Brooke Gladstone: When in despair over your social media platform, take comfort because digital domination is built on sand.

Cory Doctorow: It just takes one good competitor like TikTok or one big scandal like a live stream mass shooting or one big privacy debacle like Cambridge Analytica, and it can tip.

Brooke: From WNYC in New York. This is On the Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week, the lifecycle of internet platforms from electrifying birth to spiraling decrepitude, or as you'll hear bleeped, enpoopification.

Cory: I think the example that everyone can relate to here is Twitter. Twitter has gone from indispensable to completely dispensable for larger and larger groups of people very quickly. When that happens, when the platform tips over and becomes a useless pilot [bleep], which is the end of en***fication, then it starts to thrash.

Brooke: In thrashing, there's people power. It's all coming up after this. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. We have spent hours dissecting the anatomy of the internet chronicling concerns about privacy, the appeal of connection, our willful, woeful, walled gardens, and the fumbled attempts to regulate any of it at all. We hadn't been clued into the systemic nature of the increasing crappiness of being on let's call it big digital until now.

News clip: The competition watchdog has opened a formal probe into Amazon and Google over concerns that they have not been doing enough to combat fake reviews on their sites.

News clip: Two San Diego women are suing Amazon and a proposed class action lawsuit.

News clip: Claiming Amazon Prime members who pay $139 a year for membership have been misled for years regarding shipping times.

News clip: This morning right out of the EU, antitrust regulators as expected charging alphabets. Google of abusive practices in its digital advertising business, the regulators are saying that Google favors its own online display advertising technology services against those of its rival.

Brooke: The tech industry, changing the world as it does in mysterious ways is bound to spark editorial tongue-clucking and laments about how it's just not the way it used to be, but this is different. Those cluckers are right. Cory Doctorow, journalist, activist, and the author of many books most recently Red Team Blues, a science fiction crime thriller, has tracked this phenomenon for a long while and knows why.

He'll be our guide, exploring and explaining the process whereby going online grows ever less rewarding and evermore repellent. To start things off, this trend should have a name, luckily, Doctorow has one he calls it en***fication. It's absolutely accurate, and totally not allowed on broadcast radio.

Cory: En****fication is the death cycle of platforms and platforms are the native form of the internet. It means you have these companies that are really neither disciplined by regulation nor by competition and who can change the rules as they go.

Brooke: Now, get into the nitty-gritty of the process, which you manage to compress into three distinct steps.

Cory: Step one, first the company is good to its users. Think about Amazon, when Amazon started, it had a lot of shareholder capital, and was able to operate at a loss. It sold you goods for less than they cost. It subsidized the price of shipping. It subsidized the price of returns. Jeff Bezos was a good-natured slob who just wanted you to have stuff below costs.

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Cory: Lots of people piled in. There were lots of things that Amazon fix that were really broken for a lot of people, people who have disabilities and couldn't leave the house, people who needed to get large things. There was a point early on where Amazon started off with putting all kinds of things in Prime for free shipping.

There was this point where people on the internet were trying to find the heaviest item that you could get free shipping on. You could buy a 2-ton safe and good-natured old Uncle Jeff would pick up the shipping tab to deliver 2 tons of tempered steel to your front porch. Those were the good old days.

Brooke: You say lots of us piled in. Lots of brick-and-mortar retailers withered and died making it harder to go elsewhere.

Cory: Step one is figuring out how not just to give the users a good deal, but then spring the trap so that they don't go. Break your local retail so that the only place to shop is Amazon prepay for Prime, getting you to prepay for a year's worth of shipping. Who's going to shop anywhere else if you've already paid for the shipping? It's also getting you to prepay for a book every month.

The audible subscription packages are extraordinarily generous because that means that you would never buy an audiobook anywhere else because you've already bought the book. Then with the digital stuff, they also use digital rights management, which is this kind of encryption that locks the file to their authorized players.

You can only read a Kindle book, you can only listen to an audible book and a player that Amazon has authorized. The thing about digital rights management is that, since 1998, when Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it has been a felony to give someone a tool to remove digital rights management, even if no copyright infringement ever takes place.

If you buy one of my books on Amazon, which you can't, because none of my books are sold on Amazon with digital rights management, but if they were, and I supplied you with the tool that lets you take the DRM off, the digital rights management off, and go to a rival platform, so you could break up with Amazon, I would commit a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. Those are penalties that are much stiffer than if you just stole the book.

Brooke: Wow. Then go to step two, when the platform starts to squeeze users for the betterment of their business partners.

Cory: The platform is now a thing that you're locked to. It's got all of your recurring subscriptions, all your music, or movies, or books, or everything are stuck in its walled garden. Now, they can start doing things like allocating other surpluses, as our friend in the economics trade would say, to these sellers.

Brooke: What does that mean, allocating surpluses?

Cory: Surpluses are just goodies. It's what's left over after you're running the business or what you have in your bank account that you can spread around. Amazon can run the business at a loss, but it can get money from selling shares or by borrowing money. Other surpluses might be your privacy to pitch ads to you. Amazon takes some surplus, and it starts to allocate it to those business users.

Brooke: Charges some low fees for preferential treatment.

Cory: Really low platform fees. If you're a Kindle author or an audible author, the royalties are crazily good. This is at a time when publishing is really in the toilet. Some of that is down to Amazon. Amazon has been good to its suppliers, but not all of them. Amazon ran a project called Project Gazelle. In this project, they went to their small and medium publishers, and they demanded discounts from them that were so deep that the publishers actually were losing money on their sales.

The reason it was called Project Gazelle is that the managers in charge of this were exhorted to think of themselves as cheetahs bringing down the sickly gazelles in the herd. They're making stuff cheaper, and they're offering authors really good deals because Project Gazelle is making all the publishers disappear, and so you have creative workers piling into the platform. You have readers, you have writers, you have buyers, you have sellers, and it's still a pretty good deal.

Brooke: We're still at step two, consumers won't find better prices elsewhere. Sellers won't find a bigger pile of consumers. We arrive at step three, and this is where the ominous organ chord sounds, [organ plays] because after squeezing the consumer for the business folks, the platform then squeezes the business folks to further enrich Amazon.

Cory: Amazon is turning to the merchants and saying, "Hey, if you want to come to the top of the search results, even if you're not selling the thing that our customers searching for, you can buy ads. Amazon has this $31 billion ad market now." We now have a little bit of the kind of ads we think of when we say ads, which is like you're a publisher, and you want to run ads alongside your content, but most of their ad market is just payola. It's just saying, "If you want to be the top result for Duracell, you've got to outbid everybody else who wants to be the top result for Duracell."

Brooke: Even Duracell?

Cory: The last time I searched for Duracell on Amazon, there was a banner across the top that said, "Duracell," and then in the corner it said, "Sponsored post." Duracell outbid everyone who wasn't Duracell to have a banner across the top of the screen that said, "Duracell," when you go searching specifically for Duracell.

It's important to note here that this is a withdrawal of surplus from both end users and business customers. When you type a search into Amazon, if you're looking for a gasket for the water filter in your fridge, and you type in your fridge manufacturer or water filter and gasket--

Brooke: That's awfully random, Cory, but please go on. [laughs]

Cory: We just bought one. It's exactly the kind of thing that it used to be like, "Oh, God, do I have to figure out where to get this rubber ring that is precisely this size?" You type that in, and if Amazon is being kind to you, the top result is that thing. It's an incredible service actually. When Amazon opens the floodgates to say you can bid against it, then you get all kinds of stuff, including things that don't fit your fridge.

It's just because Amazon has done the math and said, "Overall, allowing people to advertise anything to any search term gets us more business than the ill will generated by people at the periphery who do irrational things like advertise the wrong size gasket against your fridge manufacturer."

Brooke: Sum this up.

Cory: Step one, buyers or end users are lured in with a good offer, but they're also locked in with subtle things that keep them from leaving if the offer gets worse. Then things are made worse for the buyers to make things better for the sellers. Once you have buyers and sellers who are locked in and can't leave, life is made worse for them and life is made infinitely better for the shareholders who own the platform.

Brooke: Walk us through the three steps of Facebook's en***fication.

Cory: Facebook is a canonical case of en***fication. When Facebook started, everyone already had a social media account with MySpace. Facebook's pitch to MySpace users was, "Come to Facebook and tell us who matters to you. Tell us who your friends are. If they're on the platform, anytime they say something that they want their friends to know about, we'll show it to you. Just reverse chronological order feed of everything that the people you care about have to say. That's the first stage. We're not spying on you. We're showing you the things that the people you like are saying."

Stage two is they want to bring in two kinds of business customers, advertisers, and we'll call them publishers, but it's publishers, it's performers, it's brands, it's TV networks, it's anyone who wants to reach an audience. To the advertisers, they say, "Remember when we told our users that we were never going to spy on them? We've actually got a ton of surveillance data on them, and we will let you use that really cheaply."

To the media companies, they said, "Hey, you need a funnel to drive traffic to your own website, so post an excerpt from your article along with a link. Then to the users, they said, "Do you remember when we promised you that we were only going to show you the things that the people you cared about had to say? Well, we're altering the deal a little here. We're also going to nonconsensually ram down your eyeballs, brief excerpts from media articles and advertisements."

Step one, we're going to show you what the people that you like have to say, and we're not going to spy on you. Step two, we're going to be good to our business customers. We're going to spy on you. Target ads to you, show you the stuff that you never asked to see, which is content for media brands and performers and publishers.

Brooke: Facebook was a really helpful platform for media companies, but then--

Cory: Then they'd start to say, "Actually, we're going to show your stuff less frequently unless you're more generous in what you put on the platform." You structure your material so that it lives on Facebook and never leaves anywhere else, and even then, Facebook still wants you to pay to boost your content, to reach your own subscribers. For advertisers, well, Facebook starts to do a lot of ad fraud.

Brooke: What do you mean ad fraud?

Cory: For example, Facebook and Google engaged in a secret unlawful collusive arrangement called Jedi Blue that was identified in the Texas Attorney General's antitrust case where they just agreed that they were going to charge advertisers more, pay publishers less and pocket the difference.

Brooke: What about Meta?

Cory: [chuckles] Here's Facebook. They have made this bad deal for users. They've made this bad deal for advertisers, they made this bad deal for publishers, but they all feel like they can't leave. Even if, every time they log in, every time they write a check, they're just like, "Ugh, this is terrible." The thing about that equilibrium where you've got just enough surplus in to keep people using it, but not so much that there's any extra, it's brittle.

It just takes one good competitor like TikTok or one big scandal, like a livestream mass shooting, or one big privacy debacle like Cambridge Analytica, and it can tip. We're talking about Facebook, but I think the example that everyone can relate to here is Twitter. Twitter has gone from indispensable to completely dispensable for larger and larger groups of people, businesses, movements, and so on very quickly.

When that happens, when the platform tips over and becomes a useless pile of [bleep] which is the end of en***fication, then it starts to thrash. Mark Zuckerberg has to pivot, which is Silicon Valley for thrash. Pivoting in his case is, "Let's all be legless, sexless, highly surveilled, low polygon cartoon characters in a virtual world named after a satire from a dystopian cyberpunk novel."

Brooke: There are consumers who argue that their platforms are still working for them.

Cory: People aren't lying when they say they get value out of these services. That's why we use them. The thing that the platforms want us to think is that there is no way to arrange their products and services such that all the things that we hate about them wouldn't come with the things that we love about them. That they are inseparable, that surveillance is a part of search and could not ever be anything but a part of search.

We know that you can make a Facebook without spying on people. How do we know that? Because Facebook used to be the social media service that didn't spy on you. What these platforms would like you to believe is what Margaret Thatcher wanted us to believe.

Brooke: There is no alternative.

Cory: There is no alternative. To paraphrase whoever said it, maybe it was Zizek, maybe it was Jameson. It is harder to imagine the end of the world itself than it is to imagine the end of Amazon.

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Brooke: Next up, I ask Cory if this is just classic capitalism at work, or if big digital is just different. Plus, the mystery of the giant teddy bear. This is On the Media.