Big Tech and “captive audience venues”
The digital equivalent of baseball stadiums and airport concourses.
I’m on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel Picks and Shovels. Catch me in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL next WEDNESDAY (Apr 2), and in BLOOMINGTON next FRIDAY (Apr 4). More tour stops here.
Enshittification is what you get when tech companies, run by the common-or-garden mediocre sociopaths who end up at the top of most businesses, are unshackled from any consequence for indulging their worst, greediest impulses:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/#praxis
The reason Facebook was once a nice place to hang out and talk with your friends and isn’t anymore is that Mark Zuckerberg is no longer disciplined by competitors like Instagram (which he bought) nor by regulators (whom he captured), nor by interoperable tech like ad-blockers and alternative clients (which he uses IP law to destroy) nor by his own workforce (who have become disposable thanks to workforce supply catching up with demand). It used to be that Mark Zuckerberg couldn’t really move the enshittification lever in the Facebook C-suite because these disciplining forces gummed it up. He had to worry about losing users, or about users installing alternative technology, or about regulators hitting him hard enough to hurt, or about workplace revolts. Now, he doesn’t have to worry about these things, so he’s indulging the impulses that he’s had since the earliest days in his Harvard dorm, when he was a mere larval incel cooking up an online service to help him rate the fuckability of his female classmates.
When we had defenses, Mark Zuckerberg had to respect them. Now that we’re defenseless, he’s shameless. He’s insatiable. He will devour us to the marrow.
When I’m explaining enshittification to normies, I often make comparisons to other places where you can’t escape like airports and sports stadiums: “Facebook can afford to abuse you once they have you locked for the same reason that water costs $7/bottle on the other side of the airport TSA checkpoint.” It’s an extremely apt comparison, as you can verify for yourself by reading “Shakedown at the Snack Counter: The Case for Street Pricing,” a new report from the Groundwork Collective:
https://groundworkcollaborative.org/work/street-pricing/
“Shakedown” makes the point that — as is the case with tech giants — sports stadiums and airports are creatures of vast public subsidy. If this seems counterintuitive, try Mariana Mazzucato’s Entrepreneurial State, which lists all the ways in which the tech revolution represents a privatization of publicly funded research, as with the iPhone, whose semiconductors, internet connection, voice assistant technology, touchscreen and other components all count the public as a key investor:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/the-entrepreneurial-state-appl
And, as with airports and sports stadiums, the proprietors of the iPhone business are able to reap this gigantic public subsidy without taking on any public duties. Regulators that could impose some kind of public service obligations as quid pro quo for using public funds are AWOL, or worse, captured and complicit in the ongoing, publicly financed ripoff:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/15/private-law/#thirty-percent-vig
Airport, stadiums and tech platforms are all walled gardens — roach motels that are hard to escape once they’ve been entered. Thus the scorching prices of stadium and airport food, and the 30% transaction fees imposed by Apple and Google on app revenues (this is 1,000% higher than the average fees charged by the rest of the payment processing industry!), the 51% fees extracted by Google/Meta from advertisers and publishers (compare with the historical average of 15%), and the 45–51% that Amazon takes out of every dollar earned by its platform sellers. Once you’re locked in, they can turn the screws, either by gouging buyers directly, or by gouging sellers, who pass those additional costs onto buyers.
Groundwork has a proposal to address this in physical settings: regulation. Specifically, a “street pricing” regulation that keeps the charges for food and drinks within these walled gardens to prices comparable to those on the outside. They note that these regulations enjoy wide, bipartisan support. 76% of Republicans support a regulation that can only be described as “price controls,” two words that normally trigger head-explosions in the right.
How is it that such a commanding majority of Republicans can get behind government price controls? Simple: it’s obvious that when a company no longer faces market discipline — when they’re the only game in town (or on the other side of the TSA checkpoint) — that government discipline has to fill the vacuum, and if it doesn’t, you will get mercilessly screwed.
This is where enshittification — a form of monopolistic decay unique to the tech sector — departs from everyday monopoly abuse in other sectors, like aviation and league sports. Tech has an in-built flexibility, the inescapable property of “interoperability” that comes standard with every digital system thanks to the universal nature of computers themselves.
Interoperable technologies let you hack Instagram to restore it to the state of privacy- and attention-respecting glory that made it a success in the first place:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/battery-vampire/#drained
They let you monitor Facebook’s failures to uphold its own promises about not profiting from paid political disinformation:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/06/get-you-coming-and-going/#potemkin-research-program
They let you claw back control over how Facebook’s feeds are constructed:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/08/unfollow-everything/#shut-the-zuck-up
They let Apple customers maintain their privacy, even if they have the temerity to be friends with Android users:
They let shoppers use Amazon to order from local mom-and-pop stores:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/10/view-a-sku/
They even let you destroy the net worth — and power — of Elon Musk:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/08/turnabout/#is-fair-play
Interoperability creates a unique, easily administered source of discipline over tech bosses that just isn’t available as a means of countering the ripoffs we see elsewhere, including in sports stadiums and airports. That means that, far from being harder to fix than other disgusting scams in our society, tech is easier to fix. All that stands in the way is the IP laws that criminalize the kind of reverse-engineering work that allow the users of technology to have the final say over how the devices and services they rely on work:
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
Those IP laws were spread around the world by the US Trade Representative, who insisted that every country that wanted to export its products to the US without punitive tariffs must pass laws protecting the rent-extracting scams of US tech giants. With those tariff promises now in tatters, there’s never been a better time for the rest of the world to jettison those Big Tech-protecting laws:
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/2025/03/28/street-pricing/#sportball-analogies
Image:
Daniel Brody (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:South-Station-snack-bar-1970.jpg
CC BY-SA 4.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en
