘An Owner’s Manual’ for Google’s Shareholders”, in which they explained their intention to permanently retain a majority of the company’s voting shares, in order to “advance the company’s core values.”

Here you have the founders of the firm, who, from day one, explained how their own mixed motives could lead their product into enshittification, who went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that they would never have to yield to anyone else’s voting majority, and who still turned their empire into a pile of shit, where far more is spent to ensure that no one will try any other product than is spent to ensure that their own product would compare favorably to rivals.

If Brin and Page lost the argument, what chance did their employees have?

Think of every enshittification as being preceded by an argument. Some people say, “We should extract this surplus: it will make our bosses happy, make our shareholders richer, and increase our bonuses.”

When the people on the other side of that argument said, “If we do what you suggest, it will be make our product worse and it will cost us more money than it will make us,” they tend to win the argument.

When all they can say is, “Yes, this will make us more money, but it will make the product worse,” they forever lose the argument.

The elimination of competition – and the ensu­ing capture of regulation – removed the discipline imposed by the fear of customers defecting as the product degraded. The harder it is for users to leave a service, the easier it is for the factions within a company to best their rivals in the debate over whether they should be allowed to make the service worse.

That’s what changed. That’s what’s different. Tech didn’t get worse because techies got worse. Tech got worse because the condition of the ex­ternal world made it easier for the worst techies to win arguments.

A new, good internet is possible and worth fighting for. After all, the internet is a powerful and crucial force in our lives, a single conduit for free speech, a free press, free association; and ac­cess to education, family, civics, politics, health, employment, romance, and more.

The enshittified giants of the internet may be beyond redemption. Perhaps they have become so corrupted, piled up so much sin and callous disregard for human thriving, that all that is left is to burn them to the ground.

Make no mistake: there are plenty of people within those institutions who pine for a new, good internet, an internet that is a force for hu­man liberation.

To help those people win their arguments – to win the arguments with them – we need to make sure that their point is never merely “this is wrong,” but also “this will cost us more than we can possibly gain from it.”

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All opinions expressed by commentators are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Locus.

This article and more like it in the November 2023 issue of Locus.

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