Once its users were locked in, Facebook turned to advertisers and said, "Remember when we told these rubes we'd never spy on them? It was a lie. We spy on them with every hour that God sends, and we'll sell you access to that data in the form of dirt-cheap targeted ads."

Then Facebook went to the publishers and said, "Remember when we told these suckers that we'd only show them the things they asked to see? Total lie.

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You joined Facebook because you liked the people who were there, then others joined because they liked *you*. Facebook can now make life worse for all of you without losing your business. You might hate Facebook, but you like each other, and the #CollectiveActionProblem of deciding when and whether to go, and where you should go next, is so difficult to overcome, that you all stay in a place that's getting progressively worse.

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"Post short excerpts from your content and links back to your websites and we'll nonconsensually cram them into eyeballs of people who never asked to see them. It's a free, high-value traffic funnel for your site, bringing monetizable users right to your door."

Now, Facebook had to find a way to lock in those publishers. To do this, it had to twiddle. By tiny increments, Facebook deprioritized publishers' content, forcing them to make their excerpts grew progressively longer.

10/

As with gig workers, digital flexibility gave FB it lots of leeway. Some publishers sensed the excerpts they were posting were a substitute for visiting their sites - and not an enticement - and drew down their FB posting.

When that happened, Facebook could twiddle in the publisher's favor, giving them broader distribution for shorter excerpts, then, once the publisher returned to the platform, Facebook drew down their traffic unless they started posting longer pieces.

11/

Then, it stopped showing publishers' content to their own subscribers, extorting them to pay to "boost" their posts in order to reach people who had explicitly asked to hear from them.

For users, this meant that their feeds were increasingly populated with payola-boosted content from advertisers and pay-to-play publishers who paid Facebook's #Danegeld to reach them.

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Twiddling lets platforms play users and business-customers like a fish on a line, giving them slack when they fight, then reeling them in when they tire.

Once Facebook converted a publisher to a commodity supplier to the platform, it reeled the publisher in. First, it deprioritized publishers' posts when they had links back to the publisher's site (under the pretext of policing "#clickbait" and "#MaliciousLinks").

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A user will only spend so much time on Facebook, and every post that Facebook feeds that user from someone they *want* to hear from is a missed opportunity to show them a post from someone who'll *pay* to reach them.

Here, too, twiddling lets Facebook fine-tune its approach. If a user starts to wean themself off Facebook, the algorithm (TM) can put more content the user has asked to see in the feed.

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I call this process "#twiddling": tech platforms are equipped with a million knobs on their back-ends, and platform operators can endlessly twiddle those knobs, altering the business logic from moment to moment, turning the system into an endlessly shifting quagmire where neither users nor business customers can ever be sure whether they're getting a fair deal:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

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Enshittification isn't merely a form of #RentSeeking - it is a uniquely digital phenomenon, because it relies on the inherent flexibility of digital systems. There are lots of intermediaries that want to extract surpluses from customers and suppliers - everyone from grocers to oil companies - but these can't be reconfigured in an eyeblink the that that purely digital services can.

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A sleazy boss can hide their wage-theft with a bunch of confusing deductions to your paycheck. But when your boss is an app, it can engage in #AlgorithmicWageDiscrimination, where your pay declines minutely every time you accept a job, but if you start to decline jobs, the app can raise the offer:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

4/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/14/freedom-of-reach/#ex

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#Enshittification is the process by which a #platform lures in and then captures end users (stage one), who serve as bait for business customers, who are also captured (stage two), whereupon the platform rug-pulls both groups and allocates all the value they generate and exchange to itself (stage three):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

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Fork you

Doubtless you've heard that "we all get the same 24 hours in the day." Of course it's not true: rich people and poor people experience very different demands on their time. The richer you are, the more your time is your own - not only are many systems arranged with your convenience in mind, but you also command the social power to do something about systems that abuse your time.

1/

And what books Graeber had left in him! Just weeks prior to his death, Graber finished #DawnOfEverything, his ten-year collaboration with David Wengrow. It's a nose-to-tail reconsideration of everything we know about the civilizations of prehistory, and what they tell us about the essential nature of humanity:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/08/three-freedoms/#anti-fatalism

2/

I read a prepublication draft of the book for a blurb, and I was *riveted*. In the early 18th century, the Zana-Malata people - a new culture created jointly by pirates from around the world and #Malagasy - came to dominate the island. They brought with them the democratic practices of pirate ships (where captains were elected and served at the pleasure of their crews) and the matriarchal traditions of some Malagasy, creating a feminist, anarchist "Libertalia."

4/

They created sham courts, where Zana-Malata, Malagasy and pirates put on elaborate cons for visitors where they all pretended to be subjects of a pirate monarch whose treasures were borrowed for the duration of the show.

These shams, in turn, spawned a popular English literature, with the liked of #Defoe penning bestselling, fantastical accounts of the pirate kings and their improbable adventures.

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Graeber retrieves and orders the history of this Libertalia from oral tradition, primary source documents, and records from around the world. Taken together, it's a tale that is rollicking and romantic, but also hilarious and eminently satisfying.

For example, the pirates of Madagascar found it useful (and amusing) to trick visitors into thinking the island had #PirateKings.

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Graeber tells this tale as skillfully as any 18th century romantic pirate novelist, but grounded in academic rigor and careful research. "Pirate Enlightenment" is a swashbuckling, #AntiAuthoritarian thrill-ride through the true pirates of the Indian Ocean, and the legacy they left behind.

8/

Back in Madagascar, the Zana-Malata laughed themselves silly at the credulous crowds on the other side of the world.

18th century Madagascar was a crossroads of sea-traders, religious apostates (radical Jews!), exiles and sea-bums of every description. Graeber describes how the Zana-Malata's egalitarian made them resilient and adaptable, able to meet aggression with force when needed, or to turn it away when possible.

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