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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 months

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Middlemen without enshittification

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me next in SALT LAKE CITY (Feb 21, Weller Book Works) and SAN DIEGO (Feb 22, Mysterious Galaxy). After that, it's LA, Seattle, Portland, Phoenix and more!

Enshittification describes how platforms go bad, which is also how the internet goes bad, because the internet is made of platforms, which is weird, because platforms are intermediaries and we were promised that the internet would disintermediate the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

The internet did disintermediate a hell of a lot of intermediaries – that is, "middlemen" – but then it created a bunch more of these middlemen, who coalesced into a handful of gatekeepers, or as the EU calls them "VLOPs" (Very Large Online Platforms, the most EU acronym ever).

Which raises two questions: first, why did so many of us end up flocking to these intermediaries' sites, and how did those sites end up with so much power?

To answer the first question, I want you to consider one of my favorite authors: Crad Kilodney (RIP):

https://archive.org/details/thecradkilodneypapers

When I was growing up, Crad was a fixture on the streets of Toronto. All through the day and late into the evening, winter or summer, Crad would stand on the street with a sign around his neck ("Very famous Canadian author, buy my books, $2" or sometimes just "Margaret Atwood, buy my books, $2"). He wrote these deeply weird, often very funny short stories, which he edited, typeset, printed, bound and sold himself, one at a time, to people who approached him on the street.

I had a lot of conversations with Crad – as an aspiring writer, I was endlessly fascinated by him and his books. He was funny, acerbic – and sneaky. Crad wore a wire: he kept a hidden tape recorder rolling in his coat and he secretly recorded conversations with people like me, and then released a series of home-duplicated tapes of the weirdest and funniest ones:

https://archive.org/details/on-the-street-crad-kilodney-vol-1

I love Crad. He deserves more recognition. There's an on-again/off-again documentary about his life and work that I hope gets made some day:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/09/free-sample/#putrid-scum

But – and this is the crucial part – there are writers out there I want to hear from who couldn't do what Crad did. Maybe they can write books, but not edit them. Or edit them, but not typeset them. Or typeset, but not print. Or print, but not spend the rest of their lives standing on a street-corner with a "PUTRID SCUM" sign around their neck.

Which is fine. That's why we have intermediaries. I like booksellers (I was one!). I like publishers. I like distributors. I like their salesforce, who go forth and convince the booksellers of the world to stock books like mine. I have ten million things I want to do before I die, and I'm already 52, and being a sales-rep for a publisher isn't on my bucket list. I am so thankful that someone else wants to do this for me.

That's why we have intermediaries, and why disintermediation always leads to some degree of re-intermediation. There's a lot of explicit and implicit knowledge and specialized skill required to connect buyers and sellers, creators and audiences, and other sides of two-sided markets. Some producers can do some of this stuff for themselves, and a very few – like Crad – can do it all, but most of us need some help, somewhere along the way. In the excellent 2022 book Direct, Kathryn Judge lays out a clear case for all the good that middlemen can do:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/direct-the-problem-of-middlemen/

So why were we all so anxious for disintermediation back in the late 1990s? Here's a hint: it wasn't because we hated intermediaries – it was because we hated powerful intermediaries.

The point of an intermediary is to serve as a conduit between producers and consumers, buyers and sellers, audiences and creators. When an intermediary gains power over the audience – say, by locking them inside a walled garden – and then uses that lock-in to screw producers and appropriate an ever larger share of the value going between them, that's when intermediaries become a problem.

The problem isn't that someone will handle ticketing for your gig. The problem is that Ticketmaster has locked down all the ticketing, and the venues, and the promotions, and it uses that power to gouge fans and rip off artists:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/20/anything-that-cant-go-on-forever-will-eventually-stop/

The problem isn't that there's a well-made website that lets you shop for goods sold by many small merchants and producers. It's that Amazon has cornered this market, takes $0.51 out of every dollar you spend there, and clones and destroys any small merchant who succeeds on the platform:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

The problem isn't that there's a website where you can stream most of the music ever recorded. It's that Spotify colludes with the Big Three labels to rip off artists and sneaks crap you don't want to hear into your stream in order to collect payola:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing

The problem isn't that there's a website where you can buy any audiobook you want. It's that Amazon's Audible locks every book to its platform forever and steals hundreds of millions of dollars from creators:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

The problem, in other words, isn't intermediation – it's power. The thing that distinguishes a useful intermediary from an enshittified bully is power. Intermediaries gain power when our governments stop enforcing competition law. This lets intermediaries buy each other up and corner markets. Once they've formed cozy cartels, they can capture their regulators and commit rampant labor, privacy and consumer violations with impunity. That capture also lets them harness governments to punish smaller players that want to free workers, creators, audiences and customers from walled gardens. It also hands them a whip-hand over their workers, so that any worker who refuses to aid in these nefarious plans can be easily fired:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

A world with intermediaries is a better world. As much as I love Crad Kilodney's books, I wouldn't want to live in a world where the only books on my shelves came from people prepared to stand on a street-corner wearing a "FOUL PUS FROM DEAD DOGS" sign.

The problem isn't intermediaries – it's powerful intermediaries. That's why the world's surging antitrust movement is so exciting: by reinstating competition law, we can keep intermediaries small and comparatively weak, so that creators and audiences, drivers and riders, sellers and buyers, and other groups seeking to connect will not find themselves made subservient to middlemen.

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/2024/02/19/crad-kilodney-was-an-outlier/#intermediation

#pluralistic #intermediation #disintermediation #publishing #creative labor #middlemen #distributors #publishers #publicists #enshittification #monopoly #monopsony #crad kilodney #trustbusting #antitrust

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kc22invesmentsblog · 7 months

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The Impact of Cryptocurrency on Global Financial Systems

Written by Delvin Cryptocurrency has emerged as a disruptive force in the world of finance, challenging traditional financial systems and revolutionizing the way we transact and store value. Over the past decade, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and others have gained significant attention and popularity. In this blog post, we will explore the profound impact of cryptocurrency on global…

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#Blockchain Technology #Challenges and Regulations of Cryptocurrency #Crypto Investment Opportunities #Cryptocurrency #dailyprompt #Disintermediation #Financial #Financial Literacy #knowledge #money #Passive Income #Personal Finance #The Impact of Cryptocurrency on Global Financial Systems

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wmsi07rtgm · 1 year

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avianmedia · 2 years

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DIsintermediation; defined for 2022

Disintermediation is more relevant in 2022 than ever before!

With our world inching closer towards a dystopian future which seems almost inevitable, people are increasingly awakening to the reality of losing their existence, as they know it. Though it is unlikely that we shall ever return to the comparatively idyllic existence before the arrival of Technocracy, many feel that there is time effect change in their own lives in order to help steer mankind…

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#disintermediation #paralleleconomy

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eightyonekilograms · 3 months

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do you think disintermediation is a specific problem for american democracy or do you think making democracy more direct/accountable to the electorate is always destabilizing? if the latter, what do you think the ideal democracy looks like?

This is the million-dollar question, and I don't pretend to have all the answers, but I think a plausible first step is that people need enough civic education to recognize when some proposed update to the forms of government looks more democratic but is actually less, or when some mechanism of government looks bad at first glance but is actually a load-bearing member keeping things functioning.

"More direct democracy" is a high-level goal which has many different specific instantiations. Probably some of these are good and others are destabilizing, and people should be able to recognize which is which. "Replace nomination by party delegates with primary elections" and "get rid of pork riders" are examples of destabilizing changes I think should never have been made, and should probably be rolled back, but I don't think any and all moves toward more direct democracy are bad per se.

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rocka0206 · 21 hours

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Let's understand the charm of Bit Savings

Decentralization: The future economic and technological landscape

In contemporary society, whether at the technical, economic or managerial level, the concept of decentralization has gradually changed from an idea to an important strategy for practical application. Decentralization, the process of reducing or eliminating centralized authority or control within a system or network, is increasingly becoming a key driver of innovation and efficiency.

Technology: The power of decentralized networks In the field of technology, especially information technology and blockchain technology, decentralization is embodied in the design of a system that does not rely on a single point of control or management entity. The Internet itself is an example of decentralized communication, where information can be freely transmitted between many nodes through multiple paths without passing through a central node. This structure not only improves the efficiency of information transmission, but also enhances the anti-interference ability and privacy protection of the network.

Blockchain technology has pushed this concept further. As representatives of decentralization, cryptocurrency platforms such as Bitcoin and Ethereum collectively maintain an open and transparent ledger through thousands of nodes on the network, without the need for a central authority to control or verify transactions. This approach not only reduces the possibility of fraud, but also reduces transaction costs.

Economy: The rise of decentralized finance (DeFi) Decentralization in the economy is mainly manifested in the provision of financial services. Decentralized finance (DeFi) is the use of blockchain technology to remove traditional financial intermediaries, such as banks and stock exchanges, and create and run financial instruments directly on the blockchain through smart contracts. From lending to trading to insurance, DeFi applications make financial operations more transparent, efficient and fair.

DeFi's strength lies not only in disintermediation, but also in its global and inclusive nature. DeFi services are available to anyone, regardless of location, as long as they have access to the Internet, greatly increasing the penetration of financial services.

Management level: Effectiveness of decentralized decision making In organizational management, decentralization usually means the decentralization of decision-making authority. Many businesses and organizations are increasingly adopting a decentralized management model, transferring decision-making power from a central management team to front-line employees or small teams. Doing so not only speeds up the decision-making process, but also increases productivity and employee engagement, spurring innovation.

Social governance: Decentralization of government power Decentralization in political and social governance refers to the localization of government power. By transferring power and resources from the central government to local governments, policies can not only be more targeted and efficient, but also better meet local specific needs, strengthen citizen participation and government transparency.

peroration Decentralization, as a trend, is gradually changing the way we work and live, especially in the economic and technological fields. Through decentralization, we can build a more efficient, equitable and transparent society. In the future, with the advancement of technology and the popularization of concepts, decentralization will show its unique value in more fields.

#BitNest #BitNestLoop #BitNestPureContract #BitNestis the best project in the currency circle #BitNestSecurely #BitNestAutonomously #BitNestDecentralizedly #BitNestCryptographically

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azspot · 6 months

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The world circa 2000 was not Napoleonic. Little more than two decades ago people were experimenting madly with technologies, business models, and seemingly everything else. Business theorists predicted that industries would demassify and disintermediate, old media gatekeepers would fall, products like encyclopedias would simply disappear, and entire industries would revamp, collapse, reshape, and emerge. Not just the tech world but the entire world seemed to be in a constant state of flux. Venture capital flowed out of a cornucopia. The NASDAQ hit 5,000 in March 2000, though the dot-com bubble burst roughly a year later.

Twenty Five Years After Imagined Worlds, What World Are We Living In?

#tech

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centrally-unplanned · 1 year

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I have been struggling a lot with longer form writing recently, and was on the fence about posting any of that essay at all. I do first and foremost write for myself - its the ultimate way to clarify and polish ideas. Before this essay I had thoughts on Haibane, now I have an Opinion, its crystallized; aspects of my thoughts didn’t survive the research phase, and others didn’t survive the editing phase but live on in notes. I am pretty firm believer in the idea that you don’t have viewpoints, only instincts, until you write them down.

Publishing them online is seen as an exercise in shouting into the void of the internet, but its not a frivolous part of it. The fact that its the void means I have to cull or cut nothing I don’t want to, the only judgement comes from the mirror it holds up to you. But judgement emerges nonetheless from that - the hypothetical essence of an audience that the internet imposes takes the standards you hold for craft and places them on yourself. If I wrote for my notebook alone it could stay as bullet points, it could have typos, it would not require the witticisms and style that I try to put into my writing. I however would not want an essay of sloppy bullet points, I could not tolerate such a view in the mirror, so the void pushes me to do more.

You can’t escape the social mediation of your own reality, however - my standards are but a product of the world’s standards. And by the world’s standards, no one gives a fuck about long-form anime essays. Not sure if anyone ever did, but at least in 2008 you could cloak yourself in the endless supply of WordPress blogs making a good faith effort to say otherwise. I write for myself but the void is harsh in its judgement, I know that, once a certain wordcap starts being hit, something is untenable as a consumable piece of work. It isn’t helped that I do also write short-form things on like modern shows or industry events or whatever, and like you get more feedback from that, its less work for more payoff and you know it each step of the way.

But of course that would mean cutting down ideas not for clarity but for medium compatibility, dulling the edge of your own conclusions for the craft. Goals A & B are in tension and I struggle to resolve it.

Idk I need to make Youtube videos, that is where media analysis lives anyway. Long form content isn’t gone, the written versions just got cannibalized into audio tracks with matching visuals. I know that, that is just What The Genre Is, which makes me feel foolish sometimes for my anachronism. And of course all this is hubris resting on the idea that my silly posts (on Tumblr!!) mean anything, I know that they don’t outside of what they mean to me. And yet the tension... perseveres.

I think I need to do some work disintermediating the goals of writing, come into projects thinking “this is for me”. And maybe take more stabs at writing-for-an-audience, make that explicit too, not salve ego by keeping retreat to literary narcissism in the back pocket.

Or I am just having a bad mental health spell and you post through it, Tumblr Tradition baby!

#failson writer woes

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collapsedsquid · 2 years

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Here was the web3 disruption narrative, repackaged as a pyramid scheme. The creator economy, Justin explained, had gotten rid of the need for middlemen—for people like David Geffen, even for institutions at all. And Urbit was the new paradigm, the true OS, the environment in which this economy would come to its full flowering. The key is something Justin kept calling “cultural liquidity.” This seemed to mean the ability to monetize something unique—an idea, talent or style—and turn it into a commodity. Something with a particular nature, a specific meaning, becomes something with a price. Before, we needed middlemen to do this: institutions that marketed, interpreted, evaluated cultural objects, arranging them such that they shape our social world. But now with web3, “things are becoming way more permissionless, way more frictionless.”

OnlyFans, Soundcloud, Substack, Instagram: whatever kind of “content” you produced, the middleman was disappearing. With Urbit, this disintermediation could go further, getting rid of the rent-seeking platforms and allowing you to host the content yourself and use crypto to monetize it, thereby “bootstrapping your own cultural liquidity.” The frontier is a click away. The only requirement is that everything that matters turn into content, becoming disembodied, virtual—literally liquidated. Freed from the weight of tradition, of rules and regulations, you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps as easily as you boot up your computer. The dream of the internet, which Urbit attempts to realize, is to cut out entirely this detour through the material world, otherwise known as culture. The only work left to do is to be a “reality entrepreneur,” a “decentralized AI David Geffen,” or, more likely, a reality customer, living fully in the virtual.

Wait I’m confused, aren’t onlyfans, soundcloud, and the like middlemen?

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allthebrazilianpolitics · 1 year

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Brazil is undergoing a fintech revolution

Once considered agitators, fintechs are now part of the financial establishment

Technological innovations are shaking up the world of payments and finance in Brazil. The country has an impressive number of new fintech companies that are disintermediating a very concentrated banking system, serving consumers in ways that the incumbent banks haven’t and offering millions of Brazilians their first bank accounts. Some of these companies are revolutionising the country’s finance industry.

Brazil is well suited to fintech innovations for three main reasons. First, Brazil’s banking system is small relative to the size of the country, and it is heavily dominated by just a few banks. The country’s five bank asset concentration, which is a measure of the five largest banks as a share of total commercial banking assets, has long been around 80%. This bank concentration in the US is around 50%. The rigidity and oligopolistic nature of Brazil’s banking sector has constrained the economy, leaving too many Brazilians unbanked and consumers looking for better and more convenient options.

Second is changing consumer preferences. Brazil’s fintech start-ups identified broad consumer frustration with incumbent banks and quickly jumped in to provide a suite of fintech products, all available via a smartphone and on a comparatively fast time frame. There is also a well-ingrained culture of instalment payments in Brazil. The widespread use of payments for purchases both large and small began in the 1950s with the popularisation of ‘crediários’, whereby consumers could register with a store to purchase items but then pay for them over a series of months. This culture of instalment payments lends itself well to increased digital finance, resulting in a proliferation of payment-orientated fintech start-ups operating in Brazil.

Third, the government has provided several initiatives aimed at fostering greater competition in the banking and payments sectors. The first was in 2010 when Brazil’s regulator ended the duopoly enjoyed by the dominant credit card acquirers in Brazil. By introducing competition and reducing the fees that retailers pay for credit and debit card transactions, savings were passed on to the consumer, ending a period of supernormal profit for the acquirers. The incumbent banks who owned the acquirers were then forced to look for ways to replace these profits and grow in a more consumer-friendly way.

#brazil #politics #brazilian politics #economy #technology #mod nise da silveira #image description in alt

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choutac · 1 year

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Beautiful airports and subway stations – Part 6

Authoritatively syndicate plug-and-play supply chains vis-a-vis error-free information. Appropriately disintermediate plug-and-play growth strategies without market positioning manufactured products. Monotonectally brand open-source partnerships rather than tactical potentialities. Assertively create end-to-end ideas through leading-edge niche markets. Professionally streamline equity invested…

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#magazine #video #vlog

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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Podcasting "Twiddler"

This week on my podcast, I read “Twiddler,” a recent Medium column in which I delve more deeply into enshittification, and how it is a pathology of digital platforms, distinct from the rent-seeking of the analog world that preceded it:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

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/2023/02/27/knob-jockeys/#bros-be-twiddlin

Enshittification, you’ll recall, is the lifecycle of the online platform: first, the platform allocates surpluses to end-users; then, once users are locked in, those surpluses are taken away and given to business-customers. Once the advertisers, publishers, sellers, creators and performers are locked in, the surplus is clawed away from them and taken by the platforms.

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

Facebook is the poster-child for enshittification. When FB welcomed the general public in 2006, it sold itself as the privacy-respecting alternative to Myspace, promising users it would never harvest their data. The FB feed consisted of the posts that the people you’d followed — the people you cared about — published.

FB experienced explosive growth, thanks to two factors: “network effects” (every new user was a draw for other users who wanted to converse with them), and “switching costs” (it was practically impossible to convince all the people you wanted to hear from to leave FB, much less agree on what platform to go to next). In other words, every new user who joined FB both attracted more users, and made it harder for those users to leave.

FB attained end-user lockin and was now able to transfer users’ surpluses to business customers. First, it started aggressively spying on users and offered precision targeting at rock-bottom prices to advertisers. Second, it offered media companies “algorithmic” boosting into the feeds of users who hadn’t asked to see their posts.

Media companies that posted brief excerpts to FB, along with links to their sites on the real internet were rewarded with floods of traffic, as their posts were jammed into the eyeballs of millions of FB users who never asked to see them. Media companies and advertisers went all-in for FB, integrating FB surveillance beacons in their presence on the real internet, hiring social media specialists who’d do Platform Kremlinology in order to advise them on the best way to please The Algorithm.

Once those business customers — creators, media companies, advertisers — were locked into FB, the company harvested their surplus, too. On the ad side, FB raised rates and decreased expensive anti-fraud measures, meaning that advertisers had to pay more, even as an increasing proportion of their ads were either never served, or never seen.

With media companies and creators, FB not only stopped jamming their content in front of people who never asked to see it, they actively suppressed the spread of business users’ posts even to their own subscribers. FB required media companies to transition from excerpts to fulltext feeds, and downranked or simply blocked posts that linked back to a business user’s own site, be it a newspaper’s web presence or a creator’s crowdfunding service. Business users who wanted to reach the people who had explicitly directed FB to incorporate their media in users’ feeds had to pay to “boost” their materials.

This is the (nearly) complete enshittification cycle: having harvested the surplus from users and business customers, FB is now (badly) attempting to surf the line where nearly all the value in the service lands in its shareholders’ pockets, with just enough surplus left behind to keep end-users and business-users locked in (see also: Twitter).

There have been lots of other abusive “platform” businesses in the past — famously, 19th century railroads and their robber-baron owners were so obnoxiously abusive that they spawned the trustbusting movement, the Sherman Act, and modern competition law. Did the rail barons do enshittification, too?

Well, yes — and no. I have no doubt that robber barons would have engaged in zuckerbergian shenanigans if they could have — but here we run up against the stubborn inertness of atoms and the slippery liveliness of bits. Changing a railroad schedule to make direct connections with cities where you want to destroy a rival ferry business (or hell, laying track to those cities) is a slow proposition. Changing the content recommendation system at Facebook is something you do with a few mouse-clicks.

Which brings me to the thesis of “Twiddler”: enshittification doesn’t arise from the special genius or the unique wickedness of tech barons — rather, it’s the product of the ability to twiddle. Our discourse has focused (rightly) on the extent to which platforms are “instrumented” — that is, the degree to which they spy on and analyze their users’ conduct.

But the discussion of what the platforms do with that data — the ways they “react” to it — has echoed the platforms’ own boasts of transcendental “behavior modification” prowess (c.f. “Surveillance Capitalism”) while giving short shrift to the extremely mundane, straightforward ways that the ability to change the business-logic of a platform lets it allocate and withdraw surpluses from different kinds of users to get them on the hook, reel them in, and then skin and devour them.

The Twiddler thesis, in other words, is a counter to the narrative of Maria Farrell’s Prodigal Tech Bros, who claim that they were once evil sorcerers, but, having seen the error of their ways, vow to be good sorcerers from now on, forswearing “hacking our dopamine loops” like vampires swearing off blood:

https://conversationalist.org/2020/03/05/the-prodigal-techbro/

People who repeat the claims of Prodigal Tech Bros are engaging in criti-hype, Lee Vinsel’s term for criticism that repeats tech’s own mystical narratives of their own superhuman prowess, rather than grappling with the mundanity of doing old conjurer’s tricks very quickly, with computers:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

That’s what twiddling is — doing the same things that grocery store monopolists and rail monopolists and music label monopolists have always done, but very quickly, with computers. Whether it’s Amazon rooking sellers and authors, or Apple and Google’s App Stores rooking app creators, or Tiktok and Youtube rooking performers, or Uber rooking drivers, the underlying pattern of surplus-harvesting is the same, and so is the method. They do the same thing as their predecessors, but very quickly, with computers.

A grocer who wants to price-gouge on eggs needs to dispatch an army of low-waged employees with pricing guns. AmazonFresh does the same thing in an eyeblink, by typing a new number into a field on a web-form and clicking submit. As is so often the case when a magic trick is laid bare, the actual mechanic is very, very boring: the way to make a nickel appear to vanish is to spend hundreds of hours practicing before a mirror while you shift so it is clenched between your fingers, and protrudes from behind your hand (sorry, spoiler alert).

The trick can be baffling and marvellous when you see it, but once you know how it’s done, it’s pretty obvious — the difference is that most sleight-of-hand artists don’t think they’re sorcerers, while plenty of tech bros believe their own press.

There’s a profound irony in twiddling’s role in enshittification: early internet scholarship rightly hailed the power of twiddling for internet users. Theorists like Aram Sinnreich described this as configurability — the ability of end-users (aided by tinkerers, small businesses, and co-ops) to modify the services they used to suit their own needs:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vk8c2

Arguably the most successful configurability story is ad-blocking, which Doc Searls calls “the biggest boycott in human history.” Billions of end-users of the web have twiddled their browsers so that they aren’t tracked by ad-tech and don’t see ads:

https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2015/09/28/beyond-ad-blocking-the-biggest-boycott-in-human-history/

Configurability was at the heart of early hopes for mass disintermediation, because audiences and performers (or sellers and producers) could go direct to one another, assembling a customized, un-capturable conduit composed of an a-la-carte selection of payment processors, webstores, mail and web hosts, etc. Whenever one of these utilities tried to capture that relationship and harvest an unfair share of the surplus, both ends of the transaction could foil them by blocking, reverse-engineering, modding, or mashing them up, wriggling off the hook before it could set its barbs.

But — as we can all see — a funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century. The platforms seized the internet, turning it into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”:

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

Three factors let them do this:

1. They were able to buy or merge with every major competitor, and where that failed them, they were able to use predatory pricing to drive competitors out of the market:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

2. They were able to twiddle their services, setting them a-bristle with surveillance beacons and digital actuators that could rearrange the virtual furniture every time some knob-jockey touched their dial:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

3. They were able to hoard the twiddling, using laws like the DMCA, CFAA, noncompetes, trade secrecy, and other “IP” laws to control the conduct of their competitors, critics and customers:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

That last point is very important: it’s not just that big corporations twiddle us to death — it’s that they have made it illegal for us to twiddle back. Adblocking is possible on the open web, but to ad-block your Iphone, you must first jailbreak it, which is a crime. Yes, Apple will block Facebook from spying on you — but even if you opt out of tracking, Apple still spies on you in exactly the same way Facebook did, to power their own ad-targeting business:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

This is what Jay Freeman calls “felony contempt of business-model” — the literal criminalization of configuration. When Netflix wants to decide who is and isn’t a member of your family, they just twiddle their back-end to block the child that moves back and forth between your home and your ex’s, thanks to your joint custody arrangement:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/02/nonbinary-families/#red-envelopes

But woe betide the parent who twiddles back to restore their child’s service, by jailbreaking an app or the W3C’s official, in-browser DRM, EME — trafficking in a tool to bypass EME and reconfigure your browser to suit your needs, rather than Netflix’s, is a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine, under Section 1201 of the DMCA:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-director-ceo-team-and-membership

This is the supreme irony of twiddling: Big Tech companies love to twiddle you, but if you touch your own knob, they call it a crime. Just as Big Tech firms turned “free software” into “open source” and then took all the software freedom for themselves, configurability is now the exclusive purview of corporations — those transhuman, immortal colony paperclip maximizers that treat humans as inconvenient gut-flora:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=vBknF2yUZZ8

If we are to take the net back, we’ll need to seize the means of computation. There are three steps to that process:

1. Traditional antitrust: Merger scrutiny, breakups, and bans on predatory pricing and other anticompetitive practices:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/01/federal-trade-commission-justice-department-seek-strengthen-enforcement-against-illegal-mergers

2. Anti-twiddling laws for businesses: A federal privacy law with a private right of action, labor protections, and other rules that take knobs away from tech platforms:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/you-should-have-right-sue-companies-violate-your-privacy

3. Pro-twiddling laws for users: Interoperability (both mandatory and adversarial — AKA “Competitive Compatibility” or “comcom”):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/05/time-for-some-game-theory/#massholes

Monopolists and their handmaidens — witting and unwitting — want you to believe that their dominance is inevitable (shades of Thatcher’s “there is no alternative”), because the great forces of history, the technical characteristics of digital technology, and the sorcerous mind-control of dopamine-hackers.

But the reality is much more mundane. Digital freedom was never a mirage. Indeed, it is a prize of enormous value — that’s why the platforms are so intent on hoarding it all for themselves.

Here’s this week’s podcast episode:

https://craphound.com/news/2023/02/27/twiddler/

And here’s a direct link to download the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the Internet Archive ; they’ll host your media for free, forever):

Here’s the direct feed to subscribe to my podcast:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

And here’s the original “Twiddler” article on Medium:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

Image: Stephen Drake (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Analog_Test_Array_modular_synth_by_sduck409.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

This Thu (Mar 2) I’ll be in Brussels for Antitrust, Regulation and the Political Economy, along with a who’s-who of European and US trustbusters. It’s livestreamed, and both in-person and virtual attendance are free. On Fri (Mar 3), I’ll be in Graz for the Elevate Festival.

[Image ID: A mandala made from a knob and button-covered control panel.]

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grandhotelabyss · 2 years

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An amusing flourish in the picture caption to Justin Murphy’s newsletter on Flannery O’Connor: “When was the last time you heard about Elizabeth Hardwick?” The cognoscenti have been hyping a Hardwick revival for half a decade now, to semi-avail. I got in on the game in 2017 by reading her little Herman Melville bio; I wrote about it here. For what it’s worth, I think that’s one of the funnier essays I’ve ever written:

All of the above to say that I approach Hardwick, at this stage of my reading life, with a bit, just a hint really, the proverbial soupçon, whatever that means, of suspicion—with apprehensions of fatigue. These days, for me, somehow, the New York Intellectuals, The New York Review of Each Other’s Books, have lost their luster. If I don’t care about Bloomsbury, why should I care about this even less generally relevant coterie? Their organs have been disintermediated, their politics obsolesced, in the thresher of the 21st century. The problem with ressentiment and separatism, though, is that you miss too much of relevance to yourself, because you have artificially constricted your own soul too far in advance of experience. Lady Ottoline Morrell, Barbara Epstein—sure, if you’re not in the club, who cares? But you would not want to miss a Virginia Woolf, not even in the 21st century: so to Hardwick’s Melville I go.

I suspect Murphy may have had in mind that recent survey that showed the average reader of the New York Review of Books to be, in age terms, pretty much deceased.

I never did read Hardwick’s most celebrated novel Sleepless Nights, with all those blurbs from Sontag, Roth, Didion. I started it right after I read Adler’s Speedboat and it was too similar so I put it down. These aren’t universal writers, Adler and Hardwick, in the way that O’Connor is a universal writer. It’s a different order of being. I may have heard about Hardwick lately—and she’s okay, very intelligent, very civilized; I do think her metropolitan milieu partially liked her so much because she escaped from Hicksville, and I increasingly detest that kind of thing—but nobody would say about her what (if I recall) Robert Fitzgerald said about O’Connor: that she should be mentioned in the company not of Hemingway but of Sophocles. Which might go too far, but is in the ballpark.

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Speaking of mid-to-late-20th-century American letters: over in Tablet, at whose Substack annex I myself sometimes appear, David Mikics nominates Ralph Ellison, Joan Didion, Thomas Pynchon, Flannery O’Connor, and Elizabeth Bishop as the most important postwar American writers and the antidotes to today’s over-politicized rage. No quarreling with the list—I appreciate that he said Bishop where one is probably supposed to say Ashbery—though a little Saul Bellow and a little Don DeLillo wouldn’t be amiss.

If literature can teach anything, it is patience and conviction. We mostly have neither. We lash out violently, apocalyptic and urgent, with our enemies’ lists in hand. The days of rage have returned, both on the right and the left. To weather these tantrums, we should turn back to the writers who oppose the infantile fervor of groupthink—who acknowledge the lostness of the self in the world, the first step to declaring independence.

And speaking of Don DeLillo, I spent the last week and half gratuitously and luxuriously rereading the massive Underworld—truly one of the best books there is—and I wrote about it at length here. Of DeLillo’s oeuvre, I still need to read End Zone and Ratner’s Star, both of which I’ve avoided on principles that have stood me in good stead since grade school: I don’t care about sports and I don’t care about math. And it’s been so long since I read The Names and Mao II that those readings probably don’t count. Underworld, though, is where it’s at, as I write:

For Underworld is, first of all, in the high tradition of the American novel, which, as umpteenth observers from Nathaniel Hawthorne forward have told us, has never been a novel at all, not a sober realist social survey, but a weird symbolic prose-poem, an inward voyage projected out onto the national landscape. Underworld places itself in this tradition with its first sentence: “He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.” The first thing to say about this sentence is that it pays tribute to two sentences from the Great American Novels of the early 1950s, the period when Underworld begins: the first sentence of Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March (“I am an American, Chicago born”) and the last sentence of Ellison’s Invisible Man (“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”). The second thing to say is that, like a line of poetry, the sentence admits of two readings, with “American” as either a noun, which makes the sentence a direct address to the American reader, or an adjective modifying “voice,” declaring a national origin and destiny for the novel’s style. So this is an American romance, and you have to read it like a poem; and, as in Bellow’s and Ellison’s novels, or Faulkner’s and Melville’s before them, the sensibility and suffering that emerges is less the sojourning protagonists’ and more that of the organizing and presiding consciousness. As in a book of poems or in a long poem, it’s the poet you get to know best, and not for nothing does Underworld, in its final one-word sentence, echo no novel at all but the century’s most famous poem, The Waste Land. “Shantih shantih shantih,” Eliot chants in Sanskrit, which DeLillo puts into plain American: “Peace.”

#american literature #flannery o'connor #elizabeth hardwick #don delillo #justin murphy #david mikics #literary criticism

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thompson0320 · 22 hours

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Let's understand the charm of Bit Savings

Decentralization: The future economic and technological landscape

#BitNest #BitNestLoop #BitNestPureContract #BitNestis the best project in the currency circle #BitNestSecurely #BitNestAutonomously #BitNestDecentralizedly #BitNestCryptographically

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wallace18811 · 22 hours

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Let's understand the charm of Bit Savings

Decentralization: The future economic and technological landscape

#BitNest #BitNestLoop #BitNestPureContract #BitNestis the best project in the currency circle #BitNestSecurely #BitNestAutonomously #BitNestDecentralizedly #BitNestCryptographically

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forextrendnews · 8 days

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Financial Disintermediation and Fintech: Navigating the New Financial Frontier

Financial disintermediation and Fintech are reshaping the arena of money and banking, stripping away the middleman, and placing electricity directly in your hands. Imagine a global in which peer-to-peer transactions aren't just possible, but common, in which your monetary offers are fast, direct, and tailored on your needs. That’s the unfolding truth of the brand new monetary frontier – a panorama where virtual solutions from cell payments to cryptocurrencies promise a non-public finance revolution. Dive into this journey with me, and permit’s discover how disrupting conventional banking can unlock exciting possibilities for you.

Unpacking the Shift to Peer-to-Peer Financial Solutions Exploring Peer-to-Peer Lending Platforms Peer-to-peer lending systems have modified the game. They allow humans borrow and lend money directly. These structures suit borrowers with lenders. They reduce out banks as the center guy. Now, everyone with net can be a lender or a borrower. This has made getting loans less difficult and making an investment less difficult.

Such structures encompass names like Lending Club and Prosper. They offer a spread of loans, from personal to enterprise ones. To use those, you sign up, share your economic info and create a listing on your loan need. Investors then evaluate listings and pick who to lend to. This manner is on line and pretty brief. The interest quotes can be higher than the ones of banks, and the picks are more diverse.

The Rise of Decentralized Finance Decentralized finance, or DeFi, takes this concept even further. It makes use of blockchain generation to manipulate economic transactions without significant systems. Think of it as an open monetary market on hand to anyone at the blockchain. In DeFi, markets are continually open, and there are no centralized authorities. Instead, smart contracts automate and cozy those transactions.

This way users have entire manipulate over their belongings. They transact at once with others through DeFi protocols. These protocols offer services like loans, coverage, and financial savings applications. And because they're at the blockchain, facts are public and secure. This builds accept as true with among customers.

DeFi is developing fast. It’s due to the fact human beings need greater access and control over their budget. They additionally need less interference from traditional banks. DeFi gives people this freedom and versatility. It additionally opens doors for people who don’t have get right of entry to to conventional banking.

This soar in the direction of DeFi has led banks to rethink their function. They now have to adapt to this greater open, transparent, and green manner of banking. They are integrating blockchain and growing digital offerings. This helps them live applicable in the fintech revolution.

The shift to peer-to-peer economic answers and DeFi is reshaping finance. It is making it more inclusive, smooth to use, and geared closer to the future. As we navigate this new frontier, we’ll discover greater methods to control and invest our cash. This could imply brighter financial futures for us all.

Financial disintermediation and Fintech The Evolution of Payments inside the FinTech Era Advancements in Mobile Payment Solutions Mobile fee answers have converted how we cope with cash. From settling payments to sending cash to friends, it’s all at our fingertips. But, why should we care? Simple – it’s short, secure, and cuts the problem. People no longer want to lug round stacks of playing cards. A unmarried app can keep all their price desires.

Key gamers like PayPal and Venmo make it clean. They shield our money and private details too. Companies are pushing the tech similarly each day. They paintings to preserve our mobile transactions relaxed. This is critical for incomes agree with from customers like you and me.

Companies should meet hard fintech regulations to perform. They can’t just wing it. So, we rest clean understanding experts have combed thru their security. This is massive, as more humans use digital banking offerings than ever.

Peer-to-peer lending platforms additionally advantage ground. Here, you may lend to or borrow from someone directly. No banks inside the center. People get loans quicker, and savers earn greater. It’s a win-win.

Alternative lending techniques come in many shapes. Think of small enterprise funding or crowdfunding for startups. These offerings provide opportunities for many to get investment. They didn’t have those chances before fintech shook things up.

Increased Adoption of Contactless Payments Tap and go – it’s that easy now. Contactless payments are taking on. They make shopping quick and handy. There’s no need to kind in a PIN or signal a slip. This magic comes from a tiny chip in cards and smart devices. It talks to the price terminal without any bodily contact.

Since COVID-19, its utilization soared. People desired to avoid touching things that many others had. And groups stuck on. They noticed how quick traces moved with tap payments. It turned into better for them too.

Neobanks and conventional banks conflict it out. Who will win the virtual race? Neobanks are all approximately on line finance. They don’t have branches however provide lots of fancy capabilities. These regularly encompass clean contactless payments. Traditional banks play catch up. They’re adding digital tools fast to stay in the game.

Innovative fintech startups push the envelope similarly. They grind every day to higher our charge revel in. And they create connections between specific financial offerings. So, effective finance APIs now permit other apps hook into banking offerings.

We see this change all round us. From the convenience of buying groceries with a phone to splitting a dinner bill without cash. These seamless experiences are reshaping our economic lives. And there’s greater to come back! Blockchain technology and virtual wallets also are at the rise. So, watch this space, as the technology of carrying cash might simply come to be a story for the records books.

Follow Forex Trend News for more forex information.

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