The Plan is to Make the Internet Worse. Forever. | Aaron Bastani Meets Cory Doctorow

Quick Overview

The plan for the future internet, as detailed by Cory Doctorow, involves the systematic degradation of digital products and services, a process he terms "inshitification," driven by monopolies that exploit their lack of competition through tactics like stock buybacks, rigging ad markets, and predatory pricing to maximize rents over profits.

Key Points: The process of digital services getting worse is called "inshitification," where platforms move from good service to locking users in, then making things worse for users to benefit businesses, and finally making things worse for businesses to benefit shareholders. Google internally decided to make search worse so users would search more often, resulting in more ads, as revealed in Department of Justice memos showing Pravagar Ragavan overriding Ben Gomes's objections to prioritize profit over product quality. Tech workers previously held power because they were adding a million dollars a year to their employer's bottom line, but this power dissipated when they failed to consolidate it through organizing, leading to mass layoffs like Google's 12,000 cuts despite an $80 billion stock buyback. Stock buybacks manipulate stock prices upward without improving company productivity by reducing the number of outstanding shares, effectively acting as "wash trading" that drains cash reserves needed to weather market changes. Amazon squeezes third-party sellers by charging junk fees (now 50% to 60% of sales) and using its 'Most Favored Nation' policy to impose these increased costs economy-wide, exemplified by predatory pricing against Diapers.com. Anti-circumvention laws prohibit users from defending their privacy by changing technology, making app usage fundamentally worse than website usage because defending privacy on an app requires illegal reverse engineering. The decline in market competition stems from neoliberal economists convincing governments to stop enforcing anti-monopoly law 40 years ago, leading to monopolies across nearly every sector, not just tech.