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mostlysignssomeportents · 7 days

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Antitrust is a labor issue

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me SATURDAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, then Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

This is huge: yesterday, the FTC finalized a rule banning noncompete agreements for every American worker. That means that the person working the register at a Wendy's can switch to the fry-trap at McD's for an extra $0.25/hour, without their boss suing them:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/ftc-announces-rule-banning-noncompetes

The median worker laboring under a noncompete is a fast-food worker making close to minimum wage. You know who doesn't have to worry about noncompetes? High tech workers in Silicon Valley, because California already banned noncompetes, as did Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, Virginia and Washington.

The fact that the country's largest economies, encompassing the most "knowledge-intensive" industries, could operate without shitty bosses being able to shackle their best workers to their stupid workplaces for years after those workers told them to shove it shows you what a goddamned lie noncompetes are based on. The idea that companies can't raise capital or thrive if their know-how can walk out the door, secreted away in the skulls of their ungrateful workers, is bullshit:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#neofeudal

Remember when OpenAI's board briefly fired founder Sam Altman and Microsoft offered to hire him and 700 of his techies? If "noncompetes block investments" was true, you'd think they'd have a hard time raising money, but no, they're still pulling in billions in investor capital (primarily from Microsoft itself!). This is likewise true of Anthropic, the company's major rival, which was founded by (wait for it), two former OpenAI employees.

Indeed, Silicon Valley couldn't have come into existence without California's ban on noncompetes – the first silicon company, Shockley Semiconductors, was founded by a malignant, delusional eugenicist who also couldn't manage a lemonade stand. His eight most senior employees (the "Traitorous Eight") quit his shitty company to found Fairchild Semiconductor, a rather successful chip shop – but not nearly so successful as the company that two of Fairchild's top employees founded after they quit: Intel:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/the-traitorous-eight-and-the-battle-of-germanium-valley/

Likewise a lie: the tale that noncompetes raise wages. This theory – beloved of people whose skulls are so filled with Efficient Market Hypothesis Brain-Worms that they've got worms dangling out of their nostrils and eye-sockets – holds that the right to sign a noncompete is an asset that workers can trade to their employers in exchange for better pay. This is absolutely true, provided you ignore reality.

Remember: the median noncompete-bound worker is a fast food employee making near minimum wage. The major application of noncompetes is preventing that worker from getting a raise from a rival fast-food franchisee. Those workers are losing wages due to noncompetes. Meanwhile, the highest paid workers in the country are all clustered in a a couple of cities in northern California, pulling down sky-high salaries in a state where noncompetes have been illegal since the gold rush.

If a capitalist wants to retain their workers, they can compete. Offer your workers get better treatment and better wages. That's how capitalism's alchemy is supposed to work: competition transmogrifies the base metal of a capitalist's greed into the noble gold of public benefit by making success contingent on offering better products to your customers than your rivals – and better jobs to your workers than those rivals are willing to pay. However, capitalists hate capitalism:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/18/in-extremis-veritas/#the-winnah

Capitalists hate capitalism so much that they're suing the FTC, in MAGA's beloved Fifth Circuit, before a Trump-appointed judge. The case was brought by Trump's financial advisors, Ryan LLC, who are using it to drum up business from corporations that hate Biden's new taxes on the wealthy and stepped up IRS enforcement on rich tax-cheats.

Will they win? It's hard to say. Despite what you may have heard, the case against the FTC order is very weak, as Matt Stoller explains here:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/ftc-enrages-corporate-america-by

The FTC's statutory authority to block noncompetes comes from Section 5 of the FTC Act, which bans "unfair methods of competition" (hard to imagine a less fair method than indenturing your workers). Section 6(g) of the Act lets the FTC make rules to enforce Section 5's ban on unfairness. Both are good law – 6(g) has been used many times (26 times in the five years from 1968-73 alone!).

The DC Circuit court upheld the FTC's right to "promulgate rules defining the meaning of the statutory standards of the illegality the Commission is empowered to prevent" in 1973, and in 1974, Congress changed the FTC Act, but left this rulemaking power intact.

The lawyer suing the FTC – Anton Scalia's larvum, a pismire named Eugene Scalia – has some wild theories as to why none of this matters. He says that because the law hasn't been enforced since the ancient days of the (checks notes) 1970s, it no longer applies. He says that the mountain of precedent supporting the FTC's authority "hasn't aged well." He says that other antitrust statutes don't work the same as the FTC Act. Finally, he says that this rule is a big economic move and that it should be up to Congress to make it.

Stoller makes short work of these arguments. The thing that tells you whether a law is good is its text and precedent, "not whether a lawyer thinks a precedent is old and bad." Likewise, the fact that other antitrust laws is irrelevant "because, well, they are other antitrust laws, not this antitrust law." And as to whether this is Congress's job because it's economically significant, "so what?" Congress gave the FTC this power.

Now, none of this matters if the Supreme Court strikes down the rule, and what's more, if they do, they might also neuter the FTC's rulemaking power in the bargain. But again: so what? How is it better for the FTC to do nothing, and preserve a power that it never uses, than it is for the Commission to free the 35-40 million American workers whose bosses get to use the US court system to force them to do a job they hate?

The FTC's rule doesn't just ban noncompetes – it also bans TRAPs ("training repayment agreement provisions"), which require employees to pay their bosses thousands of dollars if they quit, get laid off, or are fired:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its-a-trap/#a-little-on-the-nose

The FTC's job is to protect Americans from businesses that cheat. This is them, doing their job. If the Supreme Court strikes this down, it further delegitimizes the court, and spells out exactly who the GOP works for.

This is part of the long history of antitrust and labor. From its earliest days, antitrust law was "aimed at dollars, not men" – in other words, antitrust law was always designed to smash corporate power in order to protect workers. But over and over again, the courts refused to believe that Congress truly wanted American workers to get legal protection from the wealthy predators who had fastened their mouth-parts on those workers' throats. So over and over – and over and over – Congress passed new antitrust laws that clarified the purpose of antitrust, using words so small that even federal judges could understand them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/14/aiming-at-dollars/#not-men

After decades of comatose inaction, Biden's FTC has restored its role as a protector of labor, explicitly tackling competition through a worker protection lens. This week, the Commission blocked the merger of Capri Holdings and Tapestry Inc, a pair of giant conglomerates that have, between them, bought up nearly every "affordable luxury" brand (Versace, Jimmy Choo, Michael Kors, Kate Spade, Coach, Stuart Weitzman, etc).

You may not care about "affordable luxury" handbags, but you should care about the basis on which the FTC blocked this merger. As David Dayen explains for The American Prospect: 33,000 workers employed by these two companies would lose the wage-competition that drives them to pay skilled sales-clerks more to cross the mall floor and switch stores:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-04-24-challenge-fashion-merger-new-antitrust-philosophy/

In other words, the FTC is blocking a $8.5b merger that would turn an oligopoly into a monopoly explicitly to protect workers from the power of bosses to suppress their wages. What's more, the vote was unanimous, include the Commission's freshly appointed (and frankly, pretty terrible) Republican commissioners:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/ftc-moves-block-tapestrys-acquisition-capri

A lot of people are (understandably) worried that if Biden doesn't survive the coming election that the raft of excellent rules enacted by his agencies will die along with his presidency. Here we have evidence that the Biden administration's anti-corporate agenda has become institutionalized, acquiring a bipartisan durability.

And while there hasn't been a lot of press about that anti-corporate agenda, it's pretty goddamned huge. Back in 2021, Tim Wu (then working in the White wrote an executive order on competition that identified 72 actions the agencies could take to blunt the power of corporations to harm everyday Americans:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

Biden's agency heads took that plan and ran with it, demonstrating the revolutionary power of technical administrative competence and proving that being good at your job is praxis:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

In just the past week, there's been a storm of astoundingly good new rules finalized by the agencies:

A minimum staffing ratio for nursing homes;

The founding of the American Climate Corps;

A guarantee of overtime benefits;

A ban on financial advisors cheating retirement savers;

Medical privacy rules that protect out-of-state abortions;

A ban on junk fees in mortgage servicing;

Conservation for 13m Arctic acres in Alaska;

Classifying "forever chemicals" as hazardous substances;

A requirement for federal agencies to buy sustainable products;

Closing the gun-show loophole.

That's just a partial list, and it's only Thursday.

Why the rush? As Gerard Edic writes for The American Prospect, finalizing these rules now protects them from the Congressional Review Act, a gimmick created by Newt Gingrich in 1996 that lets the next Senate wipe out administrative rules created in the months before a federal election:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-04-23-biden-administration-regulations-congressional-review-act/

In other words, this is more dazzling administrative competence from the technically brilliant agencies that have labored quietly and effectively since 2020. Even laggards like Pete Buttigieg have gotten in on the act, despite a very poor showing in the early years of the Biden administration:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/11/dinah-wont-you-blow/#ecp

Despite those unpromising beginnings, the DOT has gotten onboard the trains it regulates, and passed a great rule that forces airlines to refund your money if they charge you for services they don't deliver:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/04/24/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-announces-rules-to-deliver-automatic-refunds-and-protect-consumers-from-surprise-junk-fees-in-air-travel/

The rule also bans junk fees and forces airlines to compensate you for late flights, finally giving American travelers the same rights their European cousins have enjoyed for two decades.

It's the latest in a string of muscular actions taken by the DOT, a period that coincides with the transfer of Jen Howard from her role as chief of staff to FTC chair Lina Khan to a new gig as the DOT's chief of competition enforcement:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-04-25-transportation-departments-new-path/

Under Howard's stewardship, the DOT blocked the merger of Spirit and Jetblue, and presided over the lowest flight cancellation rate in more than decade:

https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/2023-numbers-more-flights-fewer-cancellations-more-consumer-protections

All that, along with a suite of protections for fliers, mark a huge turning point in the US aviation industry's long and worsening abusive relationship with the American public. There's more in the offing, too including a ban on charging families extra for adjacent seats, rules to make flying with wheelchairs easier, and a ban on airlines selling passenger's private information to data brokers.

There's plenty going on in the world – and in the Biden administration – that you have every right to be furious and/or depressed about. But these expert agencies, staffed by experts, have brought on a tsunami of rules that will make every working American better off in a myriad of ways. Those material improvements in our lives will, in turn, free us up to fight the bigger, existential fights for a livable planet, free from genocide.

It may not be a good time to be alive, but it's a much better time than it was just last week.

And it's only Thursday.

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:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/25/capri-v-tapestry/#aiming-at-dollars-not-men

#pluralistic #labor #antitrust #trustbusting #noncompetes #indenture #ftc #matt stoller #david dayen #tapestry #luxury fashion #capri

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lostkokoro · 5 months

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Here's the whole collection of the official 2023 Sonic Channel Calander artwork!

What are your thoughts on this series?

Links to source below

(01) Shadow & Infinite - https://sonic.sega.jp/SonicChannel/special/sidestory/ohgiri/20221228_003113/

(02) Amy & Blaze - https://sonic.sega.jp/SonicChannel/special/sidestory/ohgiri/20230127_003123/

(03) Tikal & Chaos - https://sonic.sega.jp/SonicChannel/special/sidestory/ohgiri/20230224_008236/

(04) Sliver & Elise - https://sonic.sega.jp/SonicChannel/special/sidestory/ohgiri/20230324_008251/

(05) Vector & Vanilla - https://sonic.sega.jp/SonicChannel/special/sidestory/ohgiri/20230422_008271/

(06) Tails & Marine - https://sonic.sega.jp/SonicChannel/special/sidestory/ohgiri/20230526_008289/

(07) Gemerl, Orbot & Cubot - https://sonic.sega.jp/SonicChannel/special/sidestory/ohgiri/20230623_008306/

(08) Blaze & Silver - https://sonic.sega.jp/SonicChannel/special/sidestory/ohgiri/20230724_008323/

(09) Rouge & Omega - https://sonic.sega.jp/SonicChannel/special/sidestory/ohgiri/20230830_008335/

(10) Big, Cream & Cheese - https://sonic.sega.jp/SonicChannel/special/sidestory/ohgiri/20230925_008358/

(11) Sonic & Knuckles - https://sonic.sega.jp/SonicChannel/special/sidestory/ohgiri/20231023_008368/

(12) Super Sonic & Dr. Eggman - https://sonic.sega.jp/SonicChannel/special/sidestory/ohgiri/20231124_008398/

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apas-95 · 2 months

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Incredible double mishap in the German Navy off the coast of Yemen! The German warship's radar systems incorrectly recognized a drone circling overhead as hostile. The “Hessen” then fired two rockets at them. But in reality the unmanned aircraft was a US MQ-9 Reaper drone (20 meter wingspan, 30 million euros). A blessing in disguise for the Americans: Both German SM2 interceptor missiles did not reach their target for technical reasons, but instead fell into the sea without achieving anything.

[2024-02-28, Bild is German private media] The only thing more embarrassing than a blue-on-blue incident is a *failed* blue-on-blue incident.

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rheya28 · 10 months

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The Bluewind Inn ♥ The Sims 4: Speed Build // CC

♥ Hi guys, Today I present to you the Bluewind Inn and Suites located in Brindleton Bay. This build was inspired by the sea, the sand, and the sky. The Bluewind Inn sits near Cavalier cove and is owned by retired Marine Biologists, Rio and Jane Clarence. 5 years ago, this beautiful seaside manor was transformed into a Inn to be enjoyed by both locals and tourist.

The Bluewind inn is a multifunctional lot as it could be set as a rental lot, a restaurant, a pool, or a spa.

ATTENTION: This is a huge build and is very cc heavy, so beware. If you’ve downloaded my other builds, you should have majority of the cc’s I used…But there’s more cc on this than usual.

Please make sure to turn on bb.moveobjects on!

SPEED BUILD VIDEO

0:02 Intro

1:25 Speed Build

30:22 Photos

♥ Lot Details:

Lot Name: The Bluewind Inn

Lot size: 40x40

Location: Brindleton Bay [Cavalier Cove]

♥ MODS:

TOOL MOD by TwistedMexi

♥ CC LIST:

Note: I have all parts of all sets in this list, so I highly recommend you guys dl them since I frequently use them in all my builds!

[awingedllama] Boho Living, Blooming Rooms

[greenllamas] The woodwind collection

[Joyceisfox] Cruel Summer, Simple Live Collection, Summer Garden

[QICC] Sleek Hallway Set

[S-imagination] Notal Living Room, Rutland Kitchen

[Sooky88] Coastal Wallpaper, Leaning Framed Posters (4 frames), Seashore Framed Prints (panoramic)

[Aroundthesims4] All Plants and pots

[House of Harlix] Bafroom, Baysic, Harluxe, kichen

[Thecluttercat] Busy Bee, Mellow Moods

[Charlypancakes] The lighthouse collection, Dinna, Lavish, Maple&S Construction, Miscellanea, modish, Soak,

[FelixAndre] Chateau, Fayun, Colonial, Grove, Kyoto, Paris, Florence, Livin Rum, Orjanic, Shop the look

[Max20] Cozy Backyard Pack, Garden at home, Happily Ever After, Poolside lounge pack, Precioujs promises

[Thecowbuild] My home

[Harrie] Brutalist, Coastal, Country, Kwatei, Octave, Shop the look 2, Spoons

[Illogical Sims] Home office

[Kaiso] Rustico Living

[Kiwisim] Blocklhouse Dining, blockhouse study

[Leafmotif] Calliope Bathroom, Sunny Corner, Willow Porch set

[Littledica]Chic Bathroom, Rise & Grind, Delicious Kitchen, Delicato Lounge

[MadameRia] Back to basics, Mayaken Cozy Kitchen

[Mechtasims] Office Set

[Miiko] Harmony set

[Myshunosun] Garden Stories, Dawn Living, Midsummer eve, simmify

[Peacemaker] Alesund, Bowed, Caine Living, Adirondack Love, Creta, Futura, Hamptons, Hinterlands Dining, Kitayama

[Ars Botanica] Peonies Bouquet

[Pierism] Auntie Vera, Coldbrew, David apartment, Domain Du clos, Maison Meuliere, MCM, Oak house, The office, Winter Garden

[Littlecakes] Rustic Romance

[PLumbobteasociety] Cottage Garden

[Ravasheen] on cloud wine bottle, sit sip hooray bar cart

[Sforzinda] Clutter Ep12, GP06, Cabin Slats

[Simkoos] Tiny living Small tv, Tiny living small tv wall

[Simplistic] RH Area rugs II, Cotswolds Rug

[Sixam] Stylish Wood Nursery, Stylish wood Fancy Dining, Stylish wood Living room, Boho Bathroom, Hotel bedroom, small spaces pantry

[Sims4luxury] McGee&Co Callahan Rug, McGee&Co Goldie Rug

[Simsnetwork] Clapboard brush siding set #1

[Sundays] Kediri “rug only”, Medewi “deco surfboard only”

[Syboubou] Fency, Fitness

[Taurus Design] Angela Bedroom, Elize Bedroom, Lilith Chilling Areas

[Tuds] IND, NCTR, Rope lounge, SHKR, Wave

TS4; Wimborne Siding by Tilly Tiger

♥ Tray file

♥ Origin ID: Applez

♥ Twitter: Rheya28__

♥ Tiktok: Rheya28__

♥ Tumblr: https://rheya28.tumblr.com/

#showusyourbuilds #sims 4 cc #scenery #sims 4 #thesims4 #sims #ts4 #photography #sims 4 builds #thesims #coastal #architecture #interior design #aesthetic #ts4 build #builds #build

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nons4luvs · 4 months

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when you manifest, you detach.

a message to reality shifters and manifestors.

hello everyone! i'm nons4luvs, and i left tumblr last, last year(?) to 'focus' on my journey. and guess what !! i've made it, i know what to do in both manifestation and reality shifting. but i don't think that's what people are here for,

if you are here looking for 'advice', then you will hear the same thing again. stay, please let my words sink in. let me summarize this post for you: WHEN YOU MANIFEST, YOU DETACH. WHEN YOU SHIFT, YOU DETACH. it's the same thing. you have always been there. you have always had you desires long before you wanted it. there is no need to even think about it.

anyway, if you're still reading, here's the the uncompleted list of things I manifested;

01. I found my earpods 02. I cancelled big events last minute 03. I won raffles a total of 4 times (and more! in the future), I got lamp-light, mugs, scarves, car-cooler, etc. 04. FOOD. Anywhere, anytime. 05. Dreams 06. Messages from people 07. My parents being nice 08. being in the void state / any state at anytime I want + many, many more

But Non! They aren't as big as having your dream life!

you're correct! they aren't 'as big' because there are no 'big' or 'small' desires. it is all equal. you desired life is equal to your life right now--they are simultaneous and they are one. you are a consciousness. constant and forever. that will never stop you from manifesting anything that you think (ego) is above you.

Okay, but you still didn't say you have your dream life, so what do you mean 'i've made it'?

it means i'm giving up because i already have my dream life; in imagination. i'm detaching from what i 'desire' the most: my intended reality. To manifest, I break it down: what do I want? ... okay, now that I know what I want, do I visualize? do I need do that? ... i'm not in the mood to do that, let's let this feeling of knowing marinate for a second ... it's done! i've manifested it! yay! -- For shifting, it's the same.

Non, what do you mean detach?

all this time, i've put it all in a pedestal, when you shouldn't. i shouldn't. when you manifest, you detach. you detach from the outcome because you know it's happening, it's that easy to manifest the void state, your desires, your anything. because it was always yours way back you even wanted it. you. you are the problem. you are the solution.

you can detach, ask that to yourself: why do i detach from my desires so easily?

and answer yourself: it's because it's mine already! it's mine, and there's no need to think about it.

same way with shifting. detach. let go of your obsession with shifting. let go of your desired/intended reality. let it go and know you're there, it's natural for you. you are have always been there. there shouldn't be thought put into it.

let go. let go.

~ nons4luvs.

#master manifestor #master shifter #law of assumption #law of attraction #law of detachment #LOA #loassumption #loa tumblr #manifesting #void state #reality shift #reality shifting #shiftblr #shifting #desired reality

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carbone14 · 3 months

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Pfc Faris 'Bob' M. Tuohy du 3e Bataillon du 22e Régiment de Marines buvant un café sur l'USS Arthur Middleton (APA-25) après 2 jours de combat sur Engebi – Bataille d'Eniwetok – Campagne des îles Gilbert et Marshall – Guerre du Pacifique – Atoll d'Eniwetok – Iles Marshall – 19 février 1944

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m0tiv8me · 19 hours

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MAYbe I CAN!- 15 minutes a day Challenge🧠💪

reblog if you wish and add an update on your chosen 15 minutes of activity for the day.

DAY 02/30

@thoughts-sex-desires @definitely-grown @perspective24 @joshuamusclefan @52fit @runningfromthecuccos @athousandmorningss @marine-corps-strong @healthymist @integrationslady @lucky-jewels @tenacioustam @the-curvy-crossfitter @poh-fitblr @thepersonalhermit @wildgypsywind2 @echolaunch @robertbecomes @kittyfromthenorth123 @50snfit

#maybe i can #may challenge #accountability #day 2 #reblog add your activity #accountability post #you got this

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surgeryie · 5 months

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𓂃‿（ ✙ ） ‿𓂃 Purimarine．

A gender related 02 Purity && Marine life，The purity of Marine Life，or being Pure && Marine．PT Below the cut．

PT: Purimarine: A gender related to purity and marine life, the purity of marine life, or being pure and marine.

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mae-gi-writes · 11 months

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the note under your desk | minho (xo kitty) - series masterlist

“How did it start?” He laughs softly, looks at the wall ahead of him, “it all started with a note under her desk.”

Genre: angst, mentions of suicide, romcom, rivals to lovers au, professional swimmer athlete! Minho x marine biology major! Reader.

———

Series Masterlist —

01. Dear K.

02. Kind regards, A Stranger 03. COMINGSOON. 04. COMINGSOON.

———

A/N: comment down your username so that I can tag you in the newest chapters!

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mostlysignssomeportents · 8 days

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The specific process by which Google enshittified its search

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me SATURDAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, then Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

All digital businesses have the technical capacity to enshittify: the ability to change the underlying functions of the business from moment to moment and user to user, allowing for the rapid transfer of value between business customers, end users and shareholders:

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

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/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Which raises an important question: why do companies enshittify at a specific moment, after refraining from enshittifying before? After all, a company always has the potential to benefit by treating its business customers and end users worse, by giving them a worse deal. If you charge more for your product and pay your suppliers less, that leaves more money on the table for your investors.

Of course, it's not that simple. While cheating, price-gouging, and degrading your product can produce gains, these tactics also threaten losses. You might lose customers to a rival, or get punished by a regulator, or face mass resignations from your employees who really believe in your product.

Companies choose not to enshittify their products…until they choose to do so. One theory to explain this is that companies are engaged in a process of continuous assessment, gathering data about their competitive risks, their regulators' mettle, their employees' boldness. When these assessments indicate that the conditions are favorable to enshittification, the CEO walks over to the big "enshittification" lever on the wall and yanks it all the way to MAX.

Some companies have certainly done this – and paid the price. Think of Myspace or Yahoo: companies that made themselves worse by reducing quality and gouging on price (be it measured in dollars or attention – that is, ads) before sinking into obscure senescence. These companies made a bet that they could get richer while getting worse, and they were wrong, and they lost out.

But this model doesn't explain the Great Enshittening, in which all the tech companies are enshittifying at the same time. Maybe all these companies are subscribing to the same business newsletter (or, more likely, buying advice from the same management consultancy) (cough McKinsey cough) that is a kind of industry-wide starter pistol for enshittification.

I think it's something else. I think the main job of a CEO is to show up for work every morning and yank on the enshittification lever as hard as you can, in hopes that you can eke out some incremental gains in your company's cost-basis and/or income by shifting value away from your suppliers and customers to yourself.

We get good digital services when the enshittification lever doesn't budge – when it is constrained: by competition, by regulation, by interoperable mods and hacks that undo enshittification (like alternative clients and ad-blockers) and by workers who have bargaining power thanks to a tight labor market or a powerful union:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

When Google ordered its staff to build a secret Chinese search engine that would censor search results and rat out dissidents to the Chinese secret police, googlers revolted and refused, and the project died:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)

When Google tried to win a US government contract to build AI for drones used to target and murder civilians far from the battlefield, googlers revolted and refused, and the project died:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/technology/google-pentagon-project-maven.html

What's happened since – what's behind all the tech companies enshittifying all at once – is that tech worker power has been smashed, especially at Google, where 12,000 workers were fired just months after a $80b stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years. Likewise, competition has receded from tech bosses' worries, thanks to lax antitrust enforcement that saw most credible competitors merged into behemoths, or neutralized with predatory pricing schemes. Lax enforcement of other policies – privacy, labor and consumer protection – loosened up the enshittification lever even more. And the expansion of IP rights, which criminalize most kinds of reverse engineering and aftermarket modification, means that interoperability no longer applies friction to the enshittification lever.

Now that every tech boss has an enshittification lever that moves very freely, they can show up for work, yank the enshittification lever, and it goes all the way to MAX. When googlers protested the company's complicity in the genocide in Gaza, Google didn't kill the project – it mass-fired the workers:

https://medium.com/@notechforapartheid/statement-from-google-workers-with-the-no-tech-for-apartheid-campaign-on-googles-indiscriminate-28ba4c9b7ce8

Enshittification is a macroeconomic phenomenon, determined by the regulatory environment for competition, privacy, labor, consumer protection and IP. But enshittification is also a microeconomic phenomenon, the result of innumerable boardroom and product-planning fights within companies in which would-be enshittifiers try to do things that make the company's products and services shittier wrestle with rivals who want to keep things as they are, or make them better, whether out of principle or fear of the consequences.

Those microeconomic wrestling-matches are where we find enshittification's heroes and villains – the people who fight for the user or stand up for a fair deal, versus the people who want to cheat and wreck to make things better for the company and win bonuses and promotions for themselves:

https://locusmag.com/2023/11/commentary-by-cory-doctorow-dont-be-evil/

These microeconomic struggles are usually obscure, because companies are secretive institutions and our glimpses into their deliberations are normally limited to the odd leaked memo, whistleblower tell-all, or spectacular worker revolt. But when a company gets dragged into court, a new window opens into the company's internal operations. That's especially true when the plaintiff is the US government.

Which brings me back to Google, the poster-child for enshittification, a company that revolutionized the internet a quarter of a century ago with a search-engine that was so good that it felt like magic, which has decayed so badly and so rapidly that whole sections of the internet are disappearing from view for the 90% of users who rely on the search engine as their gateway to the internet.

Google is being sued by the DOJ's Antitrust Division, and that means we are getting a very deep look into the company, as its internal emails and memos come to light:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

Google is a tech company, and tech companies have literary cultures – they run on email and other forms of written communication, even for casual speech, which is more likely to take place in a chat program than at a water-cooler. This means that tech companies have giant databases full of confessions to every crime they've ever committed:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

Large pieces of Google's database-of-crimes are now on display – so much, in fact, that it's hard for anyone to parse through it all and understand what it means. But some people are trying, and coming up with gold. One of those successful prospectors is Ed Zitron, who has produced a staggering account of the precise moment at which Google search tipped over into enshittification, which names the executives at the very heart of the rot:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Zitron tells the story of a boardroom struggle over search quality, in which Ben Gomes – a long-tenured googler who helped define the company during its best years – lost a fight with Prabhakar Raghavan, a computer scientist turned manager whose tactic for increasing the number of search queries (and thus the number of ads the company could show to searchers) was to decrease the quality of search. That way, searchers would have to spend more time on Google before they found what they were looking for.

Zitron contrasts the background of these two figures. Gomes, the hero, worked at Google for 19 years, solving fantastically hard technical scaling problems and eventually becoming the company's "search czar." Raghavan, the villain, "failed upwards" through his career, including a stint as Yahoo's head of search from 2005-12, a presiding over the collapse of Yahoo's search business. Under Raghavan's leadership, Yahoo's search market-share fell from 30.4% to 14%, and in the end, Yahoo jettisoned its search altogether and replaced it with Bing.

For Zitron, the memos show how Raghavan engineered the ouster of Gomes, with help from the company CEO, the ex-McKinseyite Sundar Pichai. It was a triumph for enshittification, a deliberate decision to make the product worse in order to make it more profitable, under the (correct) belief that the company's exclusivity deals to provide search everywhere from Iphones and Samsungs to Mozilla would mean that the business would face no consequences for doing so.

It a picture of a company that isn't just too big to fail – it's (as FTC Chair Lina Khan put it on The Daily Show) too big to care:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaDTiWaYfcM

Zitron's done excellent sleuthing through the court exhibits here, and his writeup is incandescently brilliant. But there's one point I quibble with him on. Zitron writes that "It’s because the people running the tech industry are no longer those that built it."

I think that gets it backwards. I think that there were always enshittifiers in the C-suites of these companies. When Page and Brin brought in the war criminal Eric Schmidt to run the company, he surely started every day with a ritual, ferocious tug at that enshittification lever. The difference wasn't who was in the C-suite – the difference was how freely the lever moved.

On Saturday, I wrote:

The platforms used to treat us well and now treat us badly. That's not because they were setting a patient trap, luring us in with good treatment in the expectation of locking us in and turning on us. Tech bosses do not have the executive function to lie in wait for years and years.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/22/kargo-kult-kaptialism/#dont-buy-it

Someone on Hacker News called that "silly," adding that "tech bosses do in fact have the executive function to lie in wait for years and years. That's literally the business model of most startups":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40114339

That's not quite right, though. The business-model of the startup is to yank on the enshittification lever every day. Tech bosses don't lie in wait for the perfect moment to claw away all the value from their employees, users, business customers, and suppliers – they're always trying to get that value. It's only when they become too big to care that they succeed. That's the definition of being too big to care.

In antitrust circles, they sometimes say that "the process is the punishment." No matter what happens to the DOJ's case against Google, its internal workers have been made visible to the public. The secrecy surrounding the Google trial when it was underway meant that a lot of this stuff flew under the radar when it first appeared. But as Zitron's work shows, there is plenty of treasure to be found in that trove of documents that is now permanently in the public domain.

When future scholars study the enshittocene, they will look to accounts like Zitron's to mark the turning points from the old, good internet to the enshitternet. Let's hope those future scholars have a new, good internet on which to publish their findings.

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:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

#pluralistic #ed zitron #google #microincentives #constraints #enshittification #rot economy #platform decay #search #ben gomes #code yellow #mckinsey #hacking engagement #Prabhakar Raghavan #yahoo #doj #antitrust #trustbusting

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