Gandersauce
Disruption for thee, but not for me.
I’m on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel Picks and Shovels. Catch me in AUSTIN on MONDAY (Mar 10). I’m also doing several events for SXSW in Austin, and side-stage panels with Fediverse House and Creative Commons. More tour dates here.
It’s true that capitalists by and large hate capitalism — given their druthers, entrepreneurs would like to attain a perch from which they get to set prices and wages and need not fear competitors. A market where everything is up for grabs is great — if you’re the one doing the grabbing. Less so if you’re the one whose profits, customers and workers are being grabbed at.
But while all capitalists hate all capitalism, a specific subset of capitalists really, really hate a specific kind of capitalism. The capitalists who hate capitalism the most are Big Tech bosses, and the capitalism they hate the most is techno-capitalism. Specifically, the techno-capitalism of the first decade of this century — the move fast/break things capitalism, the beg forgiveness, not permission capitalism, the blitzscaling capitalism.
The capitalism tech bosses hate most of all is disruptive capitalism, where a single technological intervention, often made by low-resourced individuals or small groups, can upend whole industries. That kind of disruption is only fun when you’re the disruptor, but it’s no fun for the disruptees.
Jeff Bezos’s founding mantra for Amazon was “your margin is my opportunity.” This is a classic disruption story: I’m willing to take a smaller profit than the established players in the industry. My lower prices will let me poach their customers, so I grow quickly and find more opportunities to cut margins but make it up in volume. Bezos described this as a flywheel that would spin faster and faster, rolling up more and more industries. It worked!
https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/10/at-amazon-the-flywheel-effect-drives-innovation/
The point of that flywheel wasn’t the low prices, of course. Amazon is a paperclip-maximizing artificial intelligence, and the paperclip it wants to maximize is profits, and the path to maximum profits is to charge infinity dollars for things that cost you zero dollars. Infinite prices and nonexistent wages are Amazon’s twin pole-stars. Amazon warehouse workers don’t have to be injured at three times the industry average, but maiming workers is cheaper than keeping them in good health. Once Amazon vanquished its competitors and capturedthe majority of US consumers, it raised prices, and used its market dominance to force everyone else to raise their prices, too. Call it “bezosflation”:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos
We could disrupt Amazon in lots of ways. We could scrape all of Amazon’s “ASIN” identifiers and make browser plugins that let local sellers advertise when they have stock of the things you’re about to buy on Amazon:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/10/view-a-sku/
We could hack the apps that monitor Amazon drivers, from their maneuvers to their eyeballs, so drivers had more autonomy and their bosses couldn’t punish them for prioritizing their health and economic wellbeing over Amazon’s. An Amazon delivery app mod could even let drivers earn extra money by delivering for Amazon’s rivals while they’re on their routes:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men
We could sell Amazon customers virtual PVRs that let them record and keep the shows they like, which would make it easier to quit Prime, and would kill Amazon’s sleazy trick of making all the Christmas movies into extra-cost upsells from November to January:
Rival audiobook stores could sell jailbreaking kits for Audible subscribers who want to move over to a competing audiobook platform, stripping Amazon’s DRM off all their purchases and converting the files to play on a non-Amazon app:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff
Jeff Bezos’s margin could be someone else’s opportunity…in theory. But Amazon has cloaked itself — and its apps and offerings — in “digital rights management” wrappers, which cannot be removed or tampered with under pain of huge fines and imprisonment:
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
Amazon loves to disrupt, talking a big game about “free markets and personal liberties” — but let someone attempt to do unto Amazon as Amazon did unto its forebears, and the company will go running to Big Government for a legal bailout, asking the state to enforce its business model:
You’ll find this cowardice up and down the tech stack, wherever you look. Apple launched the App Store and the iTunes Store with all kinds of rhetoric about how markets — paying for things, rather than getting them free through ads — would correct the “market distortions.” Markets, we were told, would produce superior allocations, thanks to price and demand signals being conveyed through the exchange of money for goods and services.
But Apple will not allow itself to be exposed to market forces. They won’t even let independent repair shops compete with their centrally planned, monopoly service programs:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/22/apples-cement-overshoes/
Much less allow competitors to create rival app stores that compete for users and apps:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/06/spoil-the-bunch/#dma
They won’t even refurbishers re-sell parts from phones and laptops that are beyond repair:
And they take the position that if you do manage to acquire a donor part from a dead phone or laptop, that it is a felony — under the same DRM laws that keep Amazon’s racket intact — to install them in a busted device:
“Rip, mix, burn” is great when it’s Apple doing the ripping, mixing and burning, but let anyone attempt to return the favor and the company turns crybaby, whining to Customs and Border Patrol and fed cops to protect itself from being done unto as it did.
Should we blame the paperclip-maximizing Slow AI corporations for attempting to escape disruptive capitalism’s chaotic vortex? I don’t think it matters: I don’t deplore this whiny cowardice because it’s hypocritical. I hate it because it’s a ripoff that screws workers, customers and the environment.
But there is someone I do blame: the governments that pass the IP laws that allow Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and other tech giants shut down anyone who wants to disrupt them. Those governments are supposed to work for us, and yet they passed laws — like Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — that felonize reverse-engineering, modding and tinkering. These laws create an enshittogenic environment, which produces enshittification:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification
Bad enough that the US passed these laws and exposed Americans to the predatory conduct of tech enshittifiers. But then the US Trade Representative went slithering all over the world, insisting that every country the US trades with pass their own versions of the laws, turning their citizens into an all-you-can-steal buffet for US tech gougers:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/31/hall-of-famer/#necensuraninadados
This system of global “felony contempt of business-model” statutes came into being because any country that wanted to export to the USA without facing tariffs had to pass a law banning reverse-engineering of tech products in order to get a deal. That’s why farmers all over the world can’t fix their tractors without paying John Deere hundreds of dollars for each repair the farmer makes to their own tractor:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/
But with Trump imposing tariffs on US trading partners, there is now zero reason to keep those laws on the books around the world, and every reason to get rid of them. Every country could have the kind of disruptors who start a business with just a little capital, aimed directly at the highest margins of these stupidly profitable, S&P500-leading US tech giants, treating those margins as opportunities. They could jailbreak HP printers so they take any ink-cartridge; jailbreak iPhones so they can run any app store; jailbreak tractors so farmers can fix them without paying rent to Deere; jailbreak every make and model of every car so that any mechanic can diagnose and fix it, with compatible parts from any manufacturer. These aren’t just nice things to do for the people in your country’s borders: they are businesses, massive investment opportunities. The first country that perfects the universal car diagnosing tool will sell one to every mechanic in the world — along with subscriptions that keep up with new cars and new manufacturer software updates. That country could have the relationship to car repairs that Finland had to mobile phones for a decade, when Nokia disrupted the markets of every landline carrier in the world:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/03/friedmanite/#oil-crisis-two-point-oh
The US companies that could be disrupted thanks to the Trump tariffs are directly implicated in the rise of Trumpism. Take Tesla: the company’s insane valuation is a bet by the markets that Tesla will be able to charge monthly fees for subscription features and one-off fees for software upgrades, which will be wiped out when your car changes hands, triggering a fresh set of payments from the next owner.
That business model is entirely dependent on making it a crime to reverse-engineer and mod a Tesla. A move-fast-and-break-things disruptor who offered mechanics a tool that let them charge $50 (or €50!) to unlock every Tesla feature, forever, could treat Musk’s margins as their opportunity — and what an opportunity it would be!
That’s how you hurt Musk — not by being performatively aghast at his Nazi salutes. You kick that guy right in the dongle:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/#franklinite
The act of unilaterally intervening in a market, product or sector — that is, “moving fast and breaking things” — is not intrinsically amoral. There’s plenty of stuff out there that needs breaking. The problem isn’t disruption, per se. Don’t weep for the collapse of long-distance telephone calls! The problem comes when the disruptor can declare an end to history, declare themselves to be eternal kings, and block anyone from disrupting them.
If Uber had been able to nuke the entire taxi medallion system — which was dominated by speculators who charged outrageous rents to drivers — and then been smashed by driver co-ops who modded gig-work apps to keep the fares for themselves, that would have been amazing:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/21/contra-nihilismum/#the-street-finds-its-own-use-for-things
The problem isn’t disruption itself, but rather, the establishment of undisruptable, legally protected monopolies whose crybaby billionaire CEOs never have to face the same treatment they meted out to the incumbents who were on the scene when they were starting out.
We need some disruption! Their margins are your opportunity. It’s high time we started moving fast and breaking US Big Tech!
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:
