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:
Vicky Osterweil's The Extended Universe: How Disney Killed the Movies and Took Over the World makes the kind of long, polemical, startling and illuminating argument that defines great cultural criticism; it's the sort of book that encapsulates the reasons I read criticism in the first place:
My first brush with this kind of criticism came more than two decades ago, when I read John Kessel's now-classic "Creating the Innocent Killer," a critique of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, a book I had read and enjoyed enough to re-read several times:
Kessel's argument is that Card used Ender's Game to smuggle in some very ugly ideas, wrapped in a story that was compelling, even exhilarating. In Ender's Game, we meet Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, a small, physically weak boy possessed of a prodigious intellect and a great deal of sensitivity and empathy. Ender is tormented by an escalating series of aggressors, whom he retaliates against with overwhelming force, first to the point of lethality and then all the way to literal genocide. And here's where Card makes his move: Ender's sensitivity and empathy and intellect tell him that he must respond this way, because he can tell that his aggressors will not back off from their intention to harm him; and because Ender is so small and weak, he has to use whatever tactic his brilliant mind can devise, and if that tactic results in the death penalty for mere bullying, well, that's the bully's fault, not Ender's. Indeed, in dying at Ender's hands, these bullies re-victimize Ender, because Ender is a gentle, smart, wise, weak person, and these inescapable murders that he is goaded into committing are a stain on his soul that he can never wash away.
Before reading "Creating the Innocent Killer," I confess I didn't really understand what criticism was for. Like many people, I conflated "criticism" with "reviews," thinking of critical works as a species of inconveniently difficult-to-digest essays that might help me figure out which books to read and which movies to see.
Kessel's magnificent essay changed all that, and not in spite of the fact that Kessel had pointed out some very important problems with a book that I loved, but because of that fact. In helping me understand the ugliness hidden within something whose beauty and virtues I saw very clearly, Kessel taught me more about myself – about where my aesthetics and my values overlapped, and where they diverged. It was literally life-changing.
Like Kessel, Osterweil's 'Extended Universe' deals with media that I have a great deal of affection for – the products of the Walt Disney Company. Though I'm primarily interested in theme parks – I love a big, ambitious built environment of any description and Disney pursues these with a seriousness that few others can touch – the Disney films (and the films of the studios Disney purchased, like Marvel and Lucasfilm) are obviously intimately bound up in those theme park designs.
Osterweil has her own ambivalent affection for these movies. Like so many of us, she's been raised on them, and they've shaped how she sees the world and its stories. But – like me – Osterweil is deeply suspicious of capitalism, American imperialism, and the notion of "intellectual property," and she uses reviews of a dozen Disney films to make the case that Walt Disney and the studio he founded with his brother are standards-bearers for these odious forces, and not just in the overt ways that might immediately spring to mind, but also in subtle ways that can be teased out of a close reading of the films.
In so doing, Osterweil also makes a sharp and well-argued case that intellectual property, colonialism and racial oppression are all facets of the same drive, the drive of people who fancy themselves born to rule to dominate others, which requires that those others also be dehumanized and their work denigrated. When Walt Disney insisted that his be the only name associated with "his" movies, he was playing out the same logic that underpinned his virulent opposition to labor unions and his participation in American imperialism in Latin America.
As with Kessel, Osterweil's argument is full of surprises and illuminations that are especially vivid for those of us who have great affection for these works. As her chapter on Black Panther shows, this contradiction need not go unresolved. There is plenty of scope for fans to seize the reins of the narrative (and as her chapter on the reactionary backlash to the later Star Wars movies shows, it's not just the forces of progress and anti-racism who can pull off this move).
Like the very best criticism, Osterweil's book is more than a way to deepen your understanding of the material she dissects – it's a way to deepen your understanding of the world that produced it, and to deepen your understanding of yourself.
Mark Zuckerberg personally lost the Facebook antitrust case
I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me at NEW ZEALAND'S UNITY BOOKS in AUCKLAND on May 2, and in WELLINGTON on May 3. More tour dates (Pittsburgh, PDX, London, Manchester) here.
It's damned hard to prove an antitrust case: so often, the prosecution has to prove that the company intended to crush competition, and/or that they raised prices or reduced quality because they knew they didn't have to fear competitors.
It's a lot easier to prove what a corporation did than it is to prove why they did it. What am I, a mind-reader? But imagine for a second that the corporation in the dock is a global multinational. Now, imagine that the majority of the voting shares in that company are held by one man, who has served as the company's CEO since the day he founded it, personally calling every important shot in the company's history.
Now imagine that this founder/CEO, this accused monopolist, was an incorrigible blabbermouth, who communicated with his underlings almost exclusively in writing, and thus did he commit to immortal digital storage a stream – a torrent – of memos in which he explicitly confessed his guilt.
Ladies and gentlepersons, I give you Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta (nee Facebook), an accused monopolist who cannot keep his big dumb fucking mouth shut.
At long, long last, the FTC's antitrust trial against Meta is underway, and this week, Zuck himself took the stand, in agonizing sessions during which FTC lawyers brandished printouts of Zuck's own words before him, asking him to explain away his naked confessions of guilt. It did not go well for Zuck.
In a breakdown of the case for The American Prospect, editor-in-chief David Dayen opines that "The Government Has Already Won the Meta Case," having hanged Zuck on his own words:
The government is attempting to prove that Zuck bought Instagram and Whatsapp in order to extinguish competitors (and not, for example, because he thought they were good businesses that complemented Facebook's core product offerings).
This case starts by proving how Zuck felt about Insta and WA before the acquisitions. On Insta, Zuck circulated memos warning about Insta's growth trajectory:
they appear to be reaching critical mass as a place you go to share photos
and how that could turn them into a future competitor:
[Instagram could] copy what we’re doing now … I view this as a big strategic risk for us if we don’t completely own the photos space.
These are not the words of a CEO who thinks another company is making a business that complements his own – they're confessions that he is worried that they will compete with Facebook. Facebook tried to clone Insta (Remember Facebook Camera? Don't feel bad – neither does anyone else). When that failed, Zuck emailed Facebook execs, writing:
[Instagram's growth is] really scary and why we might want to consider paying a lot of money for this.
At this point, Zuck's CFO – one of the adults in the room, attempting to keep the boy king from tripping over his own dick – wrote to Zuck warning him that it was illegal to buy Insta in order to "neutralize a potential competitor."
Zuck replied that he was, indeed, solely contemplating buying Insta in order to neutralize a potential competitor. It's like this guy kept picking up his dictaphone, hitting "record," and barking, "Hey Bob, I am in receipt of your memo of the 25th, regarding the potential killing of Fred. You raise some interesting points, but I wanted to reiterate that this killing is to be a murder, and it must be as premeditated as possible. Yours very truly, Zuck."
Did Zuck buy Insta to neutralize a competitor? Sure seems like it! For one thing, Zuck cancelled all work on Facebook Camera "since we're acquiring Instagram."
But what about after the purchase. Did Zuck reduce quality and/or raise costs? Well, according to the company, it enacted an "explicit policy of not prioritizing Instagram’s growth" (a tactic called "buy or bury"). At this juncture, Zuckerberg once again put fingers to keyboard in order to create an immortal record of his intentions:
By not killing their products we prevent everyone from hating us and we make sure we don’t immediately create a hole in the market for someone else to fill.
And if someone did enter the market with a cool new gimmick (like, say, Snapchat with its disappearing messages)?
Even if some new competitors spring up, if we incorporate the social mechanics they were using, these new products won’t get much traction since we’ll already have their mechanics deployed at scale.
Remember, the Insta acquisition is only illegal if Zuck bought them to prevent competition in the marketplace (rather than, say, to make a better product). It's hard to prove why a company does anything, unless its CEO, founder, and holder of the majority of its voting stock explicitly states that his strategy is to create a system to ensure that innovating new products "won't get much traction" because he'll be able to quickly copy them.
So we have Zuck starving Insta of development except when he needs to neutralize a competitor, which is just another way of saying he set out to reduce the quality of the product after acquisition, a thing that is statutorily prohibited, but hard to prove (again, unless you confess to it in writing, herp derp).
But what about prices? Well, obviously, Insta doesn't charge its end-users in cash, but they do charge in attention. If you want to see the things you've explicitly asked for – posts from accounts you follow – you have to tolerate a certain amount of "boosted content" and ads, that is, stuff that Facebook's business customers will pay to nonconsensually cram into your eyeballs.
Did that price go up? Any Insta user knows the answer: hell yes. Instagram is such a cesspit of boosted content and ads that it's almost impossible to find stuff you actually asked to see. Indeed, when a couple of teenagers hacked together an alternative Insta client called OG App that only showed you posts from accounts you followed, it was instantly the most popular app on Google Play and Apple's App Store (and then Google and Apple killed it, at Meta's request):
But why did the price go up? Did it go up because Facebook had neutralized a competitor by purchasing it, and thus felt that it could raise prices without losing customers? Again, a hard thing to prove…unless Zuck happened to put it in writing. Which he did, as Brendan Benedict explains in Big Tech On Trial:
I think we’re badly mismanaging this right now. There’s absolutely no reason why IG ad load should be lower than FB at a time when . . . we’re having engagement issues in FB. If we were managing our company correctly, then at a minimum we’d immediately balance IG and FB ad load . . . But it’s possible we should even have a higher ad load on IG while we have this challenge so we can replace some ads with [People You May Know] on FB to turn around the issues we’re seeing.
So there you have it: Zuck bought Insta to neutralize a competitor, and after he did, he lowered its quality and raised its prices, because he knew that he was operating without significant competitors thanks to his acquisition of that key competitor. Zuck's motivations – as explained by Zuck himself – were in direct contravention of antitrust law, a thing he knew (because his execs explained it to him). That's a pretty good case.
But what about Whatsapp? How did Zuck feel about it? Well, he told his board that Whatsapp was Facebook's greatest "consumer risk," fretting that "Messenger isn’t beating WhatsApp." He blocked Whatsapp ads on Facebook, telling his team that it was "trying to build social networks and replace us." Sure, they'd lose money by turning away that business, but the "revenue is immaterial to us compared to any risk." Sure seems like Zuck saw Whatsapp as a competitor.
Meta's final line of defense in this case is that even if they did some crummy, illegal things, they still didn't manage to put together a monopoly. According to Meta's lawyers – who're billing the company more than $1m/day! – Meta is a tiny fish in a vast ocean that has many competitors, like Tiktok:
There's only one problem with this "market definition" argument, and that problem's name is Chatty Mark Zuckerberg. On the question of market definition, FTC lawyers once again raised Zuckerberg's own statements and those of his top lieutenants to show that Zuckerberg viewed his companies as "Personal Social Networks" (PSNs) and not as just generic sites full of stuff, competing with Youtube, Tiktok, and everyone else who lets users post things to the internet.
Take Instagram boss Adam Mosseri, who explained that:
Instagram will always need to focus on friends and can never exclusively be for public figures or will cease to be a social product.
And then there was Zuck's memo explaining why he offered $6b for Snapchat:
Snap Stories serves the exact same use case of sharing and consuming feeds of content that News Feed and Instagram deliver. We need to take this new dynamic seriously—both as a competitive risk and as a product opportunity to add functionality that many people clearly love and want to use daily.
And an internal strategy document that explained the competitive risks to Facebook:
Social networks have two stable equilibria: either everyone uses them, or no-one uses them. In contrast, nonsocial apps (e.g. weather apps, exercise apps) can exist [somewhere] along a continuum of adoption. The binary nature of social networks implies that there should exist a tipping point, ie some critical mass of adoption, above which a network will organically grow, and below which it will shrink.
Sure sounds like Facebook sees itself as a "social network," and not a "nonsocial app." And of course – as Dayen points out – when Tiktok (a company Meta claims as a competitor) went up for sale, Meta did not enter a bid, despite being awash in free cash flow.
In Zuckerberg's defense, he's not the only tech CEO who confesses his guilt in writing (recall that FTX planned its crimes in a groupchat called WIREFRAUD). Partly that's because these firms are run by arrogant twits, but partly it's because digital culture is a written culture, where big, dispersed teams expected to work long hours from offices all over the world as well as from their phones every hour of day and night have to rely on memos to coordinate:
When Dayen claims that "the government has won the Meta case," he doesn't mean the judge will rule in the FTC's favor (though there's a high likelihood that this will happen). Rather, he means that the case has been proven beyond any kind of reasonable doubt, in public, in a way that has historically caused other monopolists to lose their nerve, even if they won their cases. Take Microsoft and IBM – though both companies managed to draw out their cases until a new Republican administration (Reagan for IBM, GWB for Microsoft) took office and let them off the hook, both companies were profoundly transformed by the process.
IBM created the market for a generic, multivendor PC whose OS came from outside the company:
Trump being Trump, it's not inconceivable that he will attempt to intervene to get the judge to exonerate Meta. After all, Zuck did pay him a $1m bribe and then beg him to do just that:
But as Dayen writes, the ire against Meta's monopolistic conduct is thoroughly bipartisan, and if Trump was being strategic here (a very, very big "if"), he would keep his powder dry here. After all, if the judge doesn't convict Meta, Trump won't have wasted any political capital. And if Meta is convicted, Trump could solicit more bribes and favors at the "remedy" stage, when a court will decide how to punish Meta, which could be anything from a fine to a breakup order, to a nothingburger of vague orders to clean up its act.
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:
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:
Lest anyone accuse me of bargaining in bad faith here, let me start with this admission: I don't think AI is intelligent; nor do I think that the current (admittedly impressive) statistical techniques will lead to intelligence. I think worrying about what we'll do if AI becomes intelligent is at best a distraction and at worst a cynical marketing ploy:
Now, that said: among some of the "AI doomers," I recognize kindred spirits. I, too, worry about technologies controlled by corporations that have grown so powerful that they defy regulation. I worry about how those technologies are used against us, and about how the corporations that make them are fusing with authoritarian states to create a totalitarian nightmare. I worry that technology is used to spy on and immiserate workers.
I just don't think we need AI to do those things. I think we should already be worried about those things.
Last week, I had a version of this discussion in front of several hundred people at the Bronfman Lecture in Montreal, where I appeared with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (co-winner of the Turing Prize for his work creating the "deep learning" techniques powering today's AI surge), on a panel moderated by CBC Ideas host Nahlah Ayed:
It's safe to say that Bengio and I mostly disagree about AI. He's running an initiative called "Lawzero," whose goal is to create an international AI consortium that produces AI as a "digital public good" that is designed to be open, auditable, transparent and safe:
http://lawzero.org
Bengio said he'd started Lawzero because he was convinced that AI was going to get a lot more powerful, and, in the absence of some public-spirited version of AI, we would be subject to all kinds of manipulation and surveillance, and that the resulting chaos would present a civilizational risk.
Now, as I've stated (and as I said onstage) I am not worried about any of this. I am worried about AI, though. I'm worried a fast-talking AI salesman will convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job (the salesman will be pushing on an open door, since if there's one thing bosses hate, it's paying workers).
I'm worried that the seven companies that comprise 35% of the S&P 500 are headed for bankruptcy, as soon as someone makes them stop passing around the same $100b IOU while pretending it's in all their bank accounts at once. I'm worried that when that happens, the chatbots that badly do the jobs of the people who were fired because of the AI salesman will go away, and nothing and no one will do those jobs. I'm worried that the chaos caused by vaporizing a third of the stock market will lead to austerity and thence to fascism:
I worry that the workers who did those jobs will be scattered to the four winds, retrained or "discouraged" or retired, and that the priceless process knowledge they developed over generations will be wiped out and we will have to rebuild it amidst the economic and political chaos of the burst AI bubble:
But Bengio disagrees. He's very smart, and very accomplished, and he's very certain that AI is about to become "superhuman" and do horrible things to us if we don't get a handle on it. Several times at our events, he insisted that the existence of this possibility made it wildly irresponsible not to take measures to mitigate this risk.
Though I didn't say so at the time, this struck me as an AI-inflected version of Pascal's wager:
A rational person should adopt a lifestyle consistent with the existence of God and should strive to believe in God… if God does not exist, the believer incurs only finite losses, potentially sacrificing certain pleasures and luxuries; if God does exist, the believer stands to gain immeasurably, as represented for example by an eternity in Heaven in Abrahamic tradition, while simultaneously avoiding boundless losses associated with an eternity in Hell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager
Smarter people than me have been poking holes in Pascal's wager for more than 350 years. But when it comes to this modern Pascal's AI Wager, I have my own objection: how do you know when you've lost?
As of this moment, the human race has lit more than $1.4t on fire to immanentize this eschaton, and it remains stubbornly disimmanentized. How much more do we need to spend before we're certain that god isn't lurking in the word-guessing program? Sam Altman says it'll take another $2-3t – call it six months' worth of all US federal spending. If we do that and we still haven't met god, are we done? Can we call it a day?
Not according to Elon Musk. Musk says we need to deconstruct the solar system and build a Dyson sphere out of all the planets to completely encase the sun, so we can harvest every photon it emits to power our word-guessing programs:
So let's say we do that and we still haven't met god – are we done? I don't see why we would be. After all, Musk's contention isn't that our sun emits one eschaton's worth of immanentizing particles. Musk just thinks that we need a lot of these sunbeams to coax god into our plane of existence. If one sun won't do it, perhaps two? Or two hundred? Or two thousand? Once we've committed the entire human species to this god-bothering project to the extent of putting two kilosuns into harness, wouldn't we be nuts to stop there? What if god is lurking in the two thousand and first sun? Making god out of algorithms is like spelling "banana" – easy to start, hard to stop.
But as Bengio and I got into it together on stage at the Montreal Centre, it occurred to me that maybe there was some common ground between us. After all, when someone starts talking about "humane technology" that respects our privacy and works for people rather than their bosses, my ears grow points. Throw in the phrase "international digital public goods" and you've got my undivided attention.
Because there's a sense in which Bengio and I are worried about exactly the same thing. I'm terrified that our planet has been colonized by artificial lifeforms that we constructed, but which have slipped our control. I'm terrified that these lifeforms corrupt our knowledge-creation process, making it impossible for us to know what's true and what isn't. I'm terrified that these lifeforms have conquered our apparatus of state – our legislatures, agencies and courts – and so that these public bodies work against the public and for our colonizing alien overlords.
The difference is, the artificial lifeforms that worry me aren't hypothetical – they're here today, amongst us, endangering the very survival of our species. These artificial lifeforms are called "limited liability corporations" and they are a concrete, imminent risk to the human race:
What's more, challenging these artificial lifeforms will require us to build massive, "international, digital public goods": a post-American internet of free/open, auditable, transparent, enshittification-resistant platforms and firmware for every purpose and device currently in service:
And even after we've built that massive, international, digital public good, we'll still face the challenge of migrating all of our systems and loved ones out of the enshitternet of defective, spying, controlling American tech exports:
Every moment that we remain stuck in the enshitternet is a moment of existential risk. At the click of a mouse, Trump could order John Deere to switch off all the tractors in your country:
He doesn't need tanks to steal Greenland. He can just shut off Denmark's access to American platforms like Office365, iOS and Android and brick the whole damned country. It would be another Strait of Hormuz, but instead of oil and fertilizer, he'd control the flow of Lego, Ozempic and deliciously strong black licorice:
These aren't risks that could develop in the future. They're the risks we're confronted with today and frankly, they're fucking terrifying.
So here's my side-bet on Pascal's Wager. If you think we need to build "international digital public goods" to head off the future risk of a colonizing, remorseless, malevolent artificial lifeform, then let us agree that the prototype for that project is the "international digital public goods" we need right now to usher in the post-American internet and save ourselves from the colonizing, remorseless, malevolent artificial lifeforms that have already got their blood-funnels jammed down our throats.
Once we defeat those alien invaders, we may find that all the people who are trying to summon the evil god have lost the wherewithal to do so, and your crisis will have been averted. But if that's not the case and the evil god still looms on our horizon, then I will make it my business to help you mobilize the legions of skilled international digital public goods producers who are still flush from their victory over the limited liability corporation, and together, we will fight the evil god you swear is in our future.
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:
I've got good news and bad news for Trump. The good news: you can get elected by promising to do something about the cost of living crisis, and the president actually has a lot of ways to improve people's daily costs. The bad news: everything you could do to fix working people's cost of living will make an oligarch worse off.
This is the essential conundrum of Trumpismo: to keep his base happy, he needs to make their lives better; but to make their lives better, he'll have to make oligarchs angry. The oligarchs' wealth bonanza caused the cost of living crisis. Oligarchs' pleasure causes our suffering, so alleviating our suffering will reduce their pleasure.
This means that while Trump can promise help with prices, all he can deliver is union-busting, ICE lynchings, and pointless wars, none of which have any hope of materially improving the lives of working people. Indeed, all of this stuff makes working people materially worse off, as wages fall, crops rot in the fields, and gas prices shoot through the roof.
Trump would dearly love to find an ox he can safely gore, but all the good oxen are owned by his oligarch chums. Trump can't punish Ticketmaster, because the billions Ticketmaster steals from the WWE, F1 and football fans in his base all land in the pocket of oligarchs who own stock in Ticketmaster, and Trump can't afford to upset those oligarchs:
Indeed, I can't think of a single corrupt racket that Trump can afford to do something about. Not even the only cost of living metric that can approach gas prices in the hierarchy of American electoral salience: grocery prices.
Your grocery bill went up because oligarchs price-gouge you. Eggflation was caused by Cal-Maine, the monopolist that owns every brand of eggs in your grocer's fridge, who jacked up prices because they knew they could:
Pepsi and Walmart conspired to force every retailer to jack up the prices of all Pepsi products (including Frito-Lay, Gatorade, Aquafina, etc) at every retailer's store, so that Walmart could also jack up their prices and still undersell their competition (naturally, Trump let them get away with it):
This stuff isn't exactly a secret. Grocery store owners hold earnings calls with their investors where they boast about the fact that they can raise their prices far in excess of their increased costs, and blame it on inflation:
They boast about their "personalized pricing" swindles, whereby they use surveillance data to figure out how desperate you are and jack up the prices you see in their apps:
Trump has the power to put a stop to all of this, but still, he can't, because his oligarch pals would squeal, and when they squeal, Trump jumps. In theory, Trump has lots of power, but in practice, Trump can't do anything.
Which brings me to the cost of meat. Meat inflation has raced ahead of other forms of food inflation, even as the payments to ranchers and other producers fell sharply, leading to waves of bankruptcies:
Partly, that's because meat processing is controlled by cartels, with 85% of all the beef being processed by four packers, and nearly every chicken going through one of four poultry processors. These middlemen jack up prices to grocers while colluding to push down the payments to their suppliers.
How do they rig those prices? After all, it's very illegal for these four companies to get together around a table to rig prices. Instead, they use a "price consultancy" called Agri Stats that does the price-rigging for them. Every week, the packers send a detailed list of all their costs and prices into Agri Stats, and Agri Stats "advises" them all to raise all their prices at once, and anyone who doesn't play along is pushed out of the Agri Stats cartel. Everyone wins – except families paying for groceries:
Agri Stats has been doing this since the Reagan years, but they grew steadily more brazen, until, back in 2023, Biden's DOJ brought history's most obvious, easily won antitrust case against them:
And wouldn't you know it, Trump just settled that case, in a way that will make Agri Stats much, much richer and give them far more opportunities to rig prices:
Under the terms of the settlement, Agri Stats must "allow" restaurants, farmers, and other parts of the supply chain to pay it for the data it consolidates. This will allow more parties to collude to rig prices, and provide more income to Agri Stats. As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, they've been "sentenced to make money."
Agri Stats isn't the only "price consultancy" that is used to launder a price-fixing cartel that's driving up the cost of living for all Americans, including Trump's base, in order to make oligarchs better off. Companies like Realpage do the same thing for residential rents:
Trump can't do anything about any of these scams, not without goring some oligarch's precious ox. But, as Dayen points out, there are dozens of Democratic state Attorneys General who can kill Trump's sweetheart deal for Agri Stats using the Tunney Act, which gives them standing to sue to force a federal judge to review the settlement and determine whether it is fair.
Whether any AG will seize the moment remains to be seen, of course, but it would be very good politics to do so – after all, the path to political power in America runs through credible promises to do something about the cost of living crisis.
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:
Selling on Amazon is a tough business. Sure, you can reach a lot of customers, but this comes at a very high price: the junk fees that Amazon extracts from its sellers amount to 50-60% of the price you pay.
That's a hell of a lot of money to hand over to a middleman, but it's not like vendors have much choice. The vast majority of America's affluent households are Prime subscribers (depending on how you define "affluent household" it's north of 90%). Prime households prepay for a year's worth of shipping, so it's only natural that they start their shopping on Amazon, where they've already paid the delivery costs. And because Amazon reliably meets or beats the prices you'd pay elsewhere, Prime subscribers who find a product on Amazon overwhelmingly stop their shopping at Amazon, too.
At this point you might be thinking a couple things:
I. Why not try to sell the non-affluent households, who are far less likely to subscribe to Prime? and
II. If Amazon has the lowest prices, what's the problem if everyone shops there?
The answers to these two questions are intimately related, as it happens.
Let's start with selling to non-affluent households – basically, the bottom 90% of American earners. The problem here is that everyone who isn't in that top 10% is pretty goddamned broke. It's not just decades of wage stagnation and hyperinflation in health, housing and education costs. It's also that every economic crisis of this century has resulted in a "K-shaped" recovery, in which "economic recovery" means that rich people are doing fine, while everyone else is worse off than they were before the crisis.
For decades, America papered over the K-shaped hole in its economy with debt. First it was credit cards. Then it was gimmicky mortgages – home equity lines of credit, second mortgages and reverse mortgages. Then it was payday lenders. Then it was "buy-now/pay-later" services that let you buy lunch at Chipotle on an installment plan that is nominally interest-free, but is designed to trap the unwary and unlucky with massive penalties if you miss a single payment.
This produced a median American who isn't just cash-poor – they are cash-negative, drowning in debt. And – with the exception of a brief Biden intercession – every presidential administration of the 21st century has enacted policies that favor creditors over debtors. Bankruptcy is harder to declare, and creditors can hit you with effectively unlimited penalties and confiscation of your property and wages once your cash is gone. Trump has erased all the small mercies of the Biden years – for example, he just forced 8,000,000 student borrowers back into repayment:
There's plenty to worry about in a K-shaped economy – big things like "political instability" and "cultural chaos" (the fact that most people are broke has a lot to do with the surging fortunes of gambling platforms). But from a seller's perspective, the most important impact of the K-shaped economy is that only rich people buy stuff. Selling to the bottom 90% is a losing proposition because they're increasingly too broke to buy anything:
Combine the fact that the richest 10% of Americans all start their shopping on Amazon with the fact that no one else can afford to buy anything, and it's easy to see why merchants would stay on Amazon, even when junk fees hit 60%.
Which brings us to the second question: if Amazon has the best prices, what's the problem with everyone shopping there?
The answer is to be found in the California Attorney General's price-fixing lawsuit against Amazon:
The suit's been running for a long time, but the AG's office just celebrated a milestone – they've finished analyzing the internal memos they forced Amazon to disgorge through civil law's "discovery" process. These internal docs verify an open – and very dirty – secret about Amazon: the company uses its power to push up prices across the entire economy.
Here's how that works: sellers have to sell on Amazon, and that means they're losing $0.50-$0.60 on every dollar. The obvious way to handle this is by raising prices. But Amazon knows that its power comes from offering buyers prices that are as low or lower than the prices at all its competitors.
Amazon could ban its sellers from raising prices, but if they did that, they'd have to accept a smaller share of every sale (otherwise most of their sellers would go broke from selling at a loss on Amazon). So instead, Amazon imposes a business practice called "most favored nation" (MFN) pricing on its sellers.
Under an MFN arrangement, sellers are allowed to raise their prices on Amazon, but when they do, they must raise their prices everywhere else, too: at Walmart, at Target, at mom and pop indie stores, and at their own factory outlet store. Remember: Amazon doesn't have to have low prices to win, it just needs to have the same prices as everyone else. So long as prices rise throughout the economy, Amazon is fine, and it can continue to hike its junk fees on sellers, knowing that they will pay those fees by raising prices on Amazon and everywhere else their products are sold.
Like I say, this isn't really a secret. MFN terms were the basis of DC Attorney General Ken Racine's case against Amazon, five years ago:
Amazon's not the only company that does this. Under the Biden administration, the FTC brought a lawsuit against Pepsi because Pepsi and Walmart had rigged the market so that when Walmart raised its prices, Pepsi would force everyone else who carried Pepsi products to raise their prices even more. Walmart still had the lowest prices, but everything everywhere got more expensive, both at Walmart and everywhere else:
Trump's FTC dropped the Pepsi/Walmart case, and Amazon wriggled out of the DC case, but the California AG's office has a lot more resources than DC can muster. This is a timely reminder that America's antitrust laws can be enforced at the state level as well as by the federal authorities. Trump might be happy to let Amazon steal from Americans so long as Jeff Bezos neuters the Washington Post, writes a check for $1m to sit on the inaugural dais, and makes a garbage movie about Melania; but that doesn't stop California AG Rob Bonta from going after Amazon for ripping off Californians (and, in so doing, develop the evidentiary record and precedent that will allow every other state AG to go after Amazon).
The fact that Amazon's monopoly lets it control prices across the economy highlights the futility of trying to fix the Amazon problem by shopping elsewhere. A "boycott" isn't you shopping really hard, it's an organized movement with articulated demands, a theory of change, and a backbone of solidarity. "Conscious consumption" is a dead-end:
Obviously, Californians have more to worry about than getting ripped off by Amazon (like getting murdered or kidnapped by ICE agents who want to send us all to a slave labor camp in El Salvador), but the billions that Amazon steals from American buyers and sellers are the source of the millions that Bezos uses to support Trump's fascist takeover of America. Without billionaires who would happily support concentration camps in their back yards if it means saving a dollar on their taxes, fascism would still be a fringe movement.
That's why, when we hold new Nuremberg trials for Trump and his collaborators, we should also unwind every merger that was approved under Trump:
The material support for Trump's ideology of hate, violence and terror comes from Trump's program of unregulated corporate banditry. A promise to claw back every stolen dime might cool the ardor of Trump's corporate supporters, and even if it doesn't, zeroing out their bank-balances after Trump is gone will be an important lesson for future would-be billionaire collaborators.
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:
Audiobooks are hands-down the most enshittified aspect of publishing, which is why I make my own audiobooks and pre-sell them on Kickstarter, which is how I get around the fact that Amazon refuses to carry my audiobooks:
http://disenshittification.org
Why are audiobooks so enshittified? Because they have the two essential characteristics for enshittification:
1) They are digital, which means the rules for them can be shifted on a per-customer, per-usage basis; and
2) They are controlled by a monopoly, Amazon, whose Audible division is responsible for 90% of popular audiobook sales.
Amazon refuses to sell any audiobook unless it is first wrapped in the company's proprietary encryption (AKA "Digital Rights Management" or "DRM"). This DRM permanently locks Audible's audiobooks to the apps it approves, because US copyright law makes it a felony to tamper with that DRM. That means that neither the author nor the publisher can authorize you to take your Audible purchases to a rival platform, and if they try, Audible can have them imprisoned for up to five years:
Which is why none of my books are for sale on Audible. I'm not gonna submit to conditions that will let Audible take you, my reader, hostage. Not only does that make you vulnerable to whatever evil shit Amazon thinks up (remember a couple years ago, when they experimented with putting ads in the audiobooks you paid for?!), but that also makes me (and every other author) vulnerable, because if you can't leave Audible, neither can we:
Which is why I do these Kickstarters for my audiobooks! Since 2013, I've either paid narrators (like Wil Wheaton and Amber Benson) to perform my books, or I've gone into Skyboat Media's studios myself, to record under the expert direction of the legendary Gabrielle de Cuir:
https://skyboatmedia.com/
That's what I did this time, recording my forthcoming book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It in early August. Since then, I've been working with my trusty sound engineer John Taylor Williams to polish that recording to perfection. Now, I'm selling that pre-selling that audiobook on a Kickstarter where you can also pre-order the hardcover, ebook, as well as an extremely limited edition art-book collecting the collages I made for my Pluralistic.net newsletter while developing the ideas behind Enshittification:
The audiobooks and ebooks I sell through my Kickstarters are sold without any DRM, and also without any "terms and conditions." You are buying these books, not "licensing" them. That means you can do anything with these books that copyright law allows: sell 'em, give 'em away, lend 'em to a friend. Just don't violate copyright law and we're cool.
This book, Enshittification, synthesizes all the essays, speeches and panels I've done on the subject of platform decay into a single, coherent argument designed to be accessible to everyone, even (especially) your normie friends who know that everything sucks but don't understand why and are paralyzed about what to do about it.
The book's not out until October – it'll be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (US/Canada) and Verso (UK/Commonwealth), but it's already getting fantastic early notices. The Financial Times has already longlisted it for 2025's best business book of the year:
https://www.ft.com/bookaward
It's gotten starred reviews and raves from trades like Kirkus, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly, and we've sold foreign rights in more than a dozen countries, all over the world. There's also a 2026 graphic novel edition (adapted by Koren Shadmi) coming from First Second's 23rd Street Books.
Just as exciting is the Enshittification documentary, which is currently in pre-production, directed by Emily James (Just Do It), edited by Kurt Engfehr (Fahrenheit 9/11) and produced by Eve Marson (Web of Make Believe: Death, Lies and the Internet). You can pre-purchase tickets to the theatrical run and a DRM-free download here; your early support will help raise the $75,000 we need for principle photography:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/one-time-137256536
We recorded a sizzle reel at the Teardown conference in Portland last spring, and Kurt's edited it into an amazing trailer:
The documentary is a road-movie, with a crew following me on tour and interviewing me and other experts on the subject (think Inconvenient Truth, but for platform decay). We've got quite a tour planned: I'll be in Boston (with Randall "XKCD" Munroe); DC (with former CFPB chair Rohit Chopra); New Orleans; Chicago (with Kara Swisher); LA (with The American Prospect's David Dayen); Calgary; San Francisco; Portland; Seattle (with Ed Zitron); Vancouver; Calgary, Montreal, Toronto, New York City (with Lina Khan); Miami; Burbank; Lisbon; London; Hay-on-Wye; and Madison, CT. Other tour dates are still being finalized – more details to follow.
I developed enshittification as a series of posts on Pluralistic.net, my blog/newsletters/social media feed. Each edition of Pluralistic goes out with a graphic, usually a collage I've made from public domain and Creative Commons materials:
Making these collages has turned into one of my major creative outlets, and dozens of readers have asked if I would ever do a book of them. Then, last year, I got to talking to Creative Commons CEO Anna Tumadóttir about her plans for CC's 25th anniversary and we cooked up a plan to publish a little book of my Pluralistic collages to give to major donors as a premium. Anna needed 400 of these, but my printer gives me a quantity break at 500 copies, so I'm making 100 signed, numbered copies available for backers of this Kickstarter.
The books are gorgeous. Cyberpunk icon and electronic art impresario Bruce Sterling wrote me a wonderful introduction. It's designed by John D. Berry, president of the Association Typographique Internationale, a legend of type and book design:
https://johndberry.com/biographical-note/
For production, I've tapped Pasadena's Typecraft, a 118-year-old printer who ran the book on 100lb Mohawk paper. It's a gorgeous little 4.75" x 6.75" paperback, and this is the only run I plan on doing (though if people like it, I might do future volumes collecting more collages).
One of the things I love about these campaigns is the chance to work with so many wonderful partners. There's Skyboat Media and director Gabrielle de Cuir; editor John Taylor Williams of Wryneck Studios; Emily, Kurt and Eve working on the documentary; John Berry, Bruce Sterling and Typecraft for my art book. I'm also working with some of my favorite booksellers in the world to fulfill print book orders: in LA, I've got Secret Headquarters (the best comics shop in the world!), who'll fulfill US orders as well as worldwide orders for signed books and Canny Valley. For Canadian hardcover orders, I'm working with Winnipeg's McNally-Robinson. For EU orders, I'm once again working with Berlin's magnificent Otherland Books. Orders in the UK will be fulfilled directly by Verso. Working with local shippers means we don't have to fuck around with the Trump tariffs.
Enshittification is the product of my open-access publishing program. I don't charge anything for the essays I publish nearly every day on Pluralistic.net, and I release them under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license, which lets anyone reproduce and adapt them, including commercially. Releasing my work this way means that it gets spread far and wide, which means everything to me, and I'm so glad to see everyone from scrappy progressive news sites to Conde Nast taking my work and reprinting it widely.
Readers frequently ask me how they can support my work, whether I have a Patreon or some other way to accept donations. I don't have anything like that. What I have, instead, are these books, which I can't seem to stop writing. The best way to thank me for my work is to buy the books, in any (or every) format. Selling books benefits a whole community of people who are important to my work, including my publishers and agents, and also all the people who work on publishing, fulfillment and production with me. These people don't just work on my projects, of course: they have many partners of their own.
When you buy my books, you help ensure that I'll keep doing what I do – and you help all my partners keep doing what they do. And the best way to support my work is to back it on these Kickstarter campaigns. The extraordinary generosity of my Kickstarter backers since 2020 has made a huge difference to my artistic career and my family's financial stability. If you backed one of those campaigns, I thank you, sincerely. And whether you've backed before, I hope you'll consider backing this one:
