No way how did I miss this!
I listened to it 40 minutes now. As a tech person myself, it has to, of course, be taken with a grain of salt, but it is really entertaining and insightful! Cory Doctorow is a master of framing. Something seemingly innocent can happen in the tech sector and nobody really considers it to be a big deal, but Doctorow can recognize an essence of it and package it as a funny/insightful market failure story!
Great talk, I wish I could write that well. I was about to discuss this point: "All it takes is one Cambridge Analytica scandal, one whistleblower, one livestreamed mass-shooting, and users bolt for the exits, and then FB discovers that network effects are a double-edged sword." and say that people haven't left FB because of it. But then I realized that I actually don't use Facebook anymore. I mean, I haven't deleted my account. I scroll the feed for 2 minutes from time to time. Or look for events there. But almost all my close friends performed "quiet quitting," and we are not mentally there anymore. It's not our main feed as it used to be. We keep using Messenger, but it gets enshittified with ads lately. I'm wondering how much of enshittification comes from having private and public investors on board. I can imagine some entrepreneur running a 100% private company could say, "Well, this business generates enough profit for me & the company. We still want to grow because we need cash to stay competitive, but we don't want to grow at all costs". But if you're a public company or a private company with very aggressive investors, it might not be doable. It doesn't mean that all investors are bad - Vitalik does angel investing, and I imagine he might not push for growth at all costs. So, choosing an investor who has the same perspective on enshittification as an entrepreneur might be of crucial importance here.
“There are four constraints that prevent enshittification: competition, regulation, self-help, and labor. This quote made me think why I wanted to work in web3 and - I guess - why many early Internet people like it so much. This is how web3 looks through the lens of four anti-enshittification constraints: (1) Competition. You can’t lock in your users in a centralized database and provide shitty services like Facebook did. If you don’t provide the best possible service, your users will be stolen via vampire attacks (BLUR vs. OpenSea, Rainbow vs. MetaMask, etc.) (2) Regulation. There’s no regulation, which means there’s no regulatory capture. And because of (1), it’s hard for companies to grow as big as in Big Tech. (3) Self-help. Users have enormous freedom in crypto. You don’t like the service? You don’t need to migrate your whole account to another app. You just connect your wallet elsewhere and start using it. (4) Labor. Many things can be said about Crypto Twitter, but if you go to ETH devs conferences, no one cares about the coins. Many people in crypto build because they want to make a change.