Conceived in 1946 by Ray and Charles Eames, the Eames radio was never mass produced. In 2018 Vitra resurfaced the idea and released a limited edition inspired by the original design. All 999 units were sold out almost immediately.
When the makers of electronic implants abandon their projects, people who rely on the devices have everything to lose.
Title says "neurotechnology failure" but it's not the tech that's failing. It's the companies that manufacture the chips, probes, implants. And they fail because they're mean to. That's late stage capitalism; not a bug, but a feature.
I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (Mar 22) in TORONTO, then SUNDAY (Mar 24) with LAURA POITRAS in NYC, then Anaheim, and beyond!
The foundational tenet of "the Cult of Mac" is that buying products from a $3t company makes you a member of an oppressed ethnic minority and therefore every criticism of that corporation is an ethnic slur:
Call it "Apple exceptionalism" â the idea that Apple, alone among the Big Tech firms, is virtuous, and therefore its conduct should be interpreted through that lens of virtue. The wellspring of this virtue is conveniently nebulous, which allows for endless goal-post shifting by members of the Cult of Mac when Apple's sins are made manifest.
Take the claim that Apple is "privacy respecting," which is attributed to Apple's business model of financing its services though cash transactions, rather than by selling it customers to advertisers. This is the (widely misunderstood) crux of the "surveillance capitalism" hypothesis: that capitalism is just fine, but once surveillance is in the mix, capitalism fails.
Apple, then, is said to be a virtuous company because its behavior is disciplined by market forces, unlike its spying rivals, whose ability to "hack our dopamine loops" immobilizes the market's invisible hand with "behavior-shaping" shackles:
Apple makes a big deal out of its privacy-respecting ethos, and not without some justification. After all, Apple went to the mattresses to fight the FBI when they tried to force Apple to introduced defects into its encryption systems:
And Apple gave Ios users the power to opt out of Facebook spying with a single click; 96% of its customers took them up on this offer, costing Facebook $10b (one fifth of the pricetag of the metaverse boondoggle!) in a single year (you love to see it):
Bruce Schneier has a name for this practice: "feudal security." That's when you cede control over your device to a Big Tech warlord whose "walled garden" becomes a fortress that defends you against external threats:
The keyword here is external threats. When Apple itself threatens your privacy, the fortress becomes a prison. The fact that you can't install unapproved apps on your Ios device means that when Apple decides to harm you, you have nowhere to turn. The first Apple customers to discover this were in China. When the Chinese government ordered Apple to remove all working privacy tools from its App Store, the company obliged, rather than risk losing access to its ultra-cheap manufacturing base (Tim Cook's signal accomplishment, the one that vaulted him into the CEO's seat, was figuring out how to offshore Apple manufacturing to China) and hundreds of millions of middle-class consumers:
Killing VPNs and other privacy tools was just for openers. After Apple caved to Beijing, the demands kept coming. Next, Apple willingly backdoored all its Chinese cloud services, so that the Chinese state could plunder its customers' data at will:
This was the completely foreseeable consequence of Apple's "curated computing" model: once the company arrogated to itself the power to decide which software you could run on your own computer, it was inevitable that powerful actors â like the Chinese Communist Party â would lean on Apple to exercise that power in service to its goals.
Unsurprisingly, the Chinese state's appetite for deputizing Apple to help with its spying and oppression was not sated by backdooring iCloud and kicking VPNs out of the App Store. As recently as 2022, Apple continued to neuter its tools at the behest of the Chinese state, breaking Airdrop to make it useless for organizing protests in China:
But the threat of Apple turning on its customers isn't limited to China. While the company has been unwilling to spy on its users on behalf of the US government, it's proven more than willing to compromise its worldwide users' privacy to pad its own profits. Remember when Apple let its users opt out of Facebook surveillance with one click? At the very same time, Apple was spinning up its own commercial surveillance program, spying on Ios customers, gathering the very same data as Facebook, and for the very same purpose: to target ads. When it came to its own surveillance, Apple completely ignored its customers' explicit refusal to consent to spying, spied on them anyway, and lied about it:
Here's the thing: even if you believe that Apple has a "corporate personality" that makes it want to do the right thing, that desire to be virtuous is dependent on the constraints Apple faces. The fact that Apple has complete legal and technical control over the hardware it sells â the power to decide who can make software that runs on that hardware, the power to decide who can fix that hardware, the power to decide who can sell parts for that hardware â represents an irresistible temptation to enshittify Apple products.
"Constraints" are the crux of the enshittification hypothesis. The contagion that spread enshittification to every corner of our technological world isn't a newfound sadism or indifference among tech bosses. Those bosses are the same people they've always been â the difference is that today, they are unconstrained.
Having bought, merged or formed a cartel with all their rivals, they don't fear competition (Apple buys 90+ companies per year, and Google pays it an annual $26.3b bribe for default search on its operating systems and programs).
Having captured their regulators, they don't fear fines or other penalties for cheating their customers, workers or suppliers (Apple led the coalition that defeated dozens of Right to Repair bills, year after year, in the late 2010s).
Having wrapped themselves in IP law, they don't fear rivals who make alternative clients, mods, privacy tools or other "adversarial interoperability" tools that disenshittify their products (Apple uses the DMCA, trademark, and other exotic rules to block third-party software, repair, and clients).
True virtue rests not merely in resisting temptation to be wicked, but in recognizing your own weakness and avoiding temptation. As I wrote when Apple embarked on its "curated computing" path, the company would eventually â inevitably â use its power to veto its customers' choices to harm those customers:
Which is where we're at today. Apple â uniquely among electronics companies â shreds every device that is traded in by its customers, to block third parties from harvesting working components and using them for independent repair:
Apple engraves microscopic Apple logos on those parts and uses these as the basis for trademark complaints to US customs, to block the re-importation of parts that escape its shredders:
Apple entered into an illegal price-fixing conspiracy with Amazon to prevent used and refurbished devices from being sold in the "world's biggest marketplace":
Why is Apple so opposed to independent repair? Well, they say it's to keep users safe from unscrupulous or incompetent repair technicians (feudal security). But when Tim Cook speaks to his investors, he tells a different story, warning them that the company's profits are threatened by customers who choose to repair (rather than replace) their slippery, fragile glass $1,000 pocket computers (the fortress becomes a prison):
All this adds up to a growing mountain of immortal e-waste, festooned with miniature Apple logos, that our descendants will be dealing with for the next 1,000 years. In the face of this unspeakable crime, Apple engaged in a string of dishonest maneuvers, claiming that it would support independent repair. In 2022, Apple announced a home repair program that turned out to be a laughably absurd con:
Let's pause here a moment and remember that Apple once stood for independent repair, and celebrated the independent repair technicians that kept its customers' beloved Macs running:
Whatever virtue lurks in Apple's corporate personhood, it is no match for the temptation that comes from running a locked-down platform designed to capture IP rights so that it can prevent normal competitive activities, like fixing phones, processing payments, or offering apps.
When Apple rolled out the App Store, Steve Jobs promised that it would save journalism and other forms of "content creation" by finally giving users a way to pay rightsholders. A decade later, that promise has been shattered by the app tax â a 30% rake on every in-app transaction that can't be avoided because Apple will kick your app out of the App Store if you even mention that your customers can pay you via the web in order to avoid giving a third of their content dollars to a hardware manufacturer that contributed nothing to the production of that material:
Among the apps that Apple also refuses to allow on Ios is third-party browsers. Every Iphone browser is just a reskinned version of Apple's Safari, running on the same antiquated, insecure Webkit browser engine. The fact that Webkit is incomplete and outdated is a feature, not a bug, because it lets Apple block web apps â apps delivered via browsers, rather than app stores:
Last month, the EU took aim at Apple's veto over its users' and software vendors' ability to transact with one another. The newly in-effect Digital Markets Act requires Apple to open up both third-party payment processing and third-party app stores. Apple's response to this is the very definition of malicious compliance, a snake's nest of junk-fees, onerous terms of service, and petty punitive measures that all add up to a great, big "Go fuck yourself":
But Apple's bullying, privacy invasion, price-gouging and environmental crimes are global, and the EU isn't the only government seeking to end them. They're in the firing line in Japan:
And now, famously, the US Department of Justice is coming for Apple, with a bold antitrust complaint that strikes at the heart of Apple exceptionalism, the idea that monopoly is safer for users than technological self-determination:
There's passages in the complaint that read like I wrote them:
Apple wraps itself in a cloak of privacy, security, and consumer preferences to justify its anticompetitive conduct. Indeed, it spends billions on marketing and branding to promote the self-serving premise that only Apple can safeguard consumersâ privacy and security interests. Apple selectively compromises privacy and security interests when doing so is in Appleâs own financial interestâsuch as degrading the security of text messages, offering governments and certain companies the chance to access more private and secure versions of app stores, or accepting billions of dollars each year for choosing Google as its default search engine when more private options are available. In the end, Apple deploys privacy and security justifications as an elastic shield that can stretch or contract to serve Appleâs financial and business interests.
After all, Apple punishes its customers for communicating with Android users by forcing them to do so without any encryption. When Beeper Mini rolled out an Imessage-compatible Android app that fixed this, giving Iphone owners the privacy Apple says they deserve but denies to them, Apple destroyed Beeper Mini:
https://blog.beeper.com/p/beeper-moving-forward
Tim Cook is on record about this: if you want to securely communicate with an Android user, you must "buy them an Iphone":
If your friend, family member or customer declines to change mobile operating systems, Tim Cook insists that you must communicate without any privacy or security.
Even where Apple tries for security, it sometimes fails ("security is a process, not a product" -B. Schneier). To be secure in a benevolent dictatorship, it must also be an infallible dictatorship. Apple's far from infallible: Eight generations of Iphones have unpatchable hardware defects:
https://checkm8.info/
And Apple's latest custom chips have secret-leaking, unpatchable vulnerabilities:
Apple's far from infallible â but they're also far from benevolent. Despite Apple's claims, its hardware, operating system and apps are riddled with deliberate privacy defects, introduce to protect Apple's shareholders at the expense of its customers:
https://proton.me/blog/iphone-privacy
Now, antitrust suits are notoriously hard to make, especially after 40 years of bad-precedent-setting, monopoly-friendly antitrust malpractice. Much of the time, these suits fail because they can't prove that tech bosses intentionally built their monopolies. However, tech is a written culture, one that leaves abundant, indelible records of corporate deliberations. What's more, tech bosses are notoriously prone to bragging about their nefarious intentions, committing them to writing:
Apple is no exception â there's an abundance of written records that establish that Apple deliberately, illegally set out to create and maintain a monopoly:
Apple claims that its monopoly is beneficent, used to protect its users, making its products more "elegant" and safe. But when Apple's interests conflict with its customers' safety and privacy â and pocketbooks â Apple always puts itself first, just like every other corporation. In other words: Apple is unexceptional.
The Cult of Mac denies this. They say that no one wants to use a third-party app store, no one wants third-party payments, no one wants third-party repair. This is obviously wrong and trivially disproved: if no Apple customer wanted these things, Apple wouldn't have to go to enormous lengths to prevent them. The only phones that an independent Iphone repair shop fixes are Iphones: which means Iphone owners want independent repair.
The rejoinder from the Cult of Mac is that those Iphone owners shouldn't own Iphones: if they wanted to exercise property rights over their phones, they shouldn't have bought a phone from Apple. This is the "No True Scotsman" fallacy for distraction-rectangles, and moreover, it's impossible to square with Tim Cook's insistence that if you want private communications, you must buy an Iphone.
Apple is unexceptional. It's just another Big Tech monopolist. Rounded corners don't preserve virtue any better than square ones. Any company that is freed from constraints â of competition, regulation and interoperability â will always enshittify. Apple â being unexceptional â is no exception.
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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:
In âSocial Quitting,â my latest Locus Magazine column, I advance a theory to explain the precipitous vibe shift in how many of us view the once-dominant social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter, and how it is that we have so quickly gone asking what we can do to get these services out of our lives to where we should go now that weâre all ready to leave them:
The core of the argument revolves around surplusesâââthat is, the value that exists in the service. For a user, surpluses are things like âbeing able to converse with your friendsâ and âbeing able to plan activities with your friends.â For advertisers, surpluses are things like âbeing able to target ads based on the extraction and processing of private user dataâ and âbeing able to force users to look at ads before they can talk to one another.â
For the platforms, surpluses are things like, âBeing able to force advertisers and business customers to monetize their offerings through the platform, blocking rivals like Onlyfans, Patreon, Netflix, Amazon, etcâ and things like âBeing able to charge more for adsâ and âbeing able to clone your business customersâ products and then switch your users to the in-house version.â
Platforms control most of the surplus-allocating options. They can tune your feed so that it mostly consists of media and text from people you explicitly chose to follow, or so that it consists of ads, sponsored posts, or posts they think will âboost engagementâ by sinking you into a dismal clickhole. They can made ads skippable or unskippable. They can block posts with links to rival sites to force their business customers to transact within their platform, so they can skim fat commissions every time money changes hands and so that they can glean market intelligence about which of their business customersâ products they should clone and displace.
But platforms canât just allocate surpluses will-ye or nill-ye. No one would join a brand-new platform whose sales-pitch was, âNo matter who you follow, weâll show you other stuff; there will be lots of ads that you canât skip; we will spy on you a lot.â Likewise, no one would sign up to advertise or sell services on a platform whose pitch was âOur ads are really expensive. Any business you transact has to go through us, and weâll take all your profits in junk fees. This also lets us clone you and put you out of business.â
Instead, platforms have to carefully shift their surpluses around: first they have to lure in users, who will attract business customers, who will generate the fat cash surpluses that can be creamed off for the platformsâ investors. All of this has to be orchestrated to lock in each group, so that they wonât go elsewhere when the service is enshittified as it processes through its life-cycle.
This is where network effects and switching costs come into play. A service has ânetwork effectsâ if it gets more valuable as users join it. You joined Twitter to talk to the people who were already using it, and then other people joined so they could talk to you.
âSwitching costsâ are what you have to give up when you leave a service: if a service is siloedâââif it blocks interoperability with rivalsâââthen quitting that service means giving up access to the people whom you left behind. This is the single most important difference between ActivityPub-based Fediverse services like Mastodon and the silos like Twitter and Facebookâââyou can quit a Fediverse server and set up somewhere else, and still maintain your follows and followers:
In the absence of interoperability, network effects impose their own switching cost: the âcollective action problemâ of deciding when to leave and where to go. If you depend on the people you follow and who follow youâââfor emotional support, for your livelihood, for communityâââthen the extreme difficulty of convincing everyone to leave at the same time and go somewhere else means that you can be enticed into staying on a service that you no longer enjoy. The platforms can shift the surpluses away from you, provided that doing so makes you less miserable than abandoning your friends or fans or customers would. This is the Fiddler On the Roof problem: everyone stays put in the shtetl even though the cossacks ride through on the reg and beat the shit out of them, because they canât all agree on where to go if they leave:
So the first stage of the platform lifecycle is luring in users by allocating lots of surplus to themâââmaking the service fun and great and satisfying to use. Few or no ads, little or no overt data-collection, feeds that emphasize the people you want to hear from, not the people willing to pay to reach you.
This continues until the service attains a critical mass: once it becomes impossible to, say, enroll your kid in a little-league baseball team without having a Facebook account, then Facebook can start shifting its surpluses to advertisers and other business-users of the platform, who will pay Facebook to interpose themselves in your use of the platform. Youâll hate it, but you wonât leave. Junior loves little-league.
Facebook can enshittify its user experience because the users are now locked in, holding each other hostage. If Facebook can use the courts and technological countermeasures to block interoperable services, it can increase its usersâ switching costs, producing more opportunities for lucrative enshittification without the risk of losing the users that make Facebook valuable to advertisers. Thatâs why Facebook pioneered so many legal tactics for criminalizing interoperability:
This is the second phase of the toxic platform life-cycle: luring in business customers by shifting surpluses from users to advertisers, sellers, etc. This is the moment when the platforms offer cheap and easy monetization, low transaction fees, few barriers to off-platform monetization, etc. This is when, for example, a news organization can tease an article on its website with an off-platform link, luring users to click through and see the ads it controls.
Because Facebook has locked in its users through mutual hostage-taking, it can pollute their feeds with lots of these posts to news organizationsâ sites, bumping down the messages from its usersâ friends, and that means that Facebook can selectively tune how much traffic it gives to different kinds of business customers. If Facebook wants to lure in sports sites, it can cram those sitesâ posts into millions of usersâ feeds and send floods of traffic to sports outlets.
Outlets that donât participate in Facebook lose out, and so they join Facebook, start shoveling their content into it, hiring SEO Kremlinologists to help them figure out how to please The Algorithm, in hopes of gaining a permanent, durable source of readers (and thus revenue) for their site.
But ironically, once a critical mass of sports sites are on Facebook, Facebook no longer needs to prioritize sports sites in its usersâ feeds. Now that the sports sites all believe that a Facebook presence is a competitive necessity, they will hold each other hostage there, egging each other on to put more things on Facebook, even as the traffic dwindles.
Once sports sites have taken each other hostage, Facebook can claw back the surplus it allocated to them and use it to rope in another sectorâââhealth sites, casual games, employment seekers, financial advisors, etc etc. Each group is ensnared by a similar dynamic to the one that locks in the users.
But there is a difference between usersâ surpluses and businessâs surpluses. A userâs surplus is attention, and there is no such thing as an âattention economy.â You canât use attention to pay for data-centers, or executive bonuses, or to lobby Congress. Attention is not a currency in the same way that cryptos are not currencyâââit is not a store of value, nor a unit of exchange, nor or a unit of account.
Turning attention into money requires the same tactics as turning crypto into moneyâââyou have to lure in people who have real, actual money and convince them to swap it for attention. With crypto, this involved paying Larry David, Matt Damon, Spike Lee and LeBron James to lie about cryptoâs future in order to rope in suckers who would swap their perfectly cromulent âfiatâ money for unspendable crypto tokens.
With platforms, you need to bring in business customers who get paid in actual cash and convince them to give you that cash in exchange for ethereal, fast-evaporating, inconstant, unmeasurable âattention.â This works like any Ponzi scheme (that is, it works like cryptos): you can use your shareholdersâ cash to pay short-term returns to business customers, losing a little money as a convincer that brings in more trade.
Thatâs what Facebook did when it sent enormous amounts of traffic to a select few news-sites that fell for the pivot to video fraud, in order to convince their competitors to borrow billions of dollars to finance Facebookâs bid to compete with Youtube:
This convincer strategy is found in every con. If you go to the county fair, youâll see some poor bastard walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that he âwonâ by throwing three balls into a peach-basket. The carny who operated that midway game let him win the teddy precisely so that he would walk around all day, advertising the game, which is rigged so that no one else wins the giant teddy-bear:
Social media platforms can allocate giant teddy-bears to business-customers, and it can also withdraw them at will. Careful allocations mean that the platform can rope in a critical mass of business customers and then begin the final phase of its life-cycle: allocating surpluses to its shareholders.
That is, once a platform has its users locked in, and has its business customers locked in, it can enshittify its service to the point of near uselessness without losing either, allocating all the useful surplus in the business to its shareholders.
But this strategy has a problem: users and business customers donât like to be locked in! They will constantly try to find ways to de-enshittify your service and/or leave for greener pastures. And being at war with your users and business customers means that your reputation continuously declines, because every time a user or business customer figures out a way to claw back some surplus, you have to visibly, obviously enshittify your service wrestle it back.
Every time a service makes headlines for blocking an ad-blocker, or increasing its transaction fees, or screwing over its users or business customers in some other way, it makes the case that the price you pay for using the service is not worth the value it delivers.
In other words, the platforms try to establish an equilibrium where they only leave business customers and users with the absolute bare minimum needed to keep them on the service, and extract the rest for their shareholders. But this is a very brittle equilibrium, because the prices that platforms impose on their users and business customers can change very quickly, even if the platforms donât do anything differently.
Users and business customers can revalue the privacy costs, or the risks of staying on the platform based on exogenous factors. Privacy scandals and other ruptures can make the cost youâve been paying for years seem higher than you realized and no longer worth it.
This problem isnât unique to social media platforms, either. Itâs endemic to end-stage capitalism, where companies can go on for years paying their workers just barely enough to survive (or even less, expecting them to get public assistance and/or a side-hustle), and those workers can tolerate it, and tolerate it, and tolerate itâââuntil one day, they stop.
The Great Resignation, Quiet Quitting, the mass desertions from the gig economyâââthey all prove the Steinâs Law: âAnything that canât go on forever will eventually stop.â
Same for long, brittle supply-chains, where all the surplus has been squeezed out: concentrating all the microchip production in China and Taiwan, all the medical saline in Puerto Rico, all the shipping into three cartels⊠This strategy works well, and can be perfectly tuned with mathematical models that cut right to the joint, and they work and they work.
Until they stop. Until covid. Or war. Or wildfires. Or floods. Or interest rate hikes. Or revolution. All this stuff works great until you wake up and discover that the delicate balance between paying for guard labor and paying for a fair society has tilted, and now thereâs a mob building a guillotine outside the gates of your luxury compound.
This is the force underpinning collapse: âslow at first, then all at once.â A steady erosion of the failsafes, flensing all the slack out of the system, extracting all the surpluses until thereâs nothing left in the reservoir, no reason to stay.
Itâs what caused the near-collapse of Barnes and Noble, and while there are plenty of ways to describe James Dauntâs successful turnaround, the most general characterization is, âHe has reallocated the companyâs surpluses to workers, readers, writers and publishersâ:
A system can never truly stabilize. This is why utopias are nonsense: even if you design the most perfect society in which everything works brilliantly, it will still have to cope with war and meteors and pandemics and other factors beyond your control. A system canât just work well, it has to fail well.
This is why I object so strenuously to people who characterize my 2017 novel Walkaway as a âdystopian novel.â Yes, the protagonists are eking out survival amidst a climate emergency and a failing state, but they arenât giving up, theyâre building something new:
âDystopiaâ isnât when things go wrong. Assuming nothing will go wrong doesnât make you an optimist, it makes you an asshole. A dangerous asshole. Assuming nothing will go wrong is why they didnât put enough lifeboats on the Titanic. Dystopia isnât where things go wrong. Dystopia is when things go wrong, and nothing can be done about it.
Anything that canât go on forever will eventually stop. The social media barons who reeled users and business customers into a mutual hostage-taking were confident that their self-licking ice-cream coneâââin which we all continued to energetically produce surpluses for them to harvest, because we couldnât afford to leaveâââwould last forever.
They were wrong. The important thing about the Fediverse isnât that itâs noncommercial or decentralizedâââitâs that its design impedes surplus harvesting. The Fediverse is designed to keep switching costs as low as possible, by enshrining the Right Of Exit into the technical architecture of the system. The ability to leave a service without paying a price is the best defense we have against the scourge of enshittification.
(Thanks to Tim Harford for inspiring this column via an offhand remark in his kitchen a couple months ago!)
[Image ID: The Phillip Medhurst Picture Torah 397. The Israelites collect manna. Exodus cap 16 v 14. Luyken and son.]
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